Real-World Lessons in Virtual World View a video of WolfQuest, an interactive computer game in which players are immersed in every aspect of a wolf's survival in its habitat. It's bad enough that I haven't found a mate. I'm also hungry and I'm losing stamina. I've lost the rest of my group and a large grizzly bear has positioned himself across my path. What's a wolf to do?.......

What Do You Know? Google has started a new site called Knol that allows you to share your vast wealth of personal information with the world. Everyone knows something that no one else knows. Think about it, I'm sure you can come up with something. Voice your opinion on something, or tell the world about something you witnessed. Then you can share it on Knol. .........

Security flaws in online banking sites More than 75 percent of the bank Web sites surveyed in a University of Michigan study had at least one design flaw that could make customers vulnerable to cyber thieves after their money or even their identity. Atul Prakash, a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and doctoral students Laura Falk and Kevin Borders examined the Web sites of 214 financial institutions in 2006. They will present the findings for the first time at the Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security meeting at Carnegie Mellon University July 25........

Custom interfaces make computer clicking faster, easier Insert your key in the ignition of a luxury car and the seat and steering wheel will automatically adjust to preprogrammed body proportions. Stroll through the rooms of Bill Gates' mansion and each room will adjust its lighting, temperature and music to accommodate your personal preference. But open any computer program and you're largely subject to a design team's ideas about button sizes, fonts and layouts. .......

Finer Lines For Microchips MIT scientists have achieved a significant advance in nanoscale lithographic technology, used in the manufacture of computer chips and other electronic devices, to make finer patterns of lines over larger areas than have been possible with other methods. Their new technique could pave the way for next-generation computer memory and integrated-circuit chips, as well as advanced solar cells and other devices........

Free Adobe Photoshop Tutorials As complex as Adobe's Photoshop is it can always get a bit more complicated with the addition of 3rd party plugins and .........

Pubmedfight You definitely know Googlefight where you can compare the number of search results returned by Google for two terms or expressions .........

Opera Mobile 9.5 beta available on July 15 Opera has announced that its new mobile browser would soon be available for download. The new Opera 9.5 mobile would be based on the same engine as the Opera 9.5 Desktop browser. It will offer a better user experience and support many latest and popular web standards and .........

Electronic Ear To Judge And Coach Vibrato Technique the pulsating change of pitch in a singer's voice -- is an important aspect of a singer's expression, used extensively by both classical opera singers and pop stars like Shakira. Usually, the quality of a vibrato can only be judged subjectively by voice experts. Until now, that is. A research group from Tel Aviv University has successfully managed to train a computer to rate vibrato quality, and has created an application based on biofeedback to help singers improve their technique. Your computer can now be a singing coach........

Bill Gates Looks Back Microsoft''s Bill Gates gave Fortune magazine access to some rare photos from the Microsoft archives - and shared his memories about them. (via Doobybrain)

Firefox 3 World Record Last week, the all new Firefox 3 browser was downloaded more than 8 million times in 24 hours. That''s more Firefox downloads than ever had in a single day. At the moment, the people of Guinness review this World Record attempt. If you downloaded Firefox 3, try this. Type about:robots in the address bar to see this Easter .........

Discovery could enable development of faster computers Physicists at UC Riverside have made an accidental discovery in the lab that has potential to change how information in computers can be transported or stored. Dependent on the "spin" of electrons, a property electrons possess that makes them behave like tiny magnets, the discovery could help in the development of spin-based semiconductor technology such as ultrahigh-speed computers........

Dartmouth launches network security study A team of Dartmouth scientists is preparing to launch a project that examines the campus wireless computer traffic in an effort to learn how the network is used and how to best maintain its security. The project is called the Dartmouth Internet Security Testbed, or DIST. "Our campus environment is the perfect place for this project because we can examine live network activity at scale and in real time," says David Kotz, professor of computer science and the principal investigator on the DIST initiative. "We've worked in laboratory settings with controlled parameters; now it's time for a live, real-world test. For organizations that depend on their wireless networks, like we do, this research should prove invaluable." Kotz is working closely with Dartmouth's Peter Kiewit Computing Services Department........

Protecting Computer Networks From Internet Worms Researchers may have found a new way to combat the most dangerous form of computer virus. The method automatically detects within minutes when an Internet worm has infected a computer network. Network administrators can then isolate infected machines and hold them in quarantine for repairs. Ness Shroff, Ohio Eminent Scholar in Networking and Communications at Ohio State University, and colleagues describe their strategy in the current issue of IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing........

New wireless sensor network keeps tabs on the environment Have you ever wondered what happens in the rainforest when no one is looking?. Research in the University of Alberta's Faculty of Science may soon be able to answer that question. The departments of computing science and earth and atmospheric science have been working together to create a Wireless Sensor Network that allows for the clandestine data collection of environmental factors in remote locations and its monitoring from anywhere in the world where the Internet is available........

P4P system for efficient Internet usage New Haven, Conn. A Yale research team has engineered a system with the potential for making the Internet work more efficiently, in which Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Peer-to-Peer (P2P) software providers can work cooperatively to deliver data. The way people use the Internet has changed significantly over the past 10 years, making computers seem to run less efficiently and putting strain on the available bandwidth for transmitting data........

Interactive Web sites draw minds The interactive look and feel of a corporate website could help shape positive perceptions about the organization if the site includes a likeable design and features that engage the target audience, particularly job seekers, as per media researchers. S. Shyam Sundar, professor of film, video and media studies at Penn State, and Jamie Guillory, formerly an undergraduate student at Penn State, are trying to understand how interactivity in websites influences the public perception of an organization. In prior studies of websites of political candidates, Sundar had observed that the candidates were rated more positively if their site had some interactive features, even though the sites had no new content, and the candidates held the same policy positions. But too much interactivity tends to turn off people........

Broadband access opens doors to networking Proactive policies are needed to facilitate broadband Internet access and adoption in rural areas so that rural hospitals, schools and businesses can drive social and economic development and better position themselves to compete, say Penn State scientists in a recently released report from the Center for Rural Pennsylvania........

NIST tool helps Internet master top-level domains At the request of a worldwide Internet organization, a computer scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) developed an algorithm that may guide applicants in proposing new top-level domains the last part of an Internet address, such as.com, that people type in navigating the Web. As new top-level domains are added to the familiar.com,.info and.net, the algorithm* checks whether the newly proposed name is confusingly similar to existing ones by looking for visual likenesses in its appearance. Having visually distinct top-level domain names may help avoid confusion in navigating the ever-expanding Internet and combat fraud, by reducing the potential to create malicious look-alikes:.C0M with a zero instead of.COM, for instance........

A CluE in the Search for Data-Intensive Computing The Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate at the National Science Foundation (NSF) released a solicitation for proposals for the new Cluster Exploratory (CluE) initiative. The CluE program was announced in February as a part of a relationship between Google, IBM and NSF. NSF hopes this initiative will help lead to innovations in the field of data-intensive computing, as well as serve as an example for future collaborations between the private sector and the academic computing research community........