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
Via Jim Duffy, Network World
HP Wednesday said it is acquiring 3Com for $2.7 billion, 30 years after Ethernet creator Robert Metcalfe co-founded the company. The acquisition will fill out HP's data center product portfolio with switches, routers and security products, plus expand its presence in China.
Under the cash transaction, HP will pay $7.90 per 3Com share. The terms of the transaction have been approved by the HP and 3Com boards of directors. Read more
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Georgia Tech researchers have received a $450,000 NSF grant to boost security of iPhones, BlackBerries and other smartphones and the wireless networks on which they run. And it’s those networks where the researchers are really zeroing in.
Rutgers University researchers are testing whether "activity-based" password hint questions are better at safeguarding security than the static ones we're all used to, such as "What's your mother's maiden name?"
These activity-based password clues would be tied to your recent activity, like "What were you doing at noon yesterday?" Read more
Researchers are in a race against increasingly dense and powerful laptops that will melt themselves if they get much hotter. One possible solution involves putting spin on electrons to record and process information, says Jairo Sinova, a Texas A&M University physics professor, who has joined forces with researchers from Hitachi Cambridge Laboratory, the Institute of Physics ASCR, University of Cambridge and University of Nottingham. Read more
A new iPhone 3GS app that turns the mobile device into an English-Spanish/Spanish-English speech translator is the brainchild of Carnegie Mellon University Computer Science Professor Alex Waibel. The application is being sold via Jibbigo, a company launched by Waibel.
CMU says the app has a vocabulary of about 40,000 words and is ideal for world travelers and medical doctors. Speak a couple of sentences intothe phone and it spits back an audible translation. Read more
The University of Florida, Cornell University and a handful of other schools have been awarded $12.2 million to build a social/collaborative network for scientists and researchers. The idea is to make it easier to find research and like-minded researchers in an effort to speed new discoveries.
The project, funded via the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, will initially take of the form of networks within each of the 7 founding schools but within two years could expand across the country. Eventually, the network will go worldwide, grant recipients hope. Read more
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Intel Labs Pittsburgh have built an experimental energy-efficient computing cluster that combines flash memory and the sort of processors used in netbooks. Their name for it? Fast Array of Wimpy Nodes (FAWN). Read more
Google's "doodle" Wednesday on its search home page is a bar code that presumably translates into the word "Google". Read more
Charles Kao, whose work in the 1960s laid the foundation for today's long-distance fiber-optic networks, has won a share of this year's Nobel Prize in Physics. Read more
Researchers this week published a paper describing how they broke Vanish, a secure communications system prototype out of the University of Washington that generated lots of buzz when introduced over the summer for its ability to make data self-destruct. Read more
Google Wave has gotten a ton of attention this week in the Read more
AT&T Labs-Research, Yahoo Research and other members of the Bellkor's Pragmatic Chaos team are celebrating their win in the 3-year-long Netflix Prize contest. Read more
A computer algorithm developed at the University of Washington has been used to create a digital reconstruction of Rome, including landmarks like the Colosseum. Eventually, the technology could find applications in everything from architecture to building video games. Read more
Two University of California, Berkeley professors have come up with a good idea for a blog: It focuses on the top 10 pending cyberlaw cases, including those involving Google Books, net neutrality, warrentless wiretapping and Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The copyright case vs. Google over Google Books is No. 1 on their list. Read more
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates will share words of wisdom on Sept. 22 at the opening ceremony for a computer science center bearing his name at Carnegie Mellon University, the home of the nation's first such department in 1965. Read more
The National Science Foundation has pledged $400,000 over five years to fund research into mobile application management at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass. The Mobile Application Management project is led by Jeannie Albrecht, an assistant professor of computer science who has background working on the GENI research network, and will involve creation of a software toolkit that could help mobile apps developers better deal with everything from device configuration to tracking errors. Read more
The Ethernet Alliance has extended an open invite to those interested in attending its all-day Technology Exploration Forum on 40G and 100G Ethernet taking place in Santa Clara on Sept. 15. Read more
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