Spinning a Smarter Web
E-Voting Commission Gets Earful
The Election Assistance Commission's (EAC) first public hearing on the state of elections and voting systems on May 6 was characterized by opposing testimony from supporters and critics of electronic voting machines. Johns Hopkins University computer scientist Avi Rubin warned ...
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Faces of Globalization: Jobs for Tech Grads
Technology job opportunities for graduates--at least those who fail to specialize in creative areas--will grow scarcer because of layoffs and offshore outsourcing, attest people such as University of Texas at Arlington senior Brad Pitman, who has interviewed with defense department ...
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Plan for Spectrum Is Making Waves
Lobbyists from the technology industry are making their presence known in Washington as the FCC and the White House put pressure on television broadcasters to make better use of airwaves: Technology firms want greater use of spectrum to expand their wireless Internet offerings while more and ...
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How Much Does Information Technology Matter?
Nicholas G. Carr has written a follow-up book to his much debated Harvard Business Review article published in May 2003, "IT Doesn't Matter;" the new book, titled "Does IT Matter?," expands on his original hypothesis, giving detailed examples and analysis. The basic idea is that companies no longer ...
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Helping Exterminate Bugs in Spreadsheets, Web Applications
The National Science Foundation has awarded a five-year, $2.6 million Information Technology Research grant to the End Users Shaping Effective Software (EUSES) project, a six-campus initiative to help eliminate glitches in spreadsheets and Web applications developed by "end-user ...
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NASA Reassessing a Role for Robots
Robots could be employed to extend the life of the Hubble Space Telescope, assist in the maintenance of the International Space Station, set up lunar habitats, and perform other missions deemed too dangerous or costly for humans. Saving the Hubble after the scrapping of a shuttle mission in the ...
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Nanotech: Beyond the Hype--and Fear
The potential benefits of nanotechnology could be undercut or limited by unrealistic public expectations fostered by hype, or because of panic spread by alarmist musings on the technology's darker aspects. Kristen Kulinowski of Rice University's Center for Biological and Environmental ...
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How the Word Gets Around
The purpose of Brandeis University senior Sam Arbesman's Memespread Project was to track the route of a meme throughout the blogosphere in real time in an attempt to study the mechanisms behind the spread of ideas on the Web. Arbesman set up a Web site and submitted the meme to the popular Boing ...
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Smalltalk With Object-Oriented Programming Pioneer Kay
Dr. Alan Kay recently won the Association of Computing Machinery's (ACM) Turing Award for helping develop the first fully-fledged object-oriented programming language, Smalltalk. Now a Hewlett-Packard senior fellow and president of Viewpoints Research Institute, Kay says enterprise developers ...
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ACM Announces Award Winners and Fellows
As part of ACM's mission to bring broad recognition to outstanding technical and professional achievements within the computing and information technology community, ACM has announced the winners for 12 awards that span a variety of professional and technological expertise. ...
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Computer 'Mobile Agents' and Robot Tested by NASA
NASA researchers are putting "mobile agent" software through its paces in Utah's Southeast Desert in a test involving exploratory research conducted by human scientists and a prototype robotic assistant dubbed Boudreaux. The test is designed to simulate communications between planetary ...
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Presenting the Case for Industrial Qualitative Modelling
The goal of the Information Society Technologies-funded MONET2 project is to attain new insights into and industrial applications for Model-based Systems and Qualitative Reasoning (MBS&QR) technologies. The project focused on the automotive, education and training, medical, and applied ...
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The Internet's Wilder Side
Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is older than the World Wide Web, but still untamed: Virus writers research and launch code, hackers direct denial-of-service attacks, and copyright pirates offer music, video, and software for free on the IRC. Experts estimate no more than 500,000 IRC users are online at any one time, yet the network has a disproportionate ...
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How to Build a Better Hand
Tom Chau of the Bloorview MacMillan Children's Center has developed an artificial hand that responds to sounds produced by muscles in the arm, and employs a sensor to filter out background noises. The prosthesis is outfitted with a small computer chip that is trained to interpret the ...
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Internet Addresses, Phone Numbers Could Soon Be Interchangeable
Widespread adoption of the ENUM domain naming system could vastly change telecommunication by making Internet addresses and telephone numbers interchangeable. ENUM has already been endorsed in the United States by President Bush's administration, but Canada has not yet taken an official ...
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Making Up for Lost Time on IPv6
U.S. companies may not be as interested in Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) as their foreign counterparts, but the recent involvement of the U.S. government has given at least some boost to national IPv6 development. The Moonv6 project started last June, at the same time the Department of ...
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Linux Weighs In
Linux is taking over the high-end computing sector because of its flexibility, increasing maturity, and cost-effectiveness, according to scientists at government laboratories: New clustered supercomputers are almost all built to run Linux, which is much cheaper to implement across ...
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The Interactive Nightmare
A group of concerned scientists warned President Bush in 2002 that the United States' critical infrastructure is very vulnerable to cyberattack, and that massive disruptions of electrical power, finance, transportation, and other systems could take place by accident or through deliberate ...
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Spinning a Smarter Web
The Semantic Web is a project under investigation by the World Wide Web Consortium, veteran research labs such as Stanford University's Knowledge Systems Lab, and other facilities such as Ireland's Digital Enterprise Research Institute to develop a shared system that will help computers ...
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