A new Chinese supercomputer debuted atop a recently released list of the world’s most powerful computing systems. The Tianhe-2, which the government-run National University of Defense Technology developed, topped the latest Top500 list with a tested performance of 33.86 petaflops (one petaflops is 10¹⁵ flops). The second and formerly top-ranked system on the biannual list is the US’s Titan—housed at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory—which performs 17.59 petaflops. The US’s Sequoia computer ranked third, followed by the Japanese K and the US’s Mira. The Tianhe-2 uses Intel Ivy Bridge and Xeon Phi chips with 3,120,000 computing cores and has a theoretical peak performance of 54.9 petaflops. Most of the components are Chinese-made, including the Kylin Linux operating system. Of the systems on the Top500, the US has 252, China now has 66, Japan has 30, the UK has 29, and France has 23. Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of the US Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, compile the list. (BBC)(Top500 Supercomputer Sites) 

Google announced steps it is taking to end the online distribution of pornographic images of minors. The search-engine giant is creating a global database of flagged child sexual abuse images it plans to share with other search engines so that these images can ultimately be eliminated, says Google, by companies, child advocacy groups, and law enforcement. Google could also share the information with law-enforcement officials to initiate action against the content providers. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children’s Cybertipline Child Victim Identification Program reviewed 17.3 million images and videos of suspected child sexual abuse in 2011 -- four times more than it received in 2007. Google also recently created a $2 million Child Protection Technology Fund to encourage the development of technologies for detecting child pornography. As the Read Write Web-technology blog noted “Google’s program is a strong step in making it harder to find child pornography on the Internet -- and that’s a damn good thing. But sources … of this content will still be available to provide material that exploits children. All the search engines are doing is making it harder for new searchers … to locate such content.” (Read Write)(The Telegraph – 1)(The Telegraph – 2)(The Official Google Blog)
 

The popularity of Twitter has prompted the Oxford English Dictionary to break its own rules for inclusion, adding “tweet” to its pages. The OED online now lists the word as both a noun and a verb related to social networking. The dictionary formerly defined the word only as “a brief high-pitched sound.” The OED typically requires words to have been used for at least 10 years before being listed. Twitter has existed for only seven years. Other technology-related terms that the OED added include “flash mob,” “crowdsourcing,” “live blog,” “3D printer,”and “search engine optimization.” The dictionary is updated quarterly. (Computerworld)(Reuters)(The Daily Mail) 

Web mashups are a new generation of applications based on the composition of ready-to-use, heterogeneous components. They have potential to evolve users from passive recipients to active creators of applications. However, some issues are still largely unexplored, particularly those related to quality and identifying adequate components to use in mashups.

At the 2012 Eighth International Conference on the Quality of Information and Communications Technology (Quatic 2012), Italian researchers presented a paper reviewing ways to capture the intrinsic quality of mashup components, as well as the components’ capacity to maximize the final application’s quality and value. The authors also propose a process in which quality becomes the driver for suggesting how users how can complete mashups based on the integration of quality-assessment and recommendation techniques within a development tool.

“Quality-Aware Mashup Composition: Issues, Techniques and Tools” and other papers from Quatic 2012 are available to both IEEE Computer Society members and paid subscribers via the Computer Society Digital Library.
 

The Associated Press is reporting that the US National Security Agency is building a “billion-dollar epicenter for fighting global cyberthreats” that would store information including records surreptitiously collected from phone calls and e-mail. This occurs as the NSA is under public scrutiny and criticism for intercepting and collecting such communications.  When it opens in October 2013, the Bluffdale, Utah, facility will reportedly be the NSA’s largest data-storage center in the country. The facility will be a depository for all information the NSA collects and will hold a yottabyte (1024 bytes) of data. The agency says it will be “a state-of-the-art facility designed to support the US intelligence community’s efforts to further strengthen and protect the nation. Its operations will be lawfully conducted in accordance with US laws and policies.” National security experts -- including author James Bamford, who has written extensively about the NSA, and at least one former NSA employee -- speculated the secret, secure facility will be a hub for spying-related activities. Former senior technical leader with the NSA, Richard George, told the Associated Press “it’s just a big file cabinet out in the Western area. …There is no spying going on there.” (PhysOrg)(Associated Press)
 

Nanyang Technological University and University of California, Berkeley, researchers have constructed a prototype ultrafast, energy-efficient ferroelectric memory device able to use light to read data. Three types of memory chips are commonly available: RAM, ROM, and DRAM, each of which has limitations. Recent research on addressing these limitations has focused on developing an energy-efficient device that is faster and more accurate than RAM. The leading candidate is ferroelectric RAM, which is made with bismuth ferrite and uses magnetic polarization to represent the ones and zeros of binary data. The newly developed FRAM chip uses halogen light to read the polarization.  Shining a light on the material does not disturb its polarization. This would eliminate errors, specifically the erasing of data, that can occur when devices use electricity to read polarization. The researchers claim their device is about 10,000 times faster than DRAM and operates on only 3 volts of electricity, compared to DRAM’s average 15 volts. The next steps toward commercializing the technology include making it smaller. The researchers published their work in the journal Nature Communications. (PhysOrg)(Nature Communications)

A collection of applications that US researchers have developed promise to improve response times for mobile-phone users calling 911 for emergency services in the US. About 70 percent of all US emergency calls are placed via cellular telephones. However, emergency-services operators can’t automatically find mobile-phone callers’ locations, as they can with wireline-phone users. University of North Texas professor Ram Dantu, with colleagues at his school and at Texas A&M University and Columbia University, designed technology that uses GPS to pinpoint the location of a mobile-phone caller. The goal is to enable the dispatch of police or fire personnel within 60 seconds of an emergency call. The new system also transmits text, images, and video to emergency dispatchers, allowing them to collect information about injured people, including their heart rate, blood pressure, and other vital signs. Dantu said he conferred with Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas, area 911 operators to assess their needs and plans to gather feedback about the new system from additional US 911 operators. The researchers are scheduled to demonstrate their applications at the upcoming 2013 National Emergency Number Association conference in Charlotte, North Carolina. They will reportedly be commercially available within a few months. The US National Science Foundation funded the research. (PhysOrg)(Fort Worth Star-Telegram)(National Science Foundation)
 

Enterprises have started to establish dedicated risk management (RM) functions to address risks from different sources, such as currency exchange and credit risk. In most companies and projects, RM and testing functions operate independently.

However, in a paper presented at the 2012 Eighth International Conference on the Quality of Information and Communications Technology (Quatic 2012), researchers from SQS Software Quality Systems AG demonstrate the relationships between RM and test management (TM). They further describe an integration to leverage the RM-TM synergies based on two widely used standards for the respective disciplines.

“Integrating Test and Risk Management" and other papers from Quatic 2012 are available to both IEEE Computer Society members and paid subscribers via the Computer Science Digital Library.
 

NTT West has tested 4K-resolution video streaming via the Internet to TV set-top boxes in Japan. Ultrahigh definition television, commonly known as 4K, has a resolution of 3,840 × 2,160, providing four times as many pixels as conventional 1080p high-definition (HD) TV. In its three-day trial, NTT West will use the H.256/HEVC High Efficiency Video Coding standard to send ultrahigh-resolution video from a cloud server to a set-top box connected to a standard 4K television. Although ultrahigh-definition displays—on TVs, mobile devices, and computer monitors—are commercially available, there is little 4K content for them. Instead, users generally try to play digitally enhanced HD broadcasts and video. (BBC)(PC World) 

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) claims US faculty members’ copyrights and academic freedom are threatened by colleges asserting that they own the open, online courses that their instructors create. The AAUP is urging its members to seek protection for their intellectual-property rights. Without such protection, professors are unable to profit from their own writing or research, making the profession akin to working “in a service industry,” claims Cory Nelson, former AAUP president and an English professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who urged the action at the organization’s annual conference this week. “If we lose the battle over intellectual property, it's over,” he said in his remarks. The AAUP is launching a campaign to have intellectual-property protection in faculty contracts and to develop and distribute handbooks with Web-based resources teachers can consult. (SlashDot)(The Chronicle of Higher Education)