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Where Have You Gone, Bell Labs? - BusinessWeek

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 09:27:50 -0700

from the page: "Name an industry that can produce 1 million new, high-paying jobs over the next three years. You can't, because there isn't one. And that's the problem.

America needs good jobs, soon. We need 6.7 million just to replace losses from the current recession, then another 10 million to spark demand over the next decade. That's 15 million to 17 million new jobs. In the 1990s, the U.S. economy created a net 22 million jobs (a rate of 2.2 million per year), so we know it can be done. Between 2000 and the end of 2007 (the beginning of the current recession), however, the economy created new jobs at a rate of 900,000 a year, so we know it isn't doing it now. The pipeline is dry because the U.S. business model is broken. Our growth engine has run out of a key source of fuel--critical mass, basic scientific research.

The U.S. scientific innovation infrastructure has historically consisted of a loose public-private partnership that included legendary institutions such as Bell Labs, RCA Labs, Xerox PARC XRX, the research operations of IBM IBM, DARPA, NASA, and others. In each of these organizations, programs with clear commercial potential were supported alongside efforts at "pure" research, with the two streams often feeding one another. With abundant corporate and venture-capital funding for eventual commercialization, these research labs have made enormous contributions to science, technology, and the economy, including the creation of millions of high-paying jobs"

Robots to get their own operating system - tech - 10 August 2009 - New Scientist

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 09:13:20 -0700

from the page: "Roboticists have begun to think about what robots have in common and what aspects of their construction can be standardised, hopefully resulting in a basic operating system everyone can use. This would let roboticists focus their attention on taking the technology forward."

The Laboratorium: The AP Will Sell You a "License" to Words It Doesnt Own

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 18:41:19 -0700

from the page: "The Associated Press has become so deranged, so disconnected from reality, that it will sell you a "license" to quote words it didn't write and doesn't own."

Researchers: Conficker Still an Active Threat - InternetNews.com

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 10:33:46 -0700

from the page: "The dreaded Conficker botnet may have been an April Fools Day bust, but months later it is still an active threat according to security researchers. At the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at security firm F-Secure, told attendees why Conficker represents an unprecedented threat."

A short history of btrfs [LWN.net]

Sat, 01 Aug 2009 19:21:15 -0700

from the page: "You probably have heard of the cool new kid on the file system block, btrfs (pronounced "butter-eff-ess") - after all, Linus Torvalds is using it as his root file system on one of his laptops. But you might not know much about it beyond a few high-level keywords - copy-on-write, checksums, writable snapshots - and a few sensational rumors and stories - the Phoronix benchmarks, btrfs is a ZFS ripoff, btrfs is a secret plan for Oracle domination of Linux, etc. When it comes to file systems, it's hard to tell truth from rumor from vile slander: the code is so complex, the personalities are so exaggerated, and the users are so angry when they lose their data. You can't even settle things with a battle of the benchmarks: file system workloads vary so wildly that you can make a plausible argument for why any benchmark is either totally irrelevant or crucially important. "

Microsoft opened Linux-driver code after violating GPL • The Register

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 08:40:25 -0700

from the page: "Microsoft was in violation of the GPL (General Public License) on the Hyper-V code it released to open source this week.

After Redmond covered itself in glory by opening up the code, it now looks like it may have acted simply to head off any potentially embarrassing legal dispute over violation of the GPL. The rest was theater."

Op-Ed Contributor - Lost in the Cloud - NYTimes.com

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 23:07:07 -0700

from the page: "Many people consider this development to be as sensible and inevitable as the move from answering machines to voicemail.

The cloud, however, comes with real dangers.

The most difficult challenge -- both to grasp and to solve -- of the cloud is its effect on our freedom to innovate. The crucial legacy of the personal computer is that anyone can write code for it and give or sell that code to you -- and the vendors of the PC and its operating system have no more to say about it than your phone company does about which answering machine you decide to buy.

These [novel applications] tend to be produced by tinkerers and hackers. Instant messaging, peer-to-peer file sharing and the Web itself all exist thanks to people out in left field, often writing for fun rather than money, who are able to tempt the rest of us to try out what they've done.

This freedom is at risk in the cloud, where the vendor of a platform has much more control over whether and how to let others write new software."

Memristor minds: The future of artificial intelligence - 01 July 2009 - New Scientist

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 06:27:36 -0700

from the page: "In 1971, Leon Chua had that feeling. A young electronics engineer with a penchant for mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, he was fascinated by the fact that electronics had no rigorous mathematical foundation. So like any diligent scientist, he set about trying to derive one.

And he found something missing: a fourth basic circuit element besides the standard trio of resistor, capacitor and inductor. Chua dubbed it the 'memristor'. The only problem was that as far as Chua or anyone else could see, memristors did not actually exist.

Except that they do. Within the past couple of years, memristors have morphed from obscure jargon into one of the hottest properties in physics. They've not only been made, but their unique capabilities might revolutionise consumer electronics. More than that, though, along with completing the jigsaw of electronics, they might solve the puzzle of how nature makes that most delicate and powerful of computers - the brain."

AI-powered customer support robots bring human touch to virtual world - AI, MyCyberTwin, NAB, NASA - CIO

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 08:53:08 -0700

from the page: "Fusing human psychology with an advanced artificial intelligence engine, MyCyberTwin's virtual humans are being used by organisations like NASA and National Australia Bank to improve their customer support levels."

Conveying the 3D Shape of Smoothly Curving Transparent Surfaces via Texture - IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics paper

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 05:50:55 -0700

from the page: "Transparency can be a useful device for depicting multiple overlapping surfaces in a single image. The challenge is to render the transparent surfaces in such a way that their three-dimensional shape can be readily understood and their depth distance from underlying structures clearly perceived."