The Moon, Mars and Beyond...
As File Sharing Nears High Court, Net Specialists Worry
Technologists attending this week's Emerging Technologies Conference in San Diego warned that the Supreme Court's decision in the case of MGM v. Grokster could have serious ramifications for innovative Internet-based services if the court ...
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Web Tools Blaze Trail to the Past
Google's use of old-school Dynamic HTML technologies when building its Gmail and Google Maps applications has spurred discussion among Web developers about whether new Web application technologies are needed. Google Maps and Gmail functions and design put them in a different product ...
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Irish Open-Source Groups Protest Software Patents
Open-source advocates throughout the European Union (EU) are concerned that a directive officially endorsed by the EU Council will legitimize "pure" software patents and jeopardize European contributions to open-source projects. Irish open-source groups fired off a briefing document to ...
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IT Innovation From Both Sides of the Globe
The U.K. and New Zealand ministries of trade helped young technology firms from their respective countries exhibit innovative technologies at the CeBIT show. The UK@CeBIT program featured several software firms, some device manufacturers, and a Cambridge University display spinoff, while New ...
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The Giant Who Walks Amongst Us
Researchers are experimenting with and refining augmented reality (AR) systems to enhance the experience of reading a book through animated virtual characters overlaid on the actual pages. The technology's limitations include bulky head-mounted displays that the user must wear, ...
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Net Surfing for Those Unable to See
A collaborative venture between Towson University professor Jonathan Lazar and the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) is examining the many problems visually impaired people encounter when navigating the Internet. Lazar, who serves as director of the university's Computer Information ...
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Computer Study Powers Down
The economic slump, offshore outsourcing, and cutbacks in corporate IT spending have combined to create the impression that a computer science background no longer guarantees job stability, and fewer university students are choosing to major in computer science as a result; the ...
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Zooming in on Legibility
Reading Web pages on the small display screens of mobile devices is problematic, as the pages are presented as either illegible thumbnails or as difficult-to-navigate single columns. Patrick Baudisch, a human-computer interaction researcher with Microsoft Research's ...
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Researchers: Metcalfe's Law Overshoots the Mark
Metcalfe's Law, perceived as a key driver of the dot-com explosion with its assumption that a network's value increases with the square of the number of devices in the network, has been called into question by University of Minnesota researchers Andrew Odlyzko and Benjamin Tilly, who posit in a ...
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Robots Serve Humans on Land, in Sea and Air
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory director Rodney Brooks says robotic navigation technology has advanced dramatically in the last two decades, a statement verified by the development of autonomous vehicles for domestic and military use by MIT and MIT spinoffs such as ...
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Big Screens to Come in Small Packages
Philips Polymer Vision plans to have its rollable electronic display technology in consumer devices within two years and has already produced a five-inch working prototype that is flexible enough to curl around a pencil; Polymer Vision is set to spin off from its parent, Philips ...
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World's Largest Computing Grid Surpasses 100 Sites
The Large Hadron Collider Computing Grid (LCG) project announced on March 15 that over 100 sites distributed throughout 31 countries now comprise its computing grid, making the LCG the largest international scientific grid on Earth. The participating sites--chiefly research laboratories and ...
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Seismic Shift
The future for U.S. supercomputing research centers seems uncertain with the National Science Foundation's (NSF) dissolution of the Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) in favor of a "shared cyberinfrastructure." The new plan is designed to shift investment away ...
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Humanoids on the March
Japan's industrial behemoths are racing to see which of them will produce the most sophisticated humanoid robots in a competition spurred by corporate rivalry, rapid technological advancements, a hunger for publicity, and the potential for tapping a vast new market. Breakthrough ...
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This Net Is Child's Play for Elite High Schoolers
Virginia's Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, considered to be the leading technical high school in the United States, is especially lauded for its computer science program. The program is unique because it is so immersive: It involves the design and maintenance of the ...
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Virtual Therapy: Just What Some Doctors Order
A small number of American clinics are using virtual reality to help patients deal with phobias and injuries, and researchers say the technology shows promise as a tool for treating addiction and post-traumatic stress disorder, as well as helping distract patients during uncomfortable ...
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A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software
Author and ISO C++ Standards committee Chairman Herb Sutter writes that software applications will need to become concurrent because increasingly powerful processors are already starting to lose their ability to fully support existing applications. However, not all key operations of an ...
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The Moon, Mars and Beyond...
President Bush's "Vision for Space Exploration" has the lofty goal of manned missions to the Moon, Mars, and elsewhere, starting with sending robots to the Moon as early as 2008. Key to realizing this vision are joint ventures between NASA and industry for developing next-generation ...
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