Electronic Voting Systems: the Good, the Bad, and the Stupid
Fewer Women in Computer Jobs These Days; Greener Pastures--and Wallets--for Tech Workers?
The percentage of female computer systems analysts and scientists, programmers, and postsecondary computer science teachers declined from 30.5 percent in 1983 to 27.2 percent in 2002, according to an Oct. 13 report from the Commission on Professionals in Science and Technology. The study ...
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E-Voting Machine Crash Deepens Concerns
An Oct. 12 pre-election test of touch-screen voting terminals in Palm Beach County, Fla., had to be rescheduled to Oct. 15 because heat-related problems caused a computer server that indexes data from the machines to crash. Exiting county elections supervisor Theresa LePore says no data was ...
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Staying Emotionally Connected Over Time and Distance
Most people prefer to maintain their emotional connection to others via low-bandwidth communications systems such as instant messaging, and researchers think new technology could augment these modes of communication to facilitate seamless interpersonal interaction. This is the goal of the ...
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TeraGrid Swings Into High Gear
The National Science Foundation's TeraGrid has moved into full production mode, providing distributed computing, visualization, and data resources to partners. The TeraGrid currently offers 40 teraflops of aggregate computing power, petabytes of storage, and operates over a 40 Gbps network, ...
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What Do Women Game Designers Want?
Female computer game designers, programmers, and producers are as rare as female game players: About 10 percent of gaming industry professionals are women, and most of them hold jobs in customer service, quality assurance, and marketing, according to informal estimates. Ion Storm executive ...
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Endangered Species: US Programmers
Some experts are convinced that U.S. software programmers will die out in the next few years as more American companies offshore programming to low-wage countries and give domestic programming positions to foreign immigrants. The computer-related U.S. job market grew by 27,000 new ...
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MIT's Novel Fabrics See the Light
MIT researchers have created new optoelectronic fibers that can be woven together into new types of light-sensitive computer interfaces and multifunctional textile fabrics. "The technique we developed allowed us to bring together two disparate technologies: Those involved in creating ...
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New Tack Wins Prisoner's Dilemma
A team of Southampton University researchers led by computer science professor Nick Jennings and Ph.D. student Gopal Ramchurn has triumphed over 222 competitors in the 2004 Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma contest. The Prisoner's Dilemma, a game theory puzzle for two players, is described by ...
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A New Event in Programming?
Software startup iSpheres announced a new programming language that will allow easy development of event-driven enterprise applications, where information is updated to users immediately. The California Institute of Technology spinoff says event programming language (EPL) is meant for ...
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MRCI Researches Smallest Technologies Keeping 'Big Picture' in Mind
The University of Idaho's Microelectronics Research and Communications Institute (MRCI) has expanded from a $50,000-a-year initiative nine years ago to a facility with an annual budget of about $4 million under the leadership of NASA and Boeing veteran Touraj Assefi. "My goal is to ...
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Smaller Can Be Better (Except When It's Not)
Though smaller, more compact consumer electronic devices are aesthetically pleasing, device manufacturers and human-machine interaction experts are concerned that continuous miniaturization could inhibit their usability and enjoyment. Hewlett-Packard's Ken Klestinec complains that mobile phones ...
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State-of-the-Art Robotics on Display
Cutting-edge robotics technology spotlighted at the 2004 Intelligent Robotics and Systems (IROS) conference in Sendai, Japan, included entertainment and therapeutic robots, as well as presentations on how robotics is influencing intelligence research. Entertainment bots on ...
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Universities Team Up
Several Louisiana universities have partnered on the development of UCoMS, a high-speed sensor and wireless network for monitoring offshore oil and gas production and exploration in the Gulf of Mexico. The University of Louisiana-Lafayette is heading the project, which received $1.2 million ...
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Robotics Institute Turns 25
Starting Oct. 11, Carnegie Mellon University's (CMU) Robotics Institute will celebrate its 25th anniversary with a four-day event that will put its past accomplishments into perspective and focus on the challenges and responsibilities that must be met in order to reach the ultimate goal of ...
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W3C Workshop on Constraints and Capabilities to Explore Next Web Services Layer
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) members are working on a Web services constraints and capabilities framework that will allow organizations to communicate the terms of their service. Requirements for using HTTP or the ability to support GZIP compression, for example, need to be communicated ...
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Jeff Hawkins, Innovator
Redwood Neuroscience Institute (RNI) founder Jeff Hawkins believes that intelligent machines could be developed by understanding the fundamentals of human intelligence. In his latest book, "On Intelligence," Hawkins posits that intelligence, perception, creativity, and consciousness are ...
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"Grazing the Nanograss"
Researchers at Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs facility have developed "nanograss," an adaptable material comprised of ultrathin silicon posts whose properties can be adjusted on the spot through temperature, electricity, ultrasound, or other means. "By adjusting the area of these ...
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Devil's in Sensor Nets' Details
Wireless sensor networks will be a huge market in the future, surpassing even cell phones and PCs in volume, according to Crossbow Technologies CEO Michael Horton at the IEEE Conference on Sensor and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks (Secon 2004). Better chip technology is one of the main ...
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Electronic Voting Systems: the Good, the Bad, and the Stupid
Former ACM President Barbara Simons writes that enthusiasm for paperless electronic voting systems, originally touted as a solution to the hanging chad problem that muddled the last presidential election, is giving way to demands for voter-verifiable paper ...
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