Naming Names
White House 2006 Budget Proposal Would Boost IT Spending
President Bush's proposed $2.57 trillion federal budget for fiscal 2006 raises IT spending 7 percent and National Science Foundation (NSF) funding almost 26 percent, although 150 government programs would be scaled back or jettisoned. Approximately 55 percent of the requested $65.1 billion ...
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Made in Lower-Cost America
A new way for American companies to save money without offshoring IT operations is emerging: "Homeshoring" work to midsize U.S. cities or rural regions, where labor costs are cheaper, partly because housing is less expensive. Rural Sourcing founder Kathy White maintains that urban tech ...
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Improving Computer-Supported Work Through Scenario-Based Evaluation
Penn State researchers led by School of Information Sciences and Technology professor Steven Haynes conducted an 18-month study of an integrated digital environment (IDE) for managing hundreds of military vehicles that has yielded strategies for boosting the system's efficiency and usefulness. ...
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Software Ties Marks to Digital Text
Hillcrest Communications software engineer Kevin Conroy notes that word processor users regularly proofread printed documents, but cannot transfer annotation marks to the documents' digital counterparts, leaving them little option but to manually re-enter the marks electronically. Conroy ...
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Analysis: New DHS Pick Faces Cyber Dilemma
Former federal prosecutor Michael Chertoff is almost certainly to be confirmed as Homeland Security secretary and is already facing pressure on how to deal with cybersecurity. Congress, some government officials, and industry representatives have been pushing for an assistant secretary ...
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An Open-Ended Future for Open Source
Open source software and free software (OSS/FS) is entering its golden age, according to some European researchers who point to unique commercial and technical advantages. OSS/FS allows users freedom in how they use, modify, and distribute the code, but also allow them to make money from OSS/FS, ...
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Expert: Cooperate, or Risk Hobbling Moore's Law
Interuniversity MicroElectronics Center senior fellow Hugo De Man told attendees at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) on Feb. 7 that universal wireless interdevice communications can only be realized with portable devices equipped with microprocessors capable of ...
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Concept of $100 Laptop for World's Poor Is a Winner
MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte's unveiling of a $100 laptop concept at last week's World Economic Forum spotlighted a workable idea for delivering advanced communications technology to people in hostile, poverty-plagued regions. The laptop concept boasts more affordable display ...
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EU May Pursue Software Patent Bill
The European Union's proposed software patent bill has been held up for two months by Poland's opposition to rules that critics say would hurt small developers and limit freely available open-source software, but an anonymous Polish diplomat indicates that Poland could withdraw its ...
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Stanford Selected as First Regional Center for Department of Homeland Security's National Visual Analytics Work
Stanford University will serve as the first Regional Visualization and Analytics Center for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), developing new tools and methods needed to manage, represent, and analyze large amounts of information. Specifically, Stanford will develop network ...
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Data Centers' Quest for Cool: Heat Issues Put Servers at Risk
Heat output is becoming increasingly problematic for data centers, and the advent of clusters, grids, and other technologies that pack servers closely together will likely exacerbate the situation. The bulk of the 250 watts of electricity a typical server consumes ends up as heat, and ...
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Division Over Skills Crisis
Opinion is split in the technology sector over whether a shortage of Australian IT workers exists. The Information Technology Contract and Recruitment Association (ITCRA) argues that the government should increase visas for skilled immigrants by 10 percent and relax Skilled Independent ...
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PC Recycling on Congressional Agenda--Again
Rep. Mike Thompson (D-Calif.) introduced legislation calling for the establishment of national e-waste recycling standards that would require consumers to pay a maximum fee of $10 on all PCs, CRT monitors, or other federally designated devices; 3 percent of the fee would go to recyclers to ...
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Project Honeypot Aims to Trap Spammers
The tide of spam can only be countered by a partnership between technology and legislation, stresses John Praed of the Internet Law Group. This was established by the trackdown, prosecution, and conviction of spammer Jeremy Jaynes, who may face nine years of incarceration for his activities, which ...
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Matrix Realized
Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) could give disabled people more independence and better quality of life, if the technology is perfected. BCIs developed over the past 30 years either direct electrical impulses into the brain or tap the brain's electrical output: Cochlear implants are ...
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A Musical Head Trip
New software allows amateurs to compose or produce professional-sounding musical scores. Software that automatically adjusts pitch and otherwise manipulates instrumental playing or voices has been available for some time to those in the music industry, but when Apple introduced its GarageBand ...
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Building High-Speed Lanes on the Information Highway
A new paradigm for scientific research is being ushered in by meganetworks, which integrate new computing, data-storage, and networking technologies into a platform for geographically dispersed, multidisciplinary e-collaboration. One meganetwork is the National Lambda Rail (NLR) network ...
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A Conversation With Tim Bray
In an interview with Microsoft Bay Area Research Center manager Jim Gray, Sun Microsystems director of Web technologies Tim Bray puts his career in perspective. His stellar trajectory began in 1986 as coordinator of the University of Waterloo's New Oxford English Dictionary Project, and then he ...
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Naming Names
Brian Hayes writes that the advent of computer technology has transformed the nature of name-giving to a model that demands greater uniformity and uniqueness among names, while also forcing many names and numbers to fit into an inflexible format with a particularized number of digits or letters ...
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