Do you want to know the percentage of white women who support vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin? What about college-educated versus high school-educated white women? Or those who also hunt? University of Utah computer scientists have written software they hope eventually will allow news reporters and citizens to easily, interactively and visually answer such questions when analyzing election results, political opinion polls or other surveys.
When people working on a project get together with their laptops and PDAs, they share information via the internet and a client server. But new software developed by European researchers allows independent, ad hoc, secure networking anywhere.
As computer processor chips grow faster and more complex, they are likely to make it to market with more design bugs. But that may be OK, according to researchers who have devised a system that lets chips work around all functional bugs, even those that haven’t been detected.
If mere texting, talking, e-mailing and snapping pictures on mobile devices aren’t enough to satisfy your data cravings, now there’s the prospect of accessing and displaying 3-D virtual reality simulations and animations on them. New information architecture from researchers in Offenburg, Germany puts 3-D visualizations in the palm of your hand to make this possible.
This week undergraduate and graduate students in an advanced computer security course at Rice University in Houston are learning hands-on just how easy it is to wreak havoc on computer software used in today’s voting machines.
