A Newspaper Chain Sees Its Future, And It’s Online and Hyper-Local
Myron, 27, is a reporter for the Fort Myers News-Press and one of its fleet of mobile journalists, or “mojos.” The mojos have high-tech tools — ThinkPads, digital audio recorders, digital still and video cameras — but no desk, no chair, no nameplate, no land line, no office. They spend their time on the road looking for stories, filing several a day for the newspaper’s Web site, and often for the print edition, too. Their guiding principle: A constantly updated stream of intensely local, fresh Web content — regardless of its traditional news value — is key to building online and newspaper readership.
Source: Frank Ahrens, The Washington Post, December 4, 2006 (Free registration)
Making sense of sensors: The mathematics of detecting intruders
As sensor technology has exploded, such fundamental questions have come to the forefront in many areas. In particular, national security measures increasingly depend on sensor technology to detect, for example, radiological or biological hazards, hidden mines and munitions, or specific individuals in a crowd. Mathematics, especially the area of topology, provides a way of addressing such questions.
Source: American Mathematical Society, via EurekAlert!, December 5, 2006
Pioneering study shows richest 2 percent own half world wealth
The most comprehensive study of personal wealth ever undertaken also reports that the richest 1% of adults alone owned 40% of global assets in the year 2000, and that the richest 10% of adults accounted for 85% of the world total. In contrast, the bottom half of the world adult population owned barely 1% of global wealth.
[Note: Here is a link to this study divided in several sections and a direct link to the full study, "The World Distribution of Household Wealth" (PDF format, 70 pages).
Source: United Nations University, via EurekAlert!, December 5, 2006
Medical records mashup would span a lifetime
Applied Materials, BP America, Intel, Pitney Bowes and Wal-Mart Stores have sunk an undisclosed amount of money into the Omnimedix Institute, a nonprofit organization that developed and will manage the database, called "Dossia."
Dossia, which in 2007 will be made available to the companies' 2.5 million U.S. employees, dependents and retirees, will hold medical records from multiple sources for a person over their entire lifetime. The database could include test results and medical evaluations from various doctors' offices, hospitals and pharmacies.
Source: Candace Lombardi, CNET News.com, December 6, 2006
Biometrics, Nanotechnology Could Help Combat Cheating On Exams
The group that oversees Britain's curriculum and examination systems published a report this week that recommends consideration of biometrics, nanotechnology and other high-teach means to combat cheating during academic and professional exams.
Jean Underwood, who authored the university report, wrote that test encryption, biometric identification, signal jamming, signal detection, software and even nanotechnology can be put to work to fight what some researchers claim is an "epidemic of cheating."
Source: K.C. Jones, InformationWeek, December 6, 2006
New Service Lets PC Users Sell Spare CPU Cycles
An Italian programmer has launched a service that may eventually pay PC users who rent out their systems to supercomputer-like distributed computing projects.
CPUShare ["The Low Cost Supercomputer"] is the brainchild of Andrea Arcangeli, a Linux developer. “CPUShare allows home users to profit from the significant power of their hardware that otherwise would be wasted every day,” Arcangeli said on his Web site.
Source: Gregg Keizer, TechWeb, December 8, 2006
