Intel Says Chips Will Run Faster, Using Less Power
New York Times (01/27/07) P. A1; Markoff, John
Intel researchers have announced the development of a more efficient
microprocessor that could both extend Moore's Law and enhance the
performance of consumer devices. Intel researchers say the new technology
is the most important development in silicon chips since Intel first
introduced the modern integrated-circuit transistor, and is largely due to
new metallic alloys being used as insulators that alleviate the problem of
switches leaking more and more energy as they are made smaller and smaller.
The company plans to release the chips in the second half of 2007, and has
already developed a prototype that can run on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
"This is evolutionary as opposed to revolutionary," says University of
California, Berkeley associate professor of electrical engineering and
computer sciences Vivek Subramanian. Now that they have the ability to
construct smaller chips without losing energy, Intel will produce chips
with a minimum feature size of 45 nanometers, which will have an increasing
number of cores and can be switched to either higher power or significantly
lower power. The project was lead by veteran Intel physicist and director
of process architecture and integration Mark T. Bohr, who notes that, "Up
until five years ago, leakage was thought to increase with each
generation." An alloy known has hafnium, which has been previously used in
filaments and electrodes as a neutron absorber in nuclear power plants,
will take the place of silicon dioxide as an insulator. Other new alloys
that Intel is not identifying are being used to compose transistor gates,
replacing polysilicon. IBM, which plans to release chips with similar
transistors in early 2008, claims that Intel does not have a technological
lead over them, and has only chosen a different, lower-end, focus.
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Computer Program Writes Its Own Fiction
Discovery Channel (01/26/07) Viegas, Jennifer
A Mexico City computer scientist has developed MEXICA, a computer program
that understands emotion and tension well enough to compose stories. In an
Internet survey where the program's stories were pitted against both human-
and other computer-generate stories, MEXICA was ranked highest in flow and
coherence, structure, content, suspense, and overall quality. Autonomous
Metropolitan University computer scientist Rafael Perez y Perez says his
program begins with a very simple story, a few sentences outlining a
beginning, middle, and end, then treats the characters as variables and
assigns numerical values to emotional ties between them. The program can
even link certain words such as "wounded" with tension. After establishing
clusters of emotional links and tensions, the program conducts an
"engagement-reflection cycle," where it searches a database of story
actions and occurrences, called "atoms," in order to find the best fit for
the context of the character at that moment. This process is repeated
until no more matches can be made. Finally, the software conducts an
analysis of the story's "interestingness" and coherence; a story is
considered interesting when tensions levels fluctuate throughout. The
program has received praise from University of Nottingham Learning Science
Research Institute director and author Mike Sharples for Perez y Perez's
use of "key elements of that model of human creative writing--particularly
the movement between engagement and reflection." Perez y Perez says he
does not intend for programs like his to replace human writers, rather to
help them understand the way they write, and thus allow them to see how
they can improve their writing.
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At Yale, Robotics Research Matures
Yale Daily News (01/24/07)
A robot named Nico, which was developed at the Yale Computer Science
Department's social robotics lab, has shown the ability to recognize its
own reflection and tell the difference between speaker and addressee,
providing hope for future interaction between robots and humans. Nico's
creator, computer science grad student Kevin Gold, set up three categories
and corresponding parameters--self, other, inanimate--into which Nico
places the objects it sees. Visual feedback information allows Nico to
change parameters so objects can be classified with increasing accuracy.
Nico recognizes itself in the mirror by waving its arms and labeling the
objects whose motion matches the parameters as "self." Gold is currently
teaching Nico the meanings of "I" and "you" by showing the robot two people
playing catch and having whichever person has the ball say "I got the ball"
and whichever person does not have the ball say "you got the ball." Nico
already knows the meaning of "got the ball," so Gold is hoping the robot
can use a level of inference to figure out what the other words mean. Gold
says two research options he is considering next are teaching the robot to
understand itself and thus be able to predict another person's actions in a
specific situations, or cultivating language acquisition abilities in Nico
that could allow Gold to study robots' ability to learn the meaning of
objects and their usage from watching how people manipulate them.
Expressing some frustration, Gold says that presenting this kind of work is
problematic, since "A lot of people try to overstate the abilities of robot
programs. AI has had a bad history with this, with what these systems can
and can't do."
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Awaiting the Day When Everyone Writes Software
New York Times (01/28/07) P. BU3; Pontin, Jason
Charles Simonyi, the man who designed Microsoft Word and Excel, as well as
the first modern application that displayed text as it would appear when
printed on a page, is working on a new type of "what you see is what you
get" programming method intended to alleviate the problems arising from
today's software development process. This new programming method, dubbed
"intentional programming," begins with "domain experts," those who know
what a program should do, working with programmers to list the necessary
concepts for the program being created. These ideas are then translated
into domain code, a higher-level representation of the software's
functions, using a tool known as the "domain workbench" that lets users
view the actual user screen being created. Once programmers and domain
experts are satisfied with the user screen, the domain code is fed into a
"generator" that constructs the actual target code, which can be compiled
and run. Intentional programming has three major advantages over
conventional programming: those who design the program are actually the
ones who understand what it must be capable of; the design can be easily
and directly manipulated without the need to rewrite code; and the final
code is not generate by humans, who commonly make mistakes. However, there
is doubt as to the likelihood that intentional programming will have the
impact that Simonyi expects it to: It is based on the idea that
programmers don't understand what users want; the "abstraction" of code
that the users is presented with could be flawed, meaning programmers would
have to work directly with code anyway; and finally, no one knows if the
system even works, since nondisclosure agreements prohibit those working on
it to discuss their involvement.
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UMass Scientist's Program Combats Hackers
Massachusetts Daily Collegian (01/29/07) Osorio, Michelle
University of Massachusetts computer scientist Emily Berger developed
anti-hacking software, called DieHard, that takes advantage of the surplus
memory and power of today's computers. Hackers often can gain access to
sensitive information when programs request less memory than they need,
causing information to overflow into other parts of the memory, which
Berger compares to houses. The result is an override of these other
"houses." Hackers often seek out the "house" that contains a user's
sensitive information and add their own information to it in order to cause
an override. DieHard acts as a wall between a computer and those trying to
access it through programming deficiencies by using different keys and
hiding sensitive information in a safe location. "Every house is the same,
the floor plan is the same, the important information is all in the same
place and you have keys to the house," said Berger. "That's the symbol of
all computers. If you have one key you can rob anyone blind. What DieHard
essentially does is to make the key different for every house and stash the
valuables in different places." DieHard does cause a 50 to 75 percent
increase in memory consumption, but should not make a system noticeably
slower. The program works with Linux, Solaris, and Windows systems, and
can protect any application in Linux or Solaris, but for now it can only
protect Mozilla Firefox on Windows XP and 2003 systems. Berger has
received grants from the National Science Foundation, Intel, and Microsoft
for her work..
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A Wheelchair That Reads Your Mind
Wired News (01/29/07) Cole, Emmet
Researchers in Spain are creating a robotic wheelchair that can be
controlled by its user's thoughts alone. While current brain-computer
interfaces (BCIs) that work with electroencephalogram electrodes (EEGs)
have been physically plugged into the brain, powered by large immobile
computers, and known for producing crude signals, the "Biomedical
Evaluation Of Robots to Assist Human Mobility" project seeks to create a
non-invasive BCI powered by mobile computers that can understand simple
commands such as "stop," "go," "left," and "right." "You're not going to
be using EEGs to control a robotic arm to play the piano or anything," says
Case Western Reserve University's Department of Biomedical Engineering
professor Dawn Taylor, who is not involved in the project but has knowledge
of the technology being used. "But you can certainly turn right and left
and stop and go using that sort of signal." The Spanish Ministry of
Education and Science says it hopes the technology could one day provide
mobility to those with limited motor capabilities as a result of injury,
disability, or old age. Two 800 MHz computers mounted on the wheelchair
are being used to process the BCI readings and transmit commands to the
wheels. About a week of training is needed for the software to adapt to a
user's thought patterns for basic commands. "The important issue is to
have a good selection of the mental tasks for each user, so that they
produce discriminable EEG patterns," says University of Zaragoza researcher
Javier Minguez.
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Street-Fighting Robot Challenge Announced
New Scientist (01/24/07)
Individuals, companies, universities, and research institutes have until
the end of May to submit applications to Singapore's Defense Science and
Technology Agency to compete in a contest to build a robot that can operate
autonomously like a soldier in urban environments. As part of the TechX
Challenge, participants must build a warrior robot that can complete a set
of tasks, and the developer of the robot that completes the assignment the
fastest will receive a prize of $652,000. DSTA has not revealed the tasks
for the competition, which is open to foreigners who collaborate with a
local partner. The robot will need to navigate outdoors as well as
indoors, and use staircases and elevators to go from floor to floor in a
building, even when satellite navigation assistance is not available,
according to DSTA CEO Richard Lim. Participants may need to train their
entries on knowing which floor they are on and where a button would take
them, adds Robert Richardson, an expert at the University of Manchester in
the United Kingdom. Testing of robots for the qualifying round is
scheduled for May 2008, with the final round following in August.
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Personal Digital Assistants in Space
European Space Agency (01/26/07)
Personal digital assistants (PDAs) are poised to take on a greater role on
board the International Space Station (ISS). PDAs were largely limited to
personal computing and entertainment functions before last year, but they
were viewed as a potential platform for offering applications when ISS
laptops proved to be too difficult for astronauts to handle. In March,
astronauts will begin using PDAs to monitor the whereabouts of all items
stored on the ISS. The PDAs will feature a barcode reader and will use a
wireless network to access the Inventory Management System. Meanwhile,
NASA is currently reviewing the PDA Pressurization Program (PDP) for
notifying crew members of depressurization problems, and there are plans to
include the application in the standard package of software that would be
available on astronauts' PDAs. Industry is working to shrink the laptop
interface for the smaller PDA screen, through its work on the International
Procedure Viewer (IPV) application. There is also interest in using PDAs
for crew-to-crew and crew-to-systems communications, which would require
the use of VOIP applications as well as speech synthesis and speech
recognition capabilities.
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Researchers Develop New Tool to Measure IT Systems
Computerworld Australia (01/18/07) Rossi, Sandra
Queensland University of Technology researchers under the direction of
professor Guy Gable are developing a tool for measuring enterprise IT
systems' value, and Gable said his team is collaborating closely with
Accenture in Australia and the United States on techniques to gauge such
systems' impact as a way to guide improvement decisions. "Broadly,
enterprise systems are large, integrated application software packages
purchased from companies such as SAP or Oracle, and used by individuals
right across the organization for financials, HR, sales and distribution,
customer relationship management and more," noted the professor. "We have
developed a Web-based, perceptual survey with questions that are robust and
answerable by people at all levels of any organization." The survey scores
the IT system's impact on individual users and the organization, the
system's quality, and the quality of information from the system, Gable
said. The survey also presents an aggregate score that could be used to
rate the same system across time as well as the entire sector. "The
IS-Impact approach can be used as a decision support tool for management as
it identifies impacts on the organization to date and also assesses
quality, which is the best predictor of future impacts from the system,"
said Gable. The organizational effort is kept to a minimum because the
approach is inexpensive and forthright.
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W3C Publishes New Web Standards for XML
eWeek (01/25/07) Hoffman, Patrick
Eight new XML Web standards devised by the World Wide Web Consortium's
(W3C) XSL Working Group and XML Query Working Group were issued by the W3C
on Jan. 23. The standards encompass XML Path Language 2.0, XML
Transformations 2.0, XQuery 1.0: An XML Query Language, XML Syntax for
XQuery 1.0, the XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Data Model, the XQuery 1.0 and
XPath 2.0 Functions and Operators, the XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Formal
Semantics, and XSLT 2.0 and XQuery 1.0 Serialization. The purpose of the
new Web standards is to help users request information from databases and
transform and access XML data and documents via the main specifications
XQuery 1.0: An XML Query Language, XSL Transformations 2.0, and XML Path
Language 2.0. Users can search for concealed patterns in a set of data
from memos and Web service messages to multi-terabyte relational databases
with XQuery 1.0. "XQuery makes it easier to design and build Web
applications, as well as to search through and analyze complex data from
multiple sources," says W3C XML Activity Lead Liam Quin. With XSLT 2.0
comes better error detection and a language that can be employed to
transform XML documents into other XML documents; XSLT 2.0 can also be
utilized with XML Path Language 2.0, which comes with a tree representation
of XML documents along with atomic values and sequences. "This brings an
enhanced data model with a type system based on sequences of nodes or
atomic values, support for all the built-in types defined in XML Schema,
and a wide range of new functions and operators," Quin says.
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What's the Buzz? Harnessing Static to Improve Wireless
Signals
University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) (01/23/07)
The National Science Foundation has given a CAREER Award to University of
Illinois at Chicago researcher Daniela Tuninetti to study whether network
interference can be exploited by wireless devices as a way for
collaborative communication. She will receive $400,000 over five years to
present a theoretical framework for pooling communication resources to
provide cell phones, computers, and personal digital assistants with an
operating signal when they would only receive noise today. But Tuninetti,
an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, stresses
that even during interference, devices still communicate with each other.
"I'm proposing that we think of interference as something potentially
useful in a wireless channel, if appropriately exploited," she says.
Tuninetti also believes that mobile devices may also be able to take
advantage of such collaborative communication when their batteries get
weak. She plans to develop new coding and signaling strategies to increase
system capacity, and design distributed multi-access and routing protocols
to enhance collaborative communication. Tuninetti describes her efforts as
creating a "virtual antenna array" for such collaborative communication
between wireless devices.
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COBOL Today and Tomorrow, Part 2
Linux Insider (01/25/07) Abraham, Irving
Micro Focus Unix and Linux product director Irving Abraham credits COBOL's
longevity and its continued use in the foreseeable future to its
transparency, ease of maintenance, and ability to manage a massive volume
of transactions. COBOL is ubiquitous, and there is no reason for working
developers not to become proficient in the language, given the ease of
learning it, writes the author. Abraham notes that the current generation
of COBOL experts is approaching retirement, which means people who can
maintain and create new COBOL code are very much in demand. Universities,
local colleges, and trade schools offer COBOL courses, and academic
programs to support COBOL training are sponsored by the likes of Micro
Focus and IBM. Abraham's company underwrites an Academic Grant Program to
supply annual licensing for any eligible educational organization. COBOL
courses are more abundant than they were five years ago, and Abraham writes
that "COBOL is an excellent way to teach the art of programming, so credits
should not be hard to gain once your computer science department knows
there's an interest, especially if you have a professor willing to teach
it." In the absence of a formal course structure, aspirant COBOL
programmers can educate themselves using a wealth of books, publications,
Web sites, and online news groups. Abraham recommends COBOL User Groups as
an excellent starting point.
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The Fragile Network
CircleID (01/19/07) Thompson, Bill
Bill Thompson writes that the myth that the Internet can prevail in the
face of extensive damage continues to linger, when in fact the network is
highly fragile and vulnerable to major disruption if key high-speed
connections are lost. This point was hammered home last year by a major
earthquake off the coast of Taiwan that wrecked seven undersea fiber-optic
cables and constricted Internet access in the region while substantially
reducing connectivity between Asia and the rest of the worldwide Internet.
A less publicized but just as troubling event cited by Thompson is the
cessation of DeviceForge's RSS feeds because a single file hosted on a
specific server was deleted. "The major service providers run networks
which have few interconnections with each other, and as a result there are
more points at which a single failure can seriously affect network
services," notes Thompson, who argues that skilled engineers and solid
engineering practice are the solution to these sorts of problems. He says
political turbulence over such issues as network neutrality, Internet
governance, content regulation, technical standards, and content regulation
are complicating the situation. Thompson believes the UN's International
Telecommunications Union is the only agency "that could reasonably exert
some influence," but laments that new UN Secretary-General Hamadoun Toure
does not desire direct governance of the Internet by the organization. In
response to Thompson's posting, Thomas Kuehne remarks that the Internet's
fragility is not attributable to bad engineers but to "decisions of the
management and insufficient communication between different network
providers."
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IBM Crowd-Sources With Many Eyes
InternetNews.com (01/24/07) Hickin, Michael
IBM's newly launched beta version of its social computing site Many Eyes
is a part of an ongoing attempt by the company to bring social networking
to business. Many Eyes allows users to upload large data sets, choose how
they are represented visually, and discuss them in an online forum. IBM
Research director of collaborative user experiences Irene Greif describes
Many Eyes as a way to see if crowd-sourcing principles can be used to
analyze visualized data, with the goal of creating data analysis that is
both broader and deeper. The inspiration behind the site is to "start a
conversation about things like data quality ... The visualization lets you
grok at a lot more [data] at once." One possible use for Many Eyes could
be for government agencies to improve its ability to indicate potential
recipients of aid money, based on such data as income range or living in
areas that frequently experience natural disasters that could be uploaded
and made into charts. However, Grief realizes that visualization can be
misleading, and that the site may best serve to form hypotheses that would
then be subjected to examination of raw data. User behavior will be
studied to see whether or not incorrect data is uploaded and what the
effect of this would be. "One of the things we'd like to answer is how you
establish what's credible ... Maybe that's the most important societal
question," said Grief. "It's a fairly adventurous research project."
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Be Yourself and Prove Yourself, Carly Tells Women in
IT
ITworldcanada.com (01/22/07) Nobel, Carmen
Former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina was the first women to run a
Fortune 20 company and has since written a book titled "Tough Choices" that
discusses what it takes for a woman to succeed in a male-dominated
environment. In an interview, Fiorina stressed the importance of role
models, and while females can provide inspiration for young women, it is
also the responsibility of men to recognize potential. She encourages
women to be themselves, since "people are most effective when they bring
all of themselves to a challenge." Describing all good companies as
meritocracies, Fiorina explains that they will hire quality female
employees because it's the smart business thing to do ... "not because it'
the right thing to do." While she thinks it is "wonderful" when women try
to promote diversity, true diversity will come when both men and women
focus on increasing the talent pool. Fiorina blames the current small
percentage of women in IT on the fact that men are simply more comfortable
working with men, since all "people are more comfortable working with
people who are like them," but argues that hiring must be a "business
imperative," not a social consideration. While she does feel that women
need to be more comfortable speaking up in group settings, Fiorina remains
confident: "All my experience tells me that if we focus on talent, women
are going to rise to the top."
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Not Now Cell Phone -- I'm in a Meeting
Herald-Times (IND) (01/25/07) Morin, Sarah
Kay Connelly, an assistant professor of computer science at Indiana
University, does not blame the average cell phone user for the disruptions
the ringing devices can cause to classes, performances, and other events,
instead she blames technology for not having solved the problem. She is
researching ways that phones can use automated responses to make them more
aware of their users and their schedules. "The cell phone itself can make
the decision, not the human," says Connelly. A possibility she has
explored is connecting digital calendars such as Outlook to cell phones, so
the phone would know not to ring out loud while its owner is in a meeting
with her boss, for example. Existing remedies for this problem include an
instant message service that notifies incoming callers that the user is
unavailable, and jammers that block all incoming or outgoing calls in a
certain location, such as a church. Connelly thinks that jammers are
impractical since some calls are actually of vital importance, such as
those to a doctor in an emergency, and is working on a more flexible system
instead. Connelly is also investigating ways that cell phone technology
can improve people's lives, such as a text-messaging support designed
encourage girls to increase their physical activity.
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GPL 3: An Open-Source Earthquake?
Computer Reseller News (01/24/07) Cowley, Stacy
The first major revision of the GNU General Public License (GPL) in 15
years has implications that could shake up the open-source community
because of its provisions for compatibility with other licenses, software
patents, and the limitations of digital rights management (DRM). The new
GPL 3 license could potentially buttress or fragment the community, which
is divided along ideological and pragmatic lines. The pragmatists' camp,
represented by people such as Linux kernel creator Linus Torvalds, released
a position paper that objected to GPL 3, contending that the proposed
revision does not address pressing problems and instead serves as a booster
for the anti-DRM movement fomented by the Free Software Foundation. "When
you make your technical choices on technical grounds, rather than on
religious ones, they end up being better," wrote Torvalds in a piece he
posted to Groklaw. The schism between these two camps could widen if a
substantial population of open-source developers switches to GPL 3 while
others continue subscribing to GPL 2. According to Linux kernel
maintainers, the result would be a Balkanization that would "inflict
massive collateral damage upon our entire ecosystem and jeopardize the very
utility and survival of open source." Supporters of the revised license
point out significant differences between the first and second drafts of
GPL 3: Sun chief open-source officer Simon Phipps notes that the second
draft is less an attack on DRM than a more moderate consideration of how to
address DRM's consequences. The effects of GPL 3 will not be
instantaneous, and some influential industry experts predict the eventual
mutual acceptance of the license by the opposing camps in the open-source
community.
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High-Density Memory: A Switch in Time
Nature (01/24/07) Ball, Philip
Researchers Jim Heath and Fraser Stoddart of the California NanoSystems
Institute have taken a step toward molecular memory with their creation of
a prototype device that is the size of a single white blood cell, yet
features 160,000 memory elements and stores the zeroes and ones of binary
data in the switchable states of organic molecules. Such a device could
become an important milestone in the semiconducting industry's quest to
store 1 trillion bits of information in a postage stamp-sized area by 2020.
Heath and Stoddart's memory device consists of an array of small silicon
and titanium wires running parallel. A multi-junction grid is formed by
placing a set of titanium wires at right angles to the top of the silicon
wires, and the switchable rotaxane molecules are positioned at the
junctions. The latest version of the memory array features junctions that
contain about 100 rotaxanes each, although testing revealed that just one
in four of the memory elements actually performs. The researchers have
demonstrated that strong memories can be fashioned from defective arrays
through the use of software that can pinpoint viable bits while
circumventing nonviable bits. The performance of Heath and Stoddart's
device is limited by the fact that the memory cells can only be switched 10
times before they no longer work, and the researchers have a lot of ground
to cover before their invention matches other non-volatile memories
currently under development as a replacement for dynamic random access
memories.
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Report Backs NSF Prize to Spur Innovation
Science (01/26/07) Vol. 315, P. 446; Mervis, Jeffrey
The plan to have the National Science Foundation award prizes to stimulate
new research and development appears to be in limbo due to a budget freeze
and changes on Capitol Hill. In a report last week, the National Academies
expressed support for an NSF prize program, but said the agency should
start with small awards of $200,000 to $2 million before supporting more
costlier projects. Prizes are a good idea "because they bring in new
people who don't normally participate in government programs and because it
allows you to tackle controversial ideas," says NSF director Erich Bloch.
Mark Myers, a retired research executive at Xerox who led the NA's National
Research Council panel that reviewed the plan, says Congress should set
aside more money for the NSF so it can study how to run the award program
and evaluate its implementation. The panel said prizes could be awarded
for research into areas such as nano self-assembly, green chemistry,
low-carbon energy technologies, and teaching software. The cost of the
program is likely to prevent its launch this year, as the report
recommended. Meanwhile, Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.), an early advocate of
prizes, no longer heads the spending panel that oversees the NSF's budget,
and Democrats do not seem to be as optimistic about the idea.
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