Experts Worry as Poll Problems Resist Overhaul
New York Times (11/26/06) P. 1; Urbina, Ian; Drew, Christopher
Despite spending over $4 billion on new voting equipment, America is yet
to solve its elections problems. During the 2006 mid-term election, tens
of thousands of voters, in 25 states, experienced serious hindrances at the
polls ranging from long lines, to shortages of replacement paper ballots,
to voting and registration machine malfunctions. Problems reported in
Florida affected over 60,000 votes; in Colorado up to 20,000 voters went
home before voting due to repeated crashes of the voter registration
systems; and in Arkansas, officials in one county conducted three different
counts, each of which varied by more than 30,000 votes. Electionline.org
director Doug Chapin says, "If the success of an election is to be measured
according to whether each voter's voice is hear, then we would have to
conclude that this past election was not a success." Many officials feel
that a greater number of technicians available to immediately address
problems that arise would significantly help future elections, as would
assuring that polling places have enough voting machines and adequately
trained workers. "These types of low-tech problems threaten to
disenfranchise just as many people, if not more, but they tend to get less
attention," says Century Foundation election expert Tova Wang. "We still
have a long way to go toward fixing the biggest problems with our election
system." However, some point out that any system takes a long time to work
the kinks out of, so such difficulties come with the territory when
implementing such wide-ranging changes.
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Offshoring: Risk to U.S. Innovation?
EE Times (11/22/06) Leopold, George
While offshoring is picking up speed, the effect it has on the U.S.
engineering community is a subject of debate. The U.S. is still the world
leader in many areas, such as chip design, but changing global economic
conditions, including rising costs, lower overseas wages, and competitive
pressures, could put this prominence in jeopardy. What difference the
location of manufacturing makes is not agreed upon, but as MIT President
Emeritus Charles Vest says, "Globalization is the new reality." About
60,000 plants were built in China by foreign companies between 2002 and
2003, according to the National Academy of Engineering, a time when 40,000
U.S. IT jobs were lost, according to an estimate by a presidential advisory
council. With the growing value of speedy innovation, only those companies
able to maneuver the best will survive, says Vest. As far as America's
position of world leader, with the best universities and R&D
infrastructure, Vest explains, "The enemy I fear most is complacency."
While offshoring has led to the growth of U.S. companies that in some cases
has created more jobs for U.S. workers in the short run, there is no
consensus as to the longevity of the trend, partially because of the fact
that this growth is also being experienced by Chinese and Indian markets.
Many hope that costs facing companies that offshore jobs, such as reduced
productivity, and extra controls on intellectual property, will offset any
long-term benefits. In order to maintain its position at the front of
technological innovation, the U.S. must continue to improve its
universities, promote investment in innovation, and retain as many foreign
graduates from U.S. schools as possible.
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Supreme Court to Examine 'Obviousness' of Patents
CNet (11/27/06) Broache, Anne
The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday will hear arguments concerning the
standards courts should use when ruling whether a patent is too "obvious"
to be protected. Many tech companies favor a revision of the current
standard, which allows "combination" patents, rather obvious combinations
of existing products, unless hard evidence exists that another researcher
has considered the innovation earlier, because they feel that innovation is
limited when such insignificant patents are protected. The Computer and
Communications Industry Association's Will Rodger argued that if the
desired changes are made "you will have more real investment in our
research and development, you will have more confident innovators, and you
won't have companies worrying about potentially infringing a patent they
know is bogus in the first place." Open source and free software
developers are also looking to the courts to reform the patent process;
because their work is so out in the open, they are an easy target to
exploit, while many lack the resources to defend their patents in court.
Some people, known as "patent trolls," even look at IT trends and predict
small changes to current tech products, in order to get the patent before
companies do and they can take them to court. Progress and Freedom
Foundation senior fellow Jim DeLong explains that, "This results in a
diversion of creative energy away from solving problems and into
calculations of planting landmines." Those for the current "obviousness"
standards include large patent-dependent companies as well as small ones,
who claim the standard is necessary for innovation: A change would remove
the "predictability" on which they have based their innovative approach,
and bring too much subjectivity into decisions of what is obvious or not.
Should the changes be made, hundreds of thousands of patents issued in the
last 25 years would be put in danger.
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Giving Robots More than a Shred of Humanity
Washington Post (11/23/06) P. C12; Borenstein, Seth
An important element of developing artificially intelligent robots that
can help people in their everyday life is a field known as human-robot
interaction. M.I.T. robotic life group director Cynthia Breazeal explains
that, "Robots have to understand people as people. Right now, the average
robot understands people like a chair. It's something to go around."
Robots being developed with this aspect of robotics in mind include one
that can play hide-and-seek with its creator, and one that makes eye
contact with people and nods when they speak. While researchers spent time
teaching robots complex functions, such as how to play chess, the ability
to perceive and interact surroundings were ignored; these functions were
thought of as things a child can do, thus being of little importance for
roboticists. Many in the field have stepped away from hardware and
software for the time being, and joined social scientists, language
experts, and doctors, among others, in order to address the very relevant
concerns of human-robot interaction. Rather than simply programming a
dictionary into a robots memory bank, efforts are being made to teach
robots to understand body language used by humans. While some argue that
there is no replacing humans in areas such as caring for the elderly and
children, there are simply not enough people to provide all the attention
that should for these people, and in one case, that of low-functioning
autistic children, robots are more effective than humans in relating and
getting a reaction. Woman are playing a lead role in this burgeoning
field, unlike most areas of robotics.
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Xerox Seeks Erasable Form of Paper for Copiers
New York Times (11/27/06) P. C8; Markoff, John
Xerox researchers are working to develop a type of paper that can be
reused by the company's machines. A study revealed that of 1,200 pages
printed by the average office worker each month, 44.5 percent of them are
for daily use such as email, drafts, or assignments, and 21 percent of
those printed with black ink end up in the trash the same day they are
printed. Such a change from paper being used as a way to store information
to a way to display information temporarily spurred Xerox Research Center
anthropologist Brinda Dalal to undertaken the project of developing the new
paper, which she refers to as "transient documents." The current prototype
prints without toner on a yellow-tinted specially coated paper, creating a
low-res document from which the print disappears in 16 hours to 24 hours.
Each piece of this type of paper can be used for as long as it stays in
good shape, some have lasted 50 printings at the center. The technology
utilizes compounds in the paper that change color when a certain wavelength
of light is absorbed. PARC computer scientist Eric J. Shrader says
researchers are still working to extend the print process lifespan and
boost the contrast, with the goal of developing a system in which the
specially coated paper costs about two to three times that of regular
paper. Still, given the popularity of reading information from electronic
displays, Xerox is faced with the challenge of assuring a market for its
reusable paper: Past attempts to market similar technology have failed.
"I worry that this would be like coming out with Super 8 just before the
video camera," says Paul Saffo, Silicon Valley researcher who has worked
with Xerox. "This would have been a bigger deal 10 years ago."
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Augmented Reality: Hyperlinking to the Real World
TechNewsWorld (11/22/06) Mello, John P Jr.
After being abandoned for years, augmented reality (AR) is once again
being considered as a commercial possibility. While AR is currently used
in sports broadcasts, the continued innovations in cell phones such as
improved GPS, video cameras, and Internet connections could bring the
technology to everyday life. University of North Carolina computer science
professor Henry Fuchs explains, "In the future we will not be getting
information principally or exclusively through looking at a computer
screen, but by looking at something that's in the real world and a display
that's integrated with that." AR users could potentially toggle between a
live view, with imagery integrated into their surroundings, and a satellite
image. Current shortcomings in the GPS capabilities of cell phones could
be remedied by a database of decoded imagery that could identify locations
seen by the camera, in real time, according to Columbia University computer
science professor Steven K. Feiner, who sees the technology allowing users
access to the menu of a restaurants they pass, or historical information
about a certain building, for example. A Nokia project, known as Mobile
Augmented Reality Applications (MARA), has developed a prototype phone that
can utilizes AR, but the commercial availability of AR depends more on
marketing than technological considerations, analysts say.
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'Perfect Storm' Could Stifle IT
Financial Times Digital Business (11/22/06) P. 8; Bradbury, Danny
The technology industry continues to have a difficult time convincing
up-and-coming students to enroll in technology programs at the university
level. Experts in Canada say there has been a 50 percent to 70 percent
decline in students pursuing IT studies, and reports from the United
Kingdom show applications for computer science and software engineering
degrees are down by 50 percent and 60 percent, respectively. The industry
is facing a climate in which young people have negative perceptions of IT,
there will be fewer 14-18 year-olds in the years to come, and in which more
design and specification skills are needed. Also, science teachers at the
secondary level are not always specialists in the subject matter. In the
United States, IT observers say the fragmented educational system has not
done a good enough job to provide gadget-loving youngsters with tech
fundamentals such as knowledge of file structure and the workings of email.
Students are often more comfortable with the emerging devices produced by
the unpredictable world of technology, which some teachers do not
understand and advise against as a career.
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Towards Truly Ubiquitous Life Annotation
University of Southampton (ECS) (11/15/06) Smith, Ashley; Hall, Wendy;
Glaser, Hugh
A group of researchers at the University of Southampton is developing a
system whereby personal data is collected and stored indiscriminately with
no lifestyle changes required, creating annotations for the life of an
individual. Currently, people would like to have such a system, but few
are willing to put forth the effort that would be required. Handheld
devices such as mobile phones and PDAs would be able to collect information
on a user's schedule, a user's location as it changes over the course of a
day, and who the user contacts. Such a system would be able to let the
user know where they were or what they did on any given day. A desktop
program that is always running would be set to regularly extract the logs
from mobile devices and place it in a local RDF knowledge store. These
"data collectors" could also be set to gather information concerning
traffic and weather, for example, from the Web. Though what value such an
annotation system would actually have is unknown, but the researchers wish
to gather as much information as possible so it is available when uses
become apparent. The current system, being tested with a single subject,
requires nothing but hardware available off-the-shelf.
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Robot With 'Human Soul' Explores Remotely
New Scientist (11/21/06) Simonite, Tom
Researchers in Germany are developing technology that will allow a robot
to relay what it feels, sees, and hears to a human in a remote location.
The robot, which sits atop a wheeled platform and has an extendable arm,
continues to be tested by Anjelika Peer of Munich University and colleagues
Ulrich Unterhinninghofen and Martin Buss. The remote user can move the
robot by walking or with a foot pedal, look around by donning a
head-mounted display that is connected to the robot's twin cameras, control
the robot arm through a touch sensitive (haptic) interface, and move its
three-fingered hand via a wearable glove. The robot also makes use of
force-feedback so the operator can sense any physical resistance such as
bumping into or picking up an object, as well as microphones to deliver
sounds to the human user wearing a pair of headphones. Such a
"tele-operation" system could be helpful in situations in which robots are
used to roam around areas that are too dangerous for humans to enter.
"Having the feeling of moving around helps the user feel immersed in the
remote environment," says Peer. The German team plans to have a two-armed
robot by next summer.
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War Games Go Virtual
Chronicle of Higher Education (11/24/06) Vol. 53, No. 14, P. A36;
Carlson, Scott
The U.S. Army primarily supports the University of Southern California's
Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), a think tank where experts in
simulation, language-recognition, and animation technology collaborate with
people from the entertainment industry to deliver realistic virtual reality
applications for military training. Innovations are making virtual
environments increasingly immersive, incorporating such elements as
shadows, military strategy, and simulated firearms that use pneumatics to
deliver the kick and bang of actual weaponry. Army director for research
and laboratory management John Parmentola explains that virtual war games
are envisioned by the military as a less expensive alternative to live war
games, in terms of financial cost, the potential for injury, and
environmental impact. ICT program manager at the Army's Simulation &
Training Technology Center Jeff Wilkinson notes that training via
simulation can be standardized, and that soldiers' progress can be recorded
and tracked so that instructors can more easily point out errors or
illustrate concepts to trainees. "ICT's strength is not so much in making
a better battle simulation, but in taking more social types of
interactions, which are crucial in any campaign, and training soldiers on
that," says Stanford University communication professor Jeremy Bailenson.
"There may be some who are doing natural-language processing better than
[the institute], and there may be some doing graphics better than them, but
there is not an institution in the world that has put together all of the
small pieces of social interaction in a psychologically meaningful way like
they have." ICT director of technology William Swartout thinks the
military simulation research will yield the enablement of new types of
experiences that can be applied beneficially to education as well as
entertainment, such as computer games.
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Future Interaction Technologies: The ITWales
Interview
ITWales.com (11/22/06) Earls, Sali
Dr. Matt Jones, who plays a key role in the development of the Future
Interaction Technologies (FIT) Lab in the computer science department of
the Swansea University in Wales, recently spoke with ITWales.com. The Lab
addresses interactivity between people and machines, going beyond the
simple aspects of "user-friendliness." Jones, who feels that computer
science is just as applicable to general society as any other discipline
explains that, "The grand challenges in the FIT Lab will come from engaging
with national and international governments and commercial organizations,"
including educational initiatives. When discussing the Lab's "Bridging the
Global Digital Divide," Jones points out the problem "that [too many
people] see technology as some kind of healing, and that we'll be able to
go in there, to parachute in, with the latest mobile devices and Web
software, and somehow make these people's lives better. It turns out that
these people in this Indian village have a vibrant culture, social, and
educational life, and what were going to do is celebrate this through
technology," he explains. They have created a system whereby villagers
capture their stories on video camera to be wirelessly transmitted to
neighboring villages. Rather than simply promoting the latest technology,
the Lab sees its mission as addressing people's lives and values, what they
truly desire, which Jones says has always been "to relate to other
people."
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Robots Find Roles in Nursing Care
Nikkei Weekly (11/06/06) Vol. 44, No. 2259, P. 13
Robotic technology is being developed in Japan to help those in need of
hospital or rehabilitative care, as a way to prepare for the rapid aging of
the population. The RI-Man (Robot Interacting with Human) robot has been
developed by the government-affiliated Riken research institute. It
features soft silicone skin, two arms, a head, and a mobile base, that can
lift and move a person (up to 40 kg. for now). It has two microprocessors
that communicate with each other to stabilize a patient in its arms; it is
able to detect and correct an imbalance faster than a human could. A suit
has been developed to help prevent atrophy in stroke patients that
experience partial paralysis, and at this stage it helps paralysis of one
arm. The suit fits on the upper body with different sleeves for the
working and paralyzed arms; by moving the working arm, the paralyzed arm is
moved in the same way by rubber muscles inside the sleeve. Another
exoskeleton suit has been developed for the feeble or elderly, which is
able to detect bio-electrical signals that are sent when the user thinks to
move a muscle. By making the movement before the user's muscles even get
the signal, the suit takes the burden off of the body. The companies
developing these technologies expect a significant increase in the global
market for rehabilitative and other types of robotics in coming years.
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Web Chief Warns of Domain Name Chaos
Age (Australia) (11/21/06) Moses, Asher
ICANN chief executive Paul Twomey, responding to international pressure to
internationalize the DNS, says that fast-tracking the process could "break
the whole Internet," noting that if non-English letters are allowed, the
number of possible characters that can be used in domain names will
skyrocket from 37 now to over 50,000. "The Internet is like a 15-story
building, and with international domain names what we're trying to do is
change the bricks in the basement," said Twomey. "If we change the bricks
there's all these layers of code above the DNS...we have to make sure that
if we change the system, the rest is all going to work." Twomey warned of
security risks that could arise by the fact that characters in various
scripts resemble one another, meaning that fraudsters could misdirect
Internet users by registering domain names that use letters that look the
same as other letters. ICANN is now conducting "laboratory testing" of
IDNs and is working with Web browser developers and e-commerce software
makers to ensure problems are kept to a minimum.
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A Smarter Computer to Pick Stocks
New York Times (11/24/06) Duhigg, Charles
With the use of algorithms and traditional quantitative techniques having
become widespread among Wall Street firms and hedge funds in recent years,
stock pickers are now looking for new advantages in finding historical
patterns in the market. The next frontier appears to be neural networks
and genetic algorithms that will allow investments firms to pursue more
advanced pattern recognition analysis of stock market fluctuations. "Most
software fails in pattern recognition because there aren't enough
sequential rules in the world to teach a computer to discern between two
faces, or to find almost imperceptible relationships between stocks,"
explains Orhan Karaali, a computer scientist and director at the hedge fund
Advanced Investment Partners. "But a machine that can generate complicated
rules a person would never have thought of, and that can learn from past
mistakes is a powerful tool." A year ago, automatic algorithms had a hand
in approximately a third of all stock trades, studies estimate. The
algorithms and traditional quantitative techniques have helped some stock
pickers become rich, but their profits have declined in recent years as
more investment firms have adopted the technology. A few firms have
graduated to nonlinear techniques, or processes that more closely resemble
the way in which the human brain operates. Experts say the downside to the
technology is not always understanding why it may find patterns in certain
data or relationships.
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Mastering the Three Worlds of Information
Technology
Harvard Business Review (11/06) McAfee, Andrew
An excess of available technologies and the often poor performance of
corporate IT projects are fueling reluctance among business leaders to get
involved in IT, but Harvard Business School professor Andrew McAfee writes
that their participation is essential, and splits executives' IT management
responsibilities into three roles: They must help choose technologies,
cultivate their adoption, and guarantee their utilization. He notes,
"Different types of IT result in different kinds of organizational change
when they are implemented, so executives must tailor their roles to the
technologies they're using. What's critical, though, is that executives
stop looking at IT projects as technology installations and start looking
at them as periods of organizational change that they have a responsibility
to manage." Executives often lack an expansive model for IT's corporate
benefits, its organizational impact, and what they must do to ensure the
success of IT projects; McAfee says placing IT in a historical context can
help build such a model, and it is suggested by research that a quartet of
organizational complements--workers with improved skills, higher levels of
teamwork, redesigned processes, and new decision rights--can squeeze better
performance from process general purpose technologies (GPTs). The author
says his research demonstrates that IT does not boast the same
relationships with these complements that other process GPTs have, and he
points to the classification of IT into three categories: Function IT (IT
that helps execute discreet tasks), Network IT (IT that effects
interactions without parameter specification), and Enterprise IT (IT that
particularizes business processes). McAfee reasons that this
categorization can help managers comprehend which technologies they must
invest in as well as what must be done to generate the most returns. To
select the right technology, executives must clearly understand the
company's business needs; the next step is to facilitate adoption by
helping produce the complements that will get the most value out of IT; and
the third responsibility for business leaders is to exploit the
technologies to the fullest. Each IT category has unique requirements and
practices for fulfilling these three roles, concludes McAfee.
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Tangled Web
Government Technology (11/06) Vol. 19, No. 11, P. 16; Vander Veen, Chad
It is the position of Net neutrality proponents that the Internet needs
federal regulation to survive as a free and open resource and avoid its
degeneration into a biased, tiered medium dominated by telco and cable
companies. One of the central challenges of the debate is that there is no
single, universally acknowledged definition for Net neutrality. The
contention of the telco and cable companies is that there must be a "fast
lane" for bandwidth-intensive Internet applications of the future, and
supporting the necessary network investments to realize such accommodations
requires them to charge higher fees to content providers; Net neutrality
activists counter that such a scheme would establish a two-tiered Internet
that condemns average consumers to the "slow lane," while the lack of
federal regulation would give the Web's controllers license to reduce or
impede access to Web sites they object to. "If we allow what has, in a
way, been public to become fully privatized...governments, citizens and
consumers may find there are increased costs and other obstacles related to
accessing government information, electoral information, and it has impact
in local economies as well," posits the Center for Digital Democracy's Jeff
Chester, who adds that a free and open Internet is essential to ensuring
the good quality of democracy in the United States. Among the arguments
that Net neutrality opponents are making against federal regulation is its
basis on mostly speculative conclusions, while AT&T's Claudia Jones
contends that there will be less investment on network infrastructure if
regulation goes forward. "If you allow companies to manage their network,
manage the content, and build intelligence into the network so that it
operates more efficiently...then consumers will have a better experience,"
she says. The Senate Communications Act of 2006 mandates that providers
maintain a consistent level of access in keeping with what the subscriber
is paying for, but the bill does not include regulation for ISP business
models, which Net neutrality advocates want. NetCompetition.org Chairman
Scott Cleland argues that there is no such thing as Net neutrality,
insisting that "there are vast disparities of usage; on price, speed;
between technologies; on how these industries are regulated or have been
regulated in the past; between how applications work and need to work; and
lastly in the way different players align and negotiate with other
businesses."
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Technology's Promise
Futurist (12/06) Vol. 40, No. 6, P. 41; Halal, William E.
Breakthroughs in every scientific discipline capable of transforming
industries are proliferating thanks to information system innovations, and
George Washington University professor and TechCast President William Halal
cites TechCast predictions as "possibly the best forecast data ever
assembled, based on trends that outline how the technology revolution is
poised to transform life over the next 20 to 30 years." Among the major
technology areas TechCast focuses on are information technology,
manufacturing and robotics, and e-commerce. In the information technology
domain, TechCast sees important progress in the field of biometrics and the
emergence of nearly foolproof multimodal systems; quantum computers are
predicted to become commercially available around 2021, within a five-year
safety margin. TechCast predicts mainstream use of nanotechnology
applications somewhere between 2010 and 2020, while smart robots should
start entering the household by the end of the current decade, with
mainstream use emerging about 10 years later. Breakthroughs such as
Apple's iTunes and iPod are ushering in a revolution in on-demand
entertainment, and TechCast projects that 30 percent of the world
population will be using phones, TV, the Internet, and other kinds of IT
within a decade thanks to the advent of lower-cost technologies. Virtual
education is also expected to penetrate the mainstream market around 2015.
The evolution of these advances is projected by TechCast to unfold in
several phases: Intelligence in information systems and e-commerce is
expected to be the focus until 2010, when major innovations in artificial
intelligence should initiate a wide array of breakthroughs through 2020.
The industrialization of most developing countries through 2030 is likely
to spur momentum toward globalization to address challenges that are beyond
technology's scope, while 2040 to 2050 should see a mature world society
that is more or less peaceful.
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