See It, Hear It, Feel
It
Exhibitors Offer New Views
on Data
This year's Cebit IT exhibition in Germany is expected to
play host to 6,115 exhibitors showcasing technologies that
facilitate new approaches to viewing data and greater data
mobility, among other things. Fraunhofer Institute for
Computer Graphics researchers will detail an augmented ...
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New Software Takes
Guesswork Out of Tough Decisions
RAND Graduate School science and technology policy
professor Steven Popper and colleagues have developed the CARs
computer program to expedite decision-making among groups of
people with diverse backgrounds by removing the need to first
agree on a set of assumptions about real-world behavior. ...
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George Lucas to Be Keynote
Speaker at SIGGRAPH 2005 Conference
ACM's SIGGRAPH 2005 Conference will have filmmaker George
Lucas as its keynote speaker. Lucas, the creator of the Star
Wars saga and the Indiana Jones series, will deliver the
keynote address, "George Lucas: A Keynote Q&A With the
Father of Digital Cinema," on Aug. 1, 2005, during the 32nd
...
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Open-Source Overseer
Proposes Paring License List
New president of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) Russ
Nelson proposed on March 2 three additional terms to the
initiative's 10-point open-source definition, which OSI uses
to certify open-source licenses. Some people are working to
curtail the proliferation of licenses out of concern that ...
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GeoWall Project Expands the
Window Into Earth Science
The development of GeoWall technology was motivated by
complaints that 3D "cave" display systems were too elaborate,
expensive, and immersive to be effective teaching tools,
particularly for the field of geoscience. The National Science
Foundation supported the creation of the GeoWall, a cheap ...
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Data Providers Lobby to
Block More Oversight
Companies that sell personal data such as ChoicePoint have
successfully fought regulation of their industry for many
years, using a combination of lobbying and industry-funded
research groups. House and Senate disclosure forms show seven
of the country's largest data sellers spent at least $2.4 ...
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Quantum Computer Offers
Safer Data Transfers
Making information encoding and transfer safer through the
application of quantum physics principles to computing is the
goal of the newly-launched Institute for Quantum Information
Science (IQIS) at the University of Calgary. IQIS director Dr.
Barry Sanders says that quantum computing ...
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It Really Is Rocket
Science
Portland State University (PSU) computer science professor
Bart Massey serves as faculty advisor to the Portland State
Aerospace Society (PSAS), whose goal is to launch
nano-satellites into orbit using computer-controlled rockets.
Massey says PSAS' rockets, unlike those of ...
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Empowering Patients to Lead
Fully Mobile Lives
The IST-funded MobiHealth project has developed a mobile
health care system in which patients' vital signs are remotely
monitored by wearable, wireless sensors that form a body area
network (BAN) linked to a mobile base unit that sends the data
to the doctor or health care center via UMTS or GPRS. ...
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Cozying Up With Deep
Blue
Humans faced with continuously advancing technology should
learn to form symbiotic rather than adversarial relationships
with computers, such as with Garry Kasparov's "Advanced Chess"
matches where human-computer teams compete against each other,
writes George Dvorsky. Advanced chess matches ...
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With Terror in Mind, a
Formulaic Way to Parse Sentences
Attensity has developed software that can almost instantly
parse electronic documents such as emails and chat room
discussions and make unstructured data usable and relevant.
Analyst Nick Patience estimates that about 80 percent of
corporate or government information is unstructured data such
as ...
[read more]
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Google's Secret of
Success? Dealing With Failure
Speaking at this week's EclipseCon application programmer
conference, Google VP of engineering and operations Urs
Hoelzle detailed his company's data center infrastructure,
which relies on cheap, simple commodity servers in order to
build up redundancy, thus ensuring that an operation is not
...
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New Software Helps With
Anti-Terrorism Planning
Penn State researchers have developed software for
optimizing the allocation of anti-terrorism resources across
competing projects by prioritizing resources according to
objective standards and supplying a cost-benefit analysis for
various implementations. Acceptable risks and ...
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Will Congress Stop
High-Tech Trolls?
So-called patent trolls represent a huge cost of business
for deep-pocketed companies and create a chilling effect for
small startups that cannot afford to defend their use of a
contested technology. Patent trolls are companies who do not
market any product, but earn revenue through licensing ...
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'Open Courseware' Idea
Spreads
A growing movement of academic institutions is offering
their course material online for free and software tools for
making that material accessible, thanks to startup funds from
philanthropic groups such as the William and Flora Hewlett
Foundation. The movement begun by MIT's ...
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Computation Comes to
Life
Scientists such as MIT researcher Thomas Knight are looking
to "synthetic biology" to surpass the manufacturing
limitations of silicon-based computers by exploring ways to
build computers out of living cells. Shrinking circuits mean
that silicon chip fabrication will inevitably hit a ...
[read more]
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No Strings
Attached
Work has only just begun on software applications that take
advantage of third- and fourth-generation wireless network
technology. Wireless 3G communications technology that
delivers data speeds of 300 Kbps to 500 Kbps and higher
promises to revolutionize data access via applications that
can ...
[read more]
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See It, Hear It, Feel
It
Virtual 3D prototypes are on track to deliver information
at least equal to that provided by actual physical prototypes
through a combination of enhanced imaging devices, sound, and
tactile feedback. Numerous forms of virtual prototyping are
employed by General Motors to expedite vehicle ...
[read more]
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