Voted Down
E-Vote Problems Overwhelm
Feds
The upcoming presidential election's integrity could be
called into question because the U.S. Election Assistance
Commission (EAC) claims in its first annual report that it
lacks the funding to effectively address concerns about the
security of electronic voting machines, and cites a ...
[read more]
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Reforms, Not Rhetoric,
Needed to Keep Jobs on U.S. Soil
Assigning blame in the offshoring of U.S. high-tech jobs
and the erosion of science and engineering graduates, as
politicians are wont to do, will not solve the problem: What
is needed are reforms in U.S. education, more focused
professional retraining, and heavier research investment;
without ...
[read more]
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U.S. Is Losing Its
Dominance in the Sciences
The United States is quickly losing ground in international
scientific research standings, and has already fallen behind
Europe and Asia in terms of doctoral degrees awarded, for
example. The change in scientific dominance has other evidence
as well, including the number of papers ...
[read more]
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Some Counties Might Fight
E-Voting Ban
California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley's ban on
Diebold e-voting systems in Kern, San Diego, San Joaquin, and
Solano counties, along with new guidelines that election
officials in 10 other counties must comply with in order to
use e-voting machines in the November election, may spur ...
[read more]
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How to Save Energy: Just
Guess
A Georgia Institute of Technology research team led by
Center for Research on Embedded Systems and Technology
director Krishna Palem has developed Probabilistic Bits
(PBits) chips whose components are intentionally designed to
be unreliable in order to squeeze out more capacity and energy
...
[read more]
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Free Software Project
Undaunted Despite Apple Threats
The India-based Sarovar free software development community
site announced that it would halt its hosting of the PlayFair
free software project upon receiving a notice of alleged
copyright infringement from Apple Computer, but open software
advocate Anand Babu, who now serves as PlayFair's ...
[read more]
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Virtual Reality at Work,
Literally
The Information Society Technologies program-funded VIEW OF
THE FUTURE project was created to determine how virtual
reality (VR) technology could be practically deployed in the
workplace and reach its full potential. The project,
coordinated by John Wilson, professor of human factors at the
...
[read more]
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Telling
Lies
Cornell University experimental psychologist Jeff Hancock
set out to determine whether people are more likely to lie on
the phone, in email, in instant messages, or face-to-face by
having a team of 30 students keep a record of all their social
interactions and any falsehoods that cropped up; ...
[read more]
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Hampshire College Student
Uses J.K. Rowling's Quidditch as Basis for Artificial
Intelligence Experiment
A Hampshire College computer science student developed a
virtual evolutionary environment for computerized teams
playing the game Quidditch, which young witches and warlocks
play in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter stories. The project
explores the evolution of artificially intelligent ...
[read more]
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3D Search a Thing of the
Future
A long time must pass before ubiquitous image-based search
engines can emerge, but progress is being made in systems that
could serve as niche tools in the near future. A 3D model
search engine developed by Thomas Funkhouser of Princeton
University's Shape Retrieval and Analysis Group has ...
[read more]
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Facing Facts in Computer
Recognition
Face recognition is a major challenge in the development of
computer vision systems, but researchers such as Henry
Schneiderman of Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics
Institute and former Robotics Institute director Takeo Kanade
are developing software with surprising accuracy. ...
[read more]
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Will Your Next Display Be
Flexible?
The mainstream adoption of thin, flexible display screens
could happen within 10 years, postulate researchers attending
the recent Flexible Displays & Electronics Conference.
Patricia Kinzer of conference host Intertech points to the
rapid development of the flexible display industry, ...
[read more]
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NIST Quantum Keys System
Sets Speed Record for 'Unbreakable'
Encryption
Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and
Technology (NIST) recently demonstrated a quantum key
distribution (QKD) system that successfully transmitted a
stream of photons to produce a genuinely secret key at a rate
that surpassed the speed of previously reported QKD systems
...
[read more]
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Fine-Tuning
BMI
The Institute for Infocomm Research's (I2R) NeuroComm
platform is a real-time brain signal acquisition and analysis
system designed to refine brain machine interface (BMI)
methodologies. The platform is based on Windows and
incorporates signal processing, pattern recognition, and other
...
[read more]
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Crackers
Redux
Cliff Stoll chronicled the attack on Unix machines at the
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., and
university and military facilities nearly 15 years ago in his
book, "The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of
Computer Espionage." The story that Stoll, a ...
[read more]
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Radio
Freedom
The rollout of practical commercial applications for a
technology currently known as ultra-wideband (UWB) has been
held up by bureaucratic red tape since it was first proposed
by engineer Gerald Ross in 1978, and the FCC's long-in-coming
authorization for such applications has ignited a storm of ...
[read more]
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Mesh Networks Winning
Converts
Advantages of wireless mesh network technology include
greater range and flexibility: "The big strength of wireless
mesh is the ability to put it up and tear it down very
quickly," says International Data analyst Abner Germanow. Mesh
nets employ complicated algorithms that facilitate ...
[read more]
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The Pursuit of
Productivity
As companies seek increased productivity, they will be
forced to look to offshore solutions, writes Cap Gemini Ernst
& Young Americas' chief technologist John Parkinson. Given
that companies continually refine their process design and
focus, they will be able to achieve steadily improving ...
[read more]
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Voted
Down
The Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment
(SERVE) was organized under the auspices of the Federal Voting
Assistance Program (FVAP) to test whether Americans living
overseas could vote over the Internet and thus avoid falling
victim to the vagaries of paper-based ...
[read more]
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