While Rome Burns?
Researchers Aim for Plain-English Debugging
The National Science Foundation has invested $1.2 million in Carnegie Mellon University professor Brad Myers and grad student Andrew Ko's Whyline (Workspace for Helping You Link Instructions to Numbers and Events) project, a debugging program that enables users to ask questions about ...
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Horizon Programs Introduce Girls to Career Possibilities in Technical Fields
Clarkson University's Horizons programs encourage girls in middle school to pursue technology-oriented careers. The National Council for Research on Women reports that the number of women working in engineering and computing fields has stayed roughly the same for the last two decades, despite a rise ...
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Broadband: Why Policies Must Change
Both Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry and his Republican rival George W. Bush are citing the importance of universal broadband access in their campaigns, but the winner of the presidency will face an uphill battle in delivering on his promise. Federal communications policy is a ...
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Powerful New Computer Cluster Will Tackle Complex Problems in Physics and Computer Science
The University of California-Santa Cruz is home to a computer cluster of 36 dual-processor Apple Xserve G5 nodes from the Hierarchical Systems Research Foundation co-founded by UCSC alumnus David Doshay, who is working closely with physics grad student John Donohue on a project that will employ the ...
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High-Tech Employment Numbers Drop in Second Quarter
The continued offshoring of IT jobs by U.S. companies has fueled a decline in employment for domestic software engineers, programmers, hardware engineers, and computer scientists and systems analysts between the first and second quarters of 2004, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) ...
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UC San Diego Launches University-Industry Research Alliance to Address Challenges to Future Shared Networked System Infrastructures
The new Center for Networked Systems (CNS) at the University of California, San Diego, (UCSD) joins academic and industry efforts in designing new converged network systems. Grids and pervasive computing have made networks far more central to today's computing paradigm than in the past, ...
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Real-Life Science in the Lab of Tomorrow
The purpose of the IST Program-funded Lab of Tomorrow is to improve learning by providing students with real-life examples of science theory that interest and motivate them; these examples are derived from data extracted by tiny programmable devices that can be incorporated into ...
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It Should Be So Simple
The move to simplify gadgets and software is finally gaining momentum after more than 10 years of industry deliberation, partly due to a growing consumer backlash against complexity. Examples of easy-to-use products with simple designs include the PalmPilot, the Google Web site, Apple ...
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I, Pool Shark
Queen's University roboticist Michael Greenspan has developed Deep Green, a computerized billiards player that Greenspan and his team want to make capable of besting the greatest human pool champions. Greenspan was challenged in his goal by assertions from pool jockeys that the game was ...
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Online Popularity Tracked
Cornell University and Internet Archive researchers have extended the calculation of a baseball player's batting average to the measurement of the popularity of items available for sale or download on the Internet by determining the ratio of the users who download them to the users who read ...
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UK Researchers Shortlisted for 1m Award
The Malicious and Accidental Fault Tolerance (MAFTIA) project administrated by Newcastle University's Dr. Robert Stroud in collaboration with research teams in Portugal, Switzerland, and France was shortlisted for the fifth annual 1-million-euro EU Descartes Prize, which will be split equally ...
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Quantum Computing, Secure Communication Closer to Reality
UCLA researchers report in the July 22 edition of Nature that they have successfully inverted a single electron spin in a conventional off-the-shelf transistor chip and detected the current changes caused by the electron's flipping, a significant breakthrough in the push to make ...
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In Most of Europe, Electronic Voting Loses Out to Paper Ballots
European citizens and governments generally prefer traditional paper-based voting because of unresolved reliability and security issues surrounding electronic voting. The EU Commission will not endorse e-voting, while major e-voting deployments in Ireland and the United Kingdom were ...
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Finding a Way to Make the Net Truly Global
The first-ever ICANN meeting on Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) was held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where participants debated how best to incorporate non-Latin scripts into the Internet infrastructure. ICANN Chairman Vint Cerf and Internet Engineering Task Force representative John ...
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Search Engine Experts Look Forward to Completely Digital Lives and Backwards to Washington's Letters
Researchers gathered at the University of Sheffield in England commemorated 10 years of search engine technology and presented new innovations that will shape how people store and search for information. University of Sheffield computer scientist Mark Sanderson claimed the first Web search ...
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Life Has Gotten Even Shorter in Digital Age
Planned product obsolescence is a necessity to manufacturers whose profitability depends on regular turnover, while professional and consumer archivists are struggling with the dilemma of saving data produced by out-of-date machines. A 2002 survey for the Consumer Electronics ...
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Producing the Future of IT at MIT
MIT VP for information services and technology Jerrold M. Grochow says MIT has left an important legacy to the computer world, and lists Unix ancestor Multics, Project Athena, and TCP/IP as significant technologies that the university developed or contributed to that have had a lasting impact. ...
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Faster, Cheaper, Better
The supercomputer field is experiencing a renaissance after being eclipsed by the emergence of the Internet in the late 1990s: Unlike in the 1980s, when the most talented people in computer science worked to custom-build the fastest computers, many of today's supercomputers have been put ...
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While Rome Burns?"
Code Complete" author Steve McConnell told SD West 2004 attendees that good software relies chiefly on personal discipline rather than technology, and expressed hope that premature optimization will be eliminated by faster hardware; he urged developers to concentrate on code clarity and ...
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