After years of effort to coax empathy from circuitry, devices designed to soothe, support and keep us company are venturing out of the laboratory. Paro, its name derived from the first sounds of the words “personal robot,” is one of a handful that take forms that are often odd, still primitive and yet, for at [...]

union with God” and agreed to participate in an experiment devised by neuroscientist Mario Beauregard of the University of Montreal. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging fMRI, Beauregard seeks to pinpoint the brain areas that are active while the nuns recall the most powerful religious epiphany of their lives, a time they experienced a profound connection [...]

The number of American doctors using speech software to record and transcribe accounts of patient visits and treatments has more than tripled in the past three years to 150,000. The progress is striking. A few years ago, supraspinatus (a rotator cuff muscle) got translated as “fish banana.” Today, the software transcribes [...]

The same awe-inspiring Johannesburg venue, which witnessed Mandela’s first mass rally following his 1990 release, will stage tomorrow’s Opening Match, the first of 64 games. In one sense, it is familiar territory for the South Africa coach, Carlos Alberto Parreira, as he prepares to lead a team at his sixth FIFA World Cup, which is [...]

his draw almost feels like a win. I shudder to think what a win would have felt like. Could I have handled and processed it? Despite whispers in your ear from your British friends about luck the USA fully deserved a share of the points today. England, of course, dominated play, but [...]

Science Of Transdermal Alcohol Monitoring
Due to ethanol’s affinity for water, it is rapidly distributed throughout the body by the process of diffusion. Upon reaching equilibrium the fluids of the body will contain ethanol in proportion to their water content. The relationship between breath and blood alcohol is a constant ratio such [...]

Russell A. Poldrack is the director of the Imaging Research Center and professor of psychology and neurobiology at the University of Texas at Austin.
As a busy researcher who owns an iPhone, iPad, and several computers, I often find it very difficult to practice what I preach when it comes to the dangers of multitasking (though [...]

This lack of clear overarching structure can result in information confusion, duplication and internal competitive behaviors. Given the many organizational structure models different companies employ - flat, matrix, lattice, team, network, virtual and the hierarchical bureaucracy most people immediately associate with ‘business’ - the skeleton types analogy is very broad. We may be [...]

You have to have Enterprise Edition to be able to create partitions. Standard edition is limited to one partition per measure group, which is the default behavior.
When creating multiple partitions, you need to make sure that for a measure group, the data in one partition is exclusive of the data in any other partition to [...]

But after befriending a well-to-do hotel patron, the young man started traveling the world, meeting the likes of Andy Warhol, John Lennon and Patti Smith, and living in New York, Paris and the Greek island of Crete. Almost four decades later, luck struck again: A Manhattan woman bequeathed Tamang her entire estate — including two [...]

This year, Oracle OpenWorld will be held Sept 19-23rd in San Francisco.
Also this year, JavaOne and Oracle Develop will be held Sep 19-23d in San Francisco.
How can that be?
Simple. Oracle has acquired the city of San Francisco.
OK, not all of it. But an awful lot of it.
And it didn’t actually acquire the city of San [...]

JFK Marilyn photo - Bing Images.

Like previous versions of Fedora as well as version 10.04 of Ubuntu, Fedora 13 primarily uses graphics drivers with kernel-based mode setting (KMS). In some respects, Goddard once again takes the lead in terms of KMS support, as Fedora supports Intel and NVIDIA graphics chips via the current versions of X.org’s “intel” and “nouveau” graphics [...]

The core ideas of RYW consistency, as implemented in various NoSQL systems, are:
Let N = the number of copies of each record distributed across nodes of a parallel system.
Let W = the number of nodes that must successfully acknowledge a write for it to be successfully committed. By definition, W <= N.
Let R = [...]

Immutability Fosters Concurrent Programming
Sharing Is Cheap
If you’re certain that an object will never change, then sharing this object becomes a simple matter of providing a reference to it. In Java doing so often requires a lot of defensive copying. Along this vein, because we can freely share references for immutable objects, we [...]