Virtual-Reality Therapy
New Passenger Profiling System to Be Tested
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) will make another attempt at revamping the passenger screening system used to identify terrorist suspects, abandoning the controversial CAPPS II program, according to TSA head David M. Stone. While the existing CAPPS (Computer Assisted Passenger ...
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Induce Act Draws Support, Venom
Until recently, technology enthusiasts viewed the Induce Act as an alarming, but unlikely piece of legislation that could restrict an infinite number of technologies. First proposed by Sens. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the Induce Act would punish technology firms whose ...
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Missouri Plan to Let Military Cast Votes by E-Mail Draws Criticism
Missouri Secretary of State Matt Blunt has proposed allowing military personnel in designated combat areas to send their votes in by email as an alternative to absentee ballots, which can sometimes be delayed in the regular mail and miss submission deadlines. Blunt, a Republican running ...
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Self-Configuring Multifunction Mobile Terminals
The SCOUT project has focused heavily on the regulation and marketing of software-defined radios (SDRs) across Europe, spurring debate in areas such as ad hoc networks' user, operator, and regulator requirements; protocols for managing the downloaded software on reconfigurable mobile terminals; ...
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Computer People Reopen Art History Dispute
At this week's International Conference on Pattern Recognition, in Cambridge, England, two computer researchers tackled the theory early Renaissance painters used optical aids such as concave mirrors and camera obscura to accurately capture landscape perspectives. Microsoft researcher ...
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Human Chips More Than Skin-Deep
The idea of electronic ID chips implanted under the skin carries Orwellian overtones of privacy infringement, although proponents claim these fears are far outweighed by the technology's potential benefits, such as better medical care, identity theft deterrents, and the identification of disaster ...
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NASA: DOS Glitch Nearly Killed Mars Rover
NASA scientist Robert Denise said at this week's Hot Chips conference that the real cause of a glitch on the Mars Spirit rover early this year was not corruption in the flash memory, but rather an embedded DOS file system that grew out of control. An undisclosed software vendor had required the flash ...
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KDE Developers Focus on Accessibility
The KDE Community World Summit showed the commitment of open-source developers to building accessible software for disabled users. The upcoming 3.4 or 4 version of the KDE Linux desktop environment will support accessibility software that currently is only compatible with the GNOME ...
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Career Path Boost Needed to Entice Women Into IT
The U.K. Equal Opportunity Commission (EOC) wants policymakers, employers, educators, and students to work together to increase the percentage of women in the IT field. The EOC recently found the percentage of women in the IT workforce has fallen from 23 percent to 20 percent. Programs such ...
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WA Supercomputing Gets $3.1M Boost
The Australian government has provided $3.1 million (Australian) in funding to Western Australia's Interactive Virtual Environment Center (IVEC) for high performance computing and visualization technology to help upgrade its supercomputing facilities. IVEC plans to spend $1 million of the funding ...
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Exhibit Features Viruses as Art
The "I Love You rev.eng" art exhibit is set to begin a worldwide tour this September in the United States, featuring an historical analysis of hacker culture, hands-on exhibits where people can create and observe computer viruses, and art displays featuring computer code. The show is a second ...
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The Making of an Xbox Warrior
Video games have been tapped by the U.S. military as a tool for urban combat training, although the games being employed differ from commercial counterparts. The military game environments strive for realism so that players can be properly trained on survival techniques and strategies: For ...
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A Proactive Approach to Security
Symantec chief technology officer Robert Clyde is also a founding member of the IT industry's Information Sharing and Analysis Center, as well as the group's executive committee treasurer. In an interview, he says virus threats will continue to drive the security business, and notes that ...
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A Big Fly in the Open-Source Soup
While Linux and other open-source software such as the Apache Web server have dramatically increased in importance in the last few years, legal concerns have given many enterprise users at least a small pause. Linux is especially vulnerable because, unlike Apache, Mozilla, and the BSD ...
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Software Flight Plan
Retired U.S. Air Force Maj. Gen. Paul Nielsen is taking over the director post at Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute, where he says software engineering efforts will help the commercial sector deal with greater levels of integration, produce higher quality software, and ...
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Technical Standards Facilitate Innovation
Many companies that wanted to deploy speech applications to improve the service experience for their customers were impeded by technical limitations of what were then proprietary environments that significantly raised the cost of entry and discouraged corporate investment in such ...
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Looking Good--A Lesson in Layout
Niall Murphy, user interface designer and author of "Front Panel: Designing Software for Embedded User Interfaces," explains that programmers can improve the quality of their UIs by applying standard layout methods employed by graphic designers, and he outlines a number of them in this ...
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Virtual-Reality Therapy
Immersive virtual reality technology is being tapped for its therapeutic value in such areas as pain management and overcoming phobias. Hunter G. Hoffman of the University of Washington Human Interface Technology Laboratory and David R. Patterson of the university's School of Medicine ...
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