Terror's Server
Washington Researchers Seek High-Tech Ways to Help Blind Students
Researchers on the University of Washington's Tactile Graphics Project note that the visually impaired are often shut out of technical professions, given the difficulty in translating technical texts, diagrams, and graphics into formats understandable to the blind. The project aims to design ...
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Forum to Address Low Enrollments in IT College Programs
The organizers of last November's National Information Technology Human Resources Forum (NITHRF) plan to hold a follow-up forum in May so that educational and industry players can reach a consensus on why enrollment in IT college and university programs has been falling, and what this trend's ...
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Adding More Meaning From Place Searches
The IST-funded Spirit project has developed a prototype "spatially aware information retrieval" system, currently being tested in Europe, that finds data related to a particular geographical location. Spirit is a collaboration between a national mapping agency and a quintet of European ...
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>From High-Tech Driver's Licenses to National ID Cards?
The House of Representatives recently passed legislation that would create federal standards for machine-readable identification, essentially requiring states to create compliant driver's licenses or risk having their citizens shut out from national parks, airports, or other services run in ...
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How to Stop Junk E-Mail: Charge for the Stamp
Author and historian Randall Stross suggests that re-thinking the email system along the lines of the postal service, in which the sender pays for sending messages, can plug up the flood of spam. He describes the Can-Spam bill as "worse than useless," noting that prominent experts such as John ...
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View from the High Ground
In an email conversation, Xerox CTO and Xerox Innovation Group President Herve Gallaire cites materials science as a major driver of continued advances in computing and communications, while digitization and bioengineering will also have a profound impact on society and lifestyle. ...
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Gridless Enterprises Should Be Talking to the EGA
Among the attendees of the GlobusWorld grid computing conference in Boston were members of the Enterprise Grid Alliance (EGA), which aims to resolve interoperability, security, and other issues concerning enterprise implementation of grid technology. Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, and ...
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Customer Service Via Machine
In their book, "Best Face Forward: Why Companies Must Improve Their Service Interfaces With Customers," Marketspace Chairman Jeffrey Rayport and fellow strategist Bernard Jaworski argue that current machine technologies can deliver better customer service than their human counterparts. However, ...
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UMass Team Receives Grant to Aid Computer Improvement in Secondary Schools
The National Science Foundation has awarded a $1.2 million grant to a University of Massachusetts research team to develop a computer programming framework that imitates experiential learning in order to enhance the education of secondary-school students. The core principle of the ...
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Christie's to Auction Computer History
Legendary auction house Christie's International PLC is putting on the block a collection of documents that trace the evolution of computing from the 1600s to the 1970s. The sale of "The Origins of Cyberspace: A Library on the History of Computing, Networking, and ...
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Quantum Leap
Canada has become the world's premier center for quantum information processing research thanks to the efforts of Universite de Montreal professor Gilles Brassard and American physicist Charles Bennett, who together fathered quantum cryptography. Quantum cryptography supports a ...
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Workforce Planning Key to Tomorrow's IT
IT companies will need to take a proactive approach to stabilizing the workforce in the years to come, according to the people3 report, "The Incredible Shrinking Workforce: Addressing Tomorrow's Issues Today." The Gartner company calls for the implementation of a workforce planning ...
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Post-It Notes Go Mobile
Siemens has developed a new "digital graffiti" application that would allow mobile phone users to send a message to a specific geographic location, where it would appear on the screens of other mobile phone users who are passing through the area. The concept is similar to placing a Post-It note ...
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EU Steps Into Digital Rights Debate
March 31, 2005, will be the last day for the public to comment on a European Union draft document on digital rights management (DRM). Software and music interests have used DRM to safeguard their copyrighted material, but its integration with digital watermark tags to identify and monitor ...
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Network Distributed Computing: Fitscapes and Fallacies
Max Goff, technologist and author of "Network Distributed Computing: Fitscapes and Fallacies," explains the key points of his book in an interview with James Gaskin, stating that the book's core audience includes software developers, intelligent people, and people who are sensitive to ...
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Inventor Plans New Computing Platform for Students
Frustrated by the Treo and BlackBerry's "user-unfriendly" design, TanCher CEO Mark Menarik is developing a new personal digital assistant (PDA) for the educational market with built-in peer-to-peer networking and full Internet browsing. The wireless TanCher Internet and Mobile Platform ...
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ICANN's .Net Evaluator Under Scope
ICANN is standing by its appointment of Telcordia Technologies to the task of designating the next administrator of the .net domain, despite the company's indirect connections to two of the five bidders for the domain. Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC), Telcordia's parent ...
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Robot Wars
Leading technology figure Ray Kurzweil envisions warfare evolving into a predominantly decentralized, non-biological practice in which robots monitor, reconnoiter, fight, and strategize. He forecasts that machines' pattern-recognition ability will be equal to that of human beings within 25 ...
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Ten Guidelines for Designing a Successful Voice User Interface
A speech application has the greatest chance of enjoying rapid and favorable return on investment with a well-designed voice user interface (VUI) that follows a series of suggestions outlined by numerous speech experts. Questions about what functions should be automated and how the ...
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Terror's Server
Terrorists have a diverse array of online tools and techniques at their disposal with which to fund their causes, spread their messages, swell their ranks, orchestrate malicious acts, and generate fear. Examples include the ghoulish posting of murder imagery; terrorist Web sites, which ...
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