Web Future Is Not Semantic, or
Overly Orderly
Women in
Computing
In order to increase the number of women entering computer
science, more female role models and mentors are needed to up
their numbers and gain a beachhead in what is traditionally a
male-dominated environment, according to experts. The numbers
paint a ...
[read more]
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Forward-Looking Report
Released: 'Cyberinfrastructure and the Social
Sciences'
The National Science Foundation's "Cyberinfrastructure and
the Social Sciences" workshop has released a final report that
"leverages the immense expertise of NSF communities to develop
useful and usable cyberinfrastructure to support breakthrough
science and engineering ...
[read more]
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Fancy Math Takes on Je Ne
Sais Quoi
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
has evaluated machine translation programs from some 20
research groups and will publish the results later this month,
but those involved say Google's new translation entry
performed very well. Observers predict Google might ...
[read more]
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New DSL Standard Promises
10 Times the Speed
The Very-High-Bit-Rate Digital Subscriber Line 2 (VDSL2)
standard approved last week by the International
Telecommunications Union (ITU) promises to deliver a tenfold
increase in speed over the fastest DSL currently available,
although its availability to consumers could be years away.
ITU ...
[read more]
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Supernova Collapse
Simulated on a GPU
Rapid advances in graphics processing have made GPUs a
legitimate hardware-accelerated alternative to CPU systems,
and Los Alamos National Laboratory Advanced Computing Lab
researchers are working on ways to exploit GPU capabilities
for general-purpose computing, writes lab ...
[read more]
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Sounds of Silencers Are
Loud and Clear: PCs Are Too Noisy
Hobbyists are coming up with innovative solutions to dampen
the noise generated by PCs, which can be distracting and
irritating for some people. Michigan architect Russ Kinder
reduced the noise of his PC by immersing it in a bath of
nonconductive mineral oil, while St. Louis auto mechanic Carl
...
[read more]
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Pentagon Envisions
Electronic Office Assistant for Busy Human
Bosses
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is
funding the development of an electronic office assistant that
can sort email, schedule meetings, gather data for reports,
make plane reservations, and perform other mundane tasks to
reduce the workload for managers. Desirable ...
[read more]
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Forging an Anti-Terrorism
Search Tool
Researchers at the University of Buffalo have developed a
prototype search engine that mines a collection of documents
for associated ideas or links that would otherwise be
unnoticeable or that would take an extremely long time to
uncover via conventional investigative methods. The
technology, ...
[read more]
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Self-Wiring Supercomputer
Is Cool and Compact
Researchers at Edinburgh University's Edinburgh Parallel
Computing Center are building a 1 teraflop field programmable
gate array (FPGA) supercomputer designed to be up to 100 times
more energy-efficient and dramatically more space-efficient
than a conventional supercomputer of ...
[read more]
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In-Flight Voice and Data
Communications Takes Off
Researchers in the IST-funded WirelessCabin project
developed and successfully tested a wireless in-flight
communications network architecture that does not disrupt
mission-critical aircraft safety systems and terrestrial
networks. Three central elements constitute the ...
[read more]
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Has Ransomware Learned
From Cryptovirology?
The Trojan recently reported in the media to hold victims'
data hostage is probably not a true cryptovirus, writes
infosec researcher Adam Young, who pioneered cryptovirology
research along with his Columbia University professor Moti
Yung. But the news shows criminal hackers are likely to ...
[read more]
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What's the Next Big
Thing?
A roundtable discussion of future consumer electronics
covers such issues as phone-multimedia convergence, Wi-Fi, and
digital rights management. Wolfson Microelectronics CEO David
Milne expects the next big thing to be the integration of
phones and multimedia, and says the winning product in ...
[read more]
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Baby, You Can Drive My
Song
The Expression Synthesis Project (ESP) headed by USC
Viterbi School of Engineering professor Elaine Chew is
designed to impart the experience of performing music to
non-musicians, using an interface modeled after the controls
of an automobile. A musical score in the Musical Instrument
...
[read more]
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'Silent Horizon' War Games
Wrap Up for the CIA
The CIA's Information Operations Center is conducting a
three-day exercise dubbed "Silent Horizon" that simulates a
prolonged cyberterrorist attack that could potentially cause
as much damage and disruption as the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks,
say exercise participants who want to remain anonymous. ...
[read more]
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'Skin' Could Refine
Robots' Sense of Touch
University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) electrical
engineers claim to have taken a significant step toward
enhancing robots' tactile sense with the development of a
prototype "skin" composed of a flexible polymer with multiple
sensors that concurrently measure surface roughness, hardness,
...
[read more]
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Wagering on
WiMax
WiMax has been hyped as a technology that will offer a
last-mile replacement for a land-line Internet connection as
well as beefed-up Wi-Fi. WiMax's roadmap starts out with
wireless, fixed last-mile connectivity, and eventually adds
mobile broadband connectivity. Among the technology's ...
[read more]
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Evolving the Java
Platform
Sun fellow Graham Hamilton writes that a key theme of the
next Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE) and Java 2 Enterprise
Edition (J2EE) iterations is ease-of-development," the need to
maintain a balance between power, richness, and simplicity to
ensure that the new Java specs are easy to use. ...
[read more]
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Integrating Geography and
Real-Time Sensor Data
Galdos Systems President Ron Lake writes that geography
markup language (GML) has applications outside of vector
geography and images, and is being implemented for real-time
sensor data; he illustrates the viability of integrating
geography and sensor data on a "plug and play" basis through
...
[read more]
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Web Future Is Not
Semantic, or Overly Orderly
Eric Nee disputes World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) director
Tim Berners-Lee's vision of a Semantic Web in which computers
can comprehend the meaning of information through the encoding
of metadata within every piece of online content. He also
dismisses the concept of an intelligent ...
[read more]
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