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Well, annoying troll, you didn't look very hard. On their About Us page, you'll learn that Technology Review has been a publication of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1899, and that Technology Review's board of directors consists almost entirely of high-level MIT administration. Also, you might notice that the URL "http://web.mit.edu/techreview" redirects to http://www.technologyreview.com. Don't be so paranoid.

If you look at their staff list, you will notice they have ONE fact checker and 21 people involved in marketing and sales.

I give this article about as much credibility as I gave the last several MIT Technology Review articles posted here on Slashdot. In other words, none.

Here's a non-HTTPs one for those of use who don't trust encryption technology in general, not just electronic voting :-)

http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/wo_garfin kel090303.asp

The MIT Technology Review had an article last year about digital effects in movies. It starts off discussing the movie Castaway with a picture of Tom Hanks climbing rocks by a parking lot, then the same picture with the island background. According to a Sony VP, "Any shot that had ocean or sky in it, was pretty much a special effect."

MIT Technology Review did a nice article on the development of LED replacements for light bulbs in the May 2003 issue. However, you need to be a paid subscriber to read this online.

The article focuses on the often secretive research going on at competing companies to develop a cost-effective white LED, which is needed to replace general illumination. Most white LEDs today are actually UV emitters with a white phosphor, reducing the efficiency. The other standard approach is to have red, green and blue LEDs together with a diffuser.

I recently read an article in MIT's Technology Review discussing something similar. It looks like NASA is working on something similar, and for a similar purpose, although different in implementation. Finally, agriculture is getting into advanced new electronics with great ideas backed by government.

but of course we can't do that - that'd mean doing some (shock! horror!) nuclear power research, and (no! say it ain't so!) building some brand-new designs. clearly it must be much better to keep building those nuke plants just like they did back in the 1950's and 60's, or better yet, don't build any new ones at all - just keep running the ones they built back then, more or less unchanged.

Way cool. One of the arguments that the Big Three automakers have been offering for why they don't make ultra-efficient ICE SUVs is that they require more expensive high voltage electrical systems. That's also one reason (albit a minor one) why gas-electric hybrids are so expensive.

Car manufacturers have said that it is more expensive for them if their product line has to have two different types of electrical systems. If high voltage electrical systems are going to be standard equipment, though, that argument will disappear.

I'd also like to see more funding and research in clockless chips. Technology Review had a decent article a few years ago...

I asked:
"What defines a blog, anyway? "

Tablizer replied:
"How about: If it turns a profit, it is no longer a blog."

Well, there goes CNN.com, Alternet.org, Fair.org, ACLU.org, Kuro5hin, IMDB, the MIT Tech Review and everything on the BBC website.

On the other hand we'll now get authoratative hits from Amazon, Buy.com and Microsoft.

Woot!

Technology Review published an article on related vibrationally-driven sensors which are intended to be used to instrument a building, powered by the small-scale vibrations present in nearly every human-built structure. Cool stuff indeed, made possible because our micromachined silicon technology has advanced to the point where under 100 microwatts is enough to do interesting things.

In mid-2002, researchers at SUNY-Stony Brook synthesized a 7,500-letter long Polio DNA sequence, converted it to RNA, then "combined that RNA with enzymes and other molecules in a test tube, and watched as whole polio viruses assembled spontaneously."

The complicated chemical steps used to synthesize the DNA are error-prone; errors grow linearly with the number of steps "so researchers typically limit fragments to fewer than 80 letters."

The Stony-brook researchers thus took two years.

A company called Egea Biosciences has a prototype machine, the device makes a mistake only once for every 10,000 DNA letters, or bases, a 100-fold improvement over conventional techniques that typically have an error rate of one in 100.

The CEO of that company "says the technology could be extended to yield in a matter of weeks highly accurate strands 100,000 bases in length--long enough to make a very simple bacterial genome."

That's what I got out of the article. And a recognition that there is a loose analogy to semiconductor manufacturing in there. The Venter name is useful mostly for hype as far as I can tell. Actually, setting a vision is really important so I should cut him some slack, but I more appreciated the tech details above which were buried in the middle of the article.

--LP

For any of you that subscribe to MIT's Technology Review, it has a good brief in the current issue about some efforts to use CPU time as a method of thwarting bulk mailers.

To sum up, requiring a cpu intensive calculation to send off email would limit the number of emails that a person could send off per day (a 10 second calculation would limit a spammer to 8k messages per day, but would still be bearable for you and me).

Won't stop the tide, but could help stem it's growth. Would raise the cost for sending spam dramatically. Bulkmail renderfarms anyone?

For any of you that subscribe to MIT's Technology Review, it has a good brief in the current issue about some efforts to use CPU time as a method of thwarting bulk mailers.

To sum up, requiring a cpu intensive calculation to send off email would limit the number of emails that a person could send off per day (a 10 second calculation would limit a spammer to 8k messages per day, but would still be bearable for you and me).

Won't stop the tide, but could help stem it's growth. Would raise the cost for sending spam dramatically. Bulkmail renderfarms anyone?

http://www.orgnet.com/

http://www.anacubis.com/index.html

http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.html

http://www.smartmobs.com/index.html

http://smg.media.mit.edu/projects/SocialNetworkFra gments/

http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue7_4/krebs/

http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/wo_camero n030703.asp

The Article was Probably in MIT's Technology Review.
Link here.
Unfortunatly you only get the first hundred words and half to buy the rest of the article.
MIT is such a whore.

Paul Miller
MIT Student

Actually the heuristics come from much larger and more complex robots, built for the U.S. military as minesweepers (link to review). That's why the Roomba cleans in widening circles, rather than making a internal map of the room or tracing the walls.

MIT's Technology Review covered this in May 2002 in its "Five Patents to Watch"

Over the last 10 to 15 years or so, there has been interest in using carbon based fabrication instead of silicon. I'm not a physicist and my memory could be fuzzy on this, but I think the idea is that Carbon can be induced to assume fairly large molecular configurations other than diamond, graphite and "coal", including "Buckyballs" by Smalley, Curl and Kroto and "Nanotubes". These forms have different electrical conducting properties than the other forms of carbon (in fact they act as semiconductors), permitting very small device size (at the molecular level). Doping is not needed, since the conducting paths are made of the same material (albeit in a different molecular configuration) as the rest of the wafer. For an introductory treatment, try this technology review article.

At MIT Tech Review

Enjoy.

Here is a slightly modified text of an email I sent to the author of the news.com article on AOL's patent on IM.

FYI, with regards to this article, I don't know how strong this patent is because of existing prior art. If you look at this article in MIT's Technology Review, you will see that a form of IM called zephyr with buddy lists as well as chat-room style broadcasts existed since 1988. It would be great if you could also post this information in a future update to let everyone know.

Zephyr exists till today (and we here at Carnegie Mellon as well as students at MIT) use it on a daily basis. Even emacs supports zephyr :)

"HD is a retail shop, not a technology shop. ...As far as the head retailers were concerned, IT was nothing more than a 'cost center.'"

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why Home Depot will never be as big as Wal-Mart. Home Depot thinks of IT as a hole that the company is constantly pouring money into; Wal-Mart relentlessly uses IT to further its goals of getting the lowest cost from suppliers. (The definitive article on Wal-Mart and technology.)

Home Depot will never be a leader in the industry if it continues to view IT as an expense rather than an investment. Your post was an excellent example of how retailers tend to forget that technology, when used properly, can not only form the core of the business, but strengthen existing product lines. Home Depot's executive staff most likely looks at Wal-Mart and ask "How do they do that?" The answer lies in Wal-Mart's aggressive stance on technology adoption.

In fact, Wal-Mart and Home Depot are even compared here, where Wal-Mart's CIO is asked whether or not it will make a difference if competitors use RFID tags. (RFID tags are Wal-Mart's next big frontier.) "The challenge is to keep innovating faster than the competition can copy us," he says.

If what you're saying really is true of Home Depot, expect Wal-Mart to keep swallowing Home Depot's business. Wal-Mart has never labeled itself as "just a retail shop," as you label Home Depot. Home Depot doesn't have the competitive advantage, nor does it sound like they know where to spend to get that advantage. I expect that Wal-mart will remain a leader for some time to come in the retail space. This quote sums up what you're seeing nicely:

"'I think Wal-Mart views technology in a different light than most retailers,' says Peter Abell, retail research director at AMR Research. 'It's not only an integral part of the company, but it's where the leaders of the company can come from.'"

This is the direction in which Home Depot must go in order to become truly successful at lowering costs and increasing productivity. Unfortunately for Home Depot, Wal-Mart is already there, and getting further and further ahead...

The story is very interesting.

Actually, that's not correct. Even the article you link to speaks of Husseing spending a whole bunch of time and money trying to get nukes, but claims he has not succeeded (how they can know, since no inspectors have been near Iraq in four years is left as an exercise for the reader). These sources have more information on the matter, and disagree even on this point:

• A piece on Hussein's atomic program from Richard Muller of LBL
• Richard Sperzel (former head of the UN weapons inspections) to the House

As for delivery systems, a missile is hardly the only way to deliver a WMD. A far bigger risk is that of Mr. Hussein providing such a weapon to al Qaeda, or to his own intelligence services for a more uncoventional delivery.

And yes, if North Korea becomes as much a threat to us as Iraq is, we will deal with it. That doing so will be harder now that they already have nukes is a perfect demonstration of why we must not allow Mr. Hussein to get that far.

MIT's SuperArchive

Grabbe the link off of rootprompt in case any of you care

software that automatically arranges your computer files in chronological order and displays them on your monitor with the most recent files featured prominently in the foreground. Scopeware ... transfers the role of file clerk from you to the computer, seamlessly ordering documents of all sorts into convenient, time-stamped files."

MIT's Technology Review article on the state of high technology in Ghana should be required reading for the original poster, and all those interested in the subject of technology in the third world. The content of the article should give considerable pause to any clueless individual thinking that happily hacking away in their living room is going to substantially impact the living conditions of those living in the third world. While the article points out the immense promise of technology for the third world (one man interviewed had never received a piece of snail mail in his life, but had internet access, and could read news from around the world), that promise largely remains unfulfilled. The author states

Making a telephone call here requires persistence. Roughly half don't go through because of system failures, but that's only the start of Ghana's telephone woes. The country has a mere 240,000 phone lines--for a population of 20 million spread across an area the size of Britain. Moreover, telephone bills are inaccurate, overcharges common, and the installation of a new line can cost a business more than $1,000, the rough equivalent of the annual office rent. Lines are frequently stolen, sometimes with the connivance of employees of Ghana Telecom, the national carrier. Phones go dead, and remain unrepaired, for months. Some businesses hire staff for the chief purpose of dialing numbers until calls go through.

Moreover, even those fortunate enough to have access to the internet find themselves distraught by the knowledge of the incredibly poor conditions in which they must live. One internet cafe owner stated that the majority of users were online in his cafe trying to figure out a way out their country.

The upshot is that much more effort needs to be devoted towards basic infrastructure -- sanitary, transportation, and information -- before an idea like that of the poster's would make much sense.

Bob

For what it's worth, I just received my November edition of MIT's Technology Review in the mail a couple of days ago and there is a short opinion piece detailing the Eldred v. Ashcroft Supreme Court case. The article, by Seth Shulman, is very much against the extension of copyrights. To quote, "Congress stole the public's access ti its own cultural heritage by extending copyright protection to benefit a few big media companies. Fortunately, the public has the Constitution on its side." I hope he's right.

For what it's worth, I just received my November edition of MIT's Technology Review in the mail a couple of days ago and there is a short opinion piece detailing the Eldred v. Ashcroft Supreme Court case. The article, by Seth Shulman, is very much against the extension of copyrights. To quote, "Congress stole the public's access ti its own cultural heritage by extending copyright protection to benefit a few big media companies. Fortunately, the public has the Constitution on its side." I hope he's right.

That page has far too many ads.

Click here to read it without the annoying ads, but with all the pictures!

It's hard enough to take his comments about a tyrant producing the best design, but to say that better design could not have at least delayed the collapse of the towers, allowing hundreds more to escape is plain wrong.

Better fireproofing on the steel beams, or even if the rumours are true, absestos fireproofing above the 64th floor could have prevented many deaths.

Slashdot covered clockless chips briefly a few months ago. Why do they make sense? To learn why, let's compare computers to real life industry.

In the 1800s, industry was limited to a few very large factories and workplaces. Over time, these factories became bigger and bigger and faster and faster, until eventually it became impractical to make everything in one place. So.. things were decentralized. Now when your car is built, the raw materials come from Brazil, the parts are made in Taiwan, then the cars are built in America.

Processors are headed the same way. Things are becoming decentralized, and the load on the processor should, therefore, go down. The giant leaps and bounds with video cards have actually caused CPUs to have less work to do. No longer do CPUs have to do nasty 3D calculations.. the video cards do it!

Clockless chips work very well in decentralized situations, since they operate based on incoming data, rather than to a clock. This means thousands of non-standard components can work together to produce the same result as one CPU.

Even -car- engines are becoming decentralized now with specialist automatic gearboxes, electric backup motors, and psuedo-petrol engines in the Prius and Insight. With processors it makes even more sense.

References:

Business 2.0 article on Clockless Computing

Economist article on Asynchronous/Clockless chips.

Shulman wrote an article about this in a recent Tech Review. You can read part of it at http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/shulman10 902.asp. (It's premium content so you need to be a subscriber to read the whole thing.) Good stuff.

It makes you wonder if technology like the Tesla Turbine, and the technology behind the air powered car could be combined to create something much more efficient...

Oh boy! Who needs content when you can have wall-to-wall advertisements?

There was a recent article tthat suggested that product placement could be a means of getting the content cabal to give up their hard stance on PVR's, or conversely, cause a degradation in content quality.

Oh well, at least it will be better than putting ads in music.

WIND POWER IS EXPENSIVE!!! It doesn't cost much to use, but it does cost a ton to build initially, check out this article

So why was my previous comment a troll? Is it a troll because I don't want to pay higher costs for power? Is it a troll because I'm not ranting and raving about wind power????

Last time I checked, you shouldn't moderate something as a troll just because you don't agree

The Technology Review recently ran an article on wind power. It's an interesting read:

http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/fairley07 02.asp?p=0

Chris "Monty" Montgomery the mastermind behind Ogg Vorbis and cdparanoia.

A good recent example is the story in the MIT Technology Review magazine about the history of Glenn Curtiss and his role in the development of aviation. In the article, the writer describes the bitter patent battle between Curtiss and the Wright Brothers -- and makes very clear that the Wrights attempted to abuse the patent system to advance their own interests instead of advancing Progress in the Useful Arts. This was in the first decade of the 1900s! Curtiss, on the other hand, made a point of always making his ideas (though not necessarily their specific implementations), including those on which he held patents, available to everyone as a matter of principle. The article strongly suggests that aviation in general would have been significantly hindered if the Wrights had ultimately prevailed (they didn't).

The excerpt on the web site doesn't contain the passages to which I alluded, so you will either have to purchase a reprint or find someone who has a copy. But it's definitely worth a look in advance of your meeting.

-FB

A good recent example is the story in the MIT Technology Review magazine about the history of Glenn Curtiss and his role in the development of aviation. In the article, the writer describes the bitter patent battle between Curtiss and the Wright Brothers -- and makes very clear that the Wrights attempted to abuse the patent system to advance their own interests instead of advancing Progress in the Useful Arts. This was in the first decade of the 1900s! Curtiss, on the other hand, made a point of always making his ideas (though not necessarily their specific implementations), including those on which he held patents, available to everyone as a matter of principle. The article strongly suggests that aviation in general would have been significantly hindered if the Wrights had ultimately prevailed (they didn't).

The excerpt on the web site doesn't contain the passages to which I alluded, so you will either have to purchase a reprint or find someone who has a copy. But it's definitely worth a look in advance of your meeting.

-FB

As an MIT alumnus, I am very disappointed by what I perceive as MIT's tendency towards acting in ways that I consider as lacking in scientific integrity. Stealing that comic book picture is a small example. A much more important example deals with the Ballistic Missile Defense Program, which, as presently being pursued, will be totally ineffective, and will cost the US taxpayer 60 billion dollars. Ted Postol has shown this ineffectiveness using solid scientific studies to argue his point, but MIT has not stood behind him, because they stand to loose too much money if they do: MIT's idolatry of the all mighty buck, truth be damned if it gets in the way of money. Ted Postol has also helped expose a case of fraud, in which TRW claimed that a test had been successful, even though its data was collected with an infrared detector that was way warmer than its requisite operating temperature, and was therefore only measuring noise. MIT wrote a ludicrous study exonerating TRW. Read all about it here

This was in the current of M.I.T. Technology Review. Just a quick little blurb you can read at their site. But the online version of the article contains a slick, interactive animation of how typing with this thing would actually work.

It makes me wonder if this device could improved greatly by making it fit on both hands and having some of the typing motions be alot less awkward and quicker? :)

This was in the current of M.I.T. Technology Review. Just a quick little blurb you can read at their site. But the online version of the article contains a slick, interactive animation of how typing with this thing would actually work.

It makes me wonder if this device could improved greatly by making it fit on both hands and having some of the typing motions be alot less awkward and quicker? :)

We're the next group to advance CS/E. We've got to adopt these folks as our mentors and learn all we can from them.

Not just _how_ their stuff works, but _why_ they did it. Fundamental practices 30 years ago are as fundamental today as they were then.

True. But we must also learn why their stuff did not work. Dijkstra learned why the old stuff did not work and changed it. The truth is that we are in a middle of a software reliability and productivity crisis.

Dijkstra did us all a favor by eliminating the cancer of spaghetti code from algorithmic software. Now we need to look further. Are there any more cancerous tumors in software engineering that need to be cut out? I think so.

I think the biggest and nastiest cancer of them all is the practice of basing software construction on the algorithm. We need to abandon our algorithmic past and embrace a signal-based, reactive software paradigm. It took decades before Dijkstra's contributions became widely adopted. I hope we do not repeat the same mistake.

Project COSA

http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/wo_muller 071202.asp

Take a read. The government can do what it wants, but chances are, it won't work.

What I'm mainly complaining about is that, right now, the .com domain is in a legal limbo state. What that should mean is that only the laws that apply everywhere are enforced; instead, that means that all laws are enforced.

If there was a clearer geopolitical boundary on the Internet, that would mean sites would actually have to deal with less regulation; they would only have to obey the laws of the one country they register with, and not have to worry about foreign users accessing their site. France's Nazi-auction trial would have been moot, because yahoo.co.us would only have to follow American laws.

The robots described in this article don't seem to be true robots either. Their remote control is much more sophisticated than their WW2 German ancestors, they still lack autonomy.

In addition, the modern military has been using flying robots extensivly: UAVs (Unmanned Air Vehicles) that were first used by the Israelis, have been in the US arsenal for decades and have seen action since the Gulf War.

This is exactly right. Changing the underlying data representation is the first step to enabling truly new GUIs. As Gelernter says, it simply doesn't make sense to use a 1960's era data model (the hierarchical file system) on 2002 hardware.

Also, while radical approaches like 3DUIs don't make a lot of sense on top of the traditional file/folder storage model, they become much more compelling when the file system becomes a relational database.

And you are absolutely correct that Microsoft is pursuing this opportunity with a vengeance. By battling for the "Windows desktop", most Linux UI developers are fighting yesterday's battle. Instead, they should be looking forward and trying to beat Microsoft to a truly next-generation environment.

...to the conservation bomb.

The entire site makes me sick. The MIT Technology Review staff is composed of 20 peole who do advertising and one person who does fact checking. It's no surprise their home page brings up a pop-up ad. Of the ten people on their board of directors, only one seems to have any knowledge of technology. That one, Jerome Friedman, is not listed on their staff.

Their CEO appears to be a money-grubbing sell out.

During his stewardship, circulation has tripled, revenues have increased tenfold

He used to work as a manager at both Time and Fortune. It clearly shows!

It is obvious that the author never read the book he is talking about. Seeing as their lone fact checker missed this crucial fact, I have to wonder if anything in that article (or the entire site for that matter) is correct.

What the heck are the letters 'MIT' supposed to mean?

The entire site makes me sick. The MIT Technology Review staff is composed of 20 peole who do advertising and one person who does fact checking. It's no surprise their home page brings up a pop-up ad. Of the ten people on their board of directors, only one seems to have any knowledge of technology. That one, Jerome Friedman, is not listed on their staff.

Their CEO appears to be a money-grubbing sell out.

During his stewardship, circulation has tripled, revenues have increased tenfold

He used to work as a manager at both Time and Fortune. It clearly shows!

It is obvious that the author never read the book he is talking about. Seeing as their lone fact checker missed this crucial fact, I have to wonder if anything in that article (or the entire site for that matter) is correct.

What the heck are the letters 'MIT' supposed to mean?