Hollywood Profits v.
Technological Progress
Pentagon Redirects Its
Research Dollars
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) is
cutting back its basic computer science research at
universities in favor of military contractors and projects
focused on short-term results. Pentagon officials admitted to
the shift in priorities for the first time at a recent Senate
...
[read more]
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Computers Obeying Brain
Signals
Technologies designed to improve the quality of life for
paralytics and other mobility-challenged people by enabling
them to communicate and operate devices using brain-wave
signals are under development around the world. The last few
years have seen many promising brain-machine interface ...
[read more]
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Revamp for Web Navigation
System Urged
A report funded by the U.S. National Academies, the
Department of Commerce, and the National Science Foundation is
calling for changes that would make the Internet's Domain Name
System (DNS) less susceptible to corruption by spammers and
identity thieves. The DNS is a network of servers that ...
[read more]
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Women Dominate IT Courses
But More Men Get Degrees
The Tertiary Education Commission (TEC) estimates that
female IT students at tertiary institutions outnumbered male
IT students in 2004, yet more men than women continue to earn
IT degrees. Fifty-five percent of students in polytech IT
courses last year were women, compared to about 38 percent of
...
[read more]
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'Body Talk' Could Control
Mobiles
University of Glasgow professor Stephen Brewster says the
use of Visually based mobile-device interfaces on the move can
be problematic, and his team has been working on "audio
clouds" to increase the safety and ease of use of such gadgets
by facilitating control and operation via sound and ...
[read more]
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Feds Complete Internet
Traffic Report
The National Research Council has released an Internet
traffic study that was commissioned by Congress seven years
ago, just as the Internet boom was getting started. The
283-page report is titled "Signposts in Cyberspace" and is
relevant despite the time passed and changes to the Internet
...
[read more]
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IST: Driving Road Transport
Research
IST-funded projects will play a significant role in the
European Road Transport Advisory Committee's (ERTRAC) 20-year
plan to improve road transport through research. The MITRA
project's goal is to develop a prototype central information
system that police and emergency services ...
[read more]
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Computerworld Development
Survey Gives Nod to C#
A Computerworld survey of developers found that 72 percent
of respondents used Microsoft's C# programming language, while
66 percent used Java; the third, fourth, and fifth most-used
programming languages were Visual Basic (62 percent), C++ (54
percent), and JavaScript/ECMAScript (50 percent). ...
[read more]
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How Universities'
Intelligent Web Project Unlocks the Information That Really
Counts
In his annual BCS and Royal Signals Institution lecture,
Southampton University School of Electronics and Computer
Science professor Nigel Shadbolt discussed intelligent Web
searches that would produce incredibly accurate results
through their understanding of Web page contents and their ...
[read more]
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Apache Rolls Cocoon
2.1.7
The recently released Apache Cocoon 2.1.7 Web development
framework from the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) features
enhanced speed and ease of use through JDK 5.0
interoperability, various portal engine augmentations, and
additional features in the Cocoon Forms architecture,
according to ...
[read more]
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NASA Tests Shape-Shifting
Robot Pyramid for Nanotech Swarms
NASA's TETwalker robot is the prototype for autonomous
nanotechnology swarms (ANTS) that will be able to assemble
themselves into practical instrumentation or traverse uneven
terrain by changing their shape. The TETwalker resembles a
three-sided pyramid with electric motors at each ...
[read more]
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MIMO Holds Promise for
Wireless
New MIMO technology promises to dramatically increase range
and throughput of wireless networks, but proposed MIMO
implementations could hinder either performance or
compatibility with existing technology. MIMO-OFDM
(Multiple-input Multiple-output-Orthogonal Frequency Division
Multiplexing) ...
[read more]
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Carnegie Mellon Unit Looks
to Advance IT Security, Reliability
Pradeep Khosla, dean of Carnegie Mellon University's
Carnegie Institute of Technology and co-director of CyLab,
explains in an interview that CyLab is focusing on
next-generation IT systems that incorporate measurability,
sustainability, security, and trustworthiness. He says that
CyLab absorbed ...
[read more]
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IPv6 Addresses Its
Problems
IPv6 today poses little benefit to U.S. and European
enterprises or ISPs, which receive more immediate payback when
investing in basic network capabilities such as bandwidth,
security, and reliability. However, IPv6 has garnered
significant interest from Asian companies that need the ...
[read more]
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Robot Translators Decipher
Mountains of Enemy Messages
Machine translation (MT) is seen by U.S. intelligence
agencies as an important tool in fighting the war against
terrorism, as the supply of human translators is limited and a
vast backlog of untranslated material exists. Spurred by
terrorist attacks and wars in the Middle East, MT ...
[read more]
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Road to
Mars
Getting humans to Mars will take technologies that are
currently off the industry's road map, but that are possible
with basic microelectronics. NASA intends to meet this
challenge by incrementally testing each key component,
starting with unmanned vehicles sent into orbit, then
proceeding ...
[read more]
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Search for
Tomorrow
Expanding federal and corporate investments in emergent IT
areas such as electronic medical records, Internet telephony,
and anti-terrorism technology are making improved methods for
searching digital information more and more desirable. New
approaches are under investigation for making ...
[read more]
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The Enterprise
Blogosphere
Companies are adopting blogs and wikis as tools for
improving dialogue among workers, customers, and the public
because they can effect information exchange and establish
specially tailored, user-friendly data archives. Martin
Wattenberg with IBM Watson Research Center's ...
[read more]
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Hollywood Profits v.
Technological Progress
As the U.S. Supreme Court listens to arguments in the MGM
Studios v. Grokster case, a historical perspective shows the
futility of entertainment companies' efforts to stop the
spread of new technology, writes Fordham University history
professor Doron Ben-Atar. If entertainment companies ...
[read more]
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