Communications Media

The University of Pennsylvania has installed a virtual reality system that allows a participant full-body interaction with a virtual environment without the hassle of bulky, dizzying 3-D glasses. The system will be demonstrated for journalists and others Thursday, May 15.

Key to the installation, dubbed LiveActor, is the pairing of an optical motion capture system to monitor the body’s movements with a stereo projection system to immerse users in a virtual environment. The combination

Web users who stick to one or two search engines and learn those well will have better results for their queries than users who try the same query or various engines, a Penn State researcher says.

“There are no wholesale rules about structuring a query that will work on multiple search engines,” said Bernard J. Jansen, assistant professor of information sciences and technology (IST). “And what works on one engine, such as narrowing a query, can have the opposite effect on other search engine

Drivers are four times more likely to have an accident if they use a mobile phone on the road. However, using a “talking windscreen” rather than a traditional mobile phone while driving could reduce this risk, and so help to prevent accidents, according to Oxford University research just published in Psychological Science.

A growing body of evidence shows that using a hands-free phone is as problematic for drivers as using a hand-held phone. It is probably the distraction of a driver´s atte

The explosive growth in mobile phones has been supported by a similar growth in the underlying networks of base stations used to connect calls. This has created headaches for network administrators charged with keeping an increasing numbers of base stations active at all times. Now a convenient new power and management cabinet allows administrators to manage the entire operation of base stations remotely, reducing time and costs and improving range.

EUREKA project SAEB98 brought together a S

One of the most unusual, yet persistent, problems television broadcasters face is what Tom Grimes calls “unitentional defamation.”

“This takes place when TV news viewers’ memory plays tricks on them and they end up ’remembering’ the facts of a TV news story in a way that defames an innocent person portrayed in the news story,” said Grimes, the Ross Beach research chair in the A.Q. Miller School of Journalism and Mass Communications at Kansas State University.

“Peopl

New digital tools

To survive and thrive in this century, business leaders need to hardwire new technologies into their playbooks to create enduring enterprises.

Many factors, from the need to export beyond national borders to the inexorable shift to intellectual capital, are driving change, but none is more important than the rise of the Internet and digital technologies. Like the steam engine or the assembly line, the Net and digital technologies have already become an adva