Quest for Eternal Storage
Trying to Take Technology To the Masses
Bringing computer access to the impoverished segment of the world's population--a segment that totals 4 billion people--without a dependence on philanthropy is the motivation behind PCtvt, the brainchild of Carnegie Mellon University professor and artificial intelligence pioneer Raj Reddy. ...
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GIS Maps Bring Tourism, Telecom, and Environmental Info to PDAs Throughout Europe
The European Commission's ODIN Project is bringing GIS map data and other Web information to wireless personal digital assistants (PDAs) in Ireland, Greece, Norway, and Italy: The project has created a platform for presenting GIS data on the Web and delivering it to mobile devices. The ...
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Turning Jukeboxes Into Teaching Aids
Tracy Futhey, Duke University CIO and information technology VP, explains that the distribution of Apple iPod digital music players to freshmen this year is part of an experiment to see if IT can augment education. The iPod is particularly appealing for a number of reasons: It is already likely to ...
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Training Seen as Way to Counter Offshoring
In his upcoming book "Outsource: Competing in the Global Productivity Race," Cutter Consortium co-founder Edward Yourdon asserts that the trend to offshore jobs to countries that can deliver similar or better quality work for less money is not only a threat to U.S. software development jobs, ...
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Sensor "Memory" System: Faster, More Precise Damage Assessment
University of Missouri-Rolla (UMR) researchers are developing a distributed cable sensor system that promises to more accurately evaluate structural damage by "memorizing" its location, a breakthrough that could significantly speed up emergency responses to disasters. UMR's Dr. Genda ...
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Canadian Robot May Ride to Hubble's Rescue
A robot called the Special Purpose Dextrous Manipulator, known as "Dextre" for short, may be used to repair the Hubble Space Telescope now that a manned mission to Hubble appears unlikely. Made by Toronto-based MD Robotics, which also has developed robot arms for the Space Shuttle, Dextre ...
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Old Boys' Clubs Contribute to Gender Gap in IT
Penn State researchers are trying to gain a deeper understanding of why women are underrepresented in the IT industry. "The lack of women isn't due to the biological traits of the sexes, and it isn't just because IT is a male domain," said Penn State professor Eileen Trauth while presenting a ...
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Trojan Hits Windows PDAs for First Time
Kaspersky Labs last week warned of the first Trojan horse threat for mobile devices. The Backdoor.WinCE.Brador.a utility lets the hacker remotely control a device running Windows CE Version 4.2 and newer, as well as recent versions of Windows Mobile. A few weeks earlier, security experts ...
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Gov't, Enterprise Data Sharing Efforts Crumbling
The federal government says it wants more information from private network operators concerning vulnerabilities, outages, infrastructure, and traffic routing, yet government officials and agencies have been in turn making less information available to the private sector. As a result, many ...
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Clearing the Fog
The goal of NASA's Aviation Safety and Security Program is to lower fatal accident rates by 80 percent over a decade, and a key enabling technology is "tunnel-in-the-sky" synthetic vision systems (SVS) that were recently tested on a Gulfstream V aircraft in Reno, Nev. The test flights ...
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A Remote Control for Your Life
Japanese mobile phone behemoth NTT DoCoMo plans to turn the cell phone into a versatile machine that can perform dozens of other tasks in addition to traditional capabilities such as email, gameplay, and phone calls. Such tasks include personal identification, unlocking doors, electronic ...
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Cellphone Viruses: How Worried Should You Be?
Security experts warn that the Cabir virus, which spread through smart cell phones last month but did not actually do damage, is an example of the havoc that could take place. Cabir may or may not have been the first wild cell phone virus; it used the Bluetooth specification to spread through ...
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Computing Gets Physical
Gesture recognition technology has finally started to emerge from the domain of science fiction into reality, and it is the ambition of the technology's proponents and developers to make it the remote control of the 21st century. One example is the EyeToy, a peripheral for Sony Computer ...
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Crippled But Not Crashed
Making flight computers capable of safely landing damaged aircraft has been an area of research for the past 15 years, and one of the more recent breakthroughs is a system based on neural-network software developed by the Intelligent Flight Control (IFC) group at the NASA Ames Research Center. ...
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Downloading the Sky
The Virtual Observatory (VO) is an international effort to mesh thousands of scattered databases of cosmological data accrued over the last several decades into a single online resource that also functions as a grid computing network. The VO, which would be available to virtually anyone, ...
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Learning Management Systems: Are We There Yet?
Ira Fuchs, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's VP for research in information technology, explains that the purpose of the Mellon-funded OKI project was to create an architecture that expedites collaborative development of the elements comprising a modern learning management system (LMS), and notes ...
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Quest for Eternal Storage
The growing popularity of digital storage technologies such as DVD recorders has made the reliability of data storage a key issue, and adding urgency to the matter is increasing reports from users that their recorded data is becoming unreadable. These trends are fueling demand for "eternal ...
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