High-Tech's New
Day
U.S. Slips in Coding
Contest
China's Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Moscow State
University, and the Saint Petersburg Institute of Fine
Mechanics and Optics took top honors at ACM's 2005
International Collegiate Programming Contest held in Shanghai
this week. The University of Illinois ranked ...
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As Government Cap on Work
Visas Rises, So Does Confusion
When U.S. businesses complained that the government's limit
on H-1B visas for foreign workers had already been reached by
the time fiscal year 2005 began, Congress passed a measure
last November raising the 65,000 cap by an additional 20,000
visas for graduates who earned advanced degrees from U.S. ...
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View From the High Ground:
Yale's Joan Feigenbaum
Yale University computer science professor and ACM Fellow
Joan Feigenbaum lists the continuing decline of data storage
costs and the increasing penetration of computers into
everyday life as two of the most significant IT trends; the
result is the increased creation, capture, and storage of ...
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Open-Source Referees Change
the Rules
In an effort to curb the proliferation of open-source
licenses, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) board of directors
instituted new open-source license approval criteria and a new
system for classifying existing licenses at this week's Open
Source Business Conference. The OSI declared ...
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Game for
Learning
The incorporation of computer gaming into the classroom is
being encouraged by efforts and studies indicating that games
can engage students more personally in the learning process
and significantly improve their creative thinking and test
scores. A 2001 U.K. Home Office report concluded that ...
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A Long and Winding Road for
IT Women
With the percentage of women in technology fields dropping
to mid-1960s levels in Canada, attendees at a Canadian
Information Processing Society gathering worried a greater
"geek" stigma would be attached to the field and that the
industry would not be able to meet future recruiting ...
[read more]
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DNS System in Need of
Upgrade
The Internet's Domain Name System (DNS) is crucial to the
functionality of the Internet and therefore must be improved
in order to handle threats from hackers and the continued
growth of worldwide Web domains, warns a group of leading
computer scientists in a report released by the National
Academies ...
[read more]
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Testing Time for Operators
in a Brave New World
The telecommunications industry is eyeing IP Multimedia
Subsystem (IMS) technology as way to unify disparate
communications channels, ease deployment of new services,
enable new capabilities, and reduce costs. The migration path
to IMS from traditional circuit-switched networks, however,
...
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Designing a 'Bionic
Eye'
Stanford University physicists and ophthalmologists
disclosed the design of an artificial vision system that can
stimulate a retina with sharp enough resolution to enable a
visually impaired person to orient himself toward objects,
identify faces, watch television, read large fonts, and live
...
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Magic Pen Writes New
Computer Tech Chapter
Wang Jiang and colleagues at Microsoft Research Asia spent
four years developing a pen interface that enables users to
modify digital documents by scribbling text on printed
versions of the documents and converting them to electronic
text on the onscreen versions. Wang, who was an engineering
...
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Lessons in
Cybersafety
The current Internet structure makes security breaches
inevitable since it assumes reasonable behavior, warned
Harvard Law School Internet and society executive director
Jonathan Zittrain. Because attackers use the same information
avenue machines receive legitimate input from, there is always
...
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Designing Science-Friendly
Supercomputers
The PC era saw the relative decline of supercomputers as
vendors invested more money in lucrative business and personal
computing efforts. When the Japan Earth Simulator debuted in
Spring 2000 with a speed five times that of the nearest
competitor, it sparked new discussion about the direction of
...
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New Protocol Can Defuse
Turf Wars Over Information Sharing Among Federal
Agencies
Following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the U.S.
government established 24 e-government programs designed to
effect collaboration and the exchange of information between
intelligence agencies with the aim of bolstering homeland
security, but Penn State information science and technology
...
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Bigger Phishes Ready to
Spawn
Security researchers say the growth of phishing attacks has
slowed dramatically, but they warn that online criminals are
crafting more sophisticated attacks that employ pharming,
instant messaging platforms, cross-site scripting, and DNS
poisoning. Phishing attacks are also ...
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A Trail of DNA and
Data
Institute for the Future director Paul Saffo envisions a
future scenario in which biometric identity systems are used
by law enforcement to monitor citizens. However, Saffo
dismisses the reliability and security of identity that
advocates claim such systems would provide as "pure science
...
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E-Records Research in
Jeopardy
The Office of Management and Budget has cut funding for the
70-year-old National Historical Publications and Records
Commission (NHPRC), endangering future electronic records
research, according to field experts. The NHPRC is a
relatively small grants program of the National Archives ...
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Linux Making Its Mark in
Messaging
Linux is starting to gain ground as an application-layer
option, particularly with clustering, IP, and virtualization
upgrades in the most recent kernel; this trend is evidenced by
the numerous Linux versions of popular email and collaboration
servers now available as well as similar ...
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RoboGames: Battling Bots,
But No Killer App
The RoboGames competition in San Francisco showcased the
development of different robotic elements--such as
electronics, sensors, electromechanics, and precision
machining--but also reminded participants of the limits of
robot technology. Robotics Society of America President David
Calkins was ...
[read more]
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High-Tech's New
Day
New and veteran venture capitalists are on the move to turn
the Internet into a cash cow using both innovative and
traditional ideas in the wake of the dot-com bubble's
collapse. Spurred by such factors as Google's meteoric
success, the Internet's penetration into everyday life, and
the ...
[read more]
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