Study Gives High Marks to U.S. Internet
New York Times (04/09/08) P. C9; Markoff, John
The Internet infrastructure in the United States is one of the world's
best, and is improving, concludes the latest Global Information Technology
Report, contradicting previous studies. The report, done by European
researchers at Insead and commissioned by the World Economic Forum, found
that the United States ranks fourth in the world, behind only Denmark,
Sweden, and Switzerland. Last year the United States came in seventh. The
study uses an index generated from 68 variables, including market factors,
political and regulatory environment, and technology infrastructure,
instead of just bandwidth capacity and data transmission speeds. Some
experts are skeptical of the report's findings, arguing that the U.S. does
not have the same type of deployment as other countries. "If you are
looking at broadband, we have a lot of problems," says Carnegie Mellon
University computer science professor David J. Farber. "We are slow as
molasses in deploying the next generation." Other studies have shown that
the U.S. is lagging and declining in the broadband boom. Last year, a
variety of statistics on global bandwidth use showed that the U.S. was
falling behind other industrial nations in broadband network consumption
and penetration as a percentage of population. However, those statistics
fail to capture the true impact of the Internet when viewed in a cultural,
economic, and political context, says Insead professor Soumitra Dutta,
director of the study. "What the U.S. has is a number of strengths along a
number of dimensions," Dutta says. "It is not just a question of
technology. Political and economic factors become extremely important."
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US Moots System for Data Sharing on Cyber Threats
Financial Times (04/09/08) P. 2; Allison, Kevin
Department of Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff yesterday
outlined plans for a "Manhattan project" for cybersecurity that would
increase the sharing of information on potential threats between government
and industry. U.S. authorities already share some threat information with
a few companies, but there is no centralized system for sharing information
about online security threats. Chertoff says closer coordination between
government and industry is essential because a successful large-scale
attack online would have a widescale impact on the country and the world.
"The federal government does not own the Internet ... and it does not own
the nation's cyber networks," Chertoff says. "We can't be serious about
national security or national cybersecurity without engaging private
industry." Chertoff says the government is working to develop capabilities
to detect cyber attacks before they damage computer systems and that
information will be shared with IT groups, financial services companies,
and utilities to help them protect their networks, he says. Chertoff says
the cybersecurity project is not a stepping stone to government control
over the Internet. "We have no interest or intention of duplicating a
system where the government tries to sit over the Internet and prevent
things coming in they don't like," he says.
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U of M Study Finds You Get What You Pay for With Online
Q&A Sites
University of Minnesota News (04/08/08)
University of Minnesota researchers presented "Predictors of Answer
Quality in Online Q&A Sites," a paper on the answer quality provided by
online question-and-answer Web sites at ACM's 2008 Conference on Human
Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2008) in Florence, Italy. How much
people pay and how many online community members contribute to answers
ultimately determine the quality of answers. The study found that the
now-closed Google Answers site provided the best answers when it was paid
$10 or more. The Google Answers site provided long and detailed answers as
well as links to source material. Although Yahoo Answers is a free
service, its responses were comparable to answers provided by Google
Answers when the fee was low ($3) and were better than those offered by
reference librarians and an "ask-an-expert" site. "Solutions that simply
direct questions to a single individual don't achieve results as well as
those that open the question and answers to a larger community," says
professor Joseph Konstan.
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Vote Device May Get Push
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (04/07/08) Johnson, Annysa
Wisconsin is considering forgoing federal certification of a new
vote-counting device and may test the device itself in an effort to
simplify and quicken the tallying of votes in November, says Kevin Kennedy,
director of the state's Government Accountability Board. The device, the
Hybrid Accumulator Activator Transmitter (HAAT), consolidates totals from
electronic touch-screen voting machines and optical scanners, creating a
single tally, which local election officials say could significantly speed
voter returns on election night. Kennedy's comments are in response to
concerns from local officials that advances in technology and regulations
intended to ensure the integrity of elections are actually slowing tallies
at a time when voters expect near instantaneous results. Doug Chapin, who
directs the Pew Center for the States' electionline.org, says that such
conflicts are a constant undercurrent across the country, and the slower
results are because districts are both learning new equipment and making
sure the results are correct. "With each new technology or rule, we see
the value in terms of the integrity of the election," says Milwaukee
Election Commission deputy director Neil Albrecht. "But it almost always
requires additional resources and time." Kennedy says that because
Wisconsin's requirement for federal testing is a rule, and not a law, it
may be easier to amend than in other states. Chapin says Wisconsin's
decision will be watch closely across the country as many states tire of
the slow pace of federal testing.
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In Storing 1's and 0's, the Question Is $
New York Times (04/09/08) P. H1; Schwartz, John
The deterioration and loss of digital data is an enormous problem as data
formats and storage systems become outdated in a relatively short amount of
time, but data preservation faces a number of formidable challenges, not
the least of which is financing. "You can have the most elegant
technological solution to the digital-preservation problem, but if there's
no economics underpinning it, then there's no solution at all," says Online
Computer Library Center research scientist Brian Lavoie. He says the
missing ingredient is the articulation of a "full menu of models" to
encourage the development of a digital preservation market similar to the
way the computer-security market evolved. "One of the things that's
changing, finally, is people in places like the National Science Foundation
are paying enough attention to this problem and understand its scale to
start making investments that can make a difference," says Margaret
Hedstrom of the University of Michigan's School of Information. The
development of "open, extensible, and evolvable" techniques and
technologies to preserve science and engineering data is the goal of
DataNet, a five-year, $100 million program the NSF has initiated. Another
NSF-supported project is focused on economic and sustainable ways to employ
digital preservation in diverse scenarios. Hedstrom says maintaining the
accessibility of data is only part of the job, when what is also called for
is the preservation of the right information. She adds that the falling
cost of data storage is encouraging the mistaken assumption that all data
can be preserved. "But that's based on a naive view of what 'everything'
actually is," Hedstrom says.
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Old Tech Skills Again in Demand
Chicago Tribune (04/05/08) Wong, Wailin
Computer scientists say mainframes are unfairly regarded as historical
curiosities when in reality they are vital to corporations, and demand for
new mainframe professionals is creating an opportunity for students who are
entering an uncertain economy with a rising unemployment rate. Illinois IT
Association President Fred Hoch says skills that were once considered old
are becoming new again. Companies such as IBM are seeing a shortage of
mainframe-skilled graduates and have reached out to the academic community.
About two years ago, a group of companies including IBM and State Farm
asked Illinois State University to start teaching mainframe computing. IBM
lent ISU a system for the mainframe program and provided the university
with course materials and faculty training. Professor Chu Jong says he
regularly receives phone calls and emails from companies asking if students
are available for internships. ISU professors say graduates have gotten
six or seven job offers each. Michael Carton, a member of ISU's inaugural
class of mainframe-trained students, says running a mainframe offers more
challenging and varied work than other IT jobs. Mainframe professionals
say they help form corporate strategy because they find ways of making
companies' operations more efficient.
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Hubble Maps the Changing Constellation of Internet 'Black
Holes'
UW News (04/08/08) Hickey, Hannah
The University of Washington's Hubble system monitors Web traffic for lost
messages such as emails or Web site requests, dubbed Internet "black
holes," and maps them on a Web site, providing a constantly changing
representation of the Internet's weak points. The Hubble map allows Web
users to view a global map with trouble spots highlighted, or to check on
an individual network or Web page. The project will be presented at the
Usenix Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation in San
Francisco. "There's an assumption that if you have a working Internet
connection then you have access to the entire Internet," says UW doctoral
student Ethan Katz-Basset. "We found that's not the case." UW researchers
sent test messages around the world to find computers that were reachable
from some but not all of the Internet, a situation known as partial
reachability. The Hubble map is updated every 15 minutes, marking problem
locations with a flag and listing the numerical address for the group of
computers affected. A test last fall found that more than 7 percent of
computers worldwide experienced partial reachability at least once during a
three-week period. Each marked address usually represents a few hundred to
a few thousand individual computers. The Hubble project uses PlanetLab, a
shared worldwide network of academic, industrial, and government computers.
The researchers use about 100 PlanetLab computers in about 40 countries to
send virtual probes to computers around the world, reaching about 90
percent of the Internet.
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Researcher: Computer Science Job Market Improving
Daily Reveille (Louisiana State University) (04/07/08) Barbazon, Angelle
Although computer science enrollment fell during the early 2000s, some
scholars say interest in the major will jump again soon. Stu Zweben, an
associate dean at Ohio State University and chairman of the Computing
Research Association's surveys committee, says the crash of several large
startup companies in the early 2000s and rumors of instability and
downsizing alarmed many high school graduates entering colleges nationwide.
"What happens in situations like this is there's an initial shock in the
market place and it has to sort itself out," he says. Zweben says the job
market has already turned around, but most people interested in computer
science have not noticed yet because the word had not gotten out to the
students and parents of the next generation. At Louisiana State
University, Computer Science Department Chairman S.S. Iyengar says LSU
experienced a dip in enrollment four or five years ago, but enrollment is
now increasing. Iyengar says the opportunities for computer science majors
are growing every day, and notes that computer science can be applied to a
wide variety of industries, including entertainment, coastal science, and
cyber security.
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Microsoft Creates 'Instant Backing Band' for
Singers
New Scientist (04/07/08) Marks, Paul
Microsoft Research has developed MySong, software that takes a sung vocal
and generates a file containing the sequence of sung notes, a process known
as "pitch tracking," and uses that sequence to create backup music using a
technique called "chord probability computation." The software was
developed by Microsoft Research's Dan Morris and Sumit Basu and the
University of Washington's Ian Simon. "The idea is to let a creative but
musically untrained individual get a taste of song writing and music
creation," Morris says. "There was nothing out there that could take a
sung vocal melody as an input and then generate appropriate chords to
accompany it." MySong compares the sung melody to the 12 standard musical
notes and then feeds an approximate sequence of notes to the system's chord
probability computation algorithm, which uses an analysis of 300 songs to
recognize fragments of melody and chords that complement each other. To
choose the best accompaniment, the user slides an on-screen bar to set the
musical tone, choosing between options such as "happy factor" and "jazz
factor." MIT researcher and composer Tod Machover says he is impressed
with the system and notes that voice remains under-exploited in interactive
systems. Machover says the software will need to be very forgiving for
those who are not perfectly in-tune or accurate singers to be useful to
untrained singers. Morris says the software is simple enough to run on a
cell phone.
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Engelbart's Usability Dilemma: Efficiency vs
Ease-of-Use
SYS-CON (04/08/08) Monson-Haefel, Richard
In "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework," Doug Engelbart,
head of the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute,
presented a philosophy that favored efficiency over ease-of-use in
human-computer interaction, notes Richard Monson-Haefel. In essence,
Engelbart felt that basing computer interactions on the most efficient
systems was the best way to achieve an optimal human-computer symbiosis.
Monson-Haefel thinks the best embodiment of Engelbart's views is his
five-finger keyboard, which is designed for use with one hand and carries
out very rapid data entry and computer interactions when combined with a
computer mouse, which Engelbart also conceived of. The keyboard-mouse
combination was very tough to learn, which points to the crux of
Engelbart's dilemma: More efficient and potentially more powerful
human-computer interfaces have a very steep learning curve. Monson-Haefel
says the modern approach to human-computer interaction stresses ease-of-use
and usability without training, which runs counter to Engelbart's
philosophy, which led to some of the most exceptional computer technologies
in use today. The author does not think Engelbart's preference for
efficiency is a completely unsound notion, and he reasons that "perhaps,
like the violin, people could reach a new level of synergy with computers
if they followed Engelbart's philosophy and focused on efficiency over
ease-of-use."
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Inside Intel's New Chip
Technology Review (04/07/08) Greene, Kate
Intel's Atom is a new line of small, low-power chips designed to work well
with Web sites and to run media. Atom has 45 million transistors in less
than one-tenth the size of a penny and will enable designers to create
small Internet devices in novel shapes and sizes. Intel says the Atom is
four to six times faster than the ARM chips used in many cell phones,
including the iPhone, which will allow for faster downloads and smoother
video watching. Intel's Vijay Krishnan says the Intel chip is also
compatible with many Web programming languages and applications. A device
with an Atom chip would give a user access to all of the Internet without
any errors, Krishnan says. Intel focused largely on power consumption when
designing the new chips. Dual-core chips in laptops use up to 35 watts,
while the Atom line, which offers roughly the same performance as a typical
chip in a four-year-old laptop, uses three watts or less. Krishnan says
this was accomplished by creating six separate power states for the chip.
Depending on how the device is being used, the voltage the processor uses
and clock speed can be varied, and certain components, such as the memory
cache, can be turned off when not needed. Intel also streamlined the
chip's instructions to use hyperthreading technology, which simulates
multicore functions on a single-core chip.
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Emotional Machines
ICT Results (04/03/08)
The European Union-funded Humaine project has brought together specialists
from a variety of disciplines in an effort to create the foundation needed
to give machines "soft" skills. Project coordinator Roddy Cowie says such
technology is often developed by skilled programmers and engineers who
understand how to write and record computer programs, but have little
understanding about how to define and capture human emotion. "When they
developed databases, the recordings were nothing like the way emotion
appears in everyday action and interaction, and the codes they used to
describe the recording would not fit the things that happen in everyday
life," Cowie says. The Humaine project established teams from disciplines
as varied as philosophy, psychology, and computer animation. The
psychologists studied and interpreted signals that people expressed, and
collaborated with IT professionals on a database that would enable machines
to interpret and react to emotions. The project may not reach fruition for
another 20 or 30 years, though there are already concrete results and
applications for some of the technologies the project developed. "We've
developed systems for recognizing emotion using multiple modalities and
this puts us very much at the leading edge of recognition technology,"
Cowie says. "And we've identified the different types of signal which need
to be given by an agent--normally a screen representation of a person--if
it is going to react in an emotionally convincing way."
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Coming Soon: Superfast Internet
Times Online (UK) (04/06/08) Leake, Jonathan
Scientists at Cern have developed the grid, technology they say is 10,000
times faster than a typical broadband connection. The grid could be used
to transmit holographic images, allow instant online gaming with hundreds
of players, or provide high-definition video telephony for the price of a
local call. The grid will be able to download feature films within seconds
or send the entire back catalog of the Rolling Stones from Britain to Japan
in less than two seconds. Grid project member Glasgow University physics
professor David Britton believes grid technologies could revolutionize
society and enable future generations to collaborate and communicate in new
ways. The grid technology will be tested when the Large Hadron Collider is
turned on this summer. The grid will be needed to capture the massive
amounts of data the collider generates. The grid was built with dedicated
fiber-optic cables and modern routing centers. The grid's 55,000 servers
is expected to increase to 200,000 within two years. Ian Bird, project
leader for Cern's high-speed computing project, says grid technology could
make the Internet so fast that people will stop using their desktop
computers to store information and everything will be kept on the Internet.
Although the grid itself is unlikely to be available to domestic Internet
users, many telecom providers and businesses are already incorporating grid
technology into their networks.
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The Not-So-Digital Future of Digital Signal
Processing
Northwestern University (04/04/08) Ayshford, Emily
The use of organic and chemical materials to perform digital signal
processing without electrical currents could be the next major
technological revolution, say Northwestern professors Sotirios Tsaftaris
and Aggelos Katsaggelos. Their research includes studying the use of DNA
for digital signal processing, as DNA strands can be used to input and
process elements, and DNA is an excellent medium for data storage. Digital
samples can be recorded in DNA, which can be kept in a liquid form in test
tubes to save space. DNA can also be easily replicated using common
laboratory techniques, creating a database that could be easily searched,
no matter how large. Over the past 10 years scientists and engineers have
experimented with different materials for performing signal processing,
possibly leading to a "not-so-electric future" of digital signal
processing, according to Tsaftaris and Katsaggelos. For example, artist
and scientist Cameron Jones discovered that fungi grown on CDs causes the
optically recorded sound to be distorted by the fungi, and that the fungi
growth patterns were dependent on the optical grooves recorded on the CD.
Meanwhile, in 2005, a group of E. coli cells were modified to react to
light and were able to perform edge detection of an image, a basic
processing task.
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Hybrid Computer Materials May Lead to Faster, Cheaper
Technology
University of Missouri (04/03/08)
A multi-university research team is working to combine magnetic components
and semiconductor components in a single hybrid material that would allow
for the integration of memory and logical functions. The material is
expected to lead to devices that operate at much higher speeds and use
considerably less power than current devices. University of Missouri
professor Giovanni Vignale says the research's primary goal is to explore
new ways of integrating magnetic materials with emerging electronic
materials such as organic semiconductors. The research, backed by a $6.5
million grant from the Defense Department, may lead to more compact and
energy-efficient devices, and the hybrid materials developed are expected
to be much less expensive to process than traditional semiconductor chips.
"In this approach, the coupling between magnetic and non-magnetic
components would occur via a magnetic field or flow of electron spin, which
is the fundamental property of an electron and is responsible for most
magnetic phenomena," Vignale says. "The hybrid devices that we target
would allow seamless integration of memory and logical function, high-speed
optical communication and switching, and new sensor capabilities."
Universities participating in the research effort include the University of
Iowa, New York University, University of California Berkeley, the
University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Missouri.
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MIT Nexi Robot Expresses Emotions
Technovelgy.com (04/06/08) Christensen, Bill
The MIT Nexi robot can express a wide range of emotions with its face.
Designed by Xitome Design with MIT, Nexi has a neck mechanism that takes
advantage of 4 degrees of freedom at the base, in addition to the
pan-tilt-yaw capabilities of its head. Nexi can express different emotions
with its gaze, eyebrows, eyelids, and an articulate mandible. The range of
emotions expressed are comparable to those of the South Korean EveR2-Muse
Robot, which has a more human face. The robot has a color CCD in each eye,
an indoor Active 3D infrared camera in its head, and four microphones to
support sound localization. Modeled after the uBot5 mobile manipulator
developed by the Laboratory for Perceptual Robotics at UMASS Amherst, Nexi
has a Segway-style chassis that can detect human touch, a mobile base that
can balance dynamically on two wheels, and arms that can carry up to 10
pounds. The robot still needs to be taught how to respond emotionally.
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Senators Target Visa 'Loopholes'
BusinessWeek (04/01/08) Herbst, Moira
U.S. tech companies are urging Congress to raise the annual cap on visas,
but two outspoken critics of the program are working to accomplish just the
opposite. On April 1, the first day of the annual application period,
Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) sent letters to 25
Indian outsourcing firms, which were responsible for 20,000 H-1B visas in
2007, about one-third of the annual cap, asking them to explain how they
use the H-1B visa program. "We'll hear arguments all day as to why the cap
on H-1B visas should be raised, but nobody should be fooled," Grassley
says. "There are highly skilled American workers being left behind,
searching for jobs that are being filled by H-1B visa holders." Critics of
the H-1B program say outsourcers abuse the program by replacing U.S.
employees with cheaper foreign workers, who are cycled into new jobs in
their home countries. Critics also argue that the L-1 visa, which allows
for intra-company transfers, is also being abused. U.S. government data
shows that over the past several years, the list of top 10 companies
receiving both H-1B and L-1 visas has been dominated by Indian outsourcing
firms, not by U.S. tech firms such as Microsoft and Google. For the past
two years, Wipro and Infosys have been the top two recipients of the visas,
and Indian outsourcers account for nearly 80 percent of the visa petitions
approved last year among top 10 recipients. Offshore outsourcers deny they
are abusing the program and argue they are actually helping U.S. companies
in industries such as insurance and financial services stay competitive by
reducing costs for work such as computer programming.
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The Limits of Quantum Computers
Scientific American (03/08) Vol. 298, No. 3, P. 62; Aaronson, Scott
Quantum computers would be able to process information in ways that
standard computers cannot by tapping the unusual properties of quantum
mechanics, but an analysis suggests that quantum computers would outclass
conventional machines only by a slight degree for most computing problems,
writes MIT professor Scott Aaronson. Evidence now indicates that quantum
machines would be susceptible to many of the same algorithmic restrictions
as classical computers, and these restrictions are totally independent of
the practical problems of constructing quantum computers. A solid quantum
computer algorithm would guarantee that computational paths leading to an
incorrect answer neutralize while paths reading to a right answer
reinforce, Aaronson says. The discovery of an efficient quantum algorithm
to solve NP-complete problems remains elusive despite much effort, but one
definite finding is that such an algorithm would have to efficiently take
advantage of the problems' structure in a manner that is outside the
capabilities of present-day methods. Aaronson points out that physicists
have yet to come up with a final theory of physics, which gives rise to the
possibility that a physical way to efficiently solve NP-complete problems
may one day be revealed by a future theory. "People speculate about yet
more powerful kinds of computers, some of which would make quantum
computers look as pedestrian as vending machines," he notes. "All of them,
however, would rely on speculative changes to the laws of physics."
Aaronson projects that the difficulty of NP-complete problems will someday
be perceived as a basic principle that describes part of the universe's
fundamental nature.
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