#ALGORITHMS: "Gig.U to Extend LAN Speed Among Schools"

Universities nationwide are banding together to extend the gigabit per second speeds typical of modern local-area networks to long-distance connections among signatory educational institutions. Many modern PCs offer gigabit per second local-area network speeds to those willing to upgrade their switches and cables from the 10/100 megabits per second, which most people get by with on their LANs. Gig.U, on the other hand, plans to promote gigabit per second
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#3D: "Smarter 3D Employs Eye Tracking"

LG claims to have solved the problems with glasses-free 3D displays with a smarter eye-tracking technology that adapts to the viewing angle of the user. Available this fall in a 20-inch monitor, the smarter 3D solution eliminates the need for glasses and is compatible with normal 2D imagery. Glasses-free 3D displays, called auto-stereoscopic displays, have in the past depended on lenticular lenses that fit over displays to divert separate images to the right and left eyes. Unfortunately, lenticular lenses scramble regular 2D images. Parallax barriers are an alternative to lenticular lenses, but they do not provide a wide variety of viewing angles. LG has solved this last remaining problem with smarter eye-tracking technology that adapts the parallax barrier as the viewer's head moves.
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#ALGORITHMS: "Seven Reasons HTML5 Is Killing Flash"

Seven inherent features in HTML5 are eliminating the need for Adobe Flash as well as enabling Websites to add capabilities that rival native applications. The fifth generation of the hypertext markup language--HTML5--is adding capabilities once reserved for plug-ins and native applications. Test your browser's HTML5 compatibility by visiting The HTML5 Test site. Today, more than 109 million mobile users have HTML5-ready browsers, but by 2016, more than 2.1 billion mobile users will be compatible, according to ABI Research. There remain significant details to work out, which could delay the final specification until as late as 2020. However, long before then, HTML5 features will be available that virtually obsolete Flash, as well as enable normal Website developers to create universal applications that run on any platform.
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#ENERGY: "U.S. Renewables Outpace Nuclear Power"

The U.S. Energy Information Administration reports that renewable energy sources in total have surpassed nuclear power, and are likely to widen the gap unless new nuclear plants are built.
U.S production of energy from renewable sources recently passed that from nuclear reactors despite administration efforts to revitalize U.S. nuclear power generation with federal loan guarantees for constructing new nuclear reactors.
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#ALGORITHMS: "Client-Based Virtualization Gains Momentum"

Server-hosted virtualization is the poster-child of cloud computing where thin clients share a single IT-managed image. However, client-hosted virtualization is gaining momentum by claiming to offer IT cost savings, simpler centralized management, plus an enriched user experience comparable to stand-alone PCs.
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#ROBOTICS: "Smarter Robots to Inspect Aging Nukes"

With valves and pipes being allowed to leak up to 20 times their original limits by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), according to a recent Associated Press report, smarter robotic inspectors are being proposed to detect underground leaks before they release radiation into groundwater.
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#ALGORITHMS: "Five Reasons IaaS Will Top $4 Billion by 2015"

Infrastructure as a service is one of the fastest growing paradigms in the portfolio of cloud-based services. Here are the five reasons why IaaS is set to grow to become a $4 billion market by 2015.
Just as software as a service shifted software from being an enterprise asset that is licensed to being a service that is provided, and platform as a service shifted software development and hosting capabilities for specific computer architectures from being an asset purchased en masse to being a service provided on demand, infrastructure as a service allows all enterprise hardware architectures to be virtualized, including processors, storage, firewalls and other network resources.
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#BUSINESS; "Women Leaders Take Heart: Times Are Changing"

More androgynous and transformational views of leadership are opening opportunities for women in management, despite the persistent cultural perception that masculinity is required for strong leadership.
Although strong leadership continues to be perceived as an overtly masculine character trait, progress is being made toward a more androgynous view, especially for middle managers. In addition, a transformational leadership style, which offers mentoring and gender-neutral rewards as incentives, may enable women to sidestep stereotypical prejudice, according to a new study by researchers at Northwestern University.
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#ALGORITHMS: "Visualization Analytics Writ Large"

An 80 foot wide visualization display simultaneously tracks data streams from thousands of sensors to provide the real-time analytics necessary to balance a statewide electric grid, with telecommunications the next challenge. In what it terms a breakthrough combination of stream computing and analytics, Space-Time Insight today announced the installation of a record-breaking 80-foot wide wall-of-visualizations designed to give operators of one of the world's largest electric grids a real-time readout that pinpoints "hotspots" using what it calls "geospatial memory."
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#SECURITY: "Did WWIII Already Start?"

Last week the Pentagon detailed the most serious cyber-attack on U.S. national security to date. Was WWIII just declared? Intruders crossed the line in March by stealing over 24,000 classified design documents from a government contractor, according to Pentagon disclosures last week. This promoted the U.S. Cyber Command to go on the offensive.
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#CHIPS: "Ferroelectrics fabbed on plastic"

Ferroelectric memories, energy harvesting arrays, sensors and actuators could soon be fabricated on plastic substrates, according to researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, who recently demonstrated a new low-temperature process using an atomic-force microscope (AFM).

Georgia Tech postdoctoral fellow Suenne Kim (left) holds a sample of flexible polyimide substrate holding ferroelectric nanostructures, produced in the lab of professor Nazanin Bassiri-Gharb (center) while graduate assistant Yaser Bastani observes. (Credit: Gary Meek)
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#ENERGY: "Car Battery in a Bottle"

A radically new approach to the design of batteries, developed by researchers at MIT, could provide a lightweight and inexpensive alternative to existing batteries for electric vehicles and the power grid. The technology could even make “refueling” such batteries as quick and easy as pumping gas into a conventional car.
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#ALGORITHMS: "Smarter AIs Read the Manual"

MIT's AI read the manual to learn how to play "Civilization" game.
Artificial intelligence has made great strides in solving particular problems, such as IBM's Watson, which learned to beat humans at the game Jeopardy. Unfortunately, dozens of human experts needed to read and digest rules of the game in order to code them into algorithms. Now a group at MIT wants to change the hand coding of algorithms by allowing an AI to read and digest the rules all by itself.
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#WIRELESS: "Smart Monitors Benefit from RF Energy Harvesting"

Radio-frequency energy from television, AM, FM, cellular, WiFi, WiMax, Long-Term Evolution and more can now be harvested to power smarter electronic devices for security, environmental sensing, structural monitoring (bridges/buildings), food spoilage and wearable bio-monitoring devices. Much has been made of the radio-frequency waves saturating every cubic inch of air in developed nations, and especially in metropolitan centers where television, AM, FM, cellular, WiFi, WiMax, Long-Term Evolution and scientific/medical sub-bands compete. One research group at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta), however, sees RF saturation not as a potential health problem, but as an opportunity to scavenge power directly from the air.
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#ALGORITHMS: "Apple Spin-Off Hosts Enterprise App Stores"

Since Apple announced its over-the-air protocol last year, enterprises from Cisco to Procter & Gamble have quietly opened their own private-label app stores, with the help of behind-the-scenes Apple spin-off Apperian.
Apple's over-the-air protocol enables any enterprise to bypass iTunes and create its own private-label application store, with complete IT control of provisioning, with Apple spin-off Apperian Inc. providing the necessary cloud-based hosting services.
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#ROBOTICS: "Robots get Kinect's 'eyes and ears'"

Microsoft Robotics has been giving away its free Robotics Developer Studio, complete with a 3D simulator, for the last six years, but without gaining much visibility. Microsoft, however, is convinced that will change Wednesday (July 13th) when the company launches added services that allow users to plug the Kinect hands-free hardware--intended for gesture control of its Xbox gaming console--directly into any robot.
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#ALGORITHMS: "Desktop Virtualization Growing to $5B by 2016"

Virtualization will seep into every aspect of business computing over the next five years, growing tenfold as recession cost-cutting fades and mobilization of the workforces increase. Virtualizationwas perceived as useful, but expensive during the cost-cutting era before the recessionbegan to fade circa 2009, when just $500 million was invested in it. During therecession, it was still cheaper to tether workers to their desks and force themto work with inexpensive generic PCs. Now, however, businesses are jumping onthe visualization bandwagon not only to unshackle workers from their desktopPCs, but also to sidestep the security risks of mobile devices overapplications customized by IT for thin clients, tablets and smartphones.
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#CHIPS: "Freescale processors gain on-chip e-reader"

Earlier this year, Freescale Semiconductor Inc. announced the first line of processors designed to power sub-$99 e-readers. Now it has extended that line downward with integrated E-Ink driver circuitry for low-end devices from medical and home/office automation to watches whose face is an electronic paper display (EPD).
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#ALGORITHMS: "Eight Touch-Screen Gestures That Increase Comprehension"

In the age of information overload, business agility requires optimal knowledge-acquisition techniques that psychologists call "active learning." These eight touch-screen gestures optimize active-learning techniques for electronic media and will be available in an app this fall The Georgia Institute of Technology has modernized traditional active-learning techniques for touch-screens by crafting a set of gestures for electronic media--including highlighting, commenting, extracting, collapsing, magnifying, linking, outlining and bookmarking.
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#ALGORITHMS: "CIOs Say Business Analytics Is Driving Growth"

A CIO survey reveals that harnessing business intelligence and analytics is by far the CIO's top priority for increasing competitiveness over the next three to five years. IBM surveys have polled the opinions of 13,000 CIOs worldwide over the last six years, revealing in their latest study that business analytics remains the top priority in enhancing the competitiveness of their enterprises.




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#CHIPS: "Smarter Phase Change Memory Beats Flash"

Using a variety of solid-state memory technologies, IBM Research recently demonstrated a flash substitute that is 100 times faster and will last 3,000 times longer than the flash memory, which has replaced hard disks in everything from smartphones and touch-screen tablets to high-end enterprise servers and cloud-based data centers. Solid-state flash memory has largely replaced mechanical hard disks in mobile devices and even in high-performance server farms such as those at Answer.com, but now IBM has demonstrated a new, faster alternative to flash that lasts longer and can store four times as much information per bit-cell.
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