Experiment and Theory Have a New Partner: Simulation
Opening Doors for Women in Computing
Women's shrinking presence in IT has become a major area of focus since Harvard University President Lawrence Summers suggested last month that innate gender differences could partially explain why women are less successful at science and math. Some scholars argue that biology is less ...
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Biologists Turn Text Miners to Dig for Results
Bioinformatics specialists gathered at a workshop held by the Ontario Center for Genomic Computing (OCGC) to discuss how they can improve data-mining of biological research literature. Biology literature is unique in that it is not written to be easily understood, nor is it written ...
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UIUC's 640-Node Xserve Cluster Wins on Price, Speed
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) elected to build its new Turing Xserve Cluster supercomputer out of Apple hardware and software because of the advantages they offered in terms of cost, performance, efficiency, support, and compatibility, according to Computational Science ...
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Like Linux, Databases Going Open Source
Annual sales for open-source database software will skyrocket from $120 million now to $1 billion by 2008, predicts Forrester Research analyst Noel Yuhanna, forcing commercial vendors to lower their prices over the next few years. He estimates that 35 percent of all open-source database usage will ...
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What's Bugging the High-Tech Car?
High-end cars have generated a deluge of customer complaints that can be tracked in Internet forums, and experts say the culprit is complex technology that can be difficult to use and leads to software glitches. Often these electronic problems are hard to identify, even with ...
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Grid Expectations for Networked Computing: From Global Earth Monitoring to Black Hole Detection
Current grid computing systems and the probable future development of grid technology and applications were spotlighted at last week's "Grid and e-Collaboration for the Space Community" workshop at the European Space Agency's (ESA) European Space Research Institute (ESRIN) in Frascati, ...
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Miniaturization Is Key to Computers' Growth, But Parts Sure Are Tiny
The miniaturization of computer technology is driving the growth of computers' processing power. For example, disk drive storage has experienced an approximately 10,000 percent improvement over the past two decades. The first disk drive, which was 24 inches in diameter, could only ...
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Augmented-Reality Machine Works in Real Time
Oxford University researchers have developed an augmented-reality system that allows live video footage to be digitally enhanced with computer-generated scenery in real time. The technology enables a computer to construct an accurate environmental simulation in 3D while monitoring ...
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Toward a Truly Clever Artificial Intelligence
Dr. James Anderson of the University of Reading's Computer Science Department reports the development of an approach to writing computer programs that could one day be applied to the design and construction of robots whose minds function like those of humans. His "perspective ...
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Government Must Own the Problem of Supercomputing
The High-End Crusader accepts the main argument of the National Research Council's (NRC) "Future of Supercomputing" report that the government must be primarily responsible for the supercomputing problem, but disagrees that low-bandwidth systems will always rule supercomputing applications. He ...
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Searching for Context
Researchers in the IST project VICODI have developed a system that is able to define the context of an Internet search according to topic, location, and period. The system makes use of a search engine that is intuitive to context and is based on multilingual input, a knowledge structuring method ...
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Sizing Up Complex Webs: Close or Far, Many Networks Look the Same
Researchers have uncovered another similarity in the makeup of complex networks. The Jan. 27 edition of Nature reports that Hernan Makse of the City College of New York and his co-workers have discovered that all blurred networks have connection patterns that are similar to those found ...
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PHP Consortium Tackles Third-Party Application Security
The newly formed PHP Security Consortium will promote proper documentation, tools, and standards for PHP developers in order to ensure application security. Developers formed the group to support the credibility of the PHP scripting language in the wake of the Santy worm ...
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Open Integration Tools Upgrade Due in March
The 4.0 release of the OpenEAI project's open-source alternative to proprietary ERP/EAI middleware solutions is set for release in March. OpenEAI, which offers a Java-based framework modeled on Apache, is a project of developers at the University of Illinois and is based on the ...
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American Society for Information Science and Technology Annual Meeting
The plenary session featuring Sir Tim Berners-Lee was the top event of the 2004 annual conference of the American Society for Information and Technology (ASIST) in mid November. Focusing on how we can maximize technology, Berners-Lee said the semantic Web could be used to enhance ...
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Which Wi-Fi?
Five Wi-Fi hardware technologies have the potential to radically change networking, but each needs a lot more development in order to fulfill their promise. Most Wi-Fi vendors foresee wired networks being replaced by wireless networks as Wi-Fi's speed and reliability rises to Ethernet ...
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The Firefox Explosion
The Firefox open-source browser has attracted millions of users and advocates for its security, simplicity, and speed--and its success reflects the frustration many people feel toward the shortcomings of Microsoft's proprietary Internet Explorer (IE). Firefox is a breakthrough technology ...
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Unnatural Selection
Designers are hoping to address engineering problems more efficiently through the use of genetic algorithms (GAs) that breed better designs by following a biological evolutionary model. David Goldberg of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Genetic Algorithms Laboratory ...
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Experiment and Theory Have a New Partner: Simulation
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has a longstanding reputation for eagerly exploring the latest supercomputing technologies to support the continued advance of all scientific disciplines and attract some of the world's most talented researchers. Mark Seager with Livermore's Platforms ...
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