It started as a joke and ended up as a shot heard round the Internet, with the joker quitting his job and Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, suffering a blow to its credibility.
A man in Nashville, Tenn., has admitted that, in trying to shock a colleague with a joke, he put false information into a Wikipedia entry about John Seigenthaler Sr., a former editor of The Tennessean newspaper in Nashville.
Brian Chase, 38, who until Friday was an operations manager at a small delivery company, told Seigenthaler he had written the material suggesting Seigenthaler had been involved in the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy.
Seigenthaler discovered the false entry only recently and wrote about it in an op-ed article in USA Today, saying he was especially annoyed that he could not track down the perpetrator because of Internet privacy laws.
His plight touched off a debate about the reliability of information on Wikipedia — and by extension the Internet — and the difficulty in holding Web sites and their users accountable, even when someone is defamed.

Wikipedia prankster confesses

This year's USBOIP (Universal Serial Bus over Internet Protocol) hands-on project explores what is necessary to enable USB devices to operate over a network. The project attempts to spark interest and consideration about the emerging methods to extend the functions of USB devices. As with all hands-on projects, the effort for this project spanned several months' research, planning, and implementation. The recently released Wireless USB specification was unavailable during most of the project, so it did not materially affect our effort.

Portable connection: Can USB work over a network?

Portable Apps Suite allows you to carry all your standard applications on a USB thumbdrive, iPod, portable hard drive or any other portable media. It contains a portable web browser, email client, web editor, office suite, word processor, calendar/scheduler, instant messaging client and FTP client... all in one package, all preconfigured to work portably and be easy to back up. Just unzip it and you're ready to go. You can then plug your portable device right into any Windows computer and use all of the applications just like you would on your own computer.

Portable Apps Suite (USB Friendly)

D-Link, the end to end networking solutions provider for consumers and business, today announced that a new D-Link Internet Camera with 3G compatibility will be added to its award-winning line of IP surveillance products offering customers the ability to view live video streams from a 3G cell phone. The D-Link Wireless Internet Camera with 3G compatibility attaches to a home or small office network via a wired or wireless 802.11g/b connection and the live camera feed can then be pulled from the 3G cellular network by compatible cell phones with a 3GPP player. The D-Link 3G Wireless Internet Camera will offer both consumers and small businesses a flexible and convenient way to remotely monitor a home or office in real time from anywhere within the 3G service area.

D-Link Announces 3G Compatible Internet Camera Offering Mobile Monitoring From Cell Phones

Eyeballs, a severed hand, or fingers carried in ziplock bags. Back alley eye replacement surgery. These are scenarios used in recent blockbuster movies like Steven Spielberg's "Minority Report" and "Tomorrow Never Dies" to illustrate how unsavory characters in high-tech worlds beat sophisticated security and identification systems.

Sound fantastic? Maybe not. Biometrics is the science of using biological properties, such as fingerprints, an iris scan, or voice recognition, to identify individuals. And in a world of growing terrorism concerns and increasing security measures, the field of biometrics is rapidly expanding.

"Biometric systems automatically measure the unique physiological or behavioral ‘signature' of an individual, from which a decision can be made to either authenticate or determine that individual's identity," explained Stephanie C. Schuckers, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Clarkson University. "Today, biometric systems are popping up everywhere – in places like hospitals, banks, even college residence halls – to authorize or deny access to medical files, financial accounts, or restricted or private areas."

"And as with any identification or security system," Schuckers adds, "biometric devices are prone to ‘spoofing' or attacks designed to defeat them."

Clarkson University Engineer Outwits High-Tech Fingerprint Fraud

It's a scene football fans will see over and over during the bowl and NFL playoff seasons: a player, often the quarterback, being slammed to the ground and hitting the back of his head on the landing.
Sure, it hurts, but what happens to the inside of the skull? Researchers and doctors long have relied upon crude approximations made from test dummy crashes or mathematical models that infer – rather loosely – what happens to the brain during traumatic brain injury or concussion.
But the truth is that the state of the art in understanding brain deformation after impact is rather crude and uncertain because such methods don't give any true picture of what happens. Now, mechanical engineers at Washington University in St. Louis and collaborators have devised a technique on humans that for the first time shows just what the brain does when the skull accelerates.
What they've done is use a technique originally developed to measure cardiac deformation to image deformation in human subjects during repeated mild head decelerations. Picture, if you will, a mangled quarterback's occipital bone banging the ground, then rebounding. The researchers have mimicked that very motion with humans on a far milder, gentler, smaller scale and captured the movement inside the brain by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

New technique puts brain-imaging research on its head

A vegetated rooftop recycling system has been developed that allows water to be used twice before it is flushed into the communal waste water system.
The Green Roof Water Recycling System (GROW) uses semi-aquatic plants to treat waste washing water, which can then be reused for activities such as flushing the toilet.
GROW is the brainchild of Chris Shirley-Smith, whose company Water Works UK is collaborating with Imperial College London and Cranfield University. The researchers are funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.
So-called grey water from washbasins, baths and showers is pumped up to the GROW system, which is constructed on the roof of an office or housing block. It consists of an inclined framework of interconnected horizontal troughs. Planted in these troughs are rows of specially chosen plants that gently cleanse the grey water. Trickling through the GROW framework, the plants' roots naturally take up the dissolved pollutants, leaving 'green water'. Green water is not drinkable and will be dyed with a vegetable colour to signify this, but it can be used to flush toilets or water the garden.

GROWing the next generation of water recycling plants

The next advance in cameras is becoming a reality at the University of Rochester. Imaging chips revolutionized the photography industry, and now the chips themselves are being revolutionized. A pair of newly patented technologies may soon enable power-hungry imaging chips to use just a fraction of the energy used today and capture better images to boot—all while enabling cameras to shrink to the size of a shirt button and run for years on a single battery. Placed in a home, they could wirelessly provide images to a security company when an alarm is tripped, or even allow mapping software like Google's to zoom in to real-time images at street level. The enormous reduction in power consumption and increase in computing power can also bring cell-phone video calls closer to fruition.

Breakthrough Chip Delivers Better Digital Pictures For Less Power

Working hard and being employed may no longer be enough to ward off poverty, according to a study released today by the Sodexho Foundation and Brandeis University's Institute on Assets and Social Policy. The study finds that the U.S. has a large contingency of working poor who do not have sufficient resources to support their families at a minimum economic standard.
The future might be more promising, however. The study shows that new state policies are enabling more low-income households to move from poverty to the middle class by rewarding work effort, enhancing job-related earnings and providing ways to encourage the accumulation of assets such as savings and home ownership.
The study, Innovative State Policies to Reduce Poverty and Expand the Middle Class: Building Asset Security Among Low-Income Households, examines a new domestic policy framework called "asset building." The framework is based on the concept that helping people develop financial assets provides stability and an opportunity to move into the middle class.

American dream, in peril, is successfully pursued through state programs

A standard Internet protocol that checks errors made during email transmissions has now inspired a revolutionary method to transform DNA microarray analysis, a common technology used to understand gene activation. The new method, which blends experiment and computation, strengthens DNA microarray analysis, according to its Carnegie Mellon University inventor, who is publishing his findings in the December issue of Nature Biotechnology with collaborators at the Hebrew University in Israel.
The innovative method combines a new experimental procedure and a new algorithm to identify gene activation captured by DNA microarray analysis with greater sensitivity and specificity. The work holds great promise for vastly improving research on health and disease, according to Ziv Bar-Joseph, assistant professor of computer science and biological sciences at Carnegie Mellon.

Carnegie Mellon U. transforms DNA microarrays with standard Internet communications tool