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Slowdown hits NIIT NIIT’s franchisee association said 13 of the 34 franchisee education centres in Delhi were closing down or were on the verge of closure, The Times of India reports. "This has happened because of the wrong policies of the company’s management, which has also led to a decline in business," president of the franchisees association told the newspaper on telephone. NIIT’s head of education business said that the company had predicted the slowdown in the IT education business as early as April 2001. Type minus fingers How many fingers does it take to type? None, for anyone using Dasher, The Economist says. Dasher is a text-input program that works by predicting which letter is most likely to come next in a piece of text (and also the second most likely, third most likely etcetera). It then presents the possibilities to the typist on a screen. The typist chooses one, which is added to the growing text, and the program presents another set of choices. And so on. Dasher’s most recent incarnation, reported in this week’s Nature by the program’s originators, David MacKay and David Ward of Cambridge University, can literally be controlled by eye. A camera mounted next to the computer screen measures light reflected from the eyes. It works out which direction they are pointing and therefore which letter they are looking at, and transmits this information to the computer. After an hour’s practice, typists can achieve a respectable 25 words a minute. So people such as quadriplegics, who have control only over their eye-movements, can communicate quickly and comfortably with a computer. Dasher could make a significant difference to the small group of disabled people who can neither move nor talk. PC laundry College campuses have long since wired their dorms and libraries. Now some are going even further — Net-enabled laundry, Associated Press reports. IBM hopes a new system of smart, wired washers and dryers will instil a little efficiency in the college dormitory laundry room, letting students keep tabs on their laundry from anywhere they can access the Internet — their dorm rooms, the library or even a cell phone. The Armonk, New York-based company, plans to install about 9,000 of the machines on 40 campuses, all so far in the Midwest, including Ohio State University and Cedarville University in Cedarville, Ohio. Students can log onto a Web page to see if there are free machines and receive an e-mail or page when the load is finished. The system can also automatically charge students through their ID cards, though it would still accommodate traditional coins. Users can't reserve machines but the system could eliminate back-and-forth to the laundry room. Aussie 'porn' library The Australian national
library in Canberra is to download the contents of pornographic Websites
as part of its electronic collection, to give a "representative
picture of Australian erotica on the Internet". The electronic
librarian, Edgar Crook, told Guardian the files would cater to the needs
of social historians, not the dirty brigade. "The examination of
society and culture of a period by necessity involves the study of its
sexual life," he wrote in the library's newsletter. "With this
in mind, it is clear that there is no merit in |
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