Time for a Redesign
"Life After Death for CAPPS II?"
Whether the proposed Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening System II (CAPPS II) is dead for real or in name only is a matter of debate. Homeland Security's Suzanne Luber says the program itself is being redesigned because of public comments and other "operational factors," but ...
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"Internet Engineers Step Back to See Ethical Picture"
The maturation of the Internet is forcing engineers to consider privacy and other ethical ramifications, according to experts. Central Connecticut State University computer science and philosophy professor Brian O'Connell, who heads a group within the IEEE studying technology's societal impact, ...
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"New Panels Announced for SIGGRAPH 2004"
The ACM SIGGRAPH 2004 conference, the 31st International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, which takes place August 8-12 in Los Angeles, will bring back the popular panels program. The roughly 25,000 conference attendees will have a chance to hear top experts in ...
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"Sizing Up Robots"
Today's robots are a far cry from the thinking, feeling, companionable (and sometimes antagonistic) machines envisioned by science fiction and considered by many people to be the ultimate goal of robotics research. Current robots are nowhere near the humanoid models popularized in movies ...
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"Father of Visual Basic Begs: Stop the Insanity!"
In his book, "The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity," Visual Basic architect Alan Cooper argues that software has become excessively and unreasonably complicated because programmers and engineers are designing it for their ...
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"Debate Over Auctions for Internet Addresses"
At a week-long meeting scheduled to begin in Kuala Lumpur on Saturday, ICANN will consider changing the process for choosing administrators for generic top-level domains, such as .com and .net, from a merit-based to an auction system. ICANN had asked the Paris-based Organization for Economic ...
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"Probabilities Ease Genetic Logic"
The use of genetic algorithms--mathematical calculations that "evolve" a random population of solutions or designs to arrive at an optimum generation--is complicated by the enormous volume of data produced; this challenge is often met by using multiple parallel processors, which itself ...
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"Bluetoothful Loser"
Short-range Bluetooth networking technology will get an upgrade soon with Enhanced Data Rate (EDR), just as the technology's popularity begins to take hold. Two million Bluetooth devices ship each week, according to the Bluetooth Special Interest Group, many of them smart phones in the European ...
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"New SGI Supercomputer to Scale Linux to 1,024 CPUs"
Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) will have vastly more computer power to study meteorological data, simulate astronomical phenomena, and perform other computationally-intensive operations with the ...
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"Computer Brains"
Artificial Development recently announced the completion of the CCortex-based Autonomous Cognitive Model (ACM), a realistic simulation of a functioning human cortex's workflow that runs on the company's 1,000-processor, 500-node Linux supercomputing cluster. The CCortex system ...
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"802.11n: The Battle Begins"
The corporate fight over next-generation Wi-Fi standards is just starting to take shape, with the 802.11n Task Group N (TGn) entering the proposal phase at the IEEE 802 Plenary Session. So far, TGn has a total of 22 complete proposals and 39 partial proposals for the new standard, but none ...
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"New World Computer Chess Champ Crowned"
The latest version of the Junior software program developed by Israeli programmers Amir Ban and Shay Bushinsky has assumed the throne as the world's computer chess champion, based on the results of this year's finals on July 12. Junior differs from most leading chess programs in that it ...
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"The Rise of 'Digital People'"
In his book, "Digital People: From Bionic Humans to Androids," Emory University physics professor Sidney Perkowitz puts the development of artificial beings into perspective. He notes that our fascination with artificial beings covers the whole gamut of human reactions in art and ...
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"Tulsa Leading in Cyberterrorism Training"
University of Tulsa officials this week announced that the school has received a $4.7 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for its Cyber Corps program, aimed at creating a force of computer security specialists to detect cyberterrorism. Tulsa runs the U.S.'s largest Cyber ...
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"More Than an Open Source Curiosity"
Mono version 1.0 has begun shipping, enabling developers to take advantage of Microsoft's .Net development platform to write programs for Linux and other operating systems. The open-source Mono is basically a port of .Net's code, which has been submitted to the Ecma International standards ...
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"Meet the Eye Cam"
Ko Nishino and Prof. Shree Nayar of Columbia University have devised a "corneal imaging system" that can capture and study the mirror image of a person's surroundings reflected in the limbus of the eye. A high-resolution camera first takes a picture of a person's face, and ...
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"Top Ten Tech Trends"
Highly promising technologies under development include WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access), which is touted as a faster, cheaper, and more efficient substitute for cable modems and DSL lines; WiMAX service providers are hoping that the technology will carve out a ...
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"Clique Here"
People are using social networking services such as Ryze, LinkedIn, Tribe, and Friendster to engage in social activities such as dating and making business contacts. Within companies, social networking could enable employees to tap resources that may not be apparent to them in daily office ...
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"Time for a Redesign"
Nielsen Norman Group co-founder and Web design and usability guru Dr. Jakob Nielsen says intranet usability is critical for raising the productivity of workers in the white-collar and service economies: He says, "to get productivity gains today we have to adjust the machines--and by machines ...
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