Crash! Bang! Crunch! That was the noise of your glasses breaking as your head hit the inflating airbag! Picture a typical road accident scenario. What’s happened? What do you do next?

With luck, within 5 minutes you’ll be compos mentis enough to call for help on your mobile phone. But what if you’re unconscious or have broken your wrist? This is the scenario in which a new e-call system proposed under the IST project E-MERGE will come into its own.

Automatic alerts to emergency

Of all the personal computers to be unwrapped during the holiday season, more than 80 percent will be used to go online and search the Web’s more than 92 million gigabytes of data (comparable to a 2 billion-volume encyclopedia). Getting online is the easy part, finding a useful Web page is a bit harder-keeping track of a useful Web page is another issue altogether.

People have devised many tricks-such as sending e- mails to themselves or jotting on sticky notes-for keeping track of Web pa

UMHS study finds inaccurate, old information on nearly one-third of Web sites

Unlike more common cancers like breast cancer, prostate cancer or melanoma, few people understand the basic facts about what causes bladder cancer and how it is treated. So when patients are diagnosed with bladder cancer, they often turn to the Internet for information.

But a new study by researchers at the University of Michigan Health System found 32 percent of Web sites about bladder cancer cont

Internet users can be blind-sided by e-mail “cluster bombs” that inundate their inboxes with hundreds or thousands of messages in a short period of time, thereby paralyzing the users’ online activities, according to a new report by researchers at Indiana University Bloomington and RSA Laboratories in Bedford, Mass.

IUB computer scientist Filippo Menczer and RSA Laboratories Principal Research Scientist Markus Jakobsson describe in the December 2003 issue of ;login: a weakness in Web sit

The next time you try to watch a homemade movie, or access your files from a recordable DVD on your computer’s DVD drive, you might be in for an unpleasant surprise. It might not work.

Initial tests conducted by researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in collaboration with the DVD Association and the Optical Storage Technology Association show that compatibility between recordable DVDs and DVD drives is only 85 percent. This means that if a recording is made o

Iban Rodríguez Barbarin, a telecommunications engineer from Pamplona, has carried out a study on processing seismic waves emanating from the ocean’s floor. The study is the subject of his graduate thesis, ’Ocean Bottom Seismometers (OBS) processing with refraction seismology’.

The study was carried out within a wider research and development project by investigators at Navarre Public University, jointly with scientists from the Vilanova i la Geltru Centre for Technology, part of the Polytec

The idea of working from a distance with the help of modern information and communication technologies (ICTs) has been with us for three decades now.

According to the most optimistic predictions by some scholars and policy makers, it was envisaged that by the turn of the millennium most, if not all, clerical workers would be familiar with teleworking. However, from today’s perspective it is clear that this has not happened. Much like getting rid of paper in offices, escaping the constr

Future cellular telephones and other wireless communication devices are expected to be much more versatile as consumers gain the ability to program them in a variety of ways. Scientists and engineers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have teamed up with a variety of computing and telecommunications companies to develop both the test methods and the standard protocols needed to make this possible.

Programmable networks will include location aware services that will

How can you be sure your on-line transactions are secure, and find out if anybody has been siphoning off money from your credit card? The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) has developed a way of handling electronic information to protect the rights of cyberspace users and guard against fraud when buying on the Internet.

The EU Cyber Tools On-Line Search for Evidence (CTOSE) project helps identify, secure, integrate and present electronic evidence on on-line criminal offence

Rooftop satellite receivers can look out of place with the historic surroundings of ancient cities. In the first-time participation with ESA, a Greek company is working to solve this.

The project is to develop a kind of satellite receiver known as a planar array. Unlike more commonly seen parabola-shaped dishes, planar arrays pick up less interference from other satellites. Another feature is their square, flat shape.
Low-visibility is a major concern in Greece; unsightly satellite dish

Businesses throughout the UK and Europe should soon be able to reduce their travel costs thanks to improvements in the quality of teleconferencing made possible by a grant of almost €2.5 million from the Information Society Technology (IST) Programme of the European Union’s Fifth Framework Programme (FP5).

The VIRTUE (Virtual Team User Environment) project concentrated on improving the quality aspects of video conferencing and the results look set to revolutionise future technology. The VIRT

Florida Tech professor quadruples amount of information carried on single cable

Dr. Syed Murshid’s eyes light up as he flips the switches, one, two, three, and four. As the Florida Tech associate professor of electrical engineering uses his optics projector, pulses of red light project onto a wall. With each click, a new concentric circle appears. The circles represent a sea change in information technology. When he’s finished, a red glowing bull’s eye shines brightly,

Penn State engineers have developed innovative design methods for a new class of antennas composed of an array of fractal-shaped tiles that offer anywhere from a 4:1 to 8:1 improvement in bandwidth compared to their conventional counterparts.

Many natural objects, such as tree branches and their root systems, peaks and valleys in a landscape and rivers and their tributaries are versions of mathematical fractals which appear pleasingly irregular to the eye but are actually made of self-simila

The increasing use of mobile phones has resulted in increased human exposure to radiofrequency electromagnetic fields: already more than 80% of the Finnish population have a mobile phone. Although the electromagnetic fields from mobile phones are weak, the high number of exposed persons, together with some provocative but inconclusive scientific results, has raised concerns about possible health hazards. Finnish universities and research institutes have investigated possible health effects of mobile

UK broadcasters are often accused of promoting obscenity through the increased use of bad language on TV. However, new research from the University of Warwick reveals that the language of public name-calling, or ’street theatre’, in early modern England was full of foul sexual insults that are far more lewd than today’s broadcast media – and women were the main offenders.

Professor Bernard Capp’s book ’When Gossips Meet’, tracks the history of poor and ’mi

The Owasys company in Zamudio has chosen Babel technology, world leader and pioneer in speech technologies, for its new Owasys22C mobile telephone. This mobile phone has been designed and developed by Owasys specifically for those persons who are blind or visually impaired. Initially the Owasys22C will have the Spanish and English version of Babel so that other languages can be added afterwards.

The launching of the Owasys22C on to the market will enable the visually impaired and the blind t