Sensors & Sensibility
Tech Bust Zaps Interest in Computer Careers
The bursting of the technology bubble and horror stories about unemployment and offshore outsourcing of tech jobs have dampened students' interest in computer careers, and fueled a 23 percent decline in computer science program enrollments across U.S. universities between 2002 and 2003. ...
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NU Researcher Glimpses 3rd Generation of Internet
A third-generation Internet envisioned by Northwestern University researcher Joe Mambretti promises to ramp up data transmission speeds thousands of times, and that is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. As director of Northwestern's International Center for Advanced Internet ...
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Changing the Face of Web Surfing
Some Web users are taking it upon themselves to correct or re-design poorly accessible Web sites and open them up to the public, a practice that has earned praise from other users but anger--and even threats of litigation--from sites' owners. Oxford University math graduate Matthew ...
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Low Bar for High School Students Threatens Tech Sector
More U.S. high school students are not taking the rigorous coursework that is needed to succeed in college and later in the workplace, writes IBM vice president of systems development and Texas senior state executive Tony Befi. He says that trend runs counter to the trend in the workplace ...
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Aust Supercomputing Undergoes Renaissance
The Australian supercomputing sector is being revitalized by growing demands and the advent of commercial cluster computing that runs on the Linux operating system. The South Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing recently purchased a new Silicon Graphics Altix supercomputer ...
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Start-ups Search for Hard-Drive Replacements
A number of startups are pursuing often strange data storage solutions to alleviate the cost pressures on hard drive and flash memory manufacturers, and all the contenders offer ways to pack data more densely than possible with silicon circuitry, and reduce the cost of manufacturing. ...
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IBM to Help Train Students for IT Work
The new IBM Academic Initiative is a program to aid academic institutions that support open-source software and open standards by contributing hardware and software and training students for in-demand IT skills such as programming, architecture, and technology certifications, says IBM's Buell ...
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Handheld PC Virus Holds Ominous Promise
The underground group 29A has created "Duts," a new virus that is designed to infect handhelds powered by Microsoft's Windows CE software, as a proof-of-concept program. The virus proliferates by embedding copies of its code inside normal software applications, which handheld users often ...
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Battlefield Tech for Aide Workers
Almost 20 military and civilian organizations were represented at the Strong Angel II conference in Hawaii this week to demonstrate communication and collaboration technologies designed to enhance the coordination of humanitarian aid in war-torn locales and disaster sites. The event was ...
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Swift Searching for Open Source
Spanish university researchers have developed a novel search engine that enables programmers to easily find pieces of open-source code they need according to that code's function. The AMOS system relies on a simple ontology and search-term dictionary to search included elements quickly. ...
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Face of the Future?
Most scientists agree that humanoid robots popularized in the media will one day become a reality, but opinion is split as to whether that day is close or far off. Future Horizons reports that robot infants for parenthood training, house-cleaning robots, robotic elderly caregivers, ...
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Teleport Lifts Quantum Computing
Two research teams have successfully teleported the quantum states of atoms on demand, thus enabling quantum information to be transmitted reliably and stably; this breakthrough is an important step toward the construction of quantum computers that use trapped ions, which are quantum particles that ...
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ICANN Crunch Meeting Begins
ICANN's efforts to gain international backing for its oversight of the Internet face stiff opposition at a meeting this week in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Chief among the complaints is ICANN's proposed budget for 2005, which is 91 percent higher than the $8.27 million allotted in 2003. The ...
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Opposition Grows to Paperless Voting
There is a growing movement to address concerns about paperless voting systems, as evidenced by the huge turnout of protesters at the "Computer Ate My Vote" rallies held across the United States last week. Prestigious computer scientists, civil rights supporters, and tech professionals are ...
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Some Say U.S. Supercomputing Needs a Jump-Start
The U.S. House of Representatives passed a pair of bills in June designed to build momentum for U.S. supercomputing efforts, the High-Performance Supercomputing Revitalization Act of 2004 and a request for about $200 million in funding for supercomputer development at the Energy Department. ...
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U.S. E-Passport Plan Raises Tech, Diplomatic Hackles
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies are pushing technology vendors to test their prototype electronic passport solutions before the congressionally appointed Oct. 26, 2005, deadline. The U.S. Congress wants the 27 governments with which it exchanges visa ...
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Groundbreaking Research: ACM's SIGGRAPH 2004 Papers
SIGGRAPH's Papers sessions have been consistently popular as a platform for spotlighting important and challenging new areas of research in computer graphics and interactive methods, and the papers being presented at this year's conference promise to continue that tradition, and detail both ...
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Is Natural Language Real?
In 1950, Alan Turing predicted that computers would be able to process unconstrained natural language within approximately 50 years, and we are about halfway there, technologically speaking. Natural language processing technologies are not advanced enough to enable people to address computers ...
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Sensors & Sensibility
Personal information can be exploited more creatively and intrusively thanks to the emergence of new tracking and monitoring technologies, database mining programs, and greater tolerance toward surveillance; privacy experts are worried about this trend, especially because legal ...
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