The Answer Is 42 of Course
U.S. Won't Cede Control of Net Computers
The U.S. Commerce Department, in what some view as a policy reversal, says that it will retain oversight indefinitely of the 13 "root" servers that contain government-approved lists of the about 260 domain suffixes and tell Web browsers and email programs how to move Internet traffic. In 1998, the ...
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Hewlett Cites Progress on Quantum Computer
Hewlett-Packard scientists Bill Munro and Tim Spiller have devised a new strategy for developing the quantum computer. Quantum computing, a technology with debatable potential, departs from the today's transistor-based electronics and codes information in "qubits," units that ...
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Summer Science Researchers Developing System to Synchronize Data on Cell Phone
Three students at Hamilton College are working with professor Mark Bailey on a project dubbed "Data Synchronization Between Workstations via Bluetooth-Enabled Cell Phones" that aims to develop synchronization technology for cell phones. Aram Kudurshian, Mike Gruen, and Erik Goulding ...
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Female Interest in Technology Fields Crucial, Say Universities and Corporations
Amid an overall decline in students' interest in IT and engineering, women are especially looking elsewhere for their careers. This falloff in interest is ill-timed, as the Department of Labor estimates that IT jobs will be among the fastest growing through 2012. IT has declined in stature ...
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Net Pioneer Wants New Internet
David Clark, one of the chief architect of the Internet, has enlisted the National Science Foundation to help develop a "clean slate" Internet framework. The new network, which could be tested on the National LambdaRail, aims to entirely re-conceive of the mode through which Internet users around the ...
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Antispam Proposals Advance
The Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG) announced that it has adopted two competing antispam technologies, citing both as still
experimental." Microsoft, AOL, and others have been competing for control of the antispam market, which now appears to be divided between the Sender ...
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Stargazing, Internet-Style
The landscape of the Internet will change over the next 10 years, the only question is how. A recent report titled "The Future of the Internet" announced the findings of a Pew Internet & American Life Project and Elon University survey of 1,300 technology leaders, scholars, and industry ...
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Car System Lets Voice Drive the Web
Faculty member Meirav Taieb-Maimon of Ben-Gurion University in Israel has designed a voice-activated search engine that could be used by drivers to navigate the Web. The system consists of two Microsoft off-the-shelf speech recognition components and custom software called Maestro that ...
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CMU Puts Words in Ben Franklin's Mouth
Carnegie-Mellon's Synthetic Interview technology powers a new exhibit in Philadelphia's Lights of Liberty Show where patrons can ask Ben Franklin questions, either from a list of 160 that are pre-prepared, or by typing their own using a list of keywords. Software searches the computer's ...
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The $100 Computer Is Key to India's Tech Fortunes
India is winning the race to reach the 5 billion people who still do not use the Internet. The critical ingredient is cost, which the Indian company Novatium will emphasize as it unveils a basic home computer available for around $70. The price doubles to include a monitor, though ...
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Keeping an Eye on Domestic Appliances
Innovators have long sought areas in the home that technology could improve. With advances in microprocessors and connectivity, companies such as Control4 are making those visions a reality. Control4 and the South Korean telecom outfit SK Telecom have been using ZigBee technology to ...
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Why Linux Needs Rexx
Some Linux proponents see in Rexx the potential to give Linux the boost it needs to overtake the Windows desktop, writes Howard Fosdick, author of
Rexx Programmers Reference." IBM invented the scripting language many years ago, and its advocates cite numerous advantages, including free ...
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USC Voice-to-Voice Translation Machine Perfects Bedside Manner
Researchers at the USC Information Sciences Institute unveiled Transonics Spoken Dialog Translator, a natural language based spoken word translation device, at the recent Association for Computational Linguistics conference. Transonics, developed by a multi-disciplinary USC team of scientists and ...
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Teacher's Little Helpers
Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, in partnership with Sony Intelligence Dynamics Laboratories, are exploring the educational value of social robots through the Robot Using Bayesian Inference (RUBI) Project. RUBI, modeled after Sony's QRIO robot, runs on four non-motorized ...
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Introducing SKOS
The W3C recently introduced the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS), a method by which machines can understand knowledge organizations such as thesauri, terminologies, and glossaries. The SKOS Core Vocabulary, an RDF application, can join with similar data through Semantic Web ...
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E-Government Run Amok!
The National Science Foundation is studying ways in which computer information sciences can enhance government participation through its Digital Government Research Program. The NSF unveiled its research and technologies earlier in the year in Atlanta during the Digital Government ...
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Group Rethink
New York writer James Surowiecki argues in "The Wisdom of Crowds" that the collective intelligence of large groups can outsmart the most knowledgeable experts. Surowiecki cites the stock market's reaction to booster rocket manufacturer Morton Thiokol months before the federal governments went ...
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Are We There Yet?"
Software Requirements" author Karl Wiegers recommends that software organizations develop SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and trackable) product release criteria to help ensure that products will not come up short when they are rolled out. It must be determined what can ...
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The Answer Is 42 of Course
Independent security consultant Thomas Wadlow writes that the role people play in online security makes absolutes irrelevant, and he advises companies to base the defense of their security systems on the fundamental question of how the network can be designed so that is it "safe enough." ...
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