Voted Down
E-Vote Problems Overwhelm Feds
The upcoming presidential election's integrity could be called into question because the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) claims in its first annual report that it lacks the funding to effectively address concerns about the security of electronic voting machines, and cites a ...
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Reforms, Not Rhetoric, Needed to Keep Jobs on U.S. Soil
Assigning blame in the offshoring of U.S. high-tech jobs and the erosion of science and engineering graduates, as politicians are wont to do, will not solve the problem: What is needed are reforms in U.S. education, more focused professional retraining, and heavier research investment; without ...
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U.S. Is Losing Its Dominance in the Sciences
The United States is quickly losing ground in international scientific research standings, and has already fallen behind Europe and Asia in terms of doctoral degrees awarded, for example. The change in scientific dominance has other evidence as well, including the number of papers ...
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Some Counties Might Fight E-Voting Ban
California Secretary of State Kevin Shelley's ban on Diebold e-voting systems in Kern, San Diego, San Joaquin, and Solano counties, along with new guidelines that election officials in 10 other counties must comply with in order to use e-voting machines in the November election, may spur ...
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How to Save Energy: Just Guess
A Georgia Institute of Technology research team led by Center for Research on Embedded Systems and Technology director Krishna Palem has developed Probabilistic Bits (PBits) chips whose components are intentionally designed to be unreliable in order to squeeze out more capacity and energy ...
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Free Software Project Undaunted Despite Apple Threats
The India-based Sarovar free software development community site announced that it would halt its hosting of the PlayFair free software project upon receiving a notice of alleged copyright infringement from Apple Computer, but open software advocate Anand Babu, who now serves as PlayFair's ...
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Virtual Reality at Work, Literally
The Information Society Technologies program-funded VIEW OF THE FUTURE project was created to determine how virtual reality (VR) technology could be practically deployed in the workplace and reach its full potential. The project, coordinated by John Wilson, professor of human factors at the ...
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Telling Lies
Cornell University experimental psychologist Jeff Hancock set out to determine whether people are more likely to lie on the phone, in email, in instant messages, or face-to-face by having a team of 30 students keep a record of all their social interactions and any falsehoods that cropped up; ...
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Hampshire College Student Uses J.K. Rowling's Quidditch as Basis for Artificial Intelligence Experiment
A Hampshire College computer science student developed a virtual evolutionary environment for computerized teams playing the game Quidditch, which young witches and warlocks play in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter stories. The project explores the evolution of artificially intelligent ...
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3D Search a Thing of the Future
A long time must pass before ubiquitous image-based search engines can emerge, but progress is being made in systems that could serve as niche tools in the near future. A 3D model search engine developed by Thomas Funkhouser of Princeton University's Shape Retrieval and Analysis Group has ...
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Facing Facts in Computer Recognition
Face recognition is a major challenge in the development of computer vision systems, but researchers such as Henry Schneiderman of Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute and former Robotics Institute director Takeo Kanade are developing software with surprising accuracy. ...
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Will Your Next Display Be Flexible?
The mainstream adoption of thin, flexible display screens could happen within 10 years, postulate researchers attending the recent Flexible Displays & Electronics Conference. Patricia Kinzer of conference host Intertech points to the rapid development of the flexible display industry, ...
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NIST Quantum Keys System Sets Speed Record for 'Unbreakable' Encryption
Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recently demonstrated a quantum key distribution (QKD) system that successfully transmitted a stream of photons to produce a genuinely secret key at a rate that surpassed the speed of previously reported QKD systems ...
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Fine-Tuning BMI
The Institute for Infocomm Research's (I2R) NeuroComm platform is a real-time brain signal acquisition and analysis system designed to refine brain machine interface (BMI) methodologies. The platform is based on Windows and incorporates signal processing, pattern recognition, and other ...
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Crackers Redux
Cliff Stoll chronicled the attack on Unix machines at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., and university and military facilities nearly 15 years ago in his book, "The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage." The story that Stoll, a ...
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Radio Freedom
The rollout of practical commercial applications for a technology currently known as ultra-wideband (UWB) has been held up by bureaucratic red tape since it was first proposed by engineer Gerald Ross in 1978, and the FCC's long-in-coming authorization for such applications has ignited a storm of ...
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Mesh Networks Winning Converts
Advantages of wireless mesh network technology include greater range and flexibility: "The big strength of wireless mesh is the ability to put it up and tear it down very quickly," says International Data analyst Abner Germanow. Mesh nets employ complicated algorithms that facilitate ...
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The Pursuit of Productivity
As companies seek increased productivity, they will be forced to look to offshore solutions, writes Cap Gemini Ernst & Young Americas' chief technologist John Parkinson. Given that companies continually refine their process design and focus, they will be able to achieve steadily improving ...
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Voted Down
The Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment (SERVE) was organized under the auspices of the Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP) to test whether Americans living overseas could vote over the Internet and thus avoid falling victim to the vagaries of paper-based ...
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