PC Makers Take a Stylish Turn to Tackle Apple
Wall Street Journal (01/04/08) P. A1; Guth, Robert A.; Scheck, Justin;
Clark, Don
The demand for more user-friendly and attractive products is forcing PC
makers to rethink how they manufacture, advertise, and sell products, and
who they have design them. PC makers are looking for new ways to create
customer demand, including attracting consumers who care little about
technical features. New and experimental designs can create technical
problems, and it is still unclear if consumers are willing to pay a premium
for a more stylish machine. Additionally, fashion trends may change too
quickly and drastically for the computer industry to keep pace. "It's a
very dangerous route to go," says Sohrab Vossoughi, founder and president
of Ziba Design, which has designed PC prototypes for Intel. "Things go up,
and things go down." Part of the danger lies in misinterpreting or
attributing Apple's success to design alone, when in fact is has more to do
with creating synergies between its hardware and software that make its
machines more contemporary and easier to use. In June, Forrester Research
issued a report that said the PC market has entered a new "age of style"
and that attractive models could sell for $150 to $250 more per machine.
PC makers have started hiring industrial designers and others to help
design PCs from the outside in, instead of the inside out, and are finding
inspiration for PC design in classic cars, nature, and fashion trends.
Some analysts believe that as customers become used to stylized PCs, the
industry will break into new design and price segments, much like the car
industry with its levels of luxury and performance.
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Carnegie Mellon Study Identifies Where Thoughts of
Familiar Objects Occur Inside Human Brain
Carnegie Mellon News (01/03/08) Spice, Byron; Watzman, Anne
Carnegie Mellon University computer scientists and cognitive
neuroscientists, using combined methods of machine learning and brain
imaging, have developed a way of identifying where people's thoughts and
perceptions of familiar objects originate in the brain by identifying brain
activity patterns associated with the objects. The technique was developed
over two years by neuroscience professor Marcel Just and computer science
professor Tom M. Mitchell. Study participants were shown line drawings of
10 different objects, five tools and five dwellings, and asked to think
about their properties while lying in a MRI scanner. The researchers were
eventually able to identify which picture the subject was looking at based
on their characteristic whole-brain neural activation patterns. Just and
Mitchell discovered that the activation patterns evoked by an object are
not located in a single place in the brain. The machine-learning part of
the study used a computer algorithm to extract patterns from a
participant's brain activation. Data collected in one part of the study
was tested against the algorithm on data from another part of the same
study so that the algorithm was never exposed to the same patterns it was
tested on. The algorithm was able to identify a participant's thoughts
based on the patterns extracted from other participant's, indicating that
different brains show the same activity patterns when viewing the same
object. "This first step using computer algorithms to identify thoughts of
individual objects from brain activity can open new scientific paths, and
eventually roads and highways" says University of South Carolina assistant
professor of psychology Svetlana Shinkareva, the study's lead author. "We
hope to progress to identifying the thoughts associated not just with
pictures, but with words, and eventually sentences."
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Voting Groups Urge Presidential Candidates to Demand
Paper Ballots for Upcoming Primaries
Wired News (01/02/08) Zetter, Kim
Several voting integrity groups have sent a letter to presidential
candidates urging them to request that states use paper ballots for the
2008 primary election. The groups cited the recent report for Ohio that
exposes several electronic voting vulnerabilities, including a
vulnerability in ES&S iVotronic touch-screen machines that could allow
someone to manipulate code on the machines through an infrared port.
Ohio's secretary of state called the machines unfit and has requested that
optical-scan equipment replace paperless machines. The ES&S iVotronic
machines have also been implicated in multiple stories from several states
involving vote-flipping. In 2006, during early voting in Miami-Date and
Broward counties in Florida, voters complained of selecting one candidate
and having the machine record their vote for another candidate. ES&S
officials say the glitch was not a problem because voters caught the
mistake on the review screen and were able to correct it, and a Broward
County election staff member also dismissed the issue, telling a report
that it was common for a certain percentage of machines to have problems
and it was a calibration error. In Texas and Ohio similar problems were
reported, including at least one incident in Texas where the voter had a
poll worker watch as the machine registered the correct vote on the ballot
screen, but report a different candidate on the review screen.
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NASA Dreams of an Interplanetary 'Second Life' for Mars
Crew
ABC News (01/03/08) Holden, Kevin
To combat the psychological hardship of extreme isolation, NASA is testing
networking and virtual reality technologies that it believes will allow
space explorers to communicate with their families, friends, and colleagues
on Earth through a 3D virtual world similar to Second Life. "We want to
help our remote explorers 'phone home' in a way that lets them sit around a
dinner table with their family, help their children with homework, and
analyze the latest findings with their Earth-bound peers," says Jeanne
Holm, who is the chief knowledge architect at NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory. NASA has made significant efforts to develop virtual world
projects, previously establishing an island in Second Life for online
collaboration on technology projects, and the agency is working on 3D
simulations of Mars so astronauts can experience the planet before
traveling there. The concept faces significant hurdles due to the distance
between Earth and Mars. Daniel Laughlin, learning technologies project
manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, says NASA is trying to work
out the interplanetary lag problem, and while email messages seem like an
obvious and already available solution, Laughlin says it is not good
enough. Email communications would only emphasize the vast distance
between the astronauts and everyone else, whereas virtual worlds would make
astronauts feel at home. "If we were meeting in Second Life or World of
Warcraft to chat, we would both have the sense of being in the same place
overlaid on our sense of physical location," Laughlin says. "The
experience encodes into our memories as if we were in the same place."
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SETI@home Looking for More Volunteers
University of California, Berkeley (01/02/08) Sanders, Robert
The University of California, Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory is
receiving a burst of new data from an upgraded Arecibo telescope, meaning
the SETI@home project needs more desktop computers to help process the
data. SETI@home, which launched eight years ago, has signed up more than 5
million volunteers, including 170,000 devotees on 320,000 computers. The
new, more sensitive receivers on the world's largest radio telescope in
Arecibo, Puerto Rico, are generating 500 times more data for the project
than before. The new sensors are capable of scanning several regions of
the sky at the same time, instead of just one, and have a greater
sensitivity and are able to detect the polarization of radio signals. The
SETI@home software has been upgraded to manage the new data as the search
for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) enters a new era. "The next
generation SETI@home is 500 times more powerful then anything anyone has
done before," says project chief scientist Dan Werthimer. "That means we
are 500 times more likely to find ET than with the original SETI@home."
Project scientist Eric Korpela says the new data equals 300 gigabytes per
day, or 100,000 terabytes per year, approximately equal to all of the
information stored in the U.S. Library of Congress. Various other
distributed computing projects have launched since SETI, including
folding@home and cosmology@home. Most projects are on Berkeley Open
Infrastructure for Network Computing (BIONC), which was developed by
SETI@home's director David Anderson so the various projects could share
resources.
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Google Patent Imagines Robots Indexing the Grocery
Aisle
InformationWeek (01/04/08) Claburn, Thomas
Google recently filed "Recognizing Text in Images," a patent application
for a technique used for optical character recognition in digital images.
The patent application visualizes several possible applications for the
technology and shows that privacy issues surrounding Google Maps Street
View will likely get more complicated, YouTube search engines may one day
be able to find words captured on video, and Google searches may eventually
return a list of products on local store shelves. "Candidate text regions
within images can be enhanced to improve text recognition accuracy," the
application says. "Extracted image text can also be used to improve image
searching ... Additionally, the extracted image text can be combined with
location data and indexed to improve and enhance location-based searching."
Similar to how Google created street view by having camera-equipped
vehicles drive through the streets, Google envisions camera-equipped robots
traveling retail store isles for a service called Google Product View.
Such possibilities are highly speculative, and a Google representative
notes that the company files a variety of ideas that employees develop,
some of which may turn into real products and some of which do not.
However, the video-text detection technique was developed by two computer
scientists with a strong track record, Luc Vincent and Adrian Ulges, who
helped develop Google Street View and Google Book Search.
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Technologies on the Rise in 2008
BBC News (01/01/08)
BBC News predicts that five technologies could make a significant impact
in 2008. First, the mobile Web could become far more ubiquitous as the
lines blur between online and offline worlds. Over the past 12 moths,
several technologies have emerged that could drastically change how people
use the Web. Google Gears, Adobe Air, and Microsoft Silverlight have the
ability to take rich Web content and make some of it available offline.
These tools will allow users to do work offline, such as creating an eBay
auction page, that would be loaded to the Web the next time the user
connects, as well as the opposite, or building desktop applications and
running them in a Web browser. Ultra Mobile PCs could also become far more
prevalent in 2008, filling the gap between PDAs and laptops. Several
manufacturers recently launched devices that are smaller and lighter than
laptops, but are more powerful than smart phones due to features such as
flash memory. Flash memory has recently shown drastic increases in power
and could soon replace hard drives as the preferred storage method in
laptops. Internet TV is also expected to become widespread, with broadband
adoption and speeds increasing and more Internet protocol television
services being launched. Wimax is also expect to become quite popular.
Major companies such as Sprint and Intel are backing Wimax, and it is being
tried in developing countries such as Nigeria. Lastly, VOIP could finally
become a serious contender in the voice services industry in 2008. Towards
the end of 2007, network operator 3 launched a Skype phone that allows
users to make ordinary calls using the service, and handset-maker Nokia
already offers four phones able to use the technology.
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The Year in Robots
Scientific American (12/28/07) Greenemeier, Larry
The past year included several significant and exciting developments in
robotic technology. As part of NASA's efforts to send peopled missions
back to the moon, and eventually to Mars, the space agency performed
several tests to see if robotic technology could be used to provide medical
care for astronauts during extended space flights, including using robotic
surgeons software to compensate for errors in movement caused by turbulence
and varying gravitational conditions. The Department of Defense continued
to develop autonomous robotic technology that could eventually be used to
replace human soldiers in dangerous situations. In November, DARPA hosted
the 2007 Urban Challenge in which driverless cars had to navigate an urban
environment and other challenges. Also in November, University of
California, San Diego researchers reported in Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences USA that "current robot technology is surprisingly
close to achieving autonomous bonding and socialization with human toddlers
for significant periods of time." The report was based on QRIO, a two-foot
humanoid programmed to wave, dance, sit and stand, and tested in UCSD's
Early Childhood Center. While the achievements of 2007 are impressive,
2008 promises to be even more exciting. University of Colorado at Boulder
researchers will benchmark robotic devices capable of precisely measuring
and mixing medications used for treatments such as chemotherapy, the
robotic Mars rovers Opportunity and Spirit will resume the exploration of
Mars, and Scandinavian research firm Sintef will display AI-based equipment
designed to help offshore oil and gas drilling platforms operate
efficiently and safely.
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The Hottest Skills for '08
Computerworld (12/31/07) Hoffman, Thomas
Computerworld's 2008 Vital Signs survey identifies the top IT skills that
will be in demand this year. Companies will be looking for programming and
application developers who have AJAX, .Net, and PHP skills as they
Web-enable their existing applications and commit more to Web 2.0. There
also will be considerable interest in project managers who have overseen
complex assignments that resulted in a clear business benefit, and in
technical staff who can support expanding application portfolios as well as
multilingual help desk staff. People with core security credentials, and
data center experts, including mainframe technicians and database
management specialists, will be wanted. Companies want IT people with
business acumen who can serve as business analysts or business liaisons.
The job market is also favorable for people with general network
administration capabilities and network convergence, wireless, and network
security talents. "There's a great opportunity for people in the
infrastructure space as well, including messaging administrators and
network/systems administrators who act as the air-traffic controllers for
email, corporate networks, and PDAs," says Robert Half Technology's
Katherine Spencer Lee.
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Internet Opens Elite Colleges to All
Associated Press (12/29/07) Pope, Justin
MIT's "OpenCourseWare" initiative has made virtually all of the school's
courses available online for free, including lecture notes, tests, and
video lectures. Many of MIT's new online "students" are college teachers
themselves that use MIT professors as guides in designing their own classes
or as a source for help for their own students. While MIT's initiative is
the largest, other top universities are also making their course material
available online. More than 100 universities worldwide, including Johns
Hopkins, Tufts, and Notre Dame, have joined MIT in a consortium of schools
promoting their open courseware. Princeton allows Internet users to watch
prominent guest speakers, and Yale recently announced it would make
material from seven popular courses available online, with 30 more courses
to be added in the future. Stanford, Cal-Berkeley, and Duke have all made
lectures, panels, and performances available on iTunes U, a part of Apple's
music and video downloading service that offers free material from 28
colleges. Berkeley also recently announced that it will be the first to
make full course lectures available on YouTube. These online experiences
are not the full college experience as students are unable to ask questions
or earn credit or a degree, but these limitations are what make such
programs possible. The Internet has transformed higher education, and has
made online learning a multibillion-dollar industry, but the role of elite
colleges and universities in higher education has been unclear.
OpenCourseWare gets more than 1 million hits per month, with translated
materials getting another 500,000 hits. MIT's Steve Carson says the online
courses will allow those who need the knowledge, but not the certification,
to learn the skills they need.
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The Supercomputer Magerit to Participate in an
International Project to Simulate the Universe
Innovations Report (12/27/07) Martinez, Eduardo
Magerit is a supercomputer installed by Madrid's Center of Supercomputing
and Visualization at the Universidad Politecnica de Madrid's School of
Computing, and it will be utilized to simulate the observable universe as
part of an international project led by Universidad Autonoma de Madrid
professor Gustavo Yepes. The virtual recreation of the cosmos, down to the
physical processes that gave birth to cosmological structures, is needed to
fill in many of the blanks about the universe's development. Realistically
reproducing the initial conditions that led to the formation of the
observable galaxies is the goal of an interdisciplinary team of
astrophysicists. Magerit is the second most powerful supercomputer in the
recently established Spanish Supercomputing Network, and boasts 2,140
processors and a memory of close to 5 terabytes, giving it the ability to
perform more than 12 billion operations per second. Magerit and the
MareNostrum supercomputer at Barcelona's National Supercomputing Center,
along with other systems within the European Consortium of Supercomputing
Centers, have been tapped by the project. The starting conditions that the
supercomputers will work to virtualize are based on data compiled by COBE
and WMAP satellites. Project researchers are employing a method that can
add observational connections to the spatial distribution of mass and
speeds derived from the galaxy catalogues, allowing them to "prepare"
simulations to produce, at the conclusion of the time period, structures
that closely resemble what we see around us. The simulation will allow
researchers to move throughout the dimensions of space and time as they see
fit and help the fields of computational astrophysics and cosmology achieve
a less speculative and more experimental status.
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'Immersive Education' Submerges Students in Online Worlds
Made for Learning
Chronicle of Higher Education (12/21/07) Vol. 54, No. 17, P. A22; Foster,
Andrea L.
Immersive Education is a multimillion-dollar effort to build educational
virtual reality software within commercial and nonprofit fantasy spaces
such as Second Life. The project uses interactive three-dimensional
graphics, Web cameras, Internet-based telephony, and a variety of other
digital media. At a recent meeting at Boston College, Aaron E. Walsh,
founder of the project and an instructor at Boston College, along with two
other researchers demonstrated how virtual spaces can be used for more than
entertainment. The project's goal is to build three-dimensional,
interactive worlds and lessons that will grab students' attention in the
same way popular online video games do, except without the violence and
futility of video games. "It's important to allow educators to mix and
match media types to construct a virtual learning environment that's right
for their students," Walsh says. Critics say promoting video games in
schools and colleges corrupts and diminishes education, but Immersive
Education has managed to collect a large number of impressive supporters,
including Boston College, Harvard University, Amherst College, Columbia
University, MIT, Sweden's Royal Institute of Technology, Japan's University
of Aizu, NASA, Sun Microsystems, and the New Media Consortium, a
higher-education technology group. Now in its third generation, Walsh's
virtual world allows for high-resolution graphics, more realistic avatars,
the use of Web cameras, and the sharing of documents.
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Robot Jaws to Get a Human Bite
New Scientist (01/03/08) Simonite, Tom
An engineer at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom has set his
sights on providing a set of robotic jaws with copies of real human teeth.
The robot, called Dento-Munch, is capable of moving in the same chewing
motion as the human jaw. By loading Dento-Munch with accurate replicas of
human teeth, Kazem Alemzadeh will be able to test the performance of
implants and false teeth during use. Alemzadeh plans to use a 3D scanning
system comprised of an office projector, a digital camera, and custom
software to image copies of teeth that will be used to machine the
replicas. The Dento-OS system will make use of structured lights, and is
ultimately a faster, more accurate, and less costly technique. Fluorescent
spots will be used to enable the camera to pick up jaw movements. "It has
got to be as real as possible," Alemzadeh says. "We also will capture the
motion of chewing to test how materials would wear in the mouths of
individual people."
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USAF Wants to See in Holographic 3-D
Government Computer News (12/19/07) Dizard III, Wilson P.
The Air Force Scientific Research Office has unveiled holographic
technology that is capable of producing high-definition, 3D images. The
new displays are an improvement on current holographic videoconferencing
equipment because they use laser light to store the appearance of objects
or scenes to boost memory, and they also are larger in physical size and
have updating features. "We use high-efficiency, low-cost dynamic
recording materials capable of very large sizes, which is very important
for life-size, realistic 3D displays," says research team leader Nasser
Peyghambarian of the University of Arizona's Optical Sciences College. "We
can record complete scenes or objects within three minutes and can store
them for three hours." Battlefield command and control stands to benefit
from the delivery of realistic images that can be regularly and quickly
updated, and the technology can also be used for training purposes. The
team now wants to increase the size of the displays to three square feet,
render them in color, boost the writing speed of the images, and study the
psychological impact of 3D viewing and how humans interact with 3D
displays.
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Playing Dirty
IEEE Spectrum (12/07) Vol. 44, No. 12, P. 32; Kushner, David
Richard Thurman successfully programmed his computers to play games
automatically for the purpose of realizing profits in a game environment
where virtual assets are bought with real money via credit card. Thurman
developed an auto-playing robot by purchasing a program he used to
reverse-engineer his target game environment's basic mechanisms, and then
he wrote a piece of code that he embedded within the client software so it
could communicate with a development environment for Windows computers.
Once a communications link was established, Thurman purchased 30
commercially available PCs, each of which would play the game individually,
creating and manipulating a character to earn gold, with character details
randomly generated by software he wrote. Thurman shielded his identity by
buying anonymous gift cards to set up accounts rather than using a personal
credit card, and he programmed his computers to respond automatically to
incoming data from the game server. So he would not be unmasked by company
game masters who policed the game environment, Thurman constantly changed
his IP addresses and also rigged his computer array to flag unusual surges
of activity that may have indicated attempts to sniff him out. Massively
multiplayer games are appealing targets for hackers not just because of the
virtual economy they support but because they have gone mainstream, with
all kinds of people--not just programmers and "nerds"--playing them. Such
game-rigging, which critics claim violates the spirit of the games, is
allowed because no real-world laws cover online gaming.
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How (Much) to Trust Wikipedia
CITRIS Newsletter (12/07) Slack, Gordy
A major issue with the online encyclopedia Wikipedia is assuring the
accuracy of its entries, and a team of engineers led by UC Santa Cruz
computer scientist Luca de Alfaro has developed a software tool for rating
how trustworthy such entries are using the reputation of the contributor as
a determining factor. The program is undergirded by a system that assigns
and updates a numerical value of reputation to each Wikipedia author, and
that value increases as authors make contributions that are preserved by
subsequent editors. "The reputation we compute for authors is a good
predictor of future behavior: authors with high reputations really do tend
to make longer-lasting contributions to Wikipedia," notes de Alfaro. The
number of edits that Wikipedia text has been subjected to over time is used
to compute the text's trustworthiness, and De Alfaro's system tags each
word with a trust value gleaned from the reputation of the word's author,
and from the reputation of all visitors who edited nearby text. The text's
background is color-coded to reflect the author's reputation value, with
clear backgrounds representing the highest value. Edits to text are
represented in a shade of orange, with darker shades reflecting lower
levels of trustworthiness. "We are essentially automating the usual
process of text revision: for each piece of text, we take into account all
the people who revised it, giving more weight to people of higher
reputation." de Alfaro explains.
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