Stories

Captain Cyborg to write UK science funding guidelines

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Uncowed by public ridicule, attention-seeker Professor Kevin Warwick has been appointed to a panel that will determine the basis for public research funding decisions for the UK’s higher education institutions.

Captain Cyborg is one of twelve panelists chosen to set the criteria for public research funding in the UK’s Electrical and Electronic Engineering departments. It’s one of 68 panels encompassing medicine, the social sciences and the languages and is conducted by the Research Assessment Exercise, a quango funded by Higher Education Funding Council for England, and its counterparts in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

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GoogleNet – the ultimate embrace and extend?

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We’ve been reading stories about the “end of the internet” ever since the internet was exposed to the public more than a decade ago. Telcos, media companies, infrastructure hardware providers, and operating systems monopolists have all taken their turn as the villain in this particular drama. So far not one has succeeded.

But the really scary thing about “the end of the internet” was never how easily it could be achieved, but that it might be welcomed by most of the people who actually use it. Now Google has helped drive the point home.

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Sun’s newest star lauds the PT Barnum way

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“The web is now nature,” says Glenn Edens, one of Sun Microsystems’ most important executives, and its fastest-rising star.

The senior VP has been Director of Sun Labs for around 18 months, but the bright lights of Hollywood now beckon. He’s been picked to head Sun’s newest creation, a vertical business unit aimed at converged media, entertainment and broadband, which was announced with a flourish in Las Vegas at the recent National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show.

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SCO, Groklaw and the Monterey mystery that never was

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Over the past two years, the influential web site Groklaw has become a focal point for open source advocates discussing The SCO Group’s litigation against Linux companies. The community of knowledgeable experts has helped with clarifying contract technicalities, dug through news archives, and filed on-the-spot reports from the Utah the courtroom, much to SCO’s discomfort.

But over the past month the site’s maintainer Pamela Jones has run a series of articles which could offer SCO some elusive ammunition to discredit the site. [We now understand this series, after some input from your reporter, has been amended.]

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Email destroys the mind faster than marijuana – study

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Modern technology depletes human cognitive abilities more rapidly than drugs, according to a psychiatric study conducted at King’s College, London. And the curse of ‘messaging’ is to blame.

Email users suffered a 10 per cent drop in IQ scores, more than twice the fall recorded by marijuana users, in a clinical trial of over a thousand participants. Doziness, lethargy and an inability to focus are classic characteristics of a spliffhead, but email users exhibited these particular symptoms to a “startling” degree, according to Dr Glenn Wilson.

The deterioration in mental capacity was the direct result of the trialists’ addiction to technology, researchers discovered.

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Hoax paper fools cybernetic boffins

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An MIT student has had a paper consisting of computer-generated gibberish accepted by technology conference WMSCI. The pretentious gathering bills itself as “an international forum where researchers and practitioners examine Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics key issues”

Comp sci undergraduate Jeremy Stribling told us that he didn’t single out WMSCI because of its subject matter, although it’s easy to see how it made a tempting target.

WMSCI's split brain

“A Metaphor,” the organizers explain. “We are trying to relate theanalytic thinking required in focused conference sessions, to thesynthetic thinking, required for analogies generation, which calls formulti-focus domain and divergent thinking. We are trying to promote a synergic relation between analytically and synthetically oriented minds, as it is found between left and right brain hemispheres, by means of the corpus callosum.” [their emphasis]

But the conference organizers’ two minds didn’t meet in time to catch the hoax, which fell right through WMSCI’s supposedly rigorous review procedures.

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Linus Torvalds in bizarre attack on open source

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Do as I say, not do as I do

Normally we expect an attack on free software to come from one of the usual suspects: payola analysts, right wing “think tanks”, or Steve Ballmer. So it’s an odd day when Linus Torvalds himself weighs in against the principles of the movement.

Torvalds launched a blast against OpenOffice.org, and defended Microsoft’s right to keep its binary Office formats proprietary. “I’m happy with somebody writing a free replacement for Microsoft Office. But I’m not fine with them writing a free replacement just by reverse engineering the proprietary formats,” said the Linux founder. “Microsoft has its own reasons for keeping them proprietary, and I can’t argue with that.”

Actually he didn’t – we just made that quote up.

But what Torvalds really did say this weekend is only slightly less bizarre. The Linux leader also encouraged a software company to take its code under a proprietary license, his friend alleges.

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Never Hurd of the new HP boss?

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There’s a theory that British Prime Ministers, and England football managers, alternate between being bishops and bookmakers. A risk-taking rascal is succeeded by a dull, safe pair of hands, until the public clamor for the rascal once again.

By replacing the high-profile Carly Fiorina with the low-impact Mark Hurd from NCR, Hewlett Packard would appear to be following that script. The appointment of Hurd seems to signal that the board thinks HP’s core business is sound, and requires an administrator rather than a visionary. What’s needed at HP, they seem to want to tell us, are a few nuts tightened and tweaked, here and there. It’s a steady-as-she-goes appointment.

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MIT invents computer that runs away

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MIT has taken the unfriendly computer interface to its natural conclusion: and created a computer that runs away from you.

We’ve all had experiences with user interface elements that run away from us: toolbars in Windows, or the drive icons on the Mac OS X desktop, for example. But “Clocky” goes all the way – it’s an alarm clock that has wheels. If you hit the snooze button, “Clocky” rolls away and hides. To make life doubly difficult, it will try and hide in a new place every day. And if you live in a 1970s sitcom, it poses a third challenge. Since it’s covered in thick brown nylon shagpile carpet, Clocky might never be found. For now, it’s simply described as an “academic” exercise, but a fully-blown fugitive PC can’t be too far away.

Clocky: inspired by kittens

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