Technology

Paperless office?  An optimistic pipe dream.    We use more paper documents than at any time in history despite the prevalence of the Internet and digital technology.    Part…

Error Handling And Error Codes This article is a brief explanation of how errors can be handled in computer code.  The basic idea is that if an error arises then it should be obvious, and easily…

On television, police technicians zoom in on a security camera video to read a license plate or capture the face of a hold-up artist but, in real life, enhancing this low-quality video to focus in on…

Time for a job-hunting question.  Which programming languages can you work with?  It's not the same question as which languages you know, and can be a surprisingly hard question to answer,…

I spent last week in Boston, attending the Open Mobile Alliance meeting. Whenever one goes to meetings, one does the dance of the business card exchange. Because it was my first OMA meeting, I had…

Interested in Michael Jackson now that he is dead?   So are cyber criminals who are exploiting public interest in his death with spam messages that infect computers with a virus able to steal…

The Meaning Of Tolerance Tolerance, the ability to 'live with' or 'put up with' something has wide-ranging applications in engineering, and is strongly parallel to the notion of error bars1 in…

One of the pleasures of working at Reading University is being able to walk across to our Agriculture Department at lunchtime and join the table talk.  Today, they were discussing the following…

Stem cell research is a major challenge for medicine. Recently, asymmetric cell division was filmed in vivo in fruit fly germinal stem cells for the first time by the team of Jean-René Huynh at the…

David Pogue's secrets to his productivity: I use typing-expansion software...I use dictation software...I know where everything is. Years ago, I started using an address-book program that’s now…