U.S. and Japan Keep IT Thriving
eWeek (07/12/07) Perelman, Deborah
The IT Competitiveness Index, a benchmark report conducted by the
Economist magazine's research department Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU),
examined 64 nations and found that the United Sates, Japan, South Korea,
and the United Kingdom all understand what is needed to support a thriving
IT sector. The study reviewed the quality of IT and communications
infrastructure, supply of local talent, and the research and development
environment to determine how well countries support the competitiveness of
IT firms. The United States ranked in the top five countries in all
categories, which included education, infrastructure, encouragement of
innovation, and legal protection. The report is seen as good news because
counters concerns that the United States is falling behind other countries
in technology and innovation, although experts still believe the U.S. has
significant problems. Congressman Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.), chair of the
house committee on science and technology, says the education system does
not give students the strong background in science and math that is needed
to succeed in engineering careers. Every top-ranking country had its
flaws. The success in India and China was attributed to their large work
force, low wages, and language attributes, but the report said other
countries could use the same attributes to replace them. Skill-rich
countries such as Russia, Brazil, Malaysia, and Vietnam, and smaller
countries such as Estonia, Lithuania, and Chile are expected to rival India
and China. IT skill training and adapting to changing skill demands were
listed as priorities, and only a few counties, including the United States
and Australia, were credited for making a concerted effort to adjust their
curricula to fit demand.
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Digital Wand Gives Texture to Sound
Discovery News (07/10/07) Staedter, Tracy
Attendees of ACM's SIGGRAPH conference in August will be able to try out a
digital wand that will allow them to record how they believe physical
materials sound, and then use the noise to manipulate other sounds. MIT
Ph.D. candidates David Merrill and Hayes Raffle developed the new
instrument, called the Sound of Touch, which is intended to create sound
effects by brushing, scraping, or tapping. For example, people can imagine
what sandpaper sounds like when they rub a finger against it, but the
device will let them hear how it sounds to rub their voice against it, how
it sounds when it is tapped with glass, or how it sounds when it is rubbed
with felt. The wand records a sound sample when a button on its stem is
pressed, and effects can be added by moving the wand across a texture. The
stimulation from the surface is captured by sensors at the tip, and that
data is sent to a computer where the recorded sounds are merged using
specialized software inspired by MIT alum Roberto Aimi. Merrill and Raffle
will use SIGGRAPH to assess the robustness of the device, which they
envision will be used by kids, musicians, sound-designers, scientists, and
anyone else. For more information about ACM SIGGRAPH, or to register,
visit
http://www.siggraph.org/s2007/
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Data on Americans Mined for Terror Risk
Associated Press (07/10/07) Jordan, Lara Jakes
The U.S. government is engaged in a data-mining effort to collect and
store information on U.S. citizens to help find potential terrorists,
insurance frauds, and corrupt pharmacists, according to a Justice
Department report sent to Congress this week. Justice told Congress that
records on identity theft, real estate transactions, motor vehicle
accidents, and Internet drug companies are being examined to find
connections between occurrences. Additionally, the report disclosed
government plans to build a database that will be used to asses the risk
posed by people considered potential or suspected terrorists. The chairman
of the Justice Department's Senate oversight committee said the database
was "ripe for abuse," and the American Civil Liberties Union immediately
questioned the quality of the information that would be used to label
someone as a terror threat. Justice's Dean Boyd said the data-mining
databases are strictly regulated to protect privacy and civil liberties.
The report said that all but one of the databases, the one intended to
track terrorists, have been operating for several years. The
terrorist-tracking database, or System to Assess Risk (STAR), is still
under construction and is design to help counter-terror agencies narrow the
field of people who pose the greatest possible threat, not to label anyone
a terrorist, Boyd said. The Justice report also said that STAR might be
used to create a list of terror suspects from other sources, including Data
Mart. Data Mart is a collector of government information, as well as
travel data from the Airlines Reporting Corp., and other information from
private data collectors, which may including information such as voter and
vehicle registration.
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Open Source Semantic Desktop Is Coming
InternetNews.com (07/13/07) Kerner, Sean Michael
NEPOMUK, or Networked Environment for Personalized Ontology-based
Management of Unified Knowledge, is a Semantic Web-based open source
project designed to correlate and organize the massive amounts of
information saved on PCs into a Semantic Desktop. "NEPOMUK is a project
attempting to address what we see as a major missing component of the open
source environment--what we call 'semantic capabilities,' which you can
think of as the ability to define and take advantage of the relationships
between different items and types of data throughout the desktop and
beyond," says Stephane Lauriere, Semantic Web activities coordinator at
Linux distribution Mandriva. Lauriere says the Semantic Desktop will be
more powerful than existing desktop search tools, because they are limited
to full text indexing. "The Semantic Desktop makes it possible to store
relations, and then to search specific ones," Lauriere says. The Semantic
Desktop merges the document and database approaches by converting all
documents on the computer into a graph of data that can be queried by all
desktop applications. "The desktop consists of isolated data whose
structure and meaning are encapsulated in each application, just as Web
data semantics is encapsulated in each Web site information system," says
Sebastian Trug, a Mandriva architect of NEPOMUK for the upcoming release of
KDE 4 for the Linux desktop. "This data would become tremendously more
meaningful if it were cross-linked through a layer of interoperable
metadata."
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Happy Birthday, Dear Viruses
Science (07/13/07) Vol. 317, No. 5835, P. 210; Ford, Richard; Spafford,
Eugene H.
This year marks the 25th anniversary of the genesis of the first computer
virus. In 1982, a high school student in Pittsburgh wrote a virus that
infected Apple II systems. The virus is known as the "Elk Cloner" and did
little more than copy itself to floppy disks and display bad poetry, a
minor irritation compared to the viruses of today. After Elk Cloner, the
problem of malware grew slowly in the early 1980s, but became major news in
1988 when the "Morris Worm" spread worldwide and caused outages across the
still young Internet. Since then, numerous viruses and pieces of malware
have made news, created fear and headaches for everyone with a computer,
and caused billions of dollars in damage. Some of the more memorable names
include the Michelangelo virus, SQL.Slammer, Code Red, Nimda, Concept, and
Melissa. Today, the greatest risk is financial damage from stolen
information and identity theft, and attacks are far more quiet to avoid
getting noticed. Instead of displaying a message or erasing a computer's
hard drive, malware turns computers into spam machines, platforms for other
attacks, or secretly records financial information and passwords. Despite
the best efforts of researchers, programmers, and security experts, malware
is not going to go away anytime soon. Cell phones continue to become more
advanced, and as handheld mobile devices are used for computing tasks,
cell-to-cell malware will become prevalent. Computers are difficult to
make and keep secure, and humans are normally the reasons viruses manage to
bypass security measures, write Purdue University's Eugene H. Spafford and
Florida Institute of Technology's Richard Ford.
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Software Development, Eh? Canada Seeks Foreign Tech
Workers
Computerworld (07/11/07) Thibodeau, Patrick
Canada is quickly becoming the next place to develop software thanks to
the absence of a H-1B visa cap, an immigration system that favors tech
workers, an exchange rate that puts the Canadian dollar almost even with
the American dollar, and an endorsement from Microsoft. Microsoft recently
announced it will open a software development center in Vancouver, evidence
that Canada's efforts to expand its economy are working. The Canadian
government has specific programs designed to attract high-tech workers with
certain skills. The process can take between two to eight weeks, according
to immigration attorney Evan Green. Green says if a company needs a worker
with specific skills, education, and work experience, and will be paid a
salary equal to what a Canadian would earn, a foreigner can get a work
permit. Unlike the United State's H-1B visa program, there is no numerical
limit on the number of foreign workers entering Canada. Microsoft says it
decided to open the Vancouver facility partially to "recruit and retain
highly skilled people affected by immigration issues in the U.S." Canadian
consultant John O'Grady says notes that Canadian high-tech workers can be
paid as much as 20 percent less than what U.S. workers are paid. Paul
Swinwood, president of the Information and Communications Technology
Council in Ottawa, estimates that there are about 620,000 high-tech workers
in Canada. He says the number of available jobs is expected to increase by
about 100,000 over the next few years, but Canadian schools will produce
only about 15,000 students with the necessary skills. Swinwood says an
employee brought into the country on a temporary bases can usually get
permanent residency.
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While Schools Combat Low Tech Enrollment, Are Businesses
Contributing to IT Workplace Woes?
Wisconsin Technology Network (07/10/07) Plas, Joe Vanden
Schools in Wisconsin and other U.S. states are attempting to reverse
declines in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) enrollments
by convincing students and parents that the better IT jobs are not being
offshored to developing nations, and by getting kids--especially girls and
minorities--interested in the STEM fields through outreach efforts. Some
examples include the National Science Foundation-funded Wisconsin Girls
Collaborative Project and Women in Mathematics and Computers, a University
of Wisconsin-Stevens point organization in which tech-oriented college
women mentor middle and high school girls. Academics consider
interactivity to be a critical element in the cultivation of students'
interest in technology careers, and ways to provide such interactivity
include student clubs and competitions. Carlini & Associates President
James Carlini thinks U.S. tech companies are partly to blame for the
decline in STEM enrollments through their exploitation of H-1B and other
government programs, which tap lower-wage foreign labor to fill jobs,
especially in the IT sector. "Some young people choose other careers, and
I think they are being influenced by what's happening to adults in the
workforce," he remarks. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that
three of the 10 fastest-growing occupations between 2004 and 2014 will be
computer-related professions.
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Researchers Dream of Humanizing Androids
Wired News (07/11/07) Beschizza, Rob
Although science fiction has long portrayed robots as humanoid androids
capable of performing unlimited tasks, the current reality is that robots
have little to no resemblance to humans and are designed to perform very
specific tasks. However, research into human-like robots is progressing.
Jimmy Or, a research professor at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science
and Technology, has developed a bipedal robot with a flexible spine that is
self-supporting and capable of walking, a task he was told was impossible a
few years ago. After watching Lucy Liu belly dance in a movie, and taking
classes himself, Or made a connection between belly dancing and the
lampreys he was studying. Or thought it must be a natural behavior for
there to be such similar movements between the eel-like creature and belly
dancing, a revelation that inspired him to develop a robot capable of
similar movement. "At present, almost all humanoid robotics researchers
are working on similar things. Their robots have box-like torsos," Or
says. "I believe the next-generation humanoid robots should have a spine
as we do." Or believes that robots with flexible, motorized spines will be
better able to interact with humans. Other researchers have developed
flexible-spine models as well. At the University of Tennessee Health
Science Center, researchers have developed an artificial spine to test
medical devices, and University of Tokyo researchers are exploring similar
work. Or says that to make more advanced bipedal robots with flexible
spines, more powerful and coordinated actuators that embody the most recent
neurological research are needed.
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Security Paper Shows How Application Can Steal CPU
Cycles
Ars Technica (07/11/07) Reimer, Jeremy
At the annual Usenix security symposium, Dan Tsafrir, Yoav Etsion, and
Dror G. Feitelson presented their paper, "Secretly Monopolizing the CPU
Without Superuser Privileges." The researchers presented a
proof-of-concept program that allows a specified task to "cheat" and
consume more CPU cycles than the operating system would normally permit.
The program was designed for Unix-based systems, though it could
theoretically be altered to affect any multitasking operating system. The
program in the paper, called "cheat," can run as a regular
non-administrative user. Theoretically, a task could hide by arranging for
its process to run immediately after the CPU interrupt "tick," and stop
running right before the next tick. By avoiding the ticks, the standard
operating system would never notice the task is running. Without any
modification to an operating system, all methods of monitoring tasks would
not display the cheating task. Seven different operating systems were
tested as potential platforms for the attack, and only Mac OS X was immune
to the cheat attack, but only because it uses a different scheduling
algorithm for its timers. The researchers say they doubt cheat-like
attacks will become common because while they could be used to avoid
detection, using most of a computers CPU would noticeably slow the computer
and raise suspicion. However, programs could be written to cheat a little
bit, and would be extremely difficult to detect and remove. The
researchers say it is possible to protect the operating system against
cheat attacks, but performance suffers as a result.
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Supercomputing on Demand: SDSC Supports Event-Driven
Science
UCSD News (07/10/07) Tooby, Paul
The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California,
San Diego has introduced OnDemand, a new supercomputing resource that will
support event-driven science and allow researchers from various fields to
utilize SDSC's computer power for urgent computational tasks. An example
would be processing information gathered during an earthquake to create
videos the public can understand so they know where the epicenter was, how
large the quake was, and what areas sustained the greatest damage.
Normally, processing information could take hours or even days, but because
of OnDemand, researchers can access the supercomputers to run necessary
calculations in as little as 30 minutes. "This is the first time that an
allocated National Science Foundation TeraGrid supercomputing resource will
support on-demand users for urgent science applications," says SDSC's Anke
Kamrath. "In opening this new computing paradigm we've had to develop
novel ways of handling this type of allocation as well as scheduling and
job handling procedures." The OnDemand system will be used to make movies
of Southern California earthquakes or provide near real-time warnings and
predictions for the paths of tornados, hurricanes, or the direction of
toxic smoke from industrial accidents. For example, when an earthquake
with a magnitude greater than 3.5 hits Southern California, which normally
happens once or twice a month, the movie simulation will need to use 144
processors for about 28 minutes. Shortly after the earthquake strikes,
information will automatically be submitted to SDSC and allowed to be
processed. Any "normal" jobs running on those processors will be
interrupted. The SDSC OnDemand system will serve as a model to develop
on-demand capabilities on other TeraGrid systems in the future.
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CyberTrackers of the Kalahari
allAfrica.com (07/11/07) Hulm, Peter
South African conservation scientist Louis Liebenberg and former
University of Cape Town computer scientist Justin Steventon have developed
software that turns a handheld device into a digital wildlife tracker.
Liebenberg saw a need for combining technology with the traditional methods
of the Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert and Botswana when he learned tracking
from the bushmen. Liebenberg knew their skills and knowledge of
conservation was undervalued by protection authorities, partially because
the Bushmen cannot read or write. The solution was CyberTracker, software
that can be downloaded to PDAs. The screen displays a variety of symbols
that represent more than 40 animal species, subspecies, and plants, as well
as activities such as drinking, feeding, running, fighting, mating, and
sleeping. When the Bushmen observe an animal or encounter anything of
significance, they can enter the information using the pictures, with each
screen recording increasingly detailed information. Using CyberTracker, a
single tracker can record up to 300 observations a day. The handheld
computers are connected to a satellite navigational system, and
automatically record details including time, date, and exact location. All
data collection can be done on a PDA and processed on a personal computer.
The free software has been downloaded more than 25,000 times in more than
50 countries. After Liebenberg received a Rolex Award for Enterprise for
his work on CyberTracker, the European Union provided funding that allowed
him to set up a non-governmental organization to develop and distribute the
software, and there are now hundreds of certified trackers.
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Canadian Universities Get $1 Million Research
Grant
IT World Canada (07/05/07) Smith, Briony
The University of Toronto, Queen's University, the Universite du Quebec en
Outaouais, Carleton University, and the University of Waterloo will share a
three-year research grant from CA to study management, security, and
governance issues, says Gabby Silberman, senior vice president of CA Labs.
The University of Toronto has been working with CA for about a year on an
enterprise services bus project, according to computer science and
engineering professor Hans-Arno Jacobsen, that aims to make it easier to
build SOA and integrate it with event-driven architecture. Jacobsen says
the middleware could be applied to many verticals, including manufacturing,
transportation, and health care. At Queen's University, research will
focus on Web services, specifically a system that can manage itself and
adapt without asking the user, according to computer science professor Pat
Martin. The Universite du Quebec en Outaouais is working on creating
policies for identity access management, according to Silberman.
Researchers at Carleton University will study querying inconsistencies, and
University of Waterloo researchers will try to develop more adaptive
systems for diagnosis and logging. Silberman says CA viewed Canadian
universities as a good source for innovative research. "There's a lot of
strength in Canadian Universities in areas we're interested in," Silberman
says.
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Robot Unravels Mystery of Walking
BBC News (07/12/07)
A group of scientists from across Europe used knowledge gained by a 1930s
human physiologist to build Runbot, the world's fastest walking bipedal
robot. Runbot can move at speeds just over three leg lengths per second,
slightly slower than the fastest walking human. The scientists based the
robot's design on the theories of Nikolai Bernstein, who said that animal
movement is not under the total control of the brain, but "local circuits"
were primarily responsible for movement. Bernstein said the brain only
managed tasks such as walking when the understood parameters changed, like
switching from one type of terrain to another or dealing with uneven
surfaces. Runbot uses local neural loops to monitor information from
peripheral sensors on the joints and feet of the robot, as well as an
accelerometer that monitors the robot's pitch. The local neural loops
analyze the information from the sensors and the accelerometer to make
adjustments to the gait of the robot in real time to ensure joints are not
overstretched before the next step begins. If the robot encounters an
obstacle, only then is the robot's higher learning function utilized.
Runbot is different from other robots such as Asimo, because those robots
are kinematic walkers that have every step and movement calculated for
them, while Runbot is designed to walk more naturally and adapt to new
challenges, like a human.
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Bootable Disc Makes for Safer Banking, Researcher
Claims
Computerworld Australia (07/10/07) Springell, Sharon
Bond University professor and computer science researcher Paddy Krishnan
has developed a secure software application that bypasses the problem of
viruses completely for sensitive transactions such as online banking.
Krishnan and his team at Bond's Software Assurance Center created a
security system for home users tentatively called BOSS, or Bank on Secure
System. The user places the BOSS CD into the PC and reboots the computer.
Instead of the usual operating system loading, the BOSS system loads first.
Once loaded, a browser opens with a graphical keyboard for extra security.
Normal online banking can then be conducted. When the user is finish, the
original operating system is restored by removing the CD and rebooting.
Krishnan says the BOSS system works because viruses on a computer's hard
drive are inactive when running the BOSS CD, and that banks and home users
would not have to change their hardware or software. Krishnan's next step
is to continue his research into a formal verification system for the
software. "Verification is very hard because you need to mathematize the
whole thing and the system is too big for that," Krishnan says. "But it is
the only way to ensure that something works."
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High-Performance Computing: Not Just for Physical
Scientists Any More
University of Chicago (07/09/07)
Demand for high-powered computing at the University of Chicago, once
limited to physical scientists, is now nearly universal across the school's
various departments and as a result the university has expanded its
facilities. The university installed a cluster of Linux servers, called
Teraport, three years ago that contains 260 processors, each one as
powerful as a normal desktop. "It's not enormous, but it's bigger than any
other resource on campus," says Ian Foster, director of the Computation
Institute, a collaborative effort between the University of Chicago and
Argonne National Laboratory. "What's interesting is the number of people
who are finding it useful and the breadth of demand that we see for it."
So far, Teraport has processed nearly 800,000 jobs, taking more that 2.5
million hours of computing time, according to Computation Institute senior
research associate Rob Gardner. Teraport is accessed by nearly 120 users
at the school, representing more than a dozen local research groups and
collaborators from other institutions. Teraport is also accessible through
the Open Science Grid, a national network dedicated to large,
computing-intensive research projects. "We're seeing exponential growth in
the number of people who want to compute," Foster says. "Part of that is
we're hiring people who have the interest. Part of it is that people are
facing new problems."
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'Less Is More' Online
University of Missouri-Columbia (07/09/07) Kostiuk, Katherine
In a study that examined responses to pictures viewed online, University
of Missouri-Columbia researchers found that people paid more attention to
pictures selected from a small number of choices than from a large amount,
suggesting that for online content, less is more. The results of the study
may have an impact on Internet search engines, advertising, and news sites.
Kevin Wise, an assistant professor of strategic communication in MU's
School of Journalism, and Fleishman-Hillard researcher Kimberlee Pepple
conducted a study that asked participants to select three pictures they
would like to examine more closely from a group of thumbnails. In one
scenario, participants were asked to choose from six thumbnail pictures,
and in another they were asked to select from 24 thumbnails. The
researchers found that participants who viewed pictures selected from the
six thumbnails showed an orienting response, while participants selecting
from the 24 thumbnails showed no response. Participants who selected from
the group of six thumb nails also had better and faster recall of the
pictures they saw. Wise says search engine firms, news portals, and online
advertisers may want to consider presenting fewer picture options in the
future to create a more memorable response. Similar concepts may apply to
other media, such as video and text, but more research is needed, Wise
says. The study, "The Effect of Available Choice on Cognitive Processing
of Pictures," will be published in the journal Computers in Human
Behavior.
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The Future of the Web as Seen by Its Creator
IDG News Service (07/09/07) Moon, Peter
World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee calls the Internet of the future
the Semantic Web, the technological infrastructure of which he is currently
developing in his current capacity as head of the World Wide Web
Consortium. He explains in an interview that the Semantic Web's power will
be unprecedented, and at the heart of this breakthrough is data
integration, in which applications, databases, and Web pages share a common
data format. "The Semantic Web is much more powerful, because you can
connect the people, connect data, which is about the same person, which is
about the same place, which is about the same time," Berners-Lee notes. He
says an MIT research group is focusing on the issue of data privacy through
the development of systems that support "information accountability," while
another MIT team is committed to making the Semantic Web usable to people
with a non-technical background. Berners-Lee thinks the Semantic Web
explosion will take place when people employ it for data processing,
although such a development is a long way off. He believes the inclusion
of more bureaucracy into the Internet is unavoidable, while noting that
"the administration of something so big will never be controlled by a
unique bureaucracy." Berners-Lee stresses the construction of the Web as
an infrastructure, a platform for future innovations.
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Xerox's Inventor-in-Chief
Fortune (07/09/07) Vol. 156, No. 1, P. 65; Colvin, Geoff
Xerox CTO Sophie Vandebroek discusses in an interview how her company's
fortunes have improved in recent years, thanks to its production of new
technologies for reading, comprehending, routing, and securing documents.
She describes innovation as "a matter of making sure that our customers
constantly want to buy our products and services. Ultimately innovation is
about delighting the customer, and that results in great economic returns
for Xerox." Vandebroek says Xerox's overall vision is to help clients
manage document-intensive processes, which involves guaranteeing that they
receive their information at the right time and in the right place, along
with the history and context of the information they require. "It also
means seamlessly bridging the digital and physical, and making it easy and
fast to get to information," notes Vandebroek. Xerox's research centers
employ a large percentage of "work practice specialists" in fields that
include anthropology, ethnography, psychology, and sociology to aid in the
company's mass customization effort. Vandebroek says the area of greatest
emphasis for Xerox is the increase in the simplicity, speed,
miniaturization, intelligence, security, and environmental friendliness of
the company's systems and products. Vandebroek observes that girls'
interest in science and technology usually starts to wane in middle school,
and there must be an initiative to sustain their interest throughout middle
school and high school, with a particular concentration on the engineer's
social impact. Vandebroek will receive the National Medal of Technology in
late July.
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