2006

The comedian Steve Martin used to claim to be a wild and crazy guy as part of his stage act. Well, today’s Warped site has some wild and crazy guys who will make him look like a real wuss. We owe them a huge thank you, for without them, we might not enjoy all of [...]

Every year, the United State produces millions of scrap tires that clog landfills and become breeding areas for pests. Finding adequate uses for castoff tires is a continuing challenge and illegal dumping has become a serious problem throughout the nation.
Dr. Yuefeng Xie, associate professor of environmental engineering at Penn State Harrisburg, has developed a method [...]

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory and University of Chicago researchers demonstrated a new specialized software system at Supercomputing 2006 that provides computational resources quickly for emergency applications affecting public health, safety, and security. This new system, called SPRUCE (Special PRiority and Urgent Computing Environment), supports urgent computing on both traditional supercomputers and [...]

N-A-N-O, the four letters that have conjured up much excitement, hope and even fear for the past few years, were the theme of discussion for a recent two-day conference in Brussels that brought together some 400 experts, including concerned groups, policy makers and researchers from across Europe. The purpose of the conference was to delve [...]

They say if you can remember the ’60s, you probably weren’t around then. That statement is always open to interpretation. I mean, man, what do you mean by remember? But for those of us whose memories are getting a little hazy, thank God for the Internet and sites such as today’s Warped site. C’mon, breakfast [...]

An update for those of us following the Ohio University security breach situation:
The August firings of two IT workers at Ohio University after a series of data security breaches have been upheld by the schools provost. The move, made public today, comes despite a recommendation last month by a grievance committee that the workers be [...]

University of Vermont engineer invents ‘resilient machines’ that self-repair.
Dr. Joshua Bongard has invented robots that can self-heal. For example, they detecting a missing leg and invent a new way to continue walking.
Bongard’s research article entitled, “Resilient machines through continuous self modeling,” will appear in Science Magazine, Friday November 17, 2006.
Dr. Bongard is assistant professor in [...]

A $15 million upgrade to Sandia’s Red Storm computer has increased its peak speed from 41.5 to 124.4 teraflops in a computing terrain in which a single teraflop was a big deal only six years ago.
The machine, built by Cray Inc., is now rated second fastest in the world, with a Linpack speed of 101.4 [...]

Have you ever thought about the odd things that make up our lives? Urban legends, little known odd facts, that sort of thing. I am reminded of a quote from a John Wayne movie, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” Today’s site is something like that, but it also has some very interesting [...]

Visitors to Supercomputing ‘06 in Tampa, Florida this week will be the first to see a new interactive map that shows nine of the world’s largest computing Grids. The map, developed by researchers from GridPP in the UK and the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, in Geneva, uses Google Earth to pinpoint Grid sites on [...]

Sandia National Laboratories’ 8960-processor Thunderbird Linux cluster, developed in collaboration with Dell, Inc. and Cisco, maintained its sixth position in the Top500 Supercomputers by achieving an improved overall performance of 53.0 teraflops, an 18.5 percent increase in efficiency from last year’s performance.
The Top500 ranking of supercomputers is based on the Linpack benchmark, a yardstick of [...]

DBI, a California-based aerospace company involved in the research and development of thorium-fueled reactors, will host a forum on Thursday, November 30, from 10:00 a.m. - 3:00 p.m. at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, on thorium as an abundant source of clean energy to meet the world’s growing energy needs.
The forum will address [...]

The Blue Star Mothers is an organization that supports families who have sons and daughters in the military service. But times change, and in an era when, according to Paul Harvey, we treat our kids like pets and pets like kids, a site like today’s Warped site was just waiting to happen.
The name of the [...]

Michael Santo of RealTechNews writes:
Here’s a good one. New Zealand has just decided to allow the use of text message speak on its NCEA exams. You know, things like ROFL (Rolling on the Floor Laughing), stuff like that.
NZQA deputy chief executive of qualifications Bali Haque said credit would be given in this year’s NCEA exams [...]

Alice Hill of RealTechNews writes:
It makes sense when you think about it. Mailboxes are disappearing from city streets. It also makes sense that technology can help what it created by making it easier to find a nearby mailbox wherever your ZIP code may be. This is US-based only, but the integrated Google maps and directions [...]

Recharging your laptop computer - and also your cell phone and a variety of other gadgets - might one day be doable in the same convenient way many people now surf the Web: wirelessly. Marin Soljacic of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will present research by himself and his colleagues Aristeidis Karalis and John Joannopoulos [...]

Academics from the School of Computer Science and School of Psychological Sciences have developed a virtual reality system, which gives the illusion that a person’s amputated limb is still there.
The computer system created by Dr Stephen Pettifer and Toby Howard of the School of Computer Science, immerses patients into a life-size virtual reality world.
By putting [...]

Every so often, a site arises from the ashes of the Internet that just defies description. Today’s site is just such a site. At first glance I thought is was a new age religious site. Then I thought it might be about the ace of office support, Bob from Accountemps. Now I’m just not too [...]

Social policy makers and town planners will soon be able to play ‘SimCity’ for real using grid computing and e-Science techniques to test the consequences of their policies on a real, but anonymous, model of the UK population. Dr Mark Birkin and colleagues, who are developing the model at the University of Leeds, will be [...]

Almost half of Canadians and even more Americans say they find new laws aimed at protecting national security post 9/11 intrusive.
That’s just one of the wide-ranging findings of a survey on the surveillance and privacy attitudes and experiences of 9,000 people in eight countries initiated by the Queen’s University-based Surveillance Project. The multi-disciplinary group is [...]