“E-bomb” may see first combat use in Iraq
Weapons designed to attack electronic systems and not people could see their first combat use in any military attack on Iraq.
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High Power Microwave (HPM) devices are designed to destroy electronic equipment in command, control, communications and computer targets and are available to the US military. They produce an electromagnetic field of such intensity that their effect can be far more devastating than a lighting strike.
Study Links Media Violence with Mean Kids
“A study conducted by the National Institute on Media and the Family concludes that watching lots of violence on television and playing violent video games not only makes kids more physically aggressive, but it also makes them meaner and more distrustful.”
As long as nobody tries to take my violent games away, I’m happy. I’ll post more entries after I go beat someone up. I’ve had this urge to do so all day. 😉
While I do worry sometimes about machines eventually getting too much control (call it the Phillip K. Dick in me), this article makes some good points of them having insufficient control.
To Err Is Human
By GEORGE JOHNSON
THEY knew all along that human fallibility had contributed to the deaths of their children. There was the well-meaning tour operator in Moscow who had delivered the students to the wrong airport, causing them to miss an earlier flight to Spain. There was the Swiss air traffic controller who happened to take a break at just the wrong moment, leaving an overworked colleague struggling to guide five different planes through his small piece of sky.
Last week, the third, decisive element was revealed to grieving Russian parents: Ordered to climb higher by the electronic voice of the cockpit’s automatic collision detector, the pilot of the children’s plane obeyed the befuddled ground controller instead. The airliner dove head-on into a DHL cargo jet — a tragedy that might have been averted if people put more faith in machines.
New Method Said to Solve Key Problem in Math
By SARA ROBINSON
"Three Indian computer scientists have solved a longstanding mathematics problem by devising a way for a computer to tell quickly and definitively whether a number is prime � that is, whether it is evenly divisible only by itself and 1."
"Prof. Manindra Agarwal and two of his students, Nitin Saxena and Neeraj Kayal (both BTech from CSE/IITK who have just joined as Ph.D. students), have discovered a polynomial time deterministic algorithm to test if an input number is prime or not. Lots of people over (literally!) centuries have been looking for a polynomial time test for primality, and this result is a major breakthrough, likened by some to the P-time solution to Linear Programming announced in the 70s."
"One of the main features of this result is that the proof is neither too complex nor too long (their preprint paper is only 9 pages long!), and relies on very innovative and insightful use of results from number theory. "
Someday I gotta build one of these. It would put my electrical engineering skills to the test. 🙂