Tech Innovations Fuel Low-Cost Laptop

PC World Story: "How do you make a laptop that can tolerate sandstorms and monsoons, run on a car battery, and cost just $150? That was the challenge facing One Laptop per Child, a nonprofit group founded by MIT Media Lab veterans to get youngsters in developing nations online.

OLPC's XO notebook PC attains its ultralow price through a combination of innovative technology (such as its dual-mode LCD) and old-fashioned streamlining (it doesn't have a hard drive, and it uses a Linux-based operating system)."

An interesting challenge for CS students -- develop software for OLPC!

Making Computer Systems Reveal Biological Secrets

Making Computer Systems Reveal Biological Secrets: "Two of the hottest areas of scientific discussion these days are computational science, the intersection between computer science and other sciences, and systems biology, the effort to decipher the code of the human genome.

Andrew Phillips gets to work in both.

Phillips, a scientist who works for Microsoft Research Cambridge, is working with stochastic pi-calculus, a programming language particularly applicable to biological systems.

“There’s been a lot of research in computer science on programming-language theory,” Phillips says, “and a lot of that can be applied to biological modeling.”

The stakes are large. The products of that modeling could provide insights into how biological systems work, and those insights could help in understanding and curing diseases."

Mathematicians Team Up with Supercomputer to Crack 248-Dimensional Object

Scientific American: "A monstrous computer-based calculation has rekindled researchers' hopes of solving a longstanding problem in mathematics. In a style of collaboration more commonly associated with sequencing genomes, a team of 18 mathematicians and computer scientists has mapped an extremely complex object known as the E8 group.

The calculation is only a stepping stone, but an important one, researchers say, in a larger project to uncover subtle ways in which different equations or geometric shapes can be seen as facets of the same underlying thing—an insight that has led to some of the century's biggest discoveries in particle physics and may play a role in future theories. The result also highlights the growing trend of using computers to crack tough math problems."

"This is the latest case in which mathematicians have relied on computers to solve thorny problems. In 2005 the Annals of Mathematics published a computer-aided proof of Kepler's conjecture (about the most efficient way to stack spheres) after reviewers spent four years checking the code fed into the computer but finally gave up without completing the task."

Colorado Woman Sues To Hold Web Crawlers To Contracts

Information Week Colorado Woman Sues To Hold Web Crawlers To Contracts: "Computers can enter into contracts on behalf of people. The Uniform Electronic Transactions Act (UETA) says that a 'contract may be formed by the interaction of electronic agents of the parties, even if no individual was aware of or reviewed the electronic agents' actions or the resulting terms and agreements.'"

Quite an interesting result -- not the first example of computational agents being accorded a status on par with human agents.

Where are the programmers?

EETimes.com: "'We are at a low point of interest in computer science,' said Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft Research, who pointed to a sharp decline since 2001 in college undergraduates choosing com- puter science as a major. 'Jobs will go begging in the next few years because we don't have the people willing to take on the field.'"

Sociology at Microsoft

Technology Review: "Marc Smith, the senior research sociologist at Microsoft Research, believes that now is a good time to practice his trade. Thanks to the Internet, there is unprecedented access to sociological data. And thanks to computers, sociologists are better able to sift through that data, find trends, and test models."

Walking robot steps up the pace

BBC NEWS "A humanoid robot is teaching itself to walk and eventually run around a California research lab.

Dexter took its first tentative steps only a few days after it first discovered how to stand upright.

Dexter's designers say their robot differs from commercially available predecessors because it can learn from its mistakes."