November 06, 2000 - Video Conferencing Made Easy - Jesse Berst, Editorial Director ZDNet AnchorDesk, With the proliferation of Webcams, you may want to put yourself on camera soon. A new Wainhouse Research report says Web and streaming conference services will soar 85% in the coming years...

  November 26, 1999 - More than a wheelchair, the IBOT is on the move - by Bob Metcalfe, InfoWorld columnist, (IDG) -- Inventor Dean Kamen insists his IBOT is not a wheelchair. Nobody pushes you around in an IBOT. You wear it, like Kamen wears his helicopters. Now, because this is InfoWorld, and I'm hoping to brighten your day, I hasten to point out that Kamen's IBOT runs on plenty of microprocessors. Of course, being post-PC-plus, it doesn't run on Microsoft Windows...

 November 15, 2000 - The race to buy life - Carve up of the human heart: private firms, universities and charities are rushing to isolate and patent human genes before it is even understood what they do Special report: the ethics of genetics, James Meek, science correspondent Guardian Unlimited

  November 27, 2000 - Forget passwords, what about pictures? - By H. Asher Bolande, WSJ Interactive Edition, We're drowning in passwords, and our brains are rebelling. Most of us have one of two strategies for remembering all these new strings of letters and numbers: use the exact same password across the board, or keep written reminders of the various secret phrases. Either way, the entire purpose of passwords -- security -- is undermined...

 November 29, 2000 - The Graying of the Web Has Business Seeing Green - Older folks are flocking onto the Net, but many are still leery of cyber-shopping. That's a trend many companies are trying hard to change. - Louis Kelly, a 73-year-old part-time real estate agent in Dallas, had shied away from computers. Like many people born long before the tech boom, he was convinced that they were too complicated to use. But six months ago, an advertisement in Parade magazine about seniors citizens surfing the Web on a smaller, simplified Internet-only computer called an i-opener caught his attention. Now, Kelly is among the thousands of seniors using Netpliance's (NPLI ) product for everything from e-mailing the grandkids to researching real estate online...

 November 15, 2000 - Monkey Brain Operates Machine - Scientists have used the brain signals from a monkey to drive a robotic arm. As the animal stuck out its hand to pick up some food off a tray, an artificial neural system linked into the animal's head mimicked the activity in the mechanical limb...

 November 03, 2000 - Mail Abuse Prevention System LLC (MAPS) - A not-for-profit California organization whose mission is to defend the Internet's e-mail system from abuse by spammers. Our principal means of accomplishing this mission is by educating and encouraging ISP's to enforce strong terms and conditions prohibiting their customers from engaging in abusive e-mail practices...

 November 20, 2000 - An XML father maps the Web in 3D - (IDG) -- Tim Bray is among a handful of individuals who played a role in birthing XML. Long a voice of common sense in the closely knit XML community, Bray's influence on XML standard evolution is considerable. His current project is interesting, though it has no clear immediate impact on enterprise software developers...

  Electronic Reusable Paper - Researchers are striving to make dynamic sheets of electronic reusable paper no thicker than a standard transparency. Electronic reusable paper is a display material that has many of the properties of paper.  It stores an image, is viewed in reflective light, has a wide viewing angle, is flexible, and is relatively inexpensive. Unlike conventional paper, however, it is electrically writeable and erasable...

 November 20, 2000 - Wave Power Stations - As the climate change conference continues in The Hague, it is perhaps fitting that the world's first commercial wave power station is going into action in Scotland. The power station, on the island of Islay, is the product of years of research into how to effectively harvest energy from the world's oceans...

 November 20, 2000 - How Much Information? Planning a long-term data storage and retrieval solution?  You may want to read this informative report from Berkley University in California. The world produces between 1 and 2 exabytes of unique information per year, which is roughly 250 megabytes for every man, woman, and child on earth. An exabyte is a billion gigabytes, or 1018 bytes. Printed documents of all kinds comprise only .003% of the total. Magnetic storage is by far the largest medium for storing information and is the most rapidly growing, with shipped hard drive capacity doubling every year. Magnetic storage is rapidly becoming the universal medium for information storage...

 November 14, 2000 - Fat-storing gene may trigger obesity - NEW ORLEANS (AP) - A thrifty gene that helped cavemen survive food shortages appears to be a common underlying trigger of both obesity and diabetes, researchers reported Monday. German researchers said the gene apparently prompts the body to store up fat for later. They said the gene could be an important explanation of an inherited tendency to gain weight, especially among black people. Their work shows that about 90% of blacks, 50% of Asians and 30% of whites carry at least one copy of this gene. "This gene was advantageous in times of food scarcity," said Dr. Achim Gutersohn. "But in times of driving and coach potato-ing, it can cause obesity." The links between genes, living habits and health are of increasing interest to researchers, and this association appears to be especially complex in the way people gain weight.

 November 14, 2000 - Ebola outbreak linked to woman - KAMPALA, Uganda (AP) - The spread of Ebola to a third community in Uganda has been linked to a woman who fled a hospital for her hometown once she suspected she had contracted the deadly virus, a health official said Monday. Now officials trying to control the recent outbreak are trying to find anyone who had direct contact with the woman - including those who helped bury her, said Dr. Sam Okware, head of Ugandan's national task force on Ebola. She died two weeks ago, but officials did not know immediately. Three relatives of the woman also died, Okware said. Their deaths in Masindi Port, in central Uganda, bring the total of those who have died of Ebola in Uganda since the disease broke out in mid-October to 110. After the Ebola outbreak was first reported, officials hoped to contain the disease to the Gulu region, 225 miles north of the capital. But on Nov. 2, they confirmed that a soldier who had been in Gulu had died of the disease in Mbarara, 175 miles southwest of Kampala. His death was followed by three others in the same town.

 November 14, 2000 - Nursing homes need psychiatrists - CAMBRIDGE, Md. (AP) - It's Dr. Allan Anderson's weekly visit to the nursing home's special dementia unit, and problems await: Someone hit a nurse. One woman abruptly pinches another patient's face and yells curses. Another breaks into loud, gasping sobs for no apparent reason. Agitation keeps still others awake all night. Anderson is a rarity: A geriatric psychiatrist employed to care regularly for nursing home residents like these because he is specially trained in treatments to calm, even prevent, such problems. Although up to 80% of the nation's 1.6 million nursing home residents have a mental illness, mostly dementia or depression, experts say few nursing homes provide proper psychiatric care crucial to seniors' quality of life. Nursing homes were set up to treat chronic physical problems, not the explosion of Alzheimer's, other dementias, and depression accompanying the nation's booming elderly population. Typically, nursing home doctors are primary care physicians with little mental-health training who often don't know about new treatments that help such patients without sedating them into zombies. Many homes will seek special psychiatric consultations for a very ill patient, but that can take weeks. And nursing homes are suffering a severe shortage of nurses and aides - largely because fast-food restaurants can pay higher salaries - which means staff training on day-to-day handling of demented patients isn't common.

 November 16, 2000 - Big meal, heart attacks linked - NEW ORLEANS (AP) - Looking forward to a huge Thanksgiving dinner? Maybe you should consider some dietary downsizing. A study released Tuesday suggests that an unusually heavy meal increases the risk of a heart attack. Of course, it's hardly news that unhealthy eating is bad for the heart. But the latest research concludes that simply putting away one huge meal - regardless of a person's usual eating habits - is a bad thing. Doctors found that an unusually heavy meal roughly quadruples the ordinary risk of a heart attack during the two hours after eating. The risk is especially high - 10 times normal - during the first hour after pushing away from the table. But after three hours, the extra risk is almost gone. The researchers questioned 1,986 men and women about what they had eaten just before their heart attacks. Of these, 158 said they had consumed a heavy meal within the previous 26 hours, and 25 had a lot to eat during the two hours before their heart attacks. Whether quadrupling of risk really matters depends on one's underlying risk of heart trouble. For a 30-year-old healthy man, the risk of heart attack may be minuscule, so briefly increasing it matters little. But for someone with high cholesterol, high blood pressure, diabetes and other conditions that greatly increase risk, a temporary quadrupling could be more meaningful.

 Ant-eating flies may rescue South - A tiny Brazilian fly whose larvae literally eat the heads off of fire ants will be unleashed across the South under a government program to control the vicious ants that are a spreading menace to homeowners, farmers and wildlife...

 November 11, 2000 - Look, no pilot - The first unmanned combat aircraft is about to take to the skies. Does this mean curtains for fighter pilots? FROM the Red Baron to Top Gun, fighter pilots have always been regarded as glamorous figures. But a new aircraft, testing of which is about to begin at the Dryden Flight Research Center in the Mojave desert in California, could spell the beginning of the end for those magnificent men in their flying machines...

 November 17, 2000 - New rules for liver transplants - WASHINGTON (AP) - The nation's organ transplant network Thursday approved new rules for distributing scarce livers aimed at making sure the sickest patients are truly at the top of the waiting list. Network officials say the new system, which uses sophisticated, medical criteria to rank patients, will do a much better job predicting who is most likely to die without a transplant. How long a patient has been waiting, which plays a significant role in ranking patients today, will become much less important. But the changes endorsed do nothing to break down geographic barriers that keep most organs in the communities where they are donated, even if there's someone sicker in the next city or state over. The United Network for Organ Sharing endorsed the plan, 32-0, and will now submit it to the Department of Health and Human Services for approval. HHS officials, who have been demanding more sweeping changes, said they are prepared to accept the proposal, at least for now. The problem comes down to supply and demand. In 1999, there were 4,698 liver transplants performed, but 1,753 people died waiting. More than 16,000 liver patients are waiting today.

 November 17, 2000 - Stars said to tell age of pyramids - (AP) - Just how old are the pyramids? The answer may lie in the stars. Current estimates for the construction of the pyramids, based on surviving lists of the pharaohs, are believed to be accurate to within about 100 years. But Cambridge University Egyptologist Kate Spence says that by analyzing the relative position of the Earth and two stars, she has dated the construction of the Great Pyramid at Giza - one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World - to within five years of 2478 B.C. That means the Great Pyramid is 4,478 years old - or 75 years older than one commonly accepted estimate. Her estimate comes from her proposed solution to another mystery: How did the ancient Egyptians align their pyramids so that two sides ran so precisely north-south? She suggests that they used a pair of stars found in the Little and Big Dippers. But because Earth wobbles on its axis, those two stars would have given different indications for "north" over the centuries. So by calculating when that pair of stars would have been in a northern alignment, Spence says she can figure out when the pyramids were built. In Thursday's issue of the journal Nature, Spence says the two-star method could explain the various degrees of inaccuracy in the orientation of pyramids built at different times.

 November 17, 2000 - Monkey brain wired to control arm - (AP) - Researchers have wired the brains of monkeys to control robotic arms - a feat that could one day allow paralyzed people to move artificial arms and legs merely by thinking. The wires fed electrical impulses from the brains of two monkeys into a computer linked to robotic arms. When the monkeys reached for food or manipulated a joystick, the robotic arms mimicked those motions. For people who are paralyzed because of spinal cord injuries or diseases of the central nervous system, such wiring could one day enable them to bypass the damage and send impulses directly to their muscles. "It is in the realm of reality. It is not science fiction any more," said Duke University researcher Miguel Nicolelis. In the monkey experiments, 96 wires, each half the thickness of a human hair, were connected to six areas of one animal's brain, while 32 wires were connected to two areas of the second monkey's brain. The robotic arms performed simple to-and-fro movements similarly with each monkey. But they performed three-dimensional movements better when directed by the monkey with more implants. The Duke researchers' findings were reported in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature. They are now working on a chip that could be implanted under the skin, replacing the external computer.

 November 11, 2000 - NETSCAPE 6 GOOD AS GOLD - The first browser brought to you by the Netscape-America Online combination goes live Tuesday. Better than Internet Explorer? ... CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD NETSCAPE 6

 November 10, 2000 - Web hits election jackpot - The confusion and uncertainty surrounding the presidential race results could truly make this the Internet Election. ZDNet News, The presidential candidates aren't the only ones who've gone in and out of favor at the drop of a hat this election season. The Internet itself has gone from being a promising political sensation to a blip on the campaign radar screen in the past year. Now it looks like it's back again, thanks to the closest presidential race in history...

 November 06, 2000 - Meet your virtual double - A computerized version of you could soon be sitting in cyberspace, attending meetings and conferences on your behalf. BT is developing a system that adds digital doubles, or avatars, to online and telephone conferences to restore human interaction to remote meetings and make them more productive...

 November 10, 2000 - Akamai could cache in on the election hubbub - While investors ponder what stocks would do best under an Al Gore or George W. Bush presidency, at least one tech company is looking pretty good as Web traffic soars for political sites. That company, Akamai (Nasdaq: AKAM), is getting quite a marketing pitch from the political hubbub.  You must have noticed that most of the general news sites were buckling under record traffic as Webheads searched for the latest election results Tuesday night. Some sites were still sluggish through Wednesday as folks looked for the latest on the recount of Florida votes...

 November 02, 2000 - Water on the Space Station - Future astronauts poised to blast off for an extended stay on the International Space Station (ISS) might first consider dashing to the restroom for a quick splash at the lavatory, or better yet, a luxurious hot shower. Once on board the ISS, spacefarers are in for a steady diet of sponge baths using water distilled from - among other places - their crewmates breath! ...

 - Asimov's Laws of Robotics Implications for Information Technology - This article examines Asimov's stories not as literature but as a gedankenexperiment - an exercise in thinking through the ramifications of a design. Asimov's intent was to devise a set of rules that would provide reliable control over semi-autonomous machines. My goal is to determine whether such an achievement is likely or even possible in the real world. In the process, I focus on practical, legal, and ethical matters that may have short- or medium-term implications for practicing information technologists...