Every time I turn around it seems like Google is handing out a million dollars, usually for good causes. Associated Press reported late last year that Google topped $1 million in lobbying spending during its third fiscal quarter. Read more
Alastair Sweeney's book BlackBerry Planet, released last year, tells you more than you ever needed to know about Research in Motion and its famous smartphones, but as a relatively new BlackBerry user I figured getting a good backgrounder would be useful.
The National Science Foundation is funneling more than $1.7 million into a pair of computer security projects outlined today by the researchers' schools. Read more
From IDG News Service:
The U.S. Energy Department's Sandia National Laboratories is investigating the possibility of using virtualization to allow its researchers to make better use of its behemoth Red Storm supercomputer. Researchers from Northwestern University and the University of New Mexico are also participating in the project. Read more
Jon Kleinberg, a computer science professor at Cornell University, has won the 2009 Katayanagi Emerging Leadership Prize for his research into such network phenomena as how Web pages link, how social media friendships happen and how peer-to-peer file-sharing works. Read more
An article in Tuesday's Chronicle of Higher Education about the end of a Mellon Foundation program that funded several popular open source efforts has education IT pros buzzing about what the fate of those efforts. Read more
Google on Monday unveiled its latest Google Doodle, a festive tropical Christmas postcard that overlays the company's logo on its main search page. The company will be rolling out a series of additional Christmas Doodles between now and the holiday, and is archiving them at this web page. Read more
Google on Monday unveiled its latest Google Doodle, a festive tropical Christmas postcard that overlays the company's logo on its main search page. The company will be rolling out a series of additional Christmas Doodles between now and the holiday, and is archiving them at this web page. Read more
Carnegie Mellon University researcher Tom Mitchell says that privacy risks "on a scale that humans have never before faced" hinder real-time data analysis that could be used to solve health, traffic and human behavior problems. Read more
The U.S. Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has announced it will invest up to $71 million on 20 research project awards. The project awards will be matched via other funding sources, bringing the possible total investment to around $150 million. Among the projects awarded funding: Read more
Internet2, the advanced networking consortium powered by educational and research organizations, has announced that it's on the lookout for a new CEO. Read more
University of Michigan students on Dec. 9 will perform a unique concert: they will play instruments on their smartphones that they built in class. Read more
UPDATE: On Dec. 3, Neisluchowski issued a statement denying misuse of or theft of school computers.
Reports this week out of Arizona about how a public school district IT chief lost his job have put the use of volunteer grid computing efforts in the spotlight. Read more
University of Michigan professors and students have created an Android smartphone apps that gives users and developers a window into how much power their apps are chewing up. Read more
A UK researcher has compiled what he is calling the first album of Twitter music, that is, music squeezed into Twitter's signature 140-character messages.
Dan Stowell, a composer and computer scientist at Queen Mary, University of London, compiled the album – called sc140 – from Tweets sent from around the world. As much as five minutes of music can be jammed into a Tweet using programming tricks.
The MIT Kerberos Consortium held a conference in October and is now making slides from presentations available here online. These include slides from Microsoft Chief Architect for Identity Kim Cameron's keynote address and from a panel including NASA and Cornell reps. Read more
2009 marks the 13th anniversary for a slew of seminal tech industry events, so here on Friday the 13th, is a brief look back at developments both lucky and unlucky. (For our annual Geekiest 25th Anniversaries, click here) Read more