General
The New Buildings Institute promotes "energy efficiency in buildings through policy development, research, guidelines and codes." Substantial information about lighting, architecture, and mechanical systems is available on the institute's homepage. The online reports, tools, and suggested practices come from a variety of sources, including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and the institute itself. A large section of the Web site that can easily be overlooked contains many additional resources about the Public Interest Energy Research (PIER) program. A brief, free registration is required to access certain online publications, such as the 2003 edition of Advanced Lighting Guidelines. [CL]
http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/history/
This Web site serves as a collection of seminal research papers that "every serious student of computer security should read." Mostly from the 1970's but also stretching into the '80s, the papers were first collectively distributed at the 1998 National Information Systems Security Conference but are now offered online to make them more widely available. Each paper contributed to computer security by providing an original theory or concept that many others would later draw upon. For instance, one paper proposes A Provably Secure Operating System and discusses implementation considerations. There are sixteen papers in all that are available for download. [CL]
http://www.gridcomputingplanet.com/
Grid computing is a way of achieving high computational power by using the collective resources of many networked computers. This Web site serves as a news source for some of the latest breakthroughs in grid technology, major project announcements and milestones, and governmental initiatives. In addition to the regular news updates, the site offers many other resources. For example, the Frequently Asked Questions list defines grid computing and briefly touches on its importance and applications. Feature articles are added periodically and categorized into background information, grid implementations, standards, and other issues. [CL]
http://www.sme.org/cgi-bin/find-issues.pl?&&ME&SME&
Manufacturing Engineering is a monthly publication of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers. It is targeted primarily at manufacturing professionals, but it can also be of use to anyone with an interest in the field. This Web site posts between six and ten in-depth articles from each issue of the magazine. Examples of some topics that have been addressed in past issues include turbomachining processes, computer-aided design and manufacturing, and robotic assembly. The online archive maintains all previous monthly postings back to January 2000. [CL]
http://www.acm.org/~hlb/col-edit/
A computer science professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas is the author of these Digital Village columns that occasionally appear in a publication of the Association for Computing Machinery. The latest column, scheduled to appear in the December 2003 issue, discusses the Malware Month of the Millennium. This curious title refers to the month of August, when the W32/Blaster and SoBig.F worms severely affected Internet traffic. The author makes many interesting points about the rise of malicious software, including noting the "four fundamental principles of hacker 'social engineering.'" Several other columns are also available on this site, but they are mostly older and the author no longer writes them. [CL]
A revolution in addressing Internet-connected devices is taking place; the aging Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) is being replaced by the next generation IPv6. The change is due to the lack of capacity of the old version, which could only support about four billion distinct addresses. This will soon be inadequate with the explosive growth of the Internet, and hence the movement toward IPv6. The North American IPv6 Task Force homepage is frequently updated with news of deployment efforts, technology tests, and other issues. Presentation slides from the 2003 North American IPv6 Summit can be downloaded. Tutorials and background documents can also be viewed online. [CL]
http://www.unece.org/press/pr2003/03robots_index.htm
This Web page of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe contains seven press releases that summarize some of the findings of the 380-page World Robotics survey for 2003. The first press release looks at worldwide investment in robots and projects strong growth over the next three years. Some interesting statistics, such as the size of the robot workforce and the number of household service robots, are also included. The remaining documents are specific to robot markets in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the U.K., and the U.S. [CL]
http://www.forbes.com/2003/10/01/conncampusland.html
In October 2003, the Princeton Review released the findings of a study designed to rank 351 U.S. college campuses on their investments in computer and Internet resources. The results of the study are available exclusively at this Web site. Each campus's ranking was based on a number of areas of technological sophistication, including online registration and courses, computer proficiency requirements for graduating students, and presence of a wireless network. In addition to the complete results for all 351 campuses, the methodology used to collect the data is discussed. [CL]
