Report: High Schools Fail to Meet Needs of Tech-Driven
World
TechWeb (06/12/06) Jones, K.C.
The Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) has reported that
students are required to take computer science in just 26 percent of U.S.
schools. While many schools note that students do not have room in their
schedules for computing courses, the misperception that computers are
simply tools for browsing the Web or playing video games also keeps
enrollment down. "We all need to go beyond thinking this is just about the
computer as a tool to help us learn other subjects--it's really about
programming, hardware design, networks, graphics, and a myriad number of
other elements," said Anita Verno, curriculum chair of CSTA, an advisory
group created last year by ACM to promote computer science education to
policymakers, educators, and business leaders. The report outlines a plan
for implementing computer science programs in high schools, and argues for
the importance of giving students the skills and training they will need to
succeed in a technology-driven workforce. "The United States cannot ignore
the fact that there will be a shortage of qualified candidates for the 1.5
million computer and information technology jobs by 2012," said CSTA
President Chris Stephenson. The report highlights successful programs in
Canada, Israel, Scotland, South Africa, and the United States. It also
details a national curriculum and implementation plan. For more
information on CSTA, visit
http://csta.acm.org/
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Some Tech Companies Cut R&D Budgets
USA Today (06/14/06) P. B1; Kessler, Michelle
Several prominent U.S. technology companies are cutting research and
development funding, giving rise to concern that the country could lose its
competitive advantage. A recent survey of leading technology companies
found that in the most recent fiscal year they spent nearly $92 billion on
R&D, though many are facing contracting budgets and having to do more with
fewer resources. The portion of revenue that technology companies spent on
R&D declined for the fourth straight year. The announcements of budget
cuts came from some of the industry's major players, including Sun
Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, and Microsoft. "It's not a good sign for
the future innovation capacity of the U.S. economy," said Kei Koizumi of
the American Association for the Advancement of Science, noting also that
inflation is outpacing federal research funding. The United States
outspends other countries on research and development, but nations such as
China, which is projected to boost R&D spending by 28 percent from 2004 to
2006, are closing the gap. Basic research can be hard to justify in
private industry, as a 2005 survey found that there is no direct
correlation between R&D spending and increased sales, profit, or investor
return.
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Internet Pioneers: VOIP Wiretapping Complicated
IDG News Service (06/13/06) Gross, Grant
Mere days after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia
upheld a ruling that voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) providers must be
in compliance with the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act
(CALEA), the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) issued a
study warning that adhering to such requirements would bring new security
problems to the Internet. The ITAA report says not only would fulfilling
the mandate introduce major security risks, barring a vast retooling of the
Internet, but also impose additional set-up and maintenance fees that would
likely hold up U.S. Internet innovations. Sun Microsystems chief security
officer Whitfield Diffie said the lack of control VoIP providers have over
how their calls are directed online makes tracking VoIP calls more
problematic than tracking traditional phone calls. Diffie said reducing a
VoIP wiretapping system's security risks would involve a "major research
and development effort." ITAA study co-author and TCP/IP co-creator Vinton
Cerf said the enforcement of FCC CALEA rules would entail the monitoring of
numerous Internet applications, and he cautioned, "I don't see any way to
constrain or restrict the target of the intercept to simply voice, because,
in fact, every application would have to be effectively treated in the same
fashion. There's no way to tell what the bits mean in the packets that are
flowing."
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The Latest Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques
Revealed at SIGGRAPH 2006
Business Wire (06/13/06)
SIGGRAPH 2006 has accepted 86 papers for its Paper Program, which will run
from July 31 to Aug. 3, 2006, during the conference. The latest and best
research in computer graphics and interactive techniques comes from
researchers at institutions such as Princeton University, Microsoft
Research, Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, and Stanford
University, and from countries around the world. "The Papers Program is a
premier forum for disseminating ground-breaking, provocative, and important
new work in computer graphics," says Julie Dorsey, Papers Chair from Yale
University. "The program covers a wide range of topics including
animation, modeling, rendering, imaging, matting, image manipulation;
capture--of shape, appearance, and motion--and synthesis; and
physically-based simulation of natural phenomena, such as fluids."
Researchers at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory and the University of Toronto have submitted "Removing Camera
Shake From a Single Photograph," which offers an algorithm for removing
blurred images. In "Drag-and-Drop Pasting," researchers at the Chinese
University of Hong Kong, Microsoft Research Asia, and Hong Kong University
of Science and Technology have developed a method for outlining yourself to
become part of a desired cinematic scene. Other titles include "Photo
Tourism: Exploring Photo Collections in 3D," "Procedural Modeling of
Buildings," "Image-Based Material Editing," "Capturing and Animating Skin
Deformation in Human Motion," and "Real-Time Video Abstraction." ACM
SIGGRAPH is the sponsor of the conference, which is expected to draw some
25,000 computer graphics and interactive technology professionals from
around the world to Boston for technical and creative programs, and
exhibitions. For more information about SIGGRAPH, or to register, visit
http://www.siggraph.org/s2006/
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Administration to Innovators: Database not Dollars
Technology Review (06/14/06) Bullis, Kevin
While President Bush's 2007 budget calls for increased spending for
research in physical sciences, such as nanotechnology and energy programs,
life sciences will suffer from cutbacks. Funding has also dried up for new
research in the Advanced Technology Program (ATP), and the 2007 budget
actually phases the program out altogether. The ATP, which is part of the
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), should be replaced
by a database that provides researchers with information on federally
funded research, according to Robert Cresmanti, who oversees NIST.
Cresmanti described the government's vision in a recent interview, claiming
that ATP was too low of a government priority to garner funding in a
cash-strapped budget. While he admits that eliminating the ATP could make
it harder to develop new ideas into commercial products, he believes that
funding is only part of the equation. Offering novice researchers, who
have little experience securing research funding, access to a database of
federally funded research programs would provide information that could
help win over angel investors or venture capitalists. Cresmanti believes
the current system by which researchers report their work to the government
is inadequate, calling instead for a database that would be searchable and
distributable, providing details about the nature of experiments and the
overall success of past projects. That way, Cresmanti says, a researcher
could approach a venture capitalist with a well-documented description of
previous research that his project would build on. The venture capitalist
might then agree to give the researcher seed money to go visit the people
who had conducted the original experiment, so that he would not have to
reinvent the wheel to bring a product to market.
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Hiding in Plain Sight, Google Expands Its Power
New York Times (06/14/06) P. A1; Markoff, John; Hansell, Saul
As competition with Microsoft and Yahoo! intensifies, Google is quietly
building two new data centers, each the size of a football field, on the
banks of the Columbia River in The Dalles, Ore. Microsoft and Yahoo! have
both announced that they will build new data centers as well, though
Google, which already has a considerable lead in computing firepower, will
significantly expand its global resources and further solidify its position
atop the market with the new project. Google's existing global network of
computers bundled together, known as the Googleplex, is already a singular
achievement, says Danny Hillis, founder of Applied Minds. "Google has
constructed the biggest computer in the world, and it's a hidden asset,"
Hillis said. The location of its new data center, which has been a tightly
held corporate secret, will enable Google to tap into the expansive
fiber-optic networking infrastructure left over from the dot-com era. In a
sign of the intensity of the competition between search engines, Google is
still pressuring local officials to adhere to the confidentiality
agreements that it had them sign last year. Though Google is best known as
a search engine, the scale of its project indicates a broader ambition to
solidify its position as the global leader in data processing. "Google
wants to raise the barriers to entry by making the baseline service very
expensive," said Brian Reid, a former Google executive who now works for
the Internet Systems Consortium. In 2001, when Google served roughly 70
million Web pages a day, it had 8,000 computers; by 2003, it had 100,000.
Observers estimate that Google now has more than 450,000 terminals in its
arsenal distributed in data centers throughout the world. Microsoft
currently has 200,000 servers powering its Internet computing network,
though it hopes that number will grow to 800,000 by 2011.
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Prodded by Consumers, the Computer Industry Slowly Grows
Greener
Wall Street Journal (06/14/06) P. B1; Gomes, Lee
Consumer demand for longer-lasting batteries and cooler server rooms has
pushed the technology industry to focus on energy efficiency, as well as
signifying a broader trend of heightened environmental awareness. While
today's CPUs run cooler and efficient LCD screens are now in widespread
use, new inefficiencies continually arise. A new federal energy regulation
requires that power supplies convert at least 80 percent of the AC power
they take in into DC power that the computer can use. The average
efficiency today is between 60 percent and 65 percent. Another
inefficiency is the DC converters that charge portable electronic devices
such as cell phones and music players. Even when the device they power is
unplugged, the chargers can draw as much as 10 watts of current. These
so-called "wall warts" are similar to a growing number of "always on"
devices, such as a microwave that perpetually consumes power to run its
clock. Typical U.S. households can have as many as 100 of these devices,
which are the target of a recent California bill that over the next two
years will greatly restrict the use of products that consume more than 1
watt of standby power. When it comes to computers, many of the benefits of
improved energy efficiencies are negated by the increasing amount of time
people are spending using their computers, according to Bruce Nordman of
the Lawrence Berkeley Lab. Nordman believes vendors should design products
that can power down most of their parts when not in use, while keeping just
awake enough to act on an incoming message.
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Translator Lets Computers "Understand" Experiments
New Scientist (06/07/06) Simonite, Tom
Researchers at Aberystwyth University in Wales have developed a technology
to translate scientific reports into a machine-readable language that could
revolutionize scientific endeavor by enabling computers to analyze and
compare the results of experiments in different disciplines. Computers
already prepare data for analysis and perform complex calculations, but
they have a difficult time understanding natural language, said Aberystwyth
researcher Ross King, one of the developers of the new EXPO system. "If
lots of scientific papers were written in this way you could very quickly
see whether an experiment has contradictions or agreements with other
work," said King. "It would also allow much more sophisticated search
engines to find what you're looking for." EXPO represents each stage of an
experiment and the relationships between those stages with an ontology, or
descriptive framework, as well as providing methods for defining a
hypothesis, the analysis of results, and the conclusion reached. While
previous applications have developed similar representations for
specialized data, the EXPO framework is the first attempt to create a
common representation for different sciences. The researchers have already
tested the system to compare the experimental procedures used in a paper on
evolutionary science with a paper written on particle physics. EXPO
enables computers to identify similarities in the research methods of
experiments that might otherwise have gone unnoticed: Expo discovered that
the physics and evolution papers both used an analysis technique known as a
statistical branching tool. With computers able to interpret the methods
of analysis used in experiments across multiple scientific disciplines,
researchers could build on the work of previous experiments and make better
use of existing knowledge.
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'Prettier World' of Computer Modeling Provides Key
Details, Says Sandia Researcher
Sandia National Laboratories (06/12/06)
Computer-generated nanoscale simulations produce more detailed results
than experiments, according to Sandia National Laboratories researcher
Eliot Fang, attempting to refute the perception that computer models are
generally unrealistic. Fang took issue with the widely held notion that
overly generic inputs are unable to produce simulations containing the
hidden details that are revealed in experiments. "There's another,
prettier world beyond what the SEM [scanning electron microscope] shows,
and it's called simulation," Fang said in a speech delivered to members of
the Materials Research Society. "When you look through a microscope, you
don't see some things that modeling and simulation show." Fang said the
increased impact of simulation on scientific research is the natural
product of advances in computing power. Sandia researchers do not discount
the importance of experiment, but the ability to run simulations with
billions of atoms has led to discoveries that would never have come from
lab testing. In one simulation, the computer found that the tip of an
atomic force microscope picked up a small amount of material while
examining the surface of a microsystem, a discovery that altered the
properties of the surface but was unexplainable in laboratory experiments.
Computer simulations create an experimental design by linking various size
and time scales, making choices about what details to include by asking
technical questions that ensure that the simulation is consistent with
experimental data and other models. Automatic models can now inform
scientists if their technical requirements have been met, saving the
trouble of making such comparisons manually. Computer simulations can also
be cost-efficient, as they can eliminate the redundancies that occur when
repeating the same calculations in multiple experiments.
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The Disappearing Chinese Engineers
Inside Higher Ed (06/13/06) Epstein, David
More than six months after releasing a report that touched off a
nationwide panic over the shortage of engineering graduates produced in the
United States compared with China and India, the National Academies no
longer adheres to its own statistics. The National Academies modified its
figures in February, after the report already helped prompt President Bush
to call for a sweeping plan to improve science education. The revised
report lowered the number of Chinese engineers from 600,000 to 350,000,
this time including only those "engineers, computer scientists, and
information technologists with 4-year degrees." The figures were revised
when Duke researchers issued a report finding that graduates from two- and
three-year certification programs were included, some of whom were no
better trained than automotive mechanics, and that some numbers in the
study were simply incorrect. Though the numbers that sparked Bush's
American Competitiveness Initiative may have been faulty, it is generally
agreed that the National Academies' report has helped raise awareness about
scientific education, and that, even if the situation is not as dire as
first reported, the study's conclusions are still applicable. Vivek
Wadhwa, one of the authors of the Duke report, believes the one downside to
the initial report was that it prompted some engineering students to
question whether they should pursue a career in a field that seemed bound
to be dominated by another country.
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Engineering Careers Begin Here, NSF, Teachers Hope
Worcester Telegram & Gazette (MA) (06/13/06) Plumb, Taryn
Quinsigamond Community College in Worcester, Mass., was the site of an
engineering workshop that was designed to attract more local high school
and community college students to science, math, and engineering.
Approximately 20 high schools and colleges across the state are
participating in the three-year Power Up! project organized by the Boston
Museum of Science, and backed by the National Science Foundation. "This is
all about trying to get young people interested in careers in engineering
and technology," said Kathy Rentsch, dean of business and technology at
Quinsigamond. Jim Heffernan, coordinator of electronics and
electromechanical technology at Quinsigamond, told the students in
attendance that job prospects in the engineering field are good, even
though the pace of innovation and technology may mean that an excellent
year could be followed by a cutback. The students were also treated to
demonstrations of state-of-the-art technology and robotics, and
presentations on micro-electromechanical systems. In a role-play exercise,
students gained a better understanding of how a wireless system and
computer science benefit a soldier, high school teacher, a stay-at-home
parent, or a doctor. Ronald Sandler, a professor of philosophy and
religion at Northeastern University, stressed the importance of engineering
by noting that technology, along with genetics and nature, shapes human
experience, and adding that "it's a major part of what it means to be a
human being."
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Carnegie Mellon University Humanoids to Provide
Commentary for RoboCup
Carnegie Mellon News (06/08/06)
Humanoid robots will serve as commentators for the robot soccer
competitions that get underway in Bremen, Germany, on June 14. Researchers
at Carnegie Mellon University's CORAL (Cooperate, Observe, Reason, Act and
Learn) laboratory have developed new applications for a pair of 2
1/2-foot-tall robots from Sony, which will enable them to follow a soccer
ball with their electronic eyes and comment on the action during a soccer
game. Robocop 2006 will pit about 350 teams of four-legged robots, also
developed by Sony, from 40 countries against one another, in an effort to
advance artificial intelligence, robotics, and research in related fields.
The robot Sango will be restrained in its explanation of rules, analysis of
a team's advancement of the ball, and assessment of a foul, while Ami will
offer a more animated approach to commentary for spectators, as the
humanoids use synthetic voices and deliver text in both English and German.
The Game Controller that will communicate a referee's calls to the robot
soccer players will also deliver wireless communication to Sango and Ami.
The robots cannot see the entire playing field, so having them share
information about what they see and what they will say, to prevent them
from repeating or contradicting each other, was a challenge. "We need to
map the input from their vision sensors, combined with the wireless
information from the Game Controller, into a recognition of the events that
are occurring. And then that awareness of events has to be translated into
language," says CORAL head Manuela Veloso.
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Faster Wi-Fi Hits Hurdles
Wall Street Journal (06/13/06) P. B3; Clark, Don
As companies race to deploy devices with a faster version of Wi-Fi that
has yet to be standardized, the various products are often built to
different interpretations of unfinished specifications and cannot
communicate with each other at their top intended speeds. The Wi-Fi
Alliance is not endorsing any products until a formal standard is reached,
which is not expected to happen before next year. "We've taken a firm
stance," said the alliance's Frank Hanzlik. "We really think there is a
lot of room for customers to be confused." The conflict lies at the core
of technology development: Companies are eager to beat their competitors
to market, but most at the same time recognize the importance of
standardization to enable interoperability and keep prices down. Companies
look to an increase in the speed of the current 802.11n standard to drive a
new wave of spending on laptops and other hardware. The new technology
will increase current theoretical top speeds from 54 Mbps to 270 Mbps,
though the average speed is more likely to be around 100 Mbps to 150 Mbps.
After long delays, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
(IEEE) has released a draft specification, which several companies have
incorporated into their products, assuming that they will be able to work
in any changes made in the final standard relatively easily, though they
are not guaranteeing that their products will be upgradeable. Many predict
that the final standard will be very different form the draft
specification, however, and that companies will have to significantly
retool their chips to accommodate the improvements. The networking chips
based on the informal specification, known as DraftN chips, often run at
lower speeds than hoped, and the companies that are deploying them are
likely to keep the technology secret from their competitors, further
inhibiting interoperability.
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A Common Approach to Accessibility for All
IST Results (06/12/06)
IST is funding an initiative to develop a practical and common method for
benchmarking and evaluating the accessibility of Web sites. The project is
the work of the EU Web Accessibility Benchmarking (WAB) Cluster at the
Bartimeus Accessibility Foundation in the Netherlands, and three other IST
projects. The European Internet Accessibility Observatory (EIAO) project
is developing a prototype for widescale Web accessibility benchmarking,
while Support EAM is pushing the European Commission and its member states
to embrace the "eAccessibility" quality mark for goods and services, which
would bring the region in line with the standards developed within the WAB
cluster and accepted internationally by the World Wide Web Consortium
(W3C). BenToWeb (Benchmarking Tools and Methods for the Web) will offer
new software modules and methodologies for Web accessibility that address
such factors as color contrast, low vision, color deficiency, consistency
of navigation elements, and language simplicity. Ultimately, researchers
are trying to determine the best way to design and evaluate an accessible
site, and develop standards and guidelines that can work for the entire
region. The WAB cluster is expected to unveil the Unified Web Evaluation
Methodology (UWEM) 1.0 in July online for free, and it will be consistent
with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines developed by W3C. Project
coordinator Eric Velleman says Web accessibility impacts everyone, adding
that adopting W3C's guidelines will make a Web site easy to read in screen
readers, PDAs, mobile phones as a result.
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H-1B Expansion Draws Support
Washington Technology (06/12/06) Vol. 21, No. 11, P. 12; Lipowicz, Alice
The Senate's recent move to broaden the H-1B visa program has renewed the
already contentious debate in all corners of the IT industry, as employees
fear that their jobs may not be secure while technology companies bemoan
the shortage of qualified U.S. workers. The Senate's provision, which must
now clear the House before the broader immigration reform bill is debated
by both chambers, would expand the number of H-1B visas available annually
from 65,000 to 115,000, while allowing for the possibility of annual
increases of up to 15 percent in the future. Roughly half of the H-1B
visas are awarded to computer workers, with the rest going to skilled
workers from other sectors. Industry leaders such as Microsoft Chairman
Bill Gates have lobbied extensively for an expansion of the H-1B program to
safeguard U.S. competitiveness. "I applaud the Senate for recognizing that
U.S. competitiveness depends on our ability to recruit and retain the
world's best minds, no matter where they are from," Gates said. Some IT
leaders have hinted that they would outsource jobs overseas if the cap was
not adjusted. IT workers, meanwhile, protest that the program floods the
job market with foreigners who drive down salaries, particularly for older
and entry-level workers. "We think expansion of the H-1B would devastate
our careers," said American Programmers Guild President Kim Berry. Berry
referenced a 2005 studying finding that H-1B workers receive an average of
$13,000 less in compensation than comparably placed American IT workers.
Other studies have found that the data on the subject is too incomplete to
draw firm conclusions. Though the H-1B visa program has been limited to
65,000 since 1990, Congress increased the annual cap in fiscal 1999 and
2000, and again from fiscal 2001 to 2003, before reinstating the 65,000
mark in 2004.
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When Looks Are No Longer Enough
Economist Technology Quarterly (06/06) Vol. 379, No. 8481, P. 7
Though the graphics in video games have improved dramatically since the
crude, pixilated forms of the 1980s, developers are finding that looks are
not everything, and that they must make the characters' behavior more
complex, according to researchers working to enhance video games with
artificial intelligence. Despite the improved graphics, the player's
experience has seen little improvement in the last few years, according to
Michael Mateas, founder of the Experimental Game Lab at the Georgia
Institute of Technology, adding that artificial intelligence offers a host
of potential improvements. Better graphics are highlighting the functional
areas of gameplay that remain primitive, exacerbating user demand for more
sophisticated behavior. The Artificial Intelligence and Interactive
Digital Entertainment conference will meet later this month, bringing
together academic and industry leaders to increase the flow of ideas
between the two sectors. Historically, there has been a wide chasm between
artificial intelligence researchers and video game developers, though that
gap has closed somewhat in recent years. First-person shooter (FPD) games,
for instance, now use sophisticated planning systems, developed in academic
labs, to direct the behavior of the player's enemies; enemy activity used
to be pre-scripted. "Instead of scripts and hand-coded behavior, the AI
monsters in an FPS can reason from first principles," said Mateas. This
new approach adds considerably to a character's functionality. "Rather
than just moving between predefined spots, the characters in a war game can
dynamically shift, depending on what's happening," said Fiona Sperry of
Electronic Arts. University researchers are borrowing from video games as
well, as professors have found that commercial games that can easily be
altered or scripted let students learn in a flexible programming
environment.
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The Future of E-mail
Computerworld (06/12/06) Anthes, Gary
Security applications such as scanning and filtering software, coupled
with sound usage policies, do a fairly good job of protecting email, though
new threats will emerge as users begin to adopt instant messaging,
blogging, and other communication channels in greater numbers. Researchers
looking beyond stopgap security applications envision bold new uses for
email, and predict that the threat from malware will eventually subside.
The battle against spam, phishing, and malware has essentially been fought
to a draw, says BBN Technologies' Roy Tomlinson, who sent the world's first
network email message in 1971. Curbing the onslaught of email threats is
not so much a technical problem as it is a question of competing business
interests, Tomlinson said. "The players have vested interests in the
various approaches, and they are fighting tooth and nail to get their
approaches adopted. It's not the end users who are the bottleneck here,"
he said. An all-inclusive email security platform would use a machine
filter as a first defense, and then reply to suspected spam messages with
an email asking the sender to verify his identity, according to researcher
Joshua Goodman. Many experts believe that technology will only be able to
solve part of the problem, however, and that regulatory action will be
necessary to fully eradicate email threats. Though unlikely to replace
email, emerging technologies complicate the security picture, leaving IT
departments scrambling to develop comprehensive usage policies and security
applications for blogging, instant messaging, and other new communications
platforms. As more companies begin to archive email, researchers are
developing new technologies to make that information retrievable.
Companies that can mine email archives will open a trove of information
that could help them learn more about their employees and send more
targeted messages to their customers.
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Get the Google Look
InformationWeek (06/12/06)No. 1093, P. 51; Babcock, Charles
Ajax's ability to produce rapid, practical, and sticky Web sites is
arousing the interest of businesses, but the toolset's adoption is
happening at a more gradual pace because of the many options that business
technology managers must consider. The various Ajax toolkits available are
often designed for different purposes and have different levels of
long-term or short-term potential. Not all problems associated with Ajax
development can be addressed with toolkits, and it might be in the best
interest for those who do not wish to cultivate their own Ajax expertise to
wait and see which tools and toolkits will survive a market shakeout. On
the other hand, companies that want to make their applications quick,
responsive, and interactive need to choose and deploy Ajax solutions now.
Such businesses perceive close-to-real-time Web site response facilitated
via Ajax-based applications as a competitive variable for customer-oriented
Web applications. Companies that delay such a move or wait for the
emergence of open source toolkits will be trailing early adopters. But
firms with time to spare can wait for efforts such as OpenAjax to establish
well-defined standards and guarantee improved compatibility between Ajax
tools.
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Making Vehicles Safer by Making Them Smarter
EDN (06/08/06) Vol. 51, No. 12, P. 49; Cravotta, Robert
Many emerging electronic safety features for automobiles start off as
convenience features in high-end models, and it is openly acknowledged that
convenience and safety systems can improve the safety, ease, and relaxation
of driving. Electronic systems are designed to shoulder some of the
driver's cognitive burden, and the implication is that these systems might
be able to prevent accidents by calling a driver's attention to critical
details. A threat's significance and timing determines how a vehicle's
active and preventive safety systems respond: The systems may alert the
driver at the earliest possible moment, warn the driver if he or she does
not react to the information, and actively help or intercede to prevent an
accident or reduce damage. Crash avoidance requires systems that possess
the capability to identify potential crash indicators seconds before a
crash takes place, and enabling the safety system to construe the driver's
intent and associate that intent with the behavior of the vehicle is
critical in preventing the system from taking predictive action according
to inaccurate and false deductions. Systems that anticipate and recognize
potential threats much earlier must place a greater value on inferring the
driver's intent, which can be a tough challenge. To ensure the accuracy of
the inferences the safety systems make, input from multiple sensors and
types of sensors is needed, and combining different sensor types to
cross-correlate redundant information via "data fusion" can help the
systems make more informed decisions. Deploying a human-machine interface
(HMI) may constitute the biggest obstacle for electronic assist, safety,
and convenience features, because the interface must guarantee that the
operation of each predictive, active, and preventive system conforms to the
driver's expectations as well as his or her cognitive and ergonomic
parameters. The growing autonomy of automobiles will allow drivers to
primarily concentrate on reaching a destination rather than focusing on the
mechanics of the vehicle's operation.
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