Slashdot Mirror
Domain: trnmag.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to trnmag.com.
Stories · 36
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Wanted - An Online Publishing Business Model?
Eric Smalley asks: "Wanted: an online publishing business model that falls somewhere between lone weblogger and corporate media behemoth. Technology Research News (TRN) has been publishing original news stories for over five years, but we have yet to find a way to cover our costs. We are fairly popular and well-woven into the fabric of the Web; we have over 200,000 unique visitors per month, we are well represented in Google, Yahoo and MSN search results, and we are regularly slashdotted and pointed to by Wired News, other media sites and countless weblogs. Our overriding goal has been to keep the news free, including our archive. Is there no place for a small, independent media company founded and run by journalists?" "We make money by selling subscriptions to a PDF edition, selling white-paper-like reports through our site and resellers, supplying other media sites with our content through a newswire, selling subscriptions to an off-line electronic edition through a reseller, collecting fees from Lexus Nexis and other online databases, and carrying Google's Adsense advertisements. Most recently we have begun a PBS-like fund drive. That's a lot of revenue streams, but they don't add up to enough. Our costs are modest: two full-time editors, one contributing editor and two part-time staffers." -
Wanted - An Online Publishing Business Model?
Eric Smalley asks: "Wanted: an online publishing business model that falls somewhere between lone weblogger and corporate media behemoth. Technology Research News (TRN) has been publishing original news stories for over five years, but we have yet to find a way to cover our costs. We are fairly popular and well-woven into the fabric of the Web; we have over 200,000 unique visitors per month, we are well represented in Google, Yahoo and MSN search results, and we are regularly slashdotted and pointed to by Wired News, other media sites and countless weblogs. Our overriding goal has been to keep the news free, including our archive. Is there no place for a small, independent media company founded and run by journalists?" "We make money by selling subscriptions to a PDF edition, selling white-paper-like reports through our site and resellers, supplying other media sites with our content through a newswire, selling subscriptions to an off-line electronic edition through a reseller, collecting fees from Lexus Nexis and other online databases, and carrying Google's Adsense advertisements. Most recently we have begun a PBS-like fund drive. That's a lot of revenue streams, but they don't add up to enough. Our costs are modest: two full-time editors, one contributing editor and two part-time staffers." -
Wanted - An Online Publishing Business Model?
Eric Smalley asks: "Wanted: an online publishing business model that falls somewhere between lone weblogger and corporate media behemoth. Technology Research News (TRN) has been publishing original news stories for over five years, but we have yet to find a way to cover our costs. We are fairly popular and well-woven into the fabric of the Web; we have over 200,000 unique visitors per month, we are well represented in Google, Yahoo and MSN search results, and we are regularly slashdotted and pointed to by Wired News, other media sites and countless weblogs. Our overriding goal has been to keep the news free, including our archive. Is there no place for a small, independent media company founded and run by journalists?" "We make money by selling subscriptions to a PDF edition, selling white-paper-like reports through our site and resellers, supplying other media sites with our content through a newswire, selling subscriptions to an off-line electronic edition through a reseller, collecting fees from Lexus Nexis and other online databases, and carrying Google's Adsense advertisements. Most recently we have begun a PBS-like fund drive. That's a lot of revenue streams, but they don't add up to enough. Our costs are modest: two full-time editors, one contributing editor and two part-time staffers." -
Eastern Ink Painting on a Computer
Roland Piquepaille writes "Traditional Oriental ink painting is more easily done with real brushes than with a computer program because you need to model how the ink is flowing into an absorbent surface such as paper. In this brief article, Technology Research News writes that "researchers from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology have developed a brush-and-ink-style paint program, dubbed MoXi, that uses a model of pigment particles in water flowing into paper." These virtual Chinese brushes simulate in real time the ink dispersion and could be available on your PC within two years. This longer overview contains more details and references. It also includes pictures generated with MoXi. Finally, it looks at a potential trademark problem over the name MoXi." -
Nanotech Motors, Biotransistors, DNA Fractals
FleaPlus writes "The American Institute of Physics has a news bulletin describing a couple of interesting nanotech advances. The first is the smallest electric motor in the world, made by Alex Zettl's group at UC Berkeley. The second is a single-protein wet biotransistor. Additionally, Technology Research News reports on algorithmic self-assembly of DNA Sierpinski triangles, by Erik Winfree's group at Caltech." -
Metafor: Translating Natural Language to Code
vivin writes "Computer programming is second nature to most of the Slashdot crowd. However, this is not true for the vast majority of people. Formal programming languages are not as expressive or flexible as natural languages. This becomes more evident when we try to translate user requirements into actual code. Researchers at MIT have come up with a program that bridges this gap. It's not so much a tool that turns English into code, as it is a program that translates requirements (in English) to code. When Metafor analyzes English, nouns phrases become objects, verbs become functions, and adjectives become object attributes (or properties). In addition to helping programmers visualize their program better, I think it also promotes writing concise (and therefore) requirements and descriptions. Metafor doesn't handle run-on sentences (or bad English) that well." Update For for the dupe. Not going well. Appreciate all the hate mail. Really encourages improvement. -
Metafor: Translating Natural Language to Code
vivin writes "Computer programming is second nature to most of the Slashdot crowd. However, this is not true for the vast majority of people. Formal programming languages are not as expressive or flexible as natural languages. This becomes more evident when we try to translate user requirements into actual code. Researchers at MIT have come up with a program that bridges this gap. It's not so much a tool that turns English into code, as it is a program that translates requirements (in English) to code. When Metafor analyzes English, nouns phrases become objects, verbs become functions, and adjectives become object attributes (or properties). In addition to helping programmers visualize their program better, I think it also promotes writing concise (and therefore) requirements and descriptions. Metafor doesn't handle run-on sentences (or bad English) that well." Update For for the dupe. Not going well. Appreciate all the hate mail. Really encourages improvement. -
English To Code Converter
prostoalex writes "Metafor from MIT is a code visualization utility, capable of converting high-level descriptions into class and function (or method, depending on which camp you're in) definitions. According to the screenshot, it looks like Metafor tries to figure out the components of the software application, defines classes, deduce actions, and generates some function (method) signatures. A PDF document by researchers is available from MIT: "We explore the idea of using descriptions in a natural language as a representation for programs. While we cannot yet convert arbi-trary English to fully specified code, we can use a reasonably expressive subset of English as a visualization tool. Simple descriptions of program objects and their behavior generate scaffolding (underspecified) code fragments, that can be used as feedback for the designer. Roughly speaking, noun phrases can be interpreted as program objects; verbs can be functions, adjectives can be properties. A surprising amount of what we call programmatic semantics can be inferred from linguistic structure. We present a program editor, Metafor, that dynamically converts a user's stories into program code, and in a user study, participants found it useful as a brainstorming tool." There's also an article about it on ACM." -
Top Ten Advances in 2004
An anonymous reader writes "Technology Research News has released it's top ten picks for advances of 2004. Something for everyone here including notable advances in biotechnology, communications, computing, engineering, energy, security, nanotechnology, applied physics and the Internet." -
Lego Logic Gates
Thud457 writes "LEGO Logic Gates - It's like Babbage, but with bricks. All the gates except XOR are here, and he goes on to develop a clocked flip-flop. While practical mechanical computers may be out, even at the nanotechnological scale, nanomechanical memory may be in. " -
Fluid Logic Chips
Doc Ruby writes "Colorado researchers 'have constructed microfluidic gates that use the relative flow resistance of liquid to carry out the basic logic operations NOT, AND, OR, XOR, NOR and NAND. The researchers have also combined a pair of gates into a half adder, which carries out half the operation of addition.' All CPUs processing binary logic are made of these types of gates, but usually execute as flows of electrons in wires, not fluids in tubes. Will this advance revolutionize chemistry and computing the way electric gates revolutionized electronics and computing? Will 'fluid programmers' give new meaning to "flowchart"?" -
Flexible Sensors Make Robot Skin
Roland Piquepaille writes "In recent years, lots of efforts have been made to give robots the ability to hear and see. But what about the sense of touch? Unlike us, robots don't have sensitive skin. But this is about to change. By using organic, or plastic, field-effect transistors as pressure sensors deposited on a flexible material, researchers at the University of Tokyo have created an artificial skin which will give robots the sense of touch. The prototype has a density of 16 sensors per square centimeter, far from the 1,500 of our fingertips. When this density increases and when the problem of the reliability of this kind of transistors is solved, the researchers say this artificial skin will also be used for car seats or gym carpets. Expect to see them in four or five years. More details and a picture of a robotic hand using organic transistors as pressure sensors." -
P2P Web searches
prostoalex writes "Researchers at UCLA are looking for easier ways to implement Web searches by using peer-to-peer techniques to decrease the workload. 'Queries need to be passed along only a few links rather than flooded throughout the network, which keeps search-related traffic low,' reports Technology Research News." -
Open-Destination Quantum Teleportation
Roland Piquepaille writes "An international team of physicists has entangled five photons for the first time in the world, reports Technology Research News in "Five photons linked." Why is this important? Because it's the minimum number of qubits needed for universal error correction in quantum computing. In other words, they found a way to check computational errors in future quantum computers. The physicists also demonstrated what they call 'open-destination teleportation,' a way to teleport quantum information within and between computers." "They teleported the unknown quantum state of a single photon onto a superposition of three photons. They were then able to read out this teleported state at any one of the three photons by performing a measurement on the other two photons," adds PhysicsWeb in "Entanglement breaks new record ". This will be used in about ten to twenty years to move information among quantum networks. You'll find more details and references in this overview." -
Walking In A VR Future
neol'schmoe writes "There's a new solution to the age old problem of physical movement within a virtual world. Researchers in Japan have come up with tiles that move in concert with a user's pace and motion to allow free range of motion while literally walking in a virtual environment and never leaving a very small area in the real world." -
A Video Projector That Fits In Your Pocket
Sven-Erik writes "Video projectors able to project high-quality images will be embedded in your cellphones and laptops within two years. This is the promise of a new technology developed at Cambridge University. These pocket projectors will have no lenses and no light bulbs. Instead, these future battery-powered tiny projectors will rely on holographic technology and special algorithms. In 'Holograms enable pocket projectors,' Technology Research News explains that a 2D hologram will be created on a microdisplay and projected by using a laser beam. This has been possible because the researchers have written special algorithms which generates the holograms a million times faster than standard ones." Update: 07/03 21:21 GMT by T : Note that this text belongs to Roland Piquepaille and comes from his weblog; submitters, please strive to make your sources clear. -
Reducing Electricity Bills For Buildings With XML
Roland Piquepaille writes "Even if new buildings are connected to Internet, they usually don't communicate between themselves. And when it comes to electricity, these buildings are selfish and consume what they want without any coordination. Now, an XML-based system developed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is using Web services to collectively adjust power usage to variations in price. In 'Internet ups power grid IQ,' Technology Research News reports that the system was successfully tested for two weeks on five commercial buildings. 'Beyond price, systems could be programmed to respond to changes in air quality or to tap into sustainable energy sources.' You'll find more details, pictures and references in this overview. [Additional note: The system described here is completely different to the one mentioned in Slashdot last March in Building the Energy Internet.]" -
Using a Password One Doesn't Consciously Remember
ZiggyM writes "Researchers from Hebrew University in Israel have devised a way to assign a password to a user in a way that prevents the user from conciously remember or describe it, yet the user can input it correctly over 90% of the time in a 3 month period after [s]he learns to input it. It involves using visual recognition of previously-seen images, which you can recognize but cant consciously recall in detail. Recognizing the right ones from a series is interpreted as knowing the password, and the chances of guessing it is 1/100,000. Not ready for practical use yet, but very interesting concept that can develop further." -
When Robots Play Games
Roland Piquepaille writes "If the theory of evolution has worked well for us -- even if this is arguable these days -- why not apply it to mobile robots?, asks Technology Research News. Several U.S. researchers just did that and trained neural networks to play the Capture the flag game. Once the neural networks were good enough at the game, they transferred them to the robots' onboard computers. These teams of mobile robots, named EvBots (for Evolution Robots), were then also able to play the game successfully. This method could be used to build environment-aware autonomous robots able to clear a minefield or find heat sources in a collapsed building within 3 to 6 years. But the researchers want to build controllers for robots that adapt to completely unknown environments. And this will not happen before 10 or maybe 50 years. You'll find more details and references in this overview, including a picture of EvBots trying to find their way during a game." Read on for a similar robot competition held this weekend in France.saunabad writes "The annual Eurobot autonomous robot contest for amateurs is held this weekend on La Férte-Bernard, France. This year's theme is 'coconut rugby,' and the robots are collecting small stress balls from the field and carrying them to the opponent's end, or shooting them in the rugby goal, while avoiding the randomly placed obstacles at the same time. Each team has a one main robot and an optional small assisting robot."
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Solar Cells Get Boost
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers from Los Alamos National Laboratory have tapped the efficiencies of nanotechnology to double solar cells' potential energy production. The key to the method is the use of lead selenium nanocrystals which can produce 2 electrons where 1 was produced before. Other optical applications can also benefit." -
Catching (Real) Viruses With Silicon
Roland Piquepaille writes "Researchers in Iowa have used nanotechnology to develop a very small silicon chip to catch and help identify viruses, according to Technology Research News. The device, dubbed the ViriChip, is used in conjunction with an atomic force microscope (AFM). The prototype is already able to identify several viruses and should be in labs in less than two years. A particular application could help save lives by enabling doctors to check a donor heart for potential infections before transplanting it to a patient. This overview contains more details. It also includes references to other articles about the ViriChip and images showing how it looks and a virus it detected." -
Storing Light In Chips
Roland Piquepaille writes "Recently, researchers have "stopped light" by storing light pulses in hot or extremely cold gases (check these former stories on Slashdot or at BBC News Online). Now, scientists from Stanford University have devised a method to store light pulses under ordinary conditions. In Light-storing chip charted, Technology Research News says this opens the way for all-optical communications switches, quantum computers and quantum communications devices. The researchers plan to demonstrate this technique by trapping microwave signals within a year. They think that a prototype which works at optical frequencies could be made in two to five years. This overview contains more details and references." -
PDA Speech Translator
jlowery writes "Not quite as good as a babelfish, but a PDA that does translation is probably better than resorting to hand gestures alone. I could see this as a boon to the tourist who travels to places where English speakers are uncommon." -
Paraphrasing Sentences With Software
prostoalex writes "Cornell University researchers are making progress in paraphrasing and "understanding" complete sentences in a software application. Analyzing sentences on the semantic level allows the software application to treat two sentences, expressing similar thoughts and ideas, but written in a different manner, as a single semantic unit. Significant achievements in this area could revolutionize the information searching field." -
Skulls Gain Virtual Faces
rw2 writes "Totally cool, The guys at Max Planck Institute for Computer Science have developed a way to reconstruct a persons appearence when a skull is found. When police find a skull and want to know what its owner looked like, they generally use artists who reconstruct the face by building up layers of clay over the skull." -
Finding Friends Via Search Query Analysis
prostoalex writes "How many times have you met an interesting person, who happened to check out the same book in the library, or listen to the same music as you do? Researchers from University of Chicago suggest that it would be kinda cool if you could find like-minded people by analyzing the queries submitted to a Web search engine. Their PDF paper explains the research in more detail." -
Self-Assembling Networks
prostoalex writes "Researchers from Humboldt University found a way to build self-assembling networks. By emulating the behavior of ants and insects the team, which is led by Frank Schweitzer, demonstrated a simulation where agent-based architecture was able to quickly assemble itself into a network and quickly react to a broken link or damages. Schweitzer's research papers are available off his personal Web site. The scientific paper referred in the original article, Self-Assembling of Networks in an Agent-Based Model is available off Cornell server." -
Ferroelectric Storage Density Tops 20KDVDs/Cubit^2
DeAshcroft writes "As reported in Technology Research News, researchers from Tohoku University, the Japanese National Institute for Materials Science, and Pioneer Corporation have demonstrated a prototype ferroelectric (as opposed to ferromagnetic) storage mechanism with density of 1.5 trillion dots per square inch. No word on why Japanese researchers are using square inches, but the new storage benchmark is the DVD. This is 47 DVD's in a square inch, or over 20KiloDVD's per square cubit. Original paper appeared in the Applied Physics Letters." In related memory news, an Anonymous Coward writes "It appears the the ever present pause between photo's on a digital camera might finally be fixed. A company now claims http://www.mobilemag.com/content/100/102/C1396/ ) to have kicked up the write speed on a compact flash card up to 4MB/sec. This means we lesser photographers can now get the right action shot just by volume alone ;-)" -
Ferroelectric Storage Density Tops 20KDVDs/Cubit^2
DeAshcroft writes "As reported in Technology Research News, researchers from Tohoku University, the Japanese National Institute for Materials Science, and Pioneer Corporation have demonstrated a prototype ferroelectric (as opposed to ferromagnetic) storage mechanism with density of 1.5 trillion dots per square inch. No word on why Japanese researchers are using square inches, but the new storage benchmark is the DVD. This is 47 DVD's in a square inch, or over 20KiloDVD's per square cubit. Original paper appeared in the Applied Physics Letters." In related memory news, an Anonymous Coward writes "It appears the the ever present pause between photo's on a digital camera might finally be fixed. A company now claims http://www.mobilemag.com/content/100/102/C1396/ ) to have kicked up the write speed on a compact flash card up to 4MB/sec. This means we lesser photographers can now get the right action shot just by volume alone ;-)" -
Net Traffic Shocks Mimic Earthquakes
belphegor writes "Technology Research News is running an article describing research linking the similarties between Earthquakes and Internet traffic. By pinging hosts across the network, researchers 'were able to measure frequent changes in Internet congestion...results showed that the Internet, like the earth's network of faults, exhibits criticality -- a condition of sudden and drastic change. "Sudden drastic congestion leads to a large value of the round trip time of the ping signal, which is identified with a main shock," said Abe. The researchers referred to these sudden, drastic traffic changes as Internetquakes.' They also saw 'aftershocks' that can be mathematically described in a similar manner to the seismic ones more familiar to many Californians." -
Net Traffic Shocks Mimic Earthquakes
belphegor writes "Technology Research News is running an article describing research linking the similarties between Earthquakes and Internet traffic. By pinging hosts across the network, researchers 'were able to measure frequent changes in Internet congestion...results showed that the Internet, like the earth's network of faults, exhibits criticality -- a condition of sudden and drastic change. "Sudden drastic congestion leads to a large value of the round trip time of the ping signal, which is identified with a main shock," said Abe. The researchers referred to these sudden, drastic traffic changes as Internetquakes.' They also saw 'aftershocks' that can be mathematically described in a similar manner to the seismic ones more familiar to many Californians." -
Does Your Debugger Sing to You?
ZahrGnosis writes "TRN Mag Online is carrying an article titled Programming tool makes bugs sing. '[The researchers] set up software that mapped pitch and melodic contour information to structural elements in the programming language Pascal. "[We] aimed to see if information about the structure of Pascal programs could be communicated using such musical phrases".' They even found a practical application for software debugging." -
Does Your Debugger Sing to You?
ZahrGnosis writes "TRN Mag Online is carrying an article titled Programming tool makes bugs sing. '[The researchers] set up software that mapped pitch and melodic contour information to structural elements in the programming language Pascal. "[We] aimed to see if information about the structure of Pascal programs could be communicated using such musical phrases".' They even found a practical application for software debugging." -
Atomic Scale Memory
maddugan writes "Technology Research News is reporting that researchers from the University of Wisconsin at Madison have put the theoretical to the test by using single silicon atoms to represent the 1s and 0s of computing. This is equivalent to storing the contents of 7,800 DVDs in one square inch of material." -
Atomic Scale Memory
maddugan writes "Technology Research News is reporting that researchers from the University of Wisconsin at Madison have put the theoretical to the test by using single silicon atoms to represent the 1s and 0s of computing. This is equivalent to storing the contents of 7,800 DVDs in one square inch of material." -
Nanotubes Extend Battery Life
nickynicky9doors writes: "University of North Carolina researchers have demonstrated they can extend battery life by replacing the usual graphite electrode in a common rechargeable battery with a nanotube. The TRN News article speaks to an increase in the amount of charge a battery can hold and so to an increase it's lifespan. Rolled-up sheets of carbon atoms, nanotubes ...'have twice the storage capacity [of] the graphite electrode...'. The timeline for production is put at 2 years."