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subjectComputers And Society
authorNew Scientist
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An edited collection of advanced computing news from Communications of the ACM, ACM TechNews, other ACM resources, and news sites around the Web.


From ACM TechNews

Tongue Clicks to Control Wheelchairs

The University of Bristol's Ravi Vaidyanathan is leading a research effort to develop an in-ear device that would enable people to control a wheelchair by clicking...

From ACM TechNews

Army Avatars Join the Battle For Hearts and Minds

Researchers at the University of Southern California are developing realistic, immersive virtual-reality programs for the U.S. military in which the soldiers are...

Cellphones Reveal Emerging Disease Outbreaks
From ACM News

Cellphones Reveal Emerging Disease Outbreaks

Your cellphone could be a key tool in the fight against disease by relaying a telltale signature of illness to doctors and agencies monitoring new outbreaks.

Robot Arm Punches Human to Obey Asimov's Rules
From ACM News

Robot Arm Punches Human to Obey Asimov's Rules

Isaac Asimov would probably have been horrified at the experiments under way in a robotics lab in Slovenia. There, a powerful robot has been hitting people over...

The Green City That Has a Brain
From ACM News

The Green City That Has a Brain

The planned city of PlanIT Valley in northern Portugal is aiming to be an environmentally sustainable city. And, like an organism, it will have a brain: a central...

Why the Stuxnet Worm Is Like Nothing Seen Before
From ACM News

Why the Stuxnet Worm Is Like Nothing Seen Before

Stuxnet is the first worm of its type capable of attacking critical infrastructure like power stations and electricity grids: those in the know have been expecting...

Cern Collides With a Patent Reality
From ACM TechNews

Cern Collides With a Patent Reality

Previously reluctant to patent the inventions, the CERN particle physics laboratory  recently struck a deal with the World Intellectual Property Organization to...

From ACM News

Cern Collides with a Patent Reality

You might imagine that vast patent royalties flow into the organisation that invented the touchscreen and the World Wide Web. But the atom-smashing outfit CERN...

From ACM News

P ? Np? It's Bad News For the Power of Computing

Has the biggest question in computer science been solved? On 6 August, Vinay Deolalikar, a mathematician at Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto, California, sentdraft...

Social Web: The Great Tipping Point Test
From ACM News

Social Web: The Great Tipping Point Test

Every move you make, every twitter feed you update, somebody is watching you. You may not think twice about it, but if you use a social networking site, a cellphone...

Twitter Mood Maps Reveal Emotional States of America
From ACM News

Twitter Mood Maps Reveal Emotional States of America

America, are you happy? The emotional words contained in hundreds of millions of messages posted to the Twitter website may hold the answer.

From ACM News

Google May Know Your Desires Before You Do

Google attempts to return relevant search results in the blink of an eye. But in future it could go one better, delivering search results to its users even before...

Geo-Tags Reveal Celeb Secrets
From ACM TechNews

Geo-Tags Reveal Celeb Secrets

U.S. computer scientists have demonstrated that by using information from Internet images and videos it is possible to determine the addresses and locations of...

From ACM News

The Tech Refresher Russia's Spies Needed

From James Bond to Johnny English, the movies give us the impression that spies are top of the tree when it comes to money-no-object espionage technology. But that...

Drone Alone: How Airliners May Lose Their Pilots
From ACM News

Drone Alone: How Airliners May Lose Their Pilots

Would you fly in an airliner knowing there were no pilots in the cockpit? This is no mere hypothetical question. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration is taking...

From ACM News

Immortal Avatars: Back Up Your Brain, Never Die

Zoe Graystone is a girl with two brains. Only one of them is human: the other is an exact digital copy that has become conscious in its own right. When the human...

Teaching Robots Some Manners
From ACM TechNews

Teaching Robots Some Manners

People are more likely to adapt to and use robots if they behave more like humans, even if that means they operate less efficiently. 

Web Science: Exploring the Network Without Guesswork
From ACM TechNews

Web Science: Exploring the Network Without Guesswork

University of Southampton professor Nigel Shadbolt, speaking at a recent conference on the emerging discipline of Web science, says the Internet has become such...

Crumbling Labs Could Clip Nasa's Wings
From ACM News

Crumbling Labs Could Clip Nasa's Wings

Years of neglect have left many NASA labs that might be used for breakthrough technology research in rough shape, says a report from the U.S. National Academies...

Schrodinger's Cash: Minting Quantum Money
From ACM TechNews

Schrodinger's Cash: Minting Quantum Money

MIT researcher Scott Aaronson has brought quantum money a step closer to reality by outlining a computationally secure quantum money scheme founded on the type...
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