Web Future Is Not Semantic, or Overly Orderly
Women in Computing
In order to increase the number of women entering computer science, more female role models and mentors are needed to up their numbers and gain a beachhead in what is traditionally a male-dominated environment, according to experts. The numbers paint a ...
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Forward-Looking Report Released: 'Cyberinfrastructure and the Social Sciences'
The National Science Foundation's "Cyberinfrastructure and the Social Sciences" workshop has released a final report that "leverages the immense expertise of NSF communities to develop useful and usable cyberinfrastructure to support breakthrough science and engineering ...
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Fancy Math Takes on Je Ne Sais Quoi
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has evaluated machine translation programs from some 20 research groups and will publish the results later this month, but those involved say Google's new translation entry performed very well. Observers predict Google might ...
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New DSL Standard Promises 10 Times the Speed
The Very-High-Bit-Rate Digital Subscriber Line 2 (VDSL2) standard approved last week by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) promises to deliver a tenfold increase in speed over the fastest DSL currently available, although its availability to consumers could be years away. ITU ...
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Supernova Collapse Simulated on a GPU
Rapid advances in graphics processing have made GPUs a legitimate hardware-accelerated alternative to CPU systems, and Los Alamos National Laboratory Advanced Computing Lab researchers are working on ways to exploit GPU capabilities for general-purpose computing, writes lab ...
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Sounds of Silencers Are Loud and Clear: PCs Are Too Noisy
Hobbyists are coming up with innovative solutions to dampen the noise generated by PCs, which can be distracting and irritating for some people. Michigan architect Russ Kinder reduced the noise of his PC by immersing it in a bath of nonconductive mineral oil, while St. Louis auto mechanic Carl ...
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Pentagon Envisions Electronic Office Assistant for Busy Human Bosses
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is funding the development of an electronic office assistant that can sort email, schedule meetings, gather data for reports, make plane reservations, and perform other mundane tasks to reduce the workload for managers. Desirable ...
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Forging an Anti-Terrorism Search Tool
Researchers at the University of Buffalo have developed a prototype search engine that mines a collection of documents for associated ideas or links that would otherwise be unnoticeable or that would take an extremely long time to uncover via conventional investigative methods. The technology, ...
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Self-Wiring Supercomputer Is Cool and Compact
Researchers at Edinburgh University's Edinburgh Parallel Computing Center are building a 1 teraflop field programmable gate array (FPGA) supercomputer designed to be up to 100 times more energy-efficient and dramatically more space-efficient than a conventional supercomputer of ...
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In-Flight Voice and Data Communications Takes Off
Researchers in the IST-funded WirelessCabin project developed and successfully tested a wireless in-flight communications network architecture that does not disrupt mission-critical aircraft safety systems and terrestrial networks. Three central elements constitute the ...
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Has Ransomware Learned From Cryptovirology?
The Trojan recently reported in the media to hold victims' data hostage is probably not a true cryptovirus, writes infosec researcher Adam Young, who pioneered cryptovirology research along with his Columbia University professor Moti Yung. But the news shows criminal hackers are likely to ...
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What's the Next Big Thing?
A roundtable discussion of future consumer electronics covers such issues as phone-multimedia convergence, Wi-Fi, and digital rights management. Wolfson Microelectronics CEO David Milne expects the next big thing to be the integration of phones and multimedia, and says the winning product in ...
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Baby, You Can Drive My Song
The _expression_ Synthesis Project (ESP) headed by USC Viterbi School of Engineering professor Elaine Chew is designed to impart the experience of performing music to non-musicians, using an interface modeled after the controls of an automobile. A musical score in the Musical Instrument ...
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'Silent Horizon' War Games Wrap Up for the CIA
The CIA's Information Operations Center is conducting a three-day exercise dubbed "Silent Horizon" that simulates a prolonged cyberterrorist attack that could potentially cause as much damage and disruption as the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, say exercise participants who want to remain anonymous. ...
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'Skin' Could Refine Robots' Sense of Touch
University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) electrical engineers claim to have taken a significant step toward enhancing robots' tactile sense with the development of a prototype "skin" composed of a flexible polymer with multiple sensors that concurrently measure surface roughness, hardness, ...
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Wagering on WiMax
WiMax has been hyped as a technology that will offer a last-mile replacement for a land-line Internet connection as well as beefed-up Wi-Fi. WiMax's roadmap starts out with wireless, fixed last-mile connectivity, and eventually adds mobile broadband connectivity. Among the technology's ...
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Evolving the Java Platform
Sun fellow Graham Hamilton writes that a key theme of the next Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE) and Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) iterations is
ease-of-development," the need to maintain a balance between power, richness, and simplicity to ensure that the new Java specs are easy to use. ...
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Integrating Geography and Real-Time Sensor Data
Galdos Systems President Ron Lake writes that geography markup language (GML) has applications outside of vector geography and images, and is being implemented for real-time sensor data; he illustrates the viability of integrating geography and sensor data on a "plug and play" basis through ...
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Web Future Is Not Semantic, or Overly Orderly
Eric Nee disputes World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) director Tim Berners-Lee's vision of a Semantic Web in which computers can comprehend the meaning of information through the encoding of metadata within every piece of online content. He also dismisses the concept of an intelligent ...
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