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walktalker · 12-11-01, 04:33 PM

It's All Arabic-English to Him
Ask most people what they think of free Internet translation services, and their first associations are of bizarre sentence structures and amusing syntactic snafus. But where others see garbled grammar, Fahad Al Sharekh sees a new era of global communication As chief executive of Arabic and English portal site Ajeeb.com, Al Sharekh believes that the error-prone technology known as machine translation has played a key part in speeding the exchange of information between the English-speaking world and the Middle East.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,48260,00.html

A Bot Can Teach a Lot
Building vicious, 100-pound robots may seem like a dangerous pastime to some, but it's proved to be an excellent science and math-teaching tool. At last week's BattleBots tournament, 400 robots bumped, pounded, sawed, charged and hammered each other in an attempt to destroy the competition. Among the experienced engineers and garage monkeys competing were students who designed and built their own radio-controlled fighting bots.
http://www.wired.com/news/school/0,1383,48232,00.html

Robots: It's an Art Thing
Eighty years after they were first introduced to the world, robots and humans now exist side by side. The symbiotic relationship between the two has inspired a new generation of art -- and scientific research -- that examines where people end and machines begin. As technology continues to permeate life, artistic inspiration has started to come from strange places. Ian Wilmut, the scientist who cloned the lamb Dolly at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, Scotland, inspired San Francisco filmmaker Jeremy Solterbeck's short Moving Illustrations of Machines.
http://www.wired.com/news/gizmos/0,1452,48253,00.html

Robots That Repair Roads
For a highway maintenance worker, sealing cracks along the freeway is a lot like walking a tightrope without a net. Introduce a drunk driver or a flying chunk of debris, and a workaday job becomes a fatality statistic. A robot, on the other hand, knows no fear and works tirelessly and quickly: A day's worth of sealing cracks in the road can be finished in an hour. The Advanced Highway Maintenance and Construction Technology Research Center at the University of California in Davis is trying to identify the most dangerous and dreaded jobs on the road and build machines capable of doing them automatically.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,48196,00.html

Gates to Comdex: PCs Work Poorly
Bill Gates admitted it: PCs don't work very well. And he promised to fix things, although it will take him a decade. Opening the largest U.S. computer trade show, Comdex, Microsoft's chairman predicted that technology would eventually come together well enough to fade into the background and let users focus on what they want to do. The economy would feel a boost as a result, he said. Despite widespread mixed feelings within the industry in the wake of Sept. 11, Gates optimistically predicted that technology would roar ahead in the next decade. He said it would jack up productivity in what he called a "digital decade," although he voiced fears that shortcomings could allow the technology to be turned against those it was intended to serve.
http://www.wired.com/news/exec/0,1370,48323,00.html

Where the Dot-Dead Wind Up
While bankrupt Internet retailers shrivel up and die, the stuff they once sold is showing a surprising knack for sticking around online. Increasingly, it's turning up in other corners of the Web, where former rivals and bargain shops hawk the excess toys, computers and sports gear of the dot-com departed. Their ambition: to survive yet another holiday season. The only way to do it is to buy dirt-cheap," said Patrick Byrne, CEO of Overstock.com, which buys and resells excess inventory from Internet and offline business. So far, the company has purchased the wares of a number of failed dot-coms over the past couple of years, including Gear.com, jewelry sites Miadora.com and Jewelry.com, and furniture retailer GoodHome.com. It makes money by buying large quantities of inventory at cut-rate prices and passing on a portion of the discount to customers.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,48189,00.html

Pirate-proof pop goes public
Music makers are stepping up attempts to stamp out piracy with the public release of CDs that cannot be played on computers. Natalie Imbruglia's latest album is the first to go on general release with a copy-protection system built in. Commentators say that soon many more CDs employ similar anti-pirate technologies. Before now, such systems have been added in a piecemeal fashion to a limited number of releases in different countries. Critics say record companies should do more to tell consumers about the copy-protection systems used, and warn that many devices other than PCs will also have problems playing the discs.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci...00/1651544.stm

The End of the Net
Is the internet’s great run of innovation over? Lawrence Lessig, Stanford University Law School professor and a cyberlaw pioneer, thinks so. In “The Future of Ideas” he warns that the Net is in danger of being controlled by special interests who will not only take our dollars but limit our speech and our ability to produce creative works. He shared these fears with Steven Levy in New York last week.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/655756.asp?cp1=1

MS promotes Linux from threat to 'the' threat

"Linux is the long-term threat against our core business. Never forget that!" Microsoft Windows Division Veep Brian Valentine exclaims in a confidential memo to his Sales Brownshirts obtained by The Register. The core outrage from Valentine's perspective is all these Sun and IBM shops migrating in droves to the cheaper Intel platform, and observing along the way that Linux is a good deal easier to deal with if you're already acquainted with UNIX. Funny that. Kinda the key idea behind Linux, but we digress.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/22770.html

Brain scans can reveal liars
Brain scans can reveal whether someone is lying or telling the truth, US researchers have discovered. When people lied, fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scans revealed significant increases in activity in several brain regions. Daniel Langleben and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania hope fMRI could be used for more accurate forensic lie detection. The widely used polygraph test is based on changes in heart rate, blood pressure, breathing and the electrical resistance of the skin. But these factors can vary widely among individuals, making it more difficult to establish whether someone really is telling the truth.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991543

3 Bay Area companies developing drug-discovery microchips
Forget old notions of scientists pouring liquids from flasks into test tubes. In the wake of the Human Genome Program, the modern biology lab has become a factory designed to mix millions of potential drugs with thousands of newly discovered genes, in the hopes of finding a reaction that might lead to a cure. As part of this lab automation trend, several Bay Area biotech firms have created an almost magical technology called the microfluidic chip.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...2/BU199012.DTL

English No Longer Rules The Web
For the first time in the history of the World Wide Web, native English speakers are no longer the dominant demographic group on the Internet, thanks to a surge of more than 100 million new Internet users in 2001, a report released today found. The third annual "State of the Internet Report," produced jointly by the U.S. Internet Council and International Technology & Trade Associates Inc., (ITTA) found the new users – mainly from the South Pacific region – helped shrink the share of native English speakers online to roughly 45 percent of the estimated total of 500 million Web users.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/172088.html

Companies Prepare Airport Security Technology
Imagine this scenario: Upon arrival at the airport, you show the ticket agent your government-issued identification card, place your thumb in a fingerprint reader to verify your identity, and it gets checked against a database of known terrorists. Once cleared, you’re given a smart card containing, in encrypted form, flight information and your biometrics scan. The security team at the departure gate will use that card to match you against a second fingerprint reading taken just before boarding.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/172079.html

Feds Go Online To Spread Message To Muslim States
The U.S. State Department has beefed up its Internet outreach efforts in a bid to garner broader support - particularly in predominantly Muslim countries - for the war against terrorism and Afghanistan's Taliban regime. Through a clutch of government-run Web sites intended for use by foreign media, the State Department makes the case for the military efforts against the Taliban, Osama Bin Laden and the Al Qaeda terrorist network. State Department Spokesman Richard Boucher today told reporters that the Web sites are an important weapon in the battle to portray U.S. foreign policy in a positive light.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/172054.html

Online Holiday Sales To Jump 40% In Canada
Canadian Internet users could boost online sales as much as 40 percent this holiday season, according to the results of a survey released today by market research firm Pollara Inc. The survey, polling 1,600 adults by phone over the past week, found that 14 percent of Canadian Internet users expected to shop online this holiday season, up from the 10 percent counted in a similar survey last year. Toronto-based Pollara said that, on average, the online shoppers were expecting to spend $470 Canadian ($294 U.S.) each this year.
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/172053.html

More news later on

12-11-01, 04:33 PM	#2
walktalker The local newspaper man Join Date: Aug 2000 Location: Montreal Posts: 2,036	It's All Arabic-English to Him Ask most people what they think of free Internet translation services, and their first associations are of bizarre sentence structures and amusing syntactic snafus. But where others see garbled grammar, Fahad Al Sharekh sees a new era of global communication As chief executive of Arabic and English portal site Ajeeb.com, Al Sharekh believes that the error-prone technology known as machine translation has played a key part in speeding the exchange of information between the English-speaking world and the Middle East. http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,48260,00.html A Bot Can Teach a Lot Building vicious, 100-pound robots may seem like a dangerous pastime to some, but it's proved to be an excellent science and math-teaching tool. At last week's BattleBots tournament, 400 robots bumped, pounded, sawed, charged and hammered each other in an attempt to destroy the competition. Among the experienced engineers and garage monkeys competing were students who designed and built their own radio-controlled fighting bots. http://www.wired.com/news/school/0,1383,48232,00.html Robots: It's an Art Thing Eighty years after they were first introduced to the world, robots and humans now exist side by side. The symbiotic relationship between the two has inspired a new generation of art -- and scientific research -- that examines where people end and machines begin. As technology continues to permeate life, artistic inspiration has started to come from strange places. Ian Wilmut, the scientist who cloned the lamb Dolly at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, Scotland, inspired San Francisco filmmaker Jeremy Solterbeck's short Moving Illustrations of Machines. http://www.wired.com/news/gizmos/0,1452,48253,00.html Robots That Repair Roads For a highway maintenance worker, sealing cracks along the freeway is a lot like walking a tightrope without a net. Introduce a drunk driver or a flying chunk of debris, and a workaday job becomes a fatality statistic. A robot, on the other hand, knows no fear and works tirelessly and quickly: A day's worth of sealing cracks in the road can be finished in an hour. The Advanced Highway Maintenance and Construction Technology Research Center at the University of California in Davis is trying to identify the most dangerous and dreaded jobs on the road and build machines capable of doing them automatically. http://www.wired.com/news/technology...,48196,00.html Gates to Comdex: PCs Work Poorly Bill Gates admitted it: PCs don't work very well. And he promised to fix things, although it will take him a decade. Opening the largest U.S. computer trade show, Comdex, Microsoft's chairman predicted that technology would eventually come together well enough to fade into the background and let users focus on what they want to do. The economy would feel a boost as a result, he said. Despite widespread mixed feelings within the industry in the wake of Sept. 11, Gates optimistically predicted that technology would roar ahead in the next decade. He said it would jack up productivity in what he called a "digital decade," although he voiced fears that shortcomings could allow the technology to be turned against those it was intended to serve. http://www.wired.com/news/exec/0,1370,48323,00.html Where the Dot-Dead Wind Up While bankrupt Internet retailers shrivel up and die, the stuff they once sold is showing a surprising knack for sticking around online. Increasingly, it's turning up in other corners of the Web, where former rivals and bargain shops hawk the excess toys, computers and sports gear of the dot-com departed. Their ambition: to survive yet another holiday season. The only way to do it is to buy dirt-cheap," said Patrick Byrne, CEO of Overstock.com, which buys and resells excess inventory from Internet and offline business. So far, the company has purchased the wares of a number of failed dot-coms over the past couple of years, including Gear.com, jewelry sites Miadora.com and Jewelry.com, and furniture retailer GoodHome.com. It makes money by buying large quantities of inventory at cut-rate prices and passing on a portion of the discount to customers. http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,48189,00.html Pirate-proof pop goes public Music makers are stepping up attempts to stamp out piracy with the public release of CDs that cannot be played on computers. Natalie Imbruglia's latest album is the first to go on general release with a copy-protection system built in. Commentators say that soon many more CDs employ similar anti-pirate technologies. Before now, such systems have been added in a piecemeal fashion to a limited number of releases in different countries. Critics say record companies should do more to tell consumers about the copy-protection systems used, and warn that many devices other than PCs will also have problems playing the discs. http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci...00/1651544.stm The End of the Net Is the internet’s great run of innovation over? Lawrence Lessig, Stanford University Law School professor and a cyberlaw pioneer, thinks so. In “The Future of Ideas” he warns that the Net is in danger of being controlled by special interests who will not only take our dollars but limit our speech and our ability to produce creative works. He shared these fears with Steven Levy in New York last week. http://www.msnbc.com/news/655756.asp?cp1=1 MS promotes Linux from threat to 'the' threat "Linux is the long-term threat against our core business. Never forget that!" Microsoft Windows Division Veep Brian Valentine exclaims in a confidential memo to his Sales Brownshirts obtained by The Register. The core outrage from Valentine's perspective is all these Sun and IBM shops migrating in droves to the cheaper Intel platform, and observing along the way that Linux is a good deal easier to deal with if you're already acquainted with UNIX. Funny that. Kinda the key idea behind Linux, but we digress. http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/22770.html Brain scans can reveal liars Brain scans can reveal whether someone is lying or telling the truth, US researchers have discovered. When people lied, fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scans revealed significant increases in activity in several brain regions. Daniel Langleben and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania hope fMRI could be used for more accurate forensic lie detection. The widely used polygraph test is based on changes in heart rate, blood pressure, breathing and the electrical resistance of the skin. But these factors can vary widely among individuals, making it more difficult to establish whether someone really is telling the truth. http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991543 3 Bay Area companies developing drug-discovery microchips Forget old notions of scientists pouring liquids from flasks into test tubes. In the wake of the Human Genome Program, the modern biology lab has become a factory designed to mix millions of potential drugs with thousands of newly discovered genes, in the hopes of finding a reaction that might lead to a cure. As part of this lab automation trend, several Bay Area biotech firms have created an almost magical technology called the microfluidic chip. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...2/BU199012.DTL English No Longer Rules The Web For the first time in the history of the World Wide Web, native English speakers are no longer the dominant demographic group on the Internet, thanks to a surge of more than 100 million new Internet users in 2001, a report released today found. The third annual "State of the Internet Report," produced jointly by the U.S. Internet Council and International Technology & Trade Associates Inc., (ITTA) found the new users – mainly from the South Pacific region – helped shrink the share of native English speakers online to roughly 45 percent of the estimated total of 500 million Web users. http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/172088.html Companies Prepare Airport Security Technology Imagine this scenario: Upon arrival at the airport, you show the ticket agent your government-issued identification card, place your thumb in a fingerprint reader to verify your identity, and it gets checked against a database of known terrorists. Once cleared, you’re given a smart card containing, in encrypted form, flight information and your biometrics scan. The security team at the departure gate will use that card to match you against a second fingerprint reading taken just before boarding. http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/172079.html Feds Go Online To Spread Message To Muslim States The U.S. State Department has beefed up its Internet outreach efforts in a bid to garner broader support - particularly in predominantly Muslim countries - for the war against terrorism and Afghanistan's Taliban regime. Through a clutch of government-run Web sites intended for use by foreign media, the State Department makes the case for the military efforts against the Taliban, Osama Bin Laden and the Al Qaeda terrorist network. State Department Spokesman Richard Boucher today told reporters that the Web sites are an important weapon in the battle to portray U.S. foreign policy in a positive light. http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/172054.html Online Holiday Sales To Jump 40% In Canada Canadian Internet users could boost online sales as much as 40 percent this holiday season, according to the results of a survey released today by market research firm Pollara Inc. The survey, polling 1,600 adults by phone over the past week, found that 14 percent of Canadian Internet users expected to shop online this holiday season, up from the 10 percent counted in a similar survey last year. Toronto-based Pollara said that, on average, the online shoppers were expecting to spend $470 Canadian ($294 U.S.) each this year. http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/172053.html More news later on __________________ This post was sponsored by Netcoco, who wants cookies, cookies, cookies and, you guessed it, more cookies