Exploring the Ultrawideband
American Programmers Still Alive and Kicking
Edward Yourdon, author of the upcoming book, "Outsource: Competing in the Global Productivity Race," foresaw rough waters ahead for U.S.-based programmers as far back as 1989, when he noted that Indian workers adhered to very high standards of quality and productivity and were willing to ...
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Looking for a User-Friendly Internet
The Internet can be a double-edged sword for visually impaired users: It can expand their independence, or isolate them further from important information if it is too complex to navigate. Solving this problem has been the goal for the past eight years of IBM Japan accessibility researcher ...
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DHS Moves Ahead With Cybersecurity R&D Efforts
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is engaged in several pilot cybersecurity efforts designed to address the scarcity of real-world incident data, such as the Protected Repository for Defense of Infrastructure Against Cyber Threats (Protect) program. The goal of ...
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Supercomputers Aid Hurricane Forecasting
Weather forecasting has significantly advanced with supercomputing: Improvements supercomputer-aided climate modeling has helped usher in include increasingly accurate five-day forecasts and 50% less hurricane track error in the National Hurricane Center's three-day ...
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They're Robots? Those Beasts!
Some robotics researchers are looking to the animal world for inspiration, and they think the biomimetic devices they create will be able to function in places inaccessible to current-generation robots. Examples of biomimetic machines include segmented snake- and trunk-shaped robots from ...
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Human Errors Silenced Airports
A software glitch led to a three-hour shutdown of Southern California's air traffic control radio system, cutting off radio communications and leading to five incidents where planes breached the required separation distance from one another. FAA officials said the radio system, known as Voice ...
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Nose-Steered Mouse Could Save Aching Arms
Dmirty Gorodnichy of Canada's Institute of Information Technology has created the "nouse," a tool that enables PC users to navigate using the movements of their nose and eye blinks. The nouse can navigate around 2D computer software using a single Webcam and 3D software with two Webcams. ...
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Berners-Lee Calls for More Voice Apps
In a keynote address at the SpeechTek conference, World Wide Web creator and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) director Sir Tim Berners-Lee called for further development of voice recognition systems, whose current shortcomings are causing frustration among users that could be detrimental ...
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Too Hot to Handle
PC processors and graphics chips are generating uncomfortable amounts of heat for users, highlighting what is one of the most pressing technical concerns for the semiconductor industry. The excessive heat is a result of greater numbers of transistors being packed into smaller spaces. ...
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IETF Deals Microsoft's E-Mail Proposal a Setback
Microsoft's SenderID technology was sent back for revision after the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) group studying the anti-spam proposal said it contained vague intellectual property claims. Open source groups such as the Debian Project and Apache Software Foundation have ...
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Proving That Shape-Shifting Robots Can Get a Move On
A major challenge to the creation of self-reconfigurable or shape-shifting robots is establishing control and planning methods that will prevent the machines from falling apart or getting stuck as they move, and a team of Dartmouth College researchers led by Daniela Rus has devised such methods, ...
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Dozens of Experts Take on Cyberterror
Government and business leaders from across the Pacific Northwest conducted a cyberterror simulation last week to assess the vulnerability of computer-controlled critical infrastructure. The public-private partnership attracted more than 100 experts from several states, the ...
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Software Tutors Offer Help and Customized Hints
Carnegie Learning's Cognitive Tutor program is employed at 1,700 U.S. middle schools and high schools to offer math students more personalized instruction using artificial intelligence. The educational software monitors students' performance while providing customized feedback and ...
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Digital Alchemy
The computing industry has been pursuing the vision of software emulation for nearly three decades, but such efforts have yielded few results with wider applications beyond enabling one specific program to run on one other kind of processor. Furthermore, these products are often characterized by ...
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As WGIG Forms, Ideas About Defining Its Scope Circulate
The Internet Governance Project has issued a set of reports on the current state of play" in Internet governance as commissioned by the United Nations ICT Task Force as input for the U.N. Secretary-General's Working Group on Internet Governance, writes Syracuse University School of ...
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Cursor on Target
The Cursor on Target (CoT) project is a joint venture between the Air Force Electronic Systems Center (ESC), MITRE, the Navy, the Air Force Special Operations Command, and the Air Force Research Laboratory to synchronize the battlefield operations of space, air, and ground forces through a ...
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The SOA Puzzle: Five Missing Pieces
The promise of service-oriented architecture (SOA) is impeded by challenges in the areas of reliable asynchronous messaging, orchestration, security, legacy support, and semantics, and IT managers' decision to follow either a conventional enterprise application integration strategy or a Web services ...
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The Next Threat
There is growing evidence that terrorist cells such as al Qaeda are attempting to become skilled in hacking and other forms of cyberwarfare, and experts warn that cyberterrorists could cripple the World Wide Web, interfere with military communications systems, or disrupt electrical grids ...
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Exploring the Ultrawideband
A slew of commercial products, many with national and homeland security applications, stem from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's micropower impulse radar (MIR) technology, which emits millions of electromagnetic pulses in the ultrawideband (UWB) range each second to facilitate ...
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