Woz Goes Wireless
U.S. Nearing Deal on Way to Track Foreign Visitors
A system to enable federal authorities to track foreigners in the United States via a global network of databases and biometric sensors raises questions about its feasibility as well as its impact on visitors' privacy. Three bidders are vying for the US-Visit contract from the Homeland ...
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Fight Over E-Voting Leaves Election Plans as Casualties
Plans to use touch screen voting machines throughout the country are being disrupted as many states reassess their options in the wake of heavily publicized reports of security vulnerabilities, operational glitches, and oversight and obfuscation by manufacturers. "E-voting machines can only ...
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A Modern Day HAL? IBM Says Anything But
IBM research executives at the inaugural International Conference on Autonomic Computing assured attendees that scientists are not developing equivalents to HAL, the self-aware, homicidal computer from "2001: A Space Odyssey," by making computer systems capable of self-diagnosis and ...
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Europe's Semantic Web Projects Start to Mesh
The inaugural European Semantic Web Symposium held in Crete brought together international experts and showcased how semantic Web technology has moved from research into the mass market realm. W3C Web Ontology co-chair Guus Schreiber said in his keynote speech that the Resource ...
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China Trying to One-Up Technology World
Chinese companies are pursuing their own high-tech standards in order to throw off the yoke of foreign technology. University of Oregon professor Richard P. Suttmeier says cultural pride is at the center of this "techno-nationalism," born out of the country's frustration of lagging ...
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Demand Grows to Require Paper Trails for Electronic Votes
Severe doubts about the infallibility of electronically cast votes has spurred critics to clamor for voter-verified paper trails, and support for such measures is growing throughout the United States among local governments due to the federal government's failure to establish national ...
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CMU Grad Student Develops Origami-Making Robot
Carnegie Mellon University graduate student Devin Balkcom has created a robot capable of folding paper into simple origami shapes for his doctoral thesis, and this accomplishment could be a significant milestone in the development of more dexterous and useful robots. The machine is basically ...
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Software Industry Seeks Greater Market Effectiveness
The 10th International Computer Science Convention and Fair held May 10-15 in Havana, Cuba, focused on the official launch of the Cuban Software Industry (incusoft), notable achievements by Cuban institutions, and security issues, among other things. Deputy minister of Computer Science ...
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Integrated Project to Develop Programmable Artificial Cells
The ramifications of how living technology could be incorporated into the programmable artificial cell evolution (PACE) project will be the focus of a consortium of 13 companies from eight countries in Europe. Artificial cells capable of self-organization and evolution are a necessary step for ...
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Evolution Trains Robot Teams
University researchers are creating fine-tuned robot control systems using artificial evolutionary processes. North Carolina State University and University of Utah researchers used the Capture the Flag game to develop artificial neural networks that can control mobile robots: The first ...
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U.S. May Get a Privacy Czar
House Select Committee on Homeland Security members Kendrick Meek (D-Fla.) and Jim Turner (D-Texas) have introduced a bill to establish the position of federal chief privacy officer and similar positions at all federal agencies and departments. The Shield Privacy Act would also establish a ...
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Researchers to Develop Intelligent Wheelchair
Researchers from the University of Essex have teamed up with scientists from the Institute of Automation in Beijing to develop an affordable robotic wheelchair to be used by the elderly and people with disabilities. Funding for the intelligent wheelchair, RoboChair, which will have a ...
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New Bill Proposes Tech Training Tax Credit
Helping information and communications technology workers update their skills is the goal of new legislation by U.S. Rep. Jerry Weller (R-Ill.). Weller has introduced the Technology Retraining And Investment Now Act of 2004 (TRAIN), which would provide a tax credit of up to $8,000 per year to ...
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DARPA Grand Challenge Entrant Talks About the Event
Berkeley University's entrant into the recent Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Grand Challenge was an autonomous motorcycle created by a team led by 23-year-old Anthony Levandowski, who says he learned valuable lessons despite the bike's crash early in the event. He ...
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Driving By the Seat of Your Pants
Haptic technology is being added to motor vehicles so that drivers can process information--such as recommended turns--without being distracted from the road by audio or visual input from dashboard displays and voice recordings. Jan van Erp of TNO Human Factors in the Netherlands has spun ...
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Planetary Rovers Cure Their Own Ills
NASA and the European Space Agency plan to include intelligent fault-protection technology in future space rovers. Space agency officials want to add the self-preservation technology to their robotic rovers after observing how NASA was able to revive the glitch-stalled Mars rover Spirit ...
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Electronics Industry Girds for New Rules
Complying with European, Asian, and U.S. directives to reduce the amount of environmentally hazardous materials in their products will require electronics manufacturers to change their cost structure, business models, and relationships with suppliers, customers, and merchants. AMR Research calculates that it will cost companies an average of $2 million to $3 ...
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Contents Under Pressure
The results of Winter Corp.'s 2003 TopTen Program indicate that the scalability of online transaction processing (OLTP) and decision-support databases has increased dramatically in the last two years. Winter records an almost 100 percent expansion in the size of the largest ...
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Woz Goes Wireless
Steve Wozniak's latest project continues his personal drive to take a sophisticated technological concept and whittle it down into products that deliver value to everyday consumers. The core component of his latest company, Wheels of Zeus, is the ubiquitous deployment of Global Positioning ...
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