A Plug for the Unplugged $100 Laptop Computer for
Developing Nations
New York Times (02/09/06) P. C3; Varian, Hal R.
MIT Media Laboratory founder Nicholas Negroponte announced that Quanta
Computer will manufacture the $100 laptop using a Linux operating system
and an AMD chip during the technology sessions at Davos, Switzerland. The
device will have a carrying handle, a spill-resistant keyboard, and a
power-generating hand crank, as well as the ability to connect to a
wireless network and a screen that is readable in direct sunlight.
Negroponte said that network costs would be defrayed by managing the flow
of Internet data so as not to compete with commercial data. Microsoft CTO
Craig Mundie argues that a device similar to a cell phone would make more
sense than a laptop, given that the wireless communications industry is
growing steadily in developing countries. While Mundie and other critics
have focused on the business value of cell phones, Negroponte stresses that
laptops yield the strongest educational benefit. Cheap laptops have
business value, too, as they could be used as cash registers for merchants,
for example, or even as a sort of ATM if it was networked. Laptops could
also record and store legal documents such as contracts, a fundamental
element of all modern economies. Should the economies of developing
nations become dependent on the laptop, it would also have the added
benefit of encouraging literacy.
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Flexible Screens to Light up Market
Wall Street Journal (02/09/06) P. B4; Boslet, Mark
After decades of anticipation, the first flexible screens could actually
be headed for the market by the first half of 2007, according to Philips
Electronics' Polymer Vision unit. The energy-efficient screens would be
made of circuits imprinted on thin pieces of plastic, enabling cell phones
and other mobile devices to accommodate screens that open up to five
inches. Initially, the screens will only be available in black and white,
and will not have video capabilities, though enthusiasts argue that the
technology could eventually revolutionize the manner in which consumers use
a host of electronic devices. Xerox is also pursuing flexible display
technology, eyeing retail signage as a potential market. Polymer Vision
CEO Karl McGoldrick reports that his company has been approached by
computer manufacturers, phone makers, and Internet companies, and that
specific product announcements will be forthcoming in March. With annual
sales of cell phones expected to surpass 1 billion by 2010, many of which
will be smart phones, coupled with the increasing popularity of mobile
gaming, the potential market for flexible displays is enormous. Despite
the technology's promise, cost looms as a prohibitive factor, though
Polymer Vision reports that the price of a flexible five-inch display will
be on par with the liquid-crystal displays in existing mobile devices.
McGoldrick expects to jump from the five-inch screen to a seven-inch model,
which he sees as the ideal size for the mainstream market. He also expects
to have a working color prototype by 2008.
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The 'Mother' of the Internet
Investor's Business Daily (02/09/06) P. A4; Barlas, Peter
Radia Perlman says when she proposed a solution for routing information to
a group of vendors in the mid 1970s, she was largely ignored, due mainly to
her gender. But Perlman, now a distinguished engineer at Sun Microsystems,
was not to be deterred. Though she frequently found her audiences
dismissive over the years, Perlman's spanning tree algorithm, which helps
direct network traffic, became so embedded in the Internet's structure that
she has been dubbed the "Mother of the Internet." Any time a user searches
through an engine such as Google, Perlman's algorithm forms a sort of road
map to navigate the Internet. "What Radia did was to put the basic traffic
rules into place so it was possible to drive from one point to another
without hopelessly getting lost or driving in circles," said Sun CTO Greg
Papadopoulos. Perlman attended MIT and took her first paying job teaching
programming to children at one of the school's labs. She has always taken
a mathematical approach to linking information among computers, describing
concrete numbers as a way to cut through the syntactical denseness of
computer language. A manager for Digital Equipment watched Perlman's
vendor presentation, and offered her a job. Starting at Digital in 1980,
she immediately solved the information exchange problem that had confounded
the engineering team for months. Despite her field experience, Perlman
continued her education and earned a Ph.D. in computer science from MIT in
1988. She has worked at Novell and then Sun, where she developed software
that shored up the routing of simple multicast systems, keeping a site
running when it is bombarded by traffic. For the past few years Perlman
has also taught at the University of Washington and Harvard, as well as
written articles and books.
For information about ACM's Committee on Women and Computing, visit
http://www.acm.org/women
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Are We Losing Our Edge?
Time (02/13/06) Vol. 167, No. 7, P. 22; Lemonick, Michael D.; Beech,
Hannah; Bower, Amanda
The United States is in danger of losing its crown for scientific
innovation as its faces competition from overseas and reduced federal
budgets for research and development. Cutbacks in private-sector R&D
investment by corporations under the gun to generate fast profits, and
drop-offs in technical graduates because of the declining quality of math
and science education, are also contributing factors. In the past,
pressing issues such as the Second World War and the Cold War fueled a
widespread public-private push to applied as well as pure science research,
which led to the development of many world-changing technologies that
supported America's rise as the leading technological and economic power.
But the situation changed when the U.S. government and corporations began
to de-emphasize long-term results in favor of more immediate returns. This
helped cause a shrinkage of individual government grants to universities;
Caltech provost Paul Jennings says this is having a detrimental effect on
researchers, who are jumping through bureaucratic hoops to win as many
grants as possible and consequently discouraging students from pursuing
scientific careers. Less than stellar salaries for science graduates and
teachers compared to other fields are also curtailing students' career
ambitions, as is a general skepticism toward science stemming from some of
the more spectacular failures, such as the Chernobyl and Space Shuttle
disasters. America is losing ground to foreign competitors that have
established more science-friendly cultures in an effort to copy the spirit
of wide-open inquiry that so distinguished America's scientific community
at its height. But intense lobbying by industry leaders, researchers, and
lawmakers over the past few months finally appears to be bearing fruit with
President Bush's recent launch of the American Competitiveness Initiative,
a plan to dramatically increase federal funding for basic scientific
research, institute a permanent R&D tax credit, and train 70,000 more high
school science and math educators.
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Locking Down Our Digital Future
BBC News (02/08/06) Geist, Michael
A meeting in Rome last week sponsored jointly by the Italian government
and the Organization for Economic Cooperation saw hundreds of
representatives from the business, academic, and policy communities
converge to discuss the state of the digital economy. Opposing sides
voiced the argument for digital rights management (DRM) applications to
secure content, while others highlighted the rich body of works that has
come from systems that support user-generated content, such as Flickr and
Creative Commons. Advocates of the user-generated DRM alternative also
focused on the proliferation of blogs, with Technorati CEO David Sifry
noting that 75,000 new blogs are created each day. Of the 27 million blogs
that his company follows, Sifry reported that there were more written in
Japanese last month than there were in English. DRM supporters noted the
difficulty that users now encounter when trying to legally transfer content
between devices. The popularity of Napster, for example, has suffered
because the system is incompatible with Apple's iPod. Rather than
questioning the licensing restrictions, DRM proponents have blamed
equipment makers for the incompatibilities, arguing that they should
incorporate content neutrality into their next generation of devices.
Meanwhile, user-generated content faces an emerging threat from a
two-tiered Internet that could restrict access to applications such as
BitTorrent, a program frequently used to distribute material such as open
source code and independent films. If service providers follow through on
their threat to charge Web sites for bringing content to their users, the
two-tiered Internet could further undermine the availability of
user-generated content, as many smaller sites would be unable to pay the
fees.
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US Plans Massive Data Sweep
Christian Science Monitor (02/09/06) P. 1; Clayton, Mark
The U.S. government is working to harvest and link information from such
disparate sources as email and blogs to government records and intelligence
data in a large computer system built to monitor for terrorist activity.
While the government credits the parts of the system that are already
operational with having prevented some terrorist attacks, privacy advocates
warn against the latest government intrusion into daily life. In
describing the care-free attitude with which most people make search and
purchase decisions on the Internet, the Electronic Frontier Foundation's
Lee Tien says, "We have an attitude that no one will connect all those
dots. But these programs are about connecting those dots--analyzing and
aggregating them--in a way that we haven't thought about." At the center
of the initiative is a seldom-discussed three-year-old Homeland Security
project known as ADVISE (Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight,
and Semantic Enhancement). ADVISE relies heavily on data mining, an
established practice that the government is applying on an unprecedented
scale, mining the digital galaxy for information that is then
cross-referenced with government records to be stored in files known as
entities. The program demands storage for roughly 1 quadrillion entities
as it aims not just to compile information, but to establish patterns that
can give insight into terrorists' plans and motivations. The Starlight
visualization component of the ADVISE program is already operational,
helping analysts see graphical patterns in data that can elude numerical
analysis. Privacy advocates are most alarmed by the secrecy of the
program, however, as even legislators who oversee the DHS have only vague
knowledge about the program, though the department has made assurances that
privacy concerns were considered in the program's design.
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Biology Inspires Perceptive Machines
IST Results (02/09/06)
The SENSEMAKER program is attempting to create machines capable of sensing
their environments by fusing streams of sensory data to endow them with a
holistic conception their surroundings. Computer scientists, electronic
engineers, physicists, and neuroscientists have worked together examining
neural models of the brain processes that draw data from our senses,
reproducing them in silicon. The scientists began with a model of human
perception, trying to copy the spikes in voltage that characterize
biological neurons. "The traditional model of an artificial network is
quite removed from biological neurons, while the spiking neural networks we
used are more faithful to what happens in the real biological brain," said
SENSEMAKER coordinator Martin McGinnity. During the model's development,
the researchers created hardware demonstrators, such as FPGAs, to implement
hosts of spiking neural networks and simulate various elements of the
sensory system, particularly sight. The FPGAs enabled the organization of
synapses and neurons in large networks, allowing for flexibility and rapid
implementation. The researchers also developed an ASIC device that
provides better integration and more power-efficient operations. The
circuits, which can be engaged through a PC, synthesize data in a similar
fashion as the biological brain. The SENSEMAKER research translates easily
from one sense to another, as the scientists are now moving beyond vision
to explore the auditory system. While the progress is significant,
McGinnity says that there is a long way to go, as intelligent systems still
require reprogramming to adapt to their environment. Two other research
projects are in the works to solve that issue, as well as the system's
inability to react autonomously and the absence of a perception system.
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Broadband Law Rewrite Planned for 2006
CNet (02/08/06) Broache, Anne
House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas)
said his committee hopes to present a "comprehensive" plan for re-tooling
U.S. telecommunications statutes later this month during a speech at an
annual "state of the Net" conference on Wednesday. Both House and Senate
lawmakers have been debating revisions to the 1996 Telecommunications Act,
which has been targeted by critics for its failure to accommodate the rapid
growth of the Internet and broadband. Sens. John Ensign (R-Nev.) and Jim
DeMint (R-S.C.) have each introduced proposals that subscribe to a policy
of nonintervention when it comes to broadband, while the Senate Commerce
Committee has started a series of hearings that should lead to another
reform bill. Barton expressed impatience for the Senate to act, noting
that "We don't have that many legislative days this year, so it is time to
stop talking, and it is time to start working." Last fall, Barton's
committee issued a draft proposal and held a hearing that outlined rules
for technology services assigned to the categories of broadband ISPs, VoIP
providers, and broadband video providers. The draft was heavily criticized
by technology companies such as Amazon and Google for failing to clarify a
mandate for network neutrality. Barton made no mention of how that draft
would be amended prior to its formal unveiling in the House, but stated his
intentions to "very quickly" put out legislation for public review. He
added that "it's pretty tough to determine what is right in my mind" as far
as network neutrality was concerned.
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U.S. Could Fall Behind in Global 'Brain Race'
USA Today (02/09/06) P. 1D; Vergano, Dan
Though concerns over the erosion of U.S. leadership in science and
technology have become a familiar refrain, President Bush's pledge to
devote $136 billion to education and research marks the most significant
government-led drive to boost U.S. scientific competitiveness since
Sputnik. Research spending creates innovation that accounts for up to 85
percent of economic growth, according to a report by the National Academy
of Sciences. The report cites the far greater number of engineering
graduates produced annually in India and China than in the United States,
as well as a falling trade imbalance of technology goods. The report also
notes that the United States is losing its historic lead in high-energy
physics, as for the first time in decades the world's most powerful
particle accelerator will be located outside of the United States in 2007.
The report recommends increases in funding for research and education
through tax credits and other measures, while also highlighting the need
for a cultural change in schools that makes science more appealing to
students. In response to the report's findings, legislators have
introduced the PACE Act, which garnered the support of 60 senators in its
first week. Critics cite the general disdain that students express for
math and science as a driving force behind the United States' declining
international ranking in testing scores. The American Competitiveness
Initiative that Bush outlined in his State of the Union address seeks to
curb this trend by training 70,000 new high school teachers and encouraging
industry professionals to go into teaching--ideas that have been echoed in
the PACE Act. There is also concern that foreign researchers, long a
crucial part of the U.S. scientific community, are staying in their own
countries, both because their governments require it and because of U.S.
immigration restrictions.
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Feds Back Go Slow Approach on IPv6
Network World (02/08/06) Marsan, Carolyn Duffy
The Commerce Department's IPv6 Task Force has issued a new report which
found that it is unnecessary for the federal government to make a major
financial commitment to help accelerate the deployment of the new Internet
protocol by the private sector. According to the report, there are "no
substantial market barriers�that would prevent industry from investing in
IPv6 products and services as its needs require or as consumers demand."
However, the report did hint that there could be additional funding for
research and development of IPv6. "The federal government will need to
consider allocation of new resources and to work cooperatively with
non-federal authorities and the private sector to address outstanding IPv6
research and development issues and to expedite the development of suitable
deployment, coexistence and transition plans," the report says. Although
the report acknowledged the benefits of IPv6--such as easier
administration, tighter security, and an enhanced addressing scheme when
compared to the Internet's current communications protocol, IPv4--it
nonetheless recommended a go-slow approach to federal agencies and
enterprises looking to migrate to the new protocol. The report concluded
by detailing a four-point strategy to take towards IPv6. That strategy
involves monitoring and analyzing trends in the global rollout of IPv6,
conducting research on IPv6 and facilitating standardization, supporting
industry with test methodologies and test beds, and deploying IPv6 to meet
internal government IT needs after adequate planning.
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New Tech Stuff Protects, Organizes, Amuses
USA Today (02/06/06) P. 3B; Baig, Edward C.
This week's Demo conference in Phoenix, which witnessed the unveiling of
TiVo, the PalmPilot, and Salesforce.com in years past, saw a host of new
products and services poised to enter the market, including AOL's new video
search engine Truveo, and an ice cream vending machine called the MooBella
Ice Cream System. The downloadable Bones in Motion Active software can
transform a GPS-enabled cell phone into a personal trainer, recording a
runner's distance, time, location, and calories burned. Also on exhibit
was the WebSecure 1.0 software, which encrypts a computer user's keystrokes
to guard against keystroke logging attacks. Vizrea unveiled a camera phone
application that enables users to send pictures wirelessly over a Bluetooth
connection or a phone network. Blurb.com has developed a service that
takes self-publishing to the next level, allowing users to create sleek,
text-based hardcover books on a Mac or PC, complete with dust jacket, and
order copies over the Internet. While pricing remains uncertain, Blurb.com
will also allow authors to sell their books in an online marketplace.
Furby inventor Caleb Chung has invented a new electronic companion called
Pleo, equipped with 40 sensors to help him understand his surroundings and
react to the human touch. Digislide Holdings unveiled a miniature
projector that it hopes to integrate into cell phones, laptops, and
portable music players by the end of the year. IGuitar has developed a
guitar that can plug into a PC or Mac, recording the sound onto
Garageband.com or another music studio program. A tagging application
known as Riya promises to use face-recognition technology to automatically
tag and search digital photos in a library, though at present the company
reports that its facial recognition capability is equivalent to that of a
two-year-old.
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Academics Warn of 'Significant Threat' of Spyware
Epidemic
SC Magazine (02/07/06) Eazel, William
University of Washington computer science professor Hank Levy calls
spyware the top download for unsuspecting Web surfers. Levy is the
co-author of a new study that found that more than one in 20 executable
files contained piggyback spyware, and that one in 62 Web addresses engaged
in drive-by attacks or forced spyware on those who visited a Web site. The
UW research team, which also included associate professor Steven Gribble
and graduate students Alexander Moshchuk and Tanya Bragin, examined more
than 20 million Internet addresses for the study. "We wanted to look at it
from an Internet-wide perspective--what proportion of Web sites out there
are trying to infect people?," says Levy. "If our numbers are even close
to representative for Web areas frequented by users, then the spyware
threat is extensive," says Levy. The researchers found game and celebrity
Web sites to be the greatest risk for piggyback spyware, and pirate
software sites to represent the foremost threat for a drive-by attack.
Although most piggyback spyware was adware, about 14 percent was malicious,
the kind of programs that steal passwords and financial information or even
disable computers.
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IT Struggles With Climate Change
Computerworld (02/06/06) P. 27; Anthes, Gary H.
Climatologists monitoring global warming trends process more data than any
one computer can handle, necessitating them to look outward to
supercomputing centers throughout the country. In a recent interview, the
National Center for Atmospheric Research's James Hack and MIT research
scientist Patrick Heimbach described their climatologic research and the
processing power that is requires. Heimbach says he would need 20,000
processors to complete his climate study, and that the processors would
have to be faster than today's by two orders of magnitude. Absent such a
large repository of processing power in a single location, he must scale
down the scope of his activities to fit a specific computer, and must often
look elsewhere for computer resources. Hack notes that while the parallel
vector architectures of Cray and NEC offered the memory bandwidth to
advance climate applications a decade ago, the latency and bandwidth of
interconnect technologies have become the main performance bottleneck in
today's commodity environment. MIT now connects to the Internet2 Abilene
network, which, at speeds of 10 Gbps, far exceeds the maximum data transfer
rates of 100 Mbps under which Heimbach and his colleagues at MIT labored
just a year ago. Still, for transferring multiple terabytes of data, the
scientists maintain that they need more bandwidth, less cluttered networks,
and better transfer protocols. Hack notes that shipping tapes or disks
overnight is still the fastest way to transfer large sets of data, adding
that the advancement of scientific research is chronically limited by the
evolution of processing power. While many scientists agree that the
question of global warming is not a 'what-if' proposition, the answer to
the more relevant questions of severity and location will require a
twenty-five-fold increase in the level of computer processing to answer
precisely.
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States' Challenge: E-Voting Interoperability
Governing.com (02/09/06) Patton, Zach
A lack of federal funding and guidance is hindering many states from
setting up voter registration databases, according to Deborah Markowitz,
secretary of state for Vermont. Markowitz's comments came during a panel
discussion hosted by the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise
Institute. The Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002 is a $4 billion
mandate that requires states to update voting systems and establish
statewide databases of registered voters, but it did not receive funding
until a year later and still needs more than another $1 billion to be fully
funded. Markowitz added that the states that have implemented new voting
systems and voter registration databases have done so without specific
direction from the federal government. "In all states, we've had to take
some gambles," said Markowitz. Even with a revised January 2006 deadline,
about half of the states still have not established voter registration
databases. And questions remain over whether the federal government will
attempt to fully fund HAVA and provide technical guidance for states.
There are also concerns about the need to make the systems interoperable to
allow for the sharing of information between states.
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Turning the Worm Secures the Computer
New Scientist (02/04/06) Vol. 189, No. 2537, P. 32; Biever, Celeste
Experts predict that computer worms are set to become a powerful force and
that beneficial worms will quickly spread through networks and patch
machines before a malicious worm can attack. Researchers have wanted to
fight bad worms with good ones for a long time and now it appears they are
finally getting their chance. "We're talking about fighting fire with
fire," says Immunity's David Aitel. In the past, "patching worms" were
used by virus-writing gangs to try to stop the spread of worms deployed by
their competitors. Legitimate users have been cautious of releasing
patching worms because they are hard to control, raising concerns that the
originator would be responsible if one were to crash computers it was not
designed to patch. Aitel says he has fixed this problem by programming the
beneficial worms to visit only computers on a particular network. He calls
the worms "nematodes," which are programmed with a map of the network that
tells them the range of IP addresses of all the machines they have
permission to invade. The "polite" worms can be programmed to ask a
central server to grant them permission to invade. Aitel recommends using
the domain name system (DNS) server to guarantee that the infected computer
always has access to that central server. Every computer on the network
must have access to the DNS server at all times, because they contact it
every time they visit a Web page.
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Looking for a Lab-Coat Idol
Time (02/06/06) Vol. 167, No. 7, P. 26; Keegan, Rebecca Winters
The number of students in the United States pursuing the sciences
continues to decline, but the $380 million in President Bush's budget for
science-education programs appears to be a sign that policymakers are
getting serious about the issue. Science and math scores are not
necessarily falling, but they are not keeping up with the gains that
foreign students continue to make. Though teachers would seem to be an
ideal role model for science, there is a good chance that a science teacher
at the high school level may not have majored in the particular subject he
or she is teaching, and educators at the elementary level often do not like
science at all. Corporate America woos many science majors who are not
overly thrilled about taking a public school teaching position that starts
at about $32,000. "Teachers are so frightened of these subjects that they
transmit the fear to the children," says former Merck CEO P. Roy Vagelos.
And teachers who have no confidence in teaching science lack the passion to
get more students interested and excited about science. However, things
could change soon due to No Child Left Behind, which will require testing
for science in three grades starting in the 2007-2008 school year. Bush
also wants to train 70,000 educators to teach AP level science and math
courses, and bring 30,000 science and math professionals into the
classroom.
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Cyberinfrastructure for Research
Issues in Science and Technology (01/06) Vol. 22, No. 2, P. 9; Atkins,
Daniel E.
University of Michigan computer science professor Daniel E. Atkins raises
the need for advanced cyberinfrastructure (CI) for research, citing an
article by Mark Ellisman that spotlights his Biomedical Information
Research project. CI serves as a foundation that supports research
networks, grid communities, science portals, and "collaboratories," and
Atkins mentions that a number of CI-augmented science communities are
achieving functional completeness and not just focusing on the acceleration
of past practice via automation, but also on the enablement of new things,
new processes, and potentially wider involvement. "The push of technology
and the pull of science for more interdisciplinary, globally distributed,
and interinstitutional teams have combined to create an inflection point in
the flow of information technology's impact on science and more generally
on the activities of many knowledge-based communities," explains Atkins.
Launching a breakthrough advanced CI program requires three types of
activity to be cultivated and synergistically calibrated: Research and
development on CI science's technical and social frameworks; the
dependable, persistent, and evolving procurement of CI services; and
transformative use via iterative adoption and assessment of CI services in
science communities. "All this should be done in ways that extract and
exploit commonality, interoperability, economies of scale, and best
practices at the CI layer," writes Atkins. He reports that, despite the
excellent work of National Science Foundation director Arden Bement to lead
the CI movement, both NSF and basic research funding overall are in dire
straits. "A coordinated and truly interagency approach, leveraged by our
research universities, is required to establish clear leadership for the
United States in the CI movement--an essential infrastructure for
leadership in our increasingly competitive, global, and knowledge-based
economy," the author concludes.
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