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Posts Tagged ‘Science And Technology’

feature: The science and technology of air traffic control

The typical image people have of air traffic control (ATC) is that of a group of people in an airport tower who coordinate aircraft activity by staring at radar screens that use points of light to represent aircraft. While not fundamentally incorrect, this isn’t a fair representation of the extent of ATC operations. This article will flesh out that simplistic image and introduce you to the equipment, technologies, and procedures that go into keeping aircraft and air travelers safe in the air and on the ground. We’ll look at the way air traffic control is organized, and explore the communication technologies that air traffic controllers use to keep in touch with air crew and ground personnel. We’ll also look at the radar technologies used to keep track of aircraft, and we’ll end with a brief look at some next-generation technologies.

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US government looks to expand scientific open access policy

Last Thursday, the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy launched a public forum to allow the public to provide feedback into a potential expansion of the US government’s open access policy for scientific research. Right now, the National Institutes of Health is the only agency that requires recipients of its funding to make any scientific papers available to the public within a year of the publication date. For the next month, the OSTP will be soliciting feedback on whether and how the policy should be extended to other federal agencies.

The NIH’s open access policy started out as voluntary; researchers who received NIH funding were encouraged to send papers in for the NIH to host. That was generally considered a flop. Researchers are typically more focused on actual research, and not well versed in copyright issues, meaning the NIH’s archive was poorly populated. Eventually, Congress stepped in, and made the policy mandatory: any publication funded by NIH research had to be sent into the agency’s archive within a year of publication.

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KAIST’s HUBO shows off some newfound dexterity, hides emotions behind ill-fitting motorcycle helmet

Sometimes when we see the seemingly slow advance of Honda’s ASIMO, the inherent limitations of WowWee toys, or the purposefully limited one-off research projects of universities, we start to give up hope of being super best pals with a humanoid robot this century; hope of partaking in whimsical 80s movie hijinks, hand-in-metal-hand. This little video of the Korean Institute of Advanced Science and Technology’s recent advances on its HUBO project therefore serves as a bit of a “hope refresher,” allowing us to once again re-imagine those aforementioned scenes of whimsy with a metallic bot that can handle a sword and walk at an almost-useful pace, while inexplicably wearing a smallish, visored helmet. Sure, there’s a long way to go, but we’d just like to say that when the robot apocalypse doesn’t happen and we realize how much we really have in common with these machines we’ve built to look like us, that somewhere in late 2009 this video helped us keep on believing.

Continue reading KAIST’s HUBO shows off some newfound dexterity, hides emotions behind ill-fitting motorcycle helmet

Filed under: Robots

KAIST’s HUBO shows off some newfound dexterity, hides emotions behind ill-fitting motorcycle helmet originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 15 Nov 2009 01:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Classified base now hosts science center, retro computer show

This Saturday, Ars will be attending what you might consider a different kind of computer expo in a different kind of science museum. The event is hosted by MARCH, the Mid-Atlantic Retro Computing Hobbyists, and will feature 23 exhibitors with hardware that predates the 1980s, all of it working. But the Vintage Computer Festival East won’t be a show-and-tell type display; MARCH requires that its exhibitors be willing to let the attendees use anything that’s on display.

The event will take place at Info Age in New Jersey, a recently opened museum that’s taking a decidedly different approach to connecting the public with the science and technology behind the communication and computing revolutions. We talked to both the head of MARCH and the man behind Info Age to get a feel for this weekend’s events, and their place in the efforts to get Info Age up and running.

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Week in tech: self-destructing data, deleted e-books, and more

The week gone by may be best remembered for the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, but that wasn’t the only big story to emerge from the world of science and technology. Here are some others:

Computer scientists at the University of Washington have come up with a scheme that allows users to encrypt data using a key that is then stored online in a distributed computing network. As nodes drop off the network, the key is eventually lost, meaning the data is essentially lost.

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