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ACM TechNews - Friday, October 18, 2002



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ACM TechNews
Volume 4, Number 412
Date: October 18, 2002

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Top Stories for Friday, October 18, 2002:
http://www.acm.org/technews/current/homepage.html

"Tech Will Be Back, Past Slumps Suggest, as Innovators Revive It"
"Town Hall Meeting on Cybersecurity"
"Senate Approves Almost $1B for Cybersecurity Research"
"Living In an Artificial World"
"A Chip of Rubber, With Tiny Rivers Running Through It"
"XML Spec Moves Ahead Despite Complaints"
"Study Reveals Nanoscale Structure in Amorphous Material"
"EU Debates Skills Shortage"
"Chemists Brew Tiny Wires"
"Lucent, Rogers Look for Nano for Innovation"
"Laptops and Mobile Users: Everything Old is New Again"
"MIT: Smart Tech Ideas Mean Biz"
"Claude E. Shannon: Founder of Information Theory"
"Clubs Foster Computer Skills for Young Girls"
"Privacy Algorithms"
"Wired For Success"
"Maintaining the Internet"
"Scaling Agile Methods"
"The Great Liberator"

******************* News Stories ***********************

"Tech Will Be Back, Past Slumps Suggest, as Innovators Revive It"
The technology industry is likely to reinvigorate itself, even if
it takes some time, and if history proves to be an accurate
guide.  Since the introduction of the first personal computer in
1975, the technology industry has experienced several periods of ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1018f.html#item1

"Town Hall Meeting on Cybersecurity"
The White House is soliciting feedback to its National Plan to
Secure Cyberspace by holding a series of town hall-style
conferences across the nation.  One of them recently took place
at MIT, where presidential cybersecurity adviser Richard Clarke ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1018f.html#item2

"Senate Approves Almost $1B for Cybersecurity Research"
The U.S. Senate on Wednesday unanimously approved the Cyber
Security Research and Development Act, which authorizes a
five-year cybersecurity research budget of approximately $978
million.  The bill would apportion funding to initiatives ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1018f.html#item3

"Living In an Artificial World"
The chief subject at the annual PopTech conference is
technology's effects on society and culture, as well as the
reverse, notes conference co-founder Anthony Citrano.  Roughly
400 CEOs, academic figures, entrepreneurs, and innovators will ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1018f.html#item4

"A Chip of Rubber, With Tiny Rivers Running Through It"
The emerging technology of microfluidics involves circuits that
feature rubberized channels instead of silicon pathways along
which pressurized fluids, rather than electrons, flow; Dr.
Stephen R. Quake of the California Institute of Technology ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1018f.html#item5

"XML Spec Moves Ahead Despite Complaints"
XML version 1.1 was approved by the World Wide Web Consortium
(W3C) this week despite accusations from critics that IBM has
unfairly influenced the new XML specification to fit its own
purposes, adding backward-compatibility for an IBM-specific ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1018f.html#item6

"Study Reveals Nanoscale Structure in Amorphous Material"
Experiments indicating that the structure of amorphous materials
may not be as disordered as previously thought, especially at the
nanoscale level, could pave the way for new engineered materials
with diverse industrial applications, according to University of ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1018f.html#item7

"EU Debates Skills Shortage"
Ministers, academics, IT sector representatives, and public
sector organizations have gathered for a two-day eSkills summit
this week to address a IT skills shortage among European Union
member states and the threat it represents to their position in ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1018f.html#item8

"Chemists Brew Tiny Wires"
Self-assembling electronic components, or nanoelectronics, will
supposedly revolutionize the industry by offering a cheap way to
manufacture devices in mass quantities, but unfortunately,
self-organizing materials are not very conductive.  However, ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1018f.html#item9

"Lucent, Rogers Look for Nano for Innovation"
Lucent's nanotechnology research at its Bell Labs facilities will
likely be spared from funding cuts, says Nanotechnology Research
Director John A. Rogers, because the group is already applying
ground-breaking research to Lucent products.  He adds that much ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1018f.html#item10

"Laptops and Mobile Users: Everything Old Is New Again"
Laptops may be bulkier and less power-efficient than PDAs, which
continue to become more popular and sophisticated, yet they
remain the most oft-used tool of mobile users.  The size of
laptop displays, for example, is optimal for tasks that require a ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1018f.html#item11

"MIT: Smart Tech Ideas Mean Biz"
This week marks the launch of MIT's new Deshpande Center for
Technological Innovation, which is designed to address what MIT
professor Charles Cooney describes as "a gap between early-stage
ideas and a point at which small companies and venture ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1018f.html#item12

"Claude E. Shannon: Founder of Information Theory"
As today's computer scientists pioneer quantum computing, the
landmark digital computing work of Claude E. Shannon still
lingers.  Shannon was the first, in 1948, to describe information
passed over a variety of channels in mathematical terms, either ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1018f.html#item13

"Clubs Foster Computer Skills for Young Girls"
Former lawyer Eileen Ellsworth decided to create a program to
teach computer skills to middle-school girls after seeing
national statistics on female students' lack of interest in
technology.  Also contributing to her decision was the fact that ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1018f.html#item14

"Privacy Algorithms"
Government control over the exploitation of personal information
by business is a source of controversy, but a group of computer
scientists has been trying to solve the problem of data privacy
by developing software that maintains the secrecy of personal ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1018f.html#item15

"Wired For Success"
The problem of maintaining the performance of computer chips as
they shrink is one reason why scientists are investigating
smaller-scale solutions such as carbon nanotubes, but
difficulties in controlling their composition to yield precise ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1018f.html#item16

"Maintaining the Internet"
When WorldCom's UUNet backbone experienced system software
problems on Oct. 2, the effects on the Internet were widespread.
Critics link the problems to poor network maintenance and the
incident has intensified concerns that the federal government is ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1018f.html#item17

"Scaling Agile Methods"
SMGlobal President Sanjay Murthi writes that he finds agile
development methods to be very useful; he discovered that
employing eXtreme programming (XP) in a large project encouraged
more enthusiasm among staff and resulted in early problem ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1018f.html#item18

"The Great Liberator"
Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig has become a
leading figure of cyberlaw and the Internet copyright debate,
thanks to his groundbreaking work through such books as "The
Future of Ideas" and the Creative Commons project.  He ...
http://www.acm.org/technews/articles/2002-4/1018f.html#item19


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