June 9, 2009, 5:04 AM CT

Computer-related injuries

While back pain, blurred vision and mouse-related injuries are now well-documented hazards of long-term computer use, the number of acute injuries connected to computers is rising rapidly. According to a study published in the July 2009 issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, researchers from the Center for Injury Research and Policy and The Research Institute at Nationwide Children's Hospital; and The Ohio State University College of Medicine, Columbus have found a more-than-sevenfold increase in computer-related injuries due to tripping over computer equipment, head injuries due to computer monitor falls and other physical incidents.

According to data from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System database, over 78,000 cases of acute computer-related injuries were treated in U.S. emergency departments from 1994 through 2006. Approximately 93% of injuries occurred at home. The number of acute computer-related injuries increased by 732% over the 13-year study period, which is more than double the increase in household computer ownership (309%).

Injury mechanisms included hitting against or catching on computer equipment; tripping or falling over computer equipment; computer equipment falling on top of the patient; and the straining of muscles or joints. The computer part most often associated with injuries was the monitor. The percentage of monitor-related cases increased significantly, from 11.6% in 1994 to a peak of 37.1% in 2003. By 2006, it had decreased to 25.1%. The decrease since 2003 corresponds to the replacement of heavier cathode ray tube (CRT) monitors with smaller and easier-to-lift liquid crystal display (LCD) monitors......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

June 5, 2009, 4:53 AM CT

Computer graphics researchers simulate the sounds of water

Splash, splatter, babble, sploosh, drip, drop, bloop and ploop!

Those are some of the sounds that have been missing from computer graphic simulations of water and other fluids, as per scientists in Cornell's Department of Computer Science, who have come up with new algorithms to simulate such sounds to go with the images.

The work by Doug James, associate professor of computer science, and graduate student Changxi Zheng will be reported at the 2009 ACM SIGGRAPH conference Aug. 3-7 in New Orleans. It is the first step in a broader research program on sound synthesis supported by a $1.2 million grant from the Human Centered Computing Program of the National Science Foundation (NSF) to James, assistant professor Kavita Bala and associate professor Steve Marschner.

In computer-animated movies, sound can be added after the fact from recordings or by Foley artists. But as virtual worlds grow increasingly interactive and immersive, the scientists point out, sounds will need to be generated automatically to fit events that can't be predicted in advance. Recordings can be cued in, but can be repetitive and not always well matched to what's happening.

"We have no way to efficiently compute the sounds of water splashing, paper crumpling, hands clapping, wind in trees or a wine glass dropped onto the floor," the scientists said in their research proposal......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

May 5, 2009, 5:05 AM CT

'Lab on a Tube' Monitoring Device

The need for improved monitoring of neurotrauma patients has resulted in the development of a prototype of a novel, multitasking "lab on a tube" at the University of Cincinnati (UC).

UC engineers, working to fill a need expressed by physicians at the Neurotrauma Center at the UC Neuroscience Institute, have developed a preliminary working model of the multimodal tube, or "smart sensor," which is capable of continuously monitoring multiple physiological parameters in patients. The tube also is capable of draining excess cerebrospinal fluid from the injured brain and could be used to deliver medications to the patient.

Eventhough the monitoring device is still not ready for testing in humans, UC scientists hailed it as "a groundbreaking start".

Raj Narayan, MD, chairman and Frank Mayfield professor in the department of neurosurgery and the project's principal investigator, and Lori Shutter, MD, director of neurocritical care, expressed the need for a multimodality monitoring device for neurotrauma patients and participated in its design and creation.

The prototype for a smart neuro-catheter was then engineered by Chunyan Li, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in the UC department of neurosurgery who trained under Chong Ahn, PhD, professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering. Concepts for a "lab on a tube" device with multimodality sensors were developed in the Microsystems and BioMEMS Laboratory headed by Ahn......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

May 5, 2009, 4:59 AM CT

eBay and looting of antiquities

Having worked for 25 years at fragile archaeological sites in Peru, UCLA archaeologist Charles "Chip" Stanish held his breath when the online auction house eBay launched more than a decade ago.

"My greatest fear was that the Internet would democratize antiquities trafficking, which previously had been a wealthy person's vice, and lead to widespread looting," said the UCLA professor of anthropology, who directs the UCLA Cotsen Institute of Archaeology.

Indeed, eBay has drastically altered the transporting and selling of illegal artifacts, Stanish writes in an article in the May/recent issue of Archaeology, but not in the way he and other archaeologists had feared.

By improving access to a worldwide market, eBay has inadvertently created a vast market for copies of antiquities, diverting whole villages from looting to producing fake artifacts, Stanish writes. The proliferation of these copies also has added new risks to buying objects billed as artifacts, which in turn has worked to depress the market for these items, further reducing incentives to loot.

"For most of us, the Web has forever distorted the antiquities trafficking market in a positive way," Stanish said.

Looting, which is illegal, is widely recognized as destructive to cultural heritage because it can remove from public ownership tangible links to a people's past. In addition, looting is perceived as the enemy of scholarship because it typically is done without regard to any appropriate methods that allow researchers to date objects and to place them in a larger, more meaningful context......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

May 1, 2009, 5:19 AM CT

Shift in Simulation Superiority

Science and engineering are advancing rapidly in part due to ever more powerful computer simulations, yet the most advanced supercomputers require programming skills that all too few U.S. scientists possess. At the same time, affordable computers and committed national programs outside the U.S. are eroding American competitiveness in number of simulation-driven fields.

These are some of the key findings in the International Evaluation of Research and Development in Simulation-Based Engineering and Science, released on Apr. 22, 2009, by the World Technology Assessment Center (WTEC).

"The startling news was how quickly our assumptions have to change," said Phillip Westmoreland, program director for combustion, fire and plasma systems at the National Science Foundation (NSF) and one of the sponsors of the report. "Because computer chip speeds aren't increasing, hundreds and thousands of chips are being ganged together, each one with a number of processors. New ways of programming are necessary".

Like other WTEC studies, this study was led by a team of leading scientists from a range of simulation science and engineering disciplines and involved site visits to research facilities around the world.

The nearly 400-page, multi-agency report highlights several areas in which the U.S. still maintains a competitive edge, including the development of novel algorithms, but also highlights endeavors that are increasingly driven by efforts in Europe or Asia, such as the creation and simulation of new materials from first principles......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

April 30, 2009, 5:21 AM CT

Making Brighter, Full-Color Electronic Readers?

Thinking about getting an e-reader but not sure if you like reading the dim screen? An international collaboration of the University of Cincinnati, Sun Chemical, Polymer Vision and Gamma Dynamics has announced Electrofluidic Display Technology (EFD), the first technology to electrically switch the appearance of pigments in a manner that provides visual brilliance equal to conventional printed media.

This new entry into the race for full-color electronic paper can potentially provide better than 85 percent "white-state reflectance," a performance level mandatory for consumers to accept reflective display applications such as e-books, cell-phones and signage.

"If you compare this technology to what's been developed previously, there's no comparison," says developer Jason Heikenfeld, assistant professor of electrical engineering in UC's College of Engineering. "We're ahead by a wide margin in critical categories such as brightness, color saturation and video speed".

This work, which has been underway for several years, has just been reported in the paper "Electrofluidic displays using Young-Laplace transposition of brilliant pigment dispersions."

Main author Heikenfeld explains the primary advantage of the approach.

"The ultimate reflective display would simply place the best colorants used by the printing industry directly beneath the front viewing substrate of a display," he says. "In our EFD pixels, we are able to hide or reveal colored pigment in a manner that is optically superior to the techniques used in electrowetting, electrophoretic and electrochromic displays."........ Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 04:06:35 GMT

Google Phone Book Results

Google Inside's author noticed recently that you can now do a reverse phone book look up straight from the front page of Google. He says he got a hang up call, typed the number into Google's search window, hit enter, and got the name and address of the Phone's owner.Am I the only one that is slightly creeped out by how much information Google actually has access to?Well, probably not....

The more profound question is this: How much do we choose to share about ourselves on the web without giving much thought to who might see it?



David Griner had a thought-provoking piece recently about privacy on the web. He relates a conversation he had with a friend that started after he suggested that participating in social media could put our jobs at risk. David's friend compares sharing something about yourself in a closed room of friends as opposed to in the open universe of social media on the web.



The truth is that at least if I stand on my roof with a megaphone and yell stuff about myself, the sound eventually dies and all that exists after that is what my neighbors remember. With Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc., it's a relatively permanent record. People can bookmark it or download it.



Can I find stuff on you? It depends. If you Google me ("Greg Cruey" with the quotes), you get a lot of stuff about me. I live on the web. Just the first 20 links have my personal blog, my Facebook and LinkedIn pages, my Suite101 profile, and a small host of blog entries I've written. You can find out a lot about me on those pages. And after a dozen or so years of writing for the web, my name turns up on about 15,000 pages according to Goggle. Google my wife and you get 34 entries. You get the web page of a closed school she used to teach at. You get a Classmates.com profile for someone (probably one of my distant relatives) who shares both her first and last name. You get a couple of dead links and a few pages where I've mentioned her by name in something I wrote.



How much is out there really does depend on what you share....



© Zach Klein Posted by: Greg Cruey      Read more     Source

April 20, 2009, 9:33 PM CT

"Instant On" Computing

The ferroelectric materials found in today's "smart cards" used in subway, ATM and fuel cards soon may eliminate the time-consuming booting and rebooting of computer operating systems by providing an "instant-on" capability as well as preventing losses from power outages.

Scientists supported by a National Science Foundation (NSF) nanoscale interdisciplinary research team award and three Materials Research Science and Engineering Centers at Cornell University, Penn State University and Northwestern University recently added ferroelectric capability to material used in common computer transistors, a feat researchers tried to achieve for more than half a century. They reported their findings in the April 17 journal Science.

Ferroelectric materials provide low-power, high-efficiency electronic memory. Smart cards use the technology to instantly reveal and update stored information when waved before a reader. A computer with this capability could instantly provide information and other data to the user.

Scientists led by Cornell University materials scientist Darrell Schlom took strontium titanate, a normally non-ferroelectric variant of the ferroelectric material used in smart cards, and deposited it on silicon--the principal component of most semiconductors and integrated circuits--in such a way that the silicon squeezed it into a ferroelectric state......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

April 13, 2009, 12:56 AM CT

Relief for overheating laptops

Our modern age has become accustomed to regular improvements in information technology, says Slava Rotkin, but these advances do not come without a cost.

Take the laptop, for example. Its components, particularly its billions of semiconductor electronic circuits, are growing ever tinier while the instrument's power and capacity increase. But heat generated by electric current can cause the circuits to melt and the laptop hardware to fail.

Indeed, says Rotkin, an assistant professor of physics, a laptop in use can generate heat faster than an everyday hotplate and almost as fast as a small nuclear reactor.

Developing better methods to dissipate this heat has been listed as a "grand challenge" for modern electronics by the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) , a consortium of semiconductor manufacturers.

Rotkin and colleagues at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center and at the Ioffe Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia, have developed a heat-dissipation method that cools carbon nanotube electronics by utilizing nonconventional radiation in a "near-field zone" just above the substrate, or surface, on which the nanotubes rest.

The new cooling method requires that the nanotubes' substrate be composed of a polar material such as silicon-dioxide (SiO2), says Rotkin. The method channels excess heat from the nanotubes into the substrate which, being much larger, can be more effectively cooled by the vents that push cool air through laptops......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

March 31, 2009, 3:53 PM CT

Faster computer chips

Engineers at Ohio State University are in the process of developing a technique for mass producing computer chips made from the same material found in pencils.

Experts think that graphene -- the sheet-like form of carbon found in graphite pencils -- holds the key to smaller, faster electronics. It might also deliver quantum mechanical effects that could enable new kinds of electronics.

Until now, most scientists could only create tiny graphene devices one at a time, and only on traditional silicon oxide substrates. They couldn't control where they placed the devices on the substrate, and had to connect them to other electronics one at a time for testing.

In a paper reported in the March 26 issue of the journal Advanced Materials, Nitin Padture and colleagues describe a technique for stamping a number of graphene sheets onto a substrate at once, in precise locations.

"We designed the technique to mesh with standard chip-making practices," said Padture, College of Engineering Distinguished Professor in Materials Science and Engineering.

"Graphene has huge potential -- it's been dubbed 'the new silicon,'" said Padture, who is also director of Ohio State's Center for Emergent Materials. "But there hasn't been a good process for high-throughput manufacturing it into chips. The industry has several decades of chip-making technology that we can tap into, if only we could create millions of these graphene structures in precise patterns on predetermined locations, repeatedly. This result is a proof-of-concept that we should be able to do just that"......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

March 16, 2009, 8:04 PM CT

Better computers by shifting sound to light

By reversing a process that converts electrical signals into sounds heard out of a cell phone, scientists may have a new tool to enhance the way computer chips, LEDs and transistors are built.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researchers have for the first time converted the highest frequency sounds into light by reversing a process that converts electrical signals to sound.

Usually used piezo-electric speakers, such as those found in a cell phone, operate at low frequencies that human ears can hear.

But by reversing that process, lead scientists Michael Armstrong, Evan Reed and Mike Howard, LLNL colleagues, and collaborators from Los Alamos National Laboratory and Nitronex Corp., used a very high frequency sound wave - about 100 million times higher frequency than what humans can hear - to generate light.

"This process allows us to very accurately 'see' the highest frequency sound waves by translating them into light," Armstrong said.

The research appears in the March 15 edition of the journal Nature Physics.

During the last decade, pioneering experiments using sub-picosecond lasers have demonstrated the generation and detection of acoustic and shock waves in materials with terahertz (THz) frequencies. These very same experiments led to a new technique for probing the structure of semiconductor devices......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 04:32:15 GMT

Elonex ONEt Ultra Portable Notebook

This week’s Deal of the Day (if we had such a thing) would be this refurb Elonex ONEt Ultra-Portable Netbook computer, priced at a totally measly £99.99. Weight 650g, 7 inch TFT screen, Linux, WiFi, 3 x USB ports, SD card reader, 2GB SSD drive and 128 MB memory. Grab ‘em while they’re hot and sizzling.

 One thing you instantly notice about this the Elonex ONEt is its size and weight; it is an excellent travel companion as well as perfect PC for carrying around the house. The outer casing has an attractive piano-black finish, the keyboard is tactile, the mouse pad easy to use and the 7-inch digital screen provides a perfectly clear image. Posted by: Redferret      Read more     Source

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 03:03:38 GMT

Application Stores For Everyone

Photo courtesy of iStockphoto, Image# 5244112 Oh Apple, you used to be so cool with your mobile computing platform and your ubiquitous application store. Now, everyone has gone and shown up to the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona and announced their own application store for their own mobile computing platform. Now, instead of the just the Apple iTunes App store, there are going to be no less than seven application stores for seven different mobile platforms.

There is going to be the Nokia's Ovi Store, Windows Marketplace, App Store for Symbian, Android Market, BlackBerry Applications Center and the Palm Software Store. Now granted, the Palm store has been around since December, and the Android Market has been on the block since October, but the application store seems to be the way things are headed. Apple, I have to admit, did get this digital distribution thing right on the iPhone platform. I can attest that I have used the iTunes App store much more than I had ever anticipated, and they have earned a fair chunk of my money.

I am curious to see what other industries are going to follow Apple's suit. Will the next PSP have a media slot, or will games be downloaded? With broadband speeds creeping up and applications becoming smaller and more nimble, I suppose it won't be long before all software is simply digital.

via Macrumors. Posted by: Chris Matier      Read more     Source

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 17:00:14 GMT

Dell Inspiron Mini 9 3G - Review

The new Dell Inspiron Mini 9 with 3G is, on the face of it, much of a muchness as far as small computers go. It’s pretty hard to find any real differentiation between mini notebooks when all of them use the same processor, same screens and similar storage and memory specs. However the Dell stands out because of a) the name, b) the fact that it’s the one which will probably sell the most via the company’s corporate connections, c) because it has a built-in 3G mobile broadband card and finally d) because you can buy them on mobile phone style pricing (Vodafone UK, Vodafone AU). So I thought it would be interesting to take an in-depth look at one for those of you who may be considering going small-sized with your next computer purchase.

Friendly Note: This review is kinda wordy so if you’re only interested in the verdict, skip to the end.

Posted by: Redferret      Read more     Source

February 12, 2009, 6:10 AM CT

Laser sharp digital maps

Restoring habitat for spawning species of fish, such as Atlantic salmon, starts with a geological inventory of suitable rivers and streams, and the watershed systems that support them. But the high-tech mapping tools available to geologists and hydrologists have had their limits.

Now, lasers beamed from planes overhead are adding greater clarity to mapping streams and rivers and interpreting how well these bodies of water can help maintain or expand fish stocks, according to a new study.

"It's kind of like going from your backyard telescope to the Hubble telescope," says Boston College Geologist Noah P. Snyder. "Restoring fish habitat is just one example. For the fisherman, backpacker, forester, land use planner or developer anyone who uses map data this new technology is the next revolution in mapping".

Airborne laser elevation (or lidar) surveys provide a 10-fold improvement in the precision with which topographical features are measured, Snyder reports in the current edition of Eos, the weekly journal of the American Geophysical Union.

Lidar represents the latest technology to improve digital topographical maps known as digital elevation models, or DEMs. Pulsing laser beams released by a lidar device from a plane overhead bounce off of rocks, trees, soil, even water, and send signals back to the device, which makes topographical calculations based on the time it takes the laser signal to return at the speed of light......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 06:09:51 GMT

Samsung Show W7900 Struts Its Stuff

Pico projectors are all the rage, and their popularity is growing. I always thought that these little projectors would really shine once they become fully integrated into the projects that use them such as a phones or handheld games. Well, the Samsung Show W7900 has been demoed, and it is very nice.

The Samsung Show W7900 is just like any other Samsung media device save for one essential feature; it has a built in projector capable of displaying a great image up to 50 inches diagonally. Specifically, the projector features 10 lumens and 480 by 320 pixels. Other specs on the phone include a 5MP camera, 3G connector, 3.2 inch OLED screen, and a front facing VGA camera for video conferencing. If the OS and the media functions are up to snuff, this phone will be very nice.

It was only a tech demo, and there is no official Samsung W7900 release date or price, but you can bet these things will be hitting the street soon. Now if I could only get a PSP or a Nintendo DS with a built-in projector.

via PopSci Posted by: Chris Matier      Read more     Source

January 15, 2009, 7:36 PM CT

Electronic biological chips

A handheld, ultra-portable device that can recognize and immediately report on a wide variety of environmental or medical compounds may eventually be possible, using a method that incorporates a mixture of biologically tagged nanowires onto integrated circuit chips, as per Penn State researchers.

"Probably one of the most important things for connecting to the circuit is to place the wires accurately," says Theresa S. Mayer, professor of electrical engineering and director of Penn State's Nanofabrication Laboratory. "We need to control spatial placement on the chip with less than a micron of accuracy".

Using standard chip manufacturing, each type of nanowire would be placed on the board in a separate operation. Using the researchers' bottom-up method, they can place three different types of DNA-coated wires where they wanted them, with an error rate of less than 1 percent.

"This approach can be used to simultaneously detect different pathogens or diseases based on their nucleic acid signatures," says Christine D. Keating, associate professor of chemistry.

"Device components such as nanowires can be synthesized from a number of different materials and even coated with biological molecules previous to assembling them onto a chip," the scientists note in today's (Jan. 16) issue of Science They add that positioning the nanowires accurately is still difficult using conventional methods......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

November 12, 2008, 10:29 PM CT

Computers make sense of experiments on human disease

Increased use of computers to create predictive models of human disease is likely following a workshop organised by the European Science Foundation (ESF), which urged for a collaborative effort between specialists in the field. Human disease research produces an enormous amount of data from different sources such as animal models, high throughput genetic screening of human tissue, and in vitro laboratory experiments. This data operates at different levels and scales including genes, molecules, cells, tissues and whole organs, embodying a huge amount of potentially valuable insight that current computer modelling approaches often fail to exploit properly.

However, significant advances in the modelling of a few specific diseases, such as multiple sclerosis (MS), have been made. A major aim of the ESF workshop was thus to generalise such work and create a more coherent body of expertise across the whole field of computational disease analysis, as per Albert Compte, co-convenor of the ESF workshop, from the Computational and physiological bases of cortical networks laboratory at the Institut d'Investigacions Biomdiques August Pi Sunyer (IDIBAPS) in Barcelona. "A workshop like this one was useful in seeing how advances in other research fields can be used more generally for disease modelling," said Compte. "So far, novel modelling approaches have been confined to a specific disease or a particular level of description"......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

November 6, 2008, 7:58 PM CT

Proof by computer

New computer tools have the potential to revolutionize the practice of mathematics by providing far more-reliable proofs of mathematical results than have ever been possible in the history of humankind. These computer tools, based on the notion of "formal proof", have in recent years been used to provide nearly infallible proofs of a number of important results in mathematics. A ground-breaking collection of four articles by leading experts, published recently in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society (http://www.ams.org/notices), explores new developments in the use of formal proof in mathematics.

When mathematicians prove theorems in the traditional way, they present the argument in narrative form. They assume prior results, they gloss over details they think other experts will understand, they take shortcuts to make the presentation less tedious, they appeal to intuition, etc. The correctness of the arguments is determined by the scrutiny of other mathematicians, in informal discussions, in lectures, or in journals. It is sobering to realize that the means by which mathematical results are verified is essentially a social process and is thus fallible. When it comes to central, well known results, the proofs are particularly well checked and errors are eventually found. Nevertheless the history of mathematics has a number of stories about false results that went undetected for a long time. In addition, in some recent cases, important theorems have mandatory such long and complicated proofs that very few people have the time, energy, and necessary background to check through them. And some proofs contain extensive computer code to, for example, check a lot of cases that would be infeasible to check by hand. How can mathematicians be sure that such proofs are reliable?........ Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 04:06:42 GMT

Webicina will be open to patients

We are working hard to get Webicina ready by the 7th of October. This Tuesday, after months of preparation, we will launch it officially. We decided to open the service for patients as well. That is why it’s easy to say now Webicina is really trying to build a bridge between e-patients and physicians.

The services we will provide:

• Consulting: presentations about web 2.0 and medicine in person; or online (webinars, Second Life workshops).
• Online Image Building Solutions: e-mail support for 3 months about the tools and methods medical professionals need to build a proper online reputation.
• E-Courses: materials and step-by-step tutorials through which users can learn to use the web 2.0 tools and methods they need. Premium account provides a 3 months long access and e-mail support, while the Basic account does not include e-mail support.
• Personalized Medicine 2.0 Package: a personalized set of web 2.0 tools designed to solve the problems of physicians, health care workers and patients. Membership includes one extended e-mail containing all the web 2.0 tools, services and information dedicated to a specific medical condition or a medical specialty.

Please join the discussion about how to change the way medicine is practiced and healthcare is delivered from the 7th of October! Posted by: Bertalan      Read more     Source

October 1, 2008, 8:19 PM CT

Computer hardware 'guardians' protect users

As computer processor chips grow faster and more complex, they are likely to make it to market with more design bugs. But that may be OK, as per University of Michigan scientists who have devised a system that lets chips work around all functional bugs, even those that haven't been detected.

Firms such as Intel find functional bugs by simulating different scenarios, commands and configurations that their processor might encounter. Bugs only show themselves when they're triggered by certain configurations. When firms find major bugs, they fix them. But because it would be virtually impossible to simulate all possibilities, engineers don't find all the bugs.

Buggy hardware inadvertently released to customers could fail. Short of replacing the product, there isn't much a company can do to fix the problem today.

The U-M researchers' system would eliminate this risk by building a virtual fence that prevents a chip from operating in untested configurations. The approach keeps track of all the configurations the firm did test, and loads that information onto a miniscule monitor that would be added to each processor.

The monitor, called a semantic guardian, keeps the chip operating within its virtual fence. It works by switching the processor into a slower, bare-bones, safe mode when the chip encounters a configuration that has not been validated. In this way, the monitor would treat all untested configurations as potential threats......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

September 25, 2008, 10:54 PM CT

Free Adeona service tracks stolen laptops

As college students head back to school with gleaming new laptops, some will, unfortunately, see the last of their machine in a library, cafeteria or dorm room. And it's not just college campuses that are hot spots for computer theft, or just students who are the targets. Newspapers recently reported that airports in the United States record hundreds of thousands of laptop thefts annually. Such thefts are not only expensive, they also often mean losing sensitive data.

Scientists at the University of Washington and at the University of California, San Diego have created a new laptop theft-protection tool. The software not only provides a virtual watchdog on your precious machine -- reporting the laptop's location when it connects to the Internet -- but does so without letting anybody but you monitor your whereabouts.

The tool is named Adeona, after the Roman goddess of safe returns, and is posted at http://adeona.cs.washington.edu/. It works by using the Internet as a homing beacon. Once Adeona is installed, the machine will occasionally send its Internet protocol address and related information to OpenDHT, a free online storage network. This information can be used to establish the computer's general location.

On a Macintosh computer, Adeona also uses the computer's internal camera to take a photo that it sends to the same server......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

August 27, 2008, 6:54 PM CT

Real-World Lessons in Virtual World

View a video of WolfQuest, an interactive computer game in which players are immersed in every aspect of a wolf's survival in its habitat.

It's bad enough that I haven't found a mate. I'm also hungry and I'm losing stamina. I've lost the rest of my group and a large grizzly bear has positioned himself across my path. What's a wolf to do?

Adopting the identity of a wolf is the key to learning about wolf behavior and ecology in WolfQuest, a computer game developed and hosted by the Minnesota Zoo with funding from the National Science Foundation. WolfQuest is one example of how, through computer gaming technology, learning can reach across time and space and link learners to a set of challenges--along with a set of tools to address them, and the motivation to succeed. Other such projects developed with NSF funding include "Project IT Girl," a project that involves high-school girls in designing and developing educational games, and LunarQuest, a multiple-player game that aims to support the learning of physics.

Through computer games, a single player can immerse himself or herself in a problem that demands the tools of science or math to solve it. The technology can also link a team of players who must work together and pool their resources to address issues. Just as the technology provides a network for learning, it also provides a trail of results detailing the players' success in rising to the challenges presented......... Posted by: Ethan      Read more         Source

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 00:23:19 GMT

What Do You Know?

Google has started a new site called Knol that allows you to share your vast wealth of personal information with the world. Everyone knows something that no one else knows. Think about it, I'm sure you can come up with something. Voice your opinion on something, or tell the world about something you witnessed. Then you can share it on Knol.



"The web contains vast amounts of information, but not everything worth knowing is on the web. An enormous amount of information resides in people's heads" ~Cedric Dupont, Product Manager and Michael McNally, Software Engineer

Then you can browse around Knol and find other articles that interest you. Make modification suggestions to the author of the article, they can then choose to use your suggestions or not. Write reviews on other people's articles.

If you choose to use ads in your Knol articles, you stand the chance of earning a little extra money. You can even add cartoons to your articles from New Yorker magazine. Posted by: Linda Roeder      Read more     Source