A team of Indian-origin researchers in Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) says that small hospitals in rural areas can provide patients with the benefits of modern equipment and technology by sharing an IT infrastructure with larger hospitals in the same geographic area.

Assistant Professor Madhu Reddy, Associate Professor Sandeep Purao, and graduate student Mary Kelly conducted interviews with administrators at a regional hospital and three small, rural hospitals in central Pennsylvania.

The researchers said that the three smaller hospitals relied on the regional hospital to manage such things as software, laboratory information, and technical support.

Reporting their findings in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, the team said that the smaller hospitals saw financial savings from the partnership, and also benefited from the shared IT staff and its experience.

“The most prominent financial benefit for the rural hospitals was the ability to afford a comprehensive IT infrastructure at a relatively low price. For instance, the rural hospitals only pay a percentage of the hardware dedicated to their needs … if the regional hospital buys a new hard drive, the rural hospitals will only be charged for the percentage of the hard drive they use,” Reddy said.

The regional hospital did not profit from sharing its services, but the smaller hospitals did take on costs involved with the partnership, and helped pay for the additional staffing required to make the relationship possible.

The one problem associated with the outsourcing system was the perception among the smaller hospitals that their customer service requests were sometimes not a high priority for the regional hospital’s IT staff, said the researchers.

“They believed a traditional vendor would want to meet their needs in order to retain their business, but that was not always the case in the partnership. However, as the partnership evolved over time, they were able to overcome this challenge,” Reddy said.

The researchers want to continue this research by organizing a larger case study, which will examine rural/regional hospital IT relationships throughout Pennsylvania.

Their aim is to determine whether such a relationship can have long-term benefits for rural hospitals across the state and the country.

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Professional and aspiring musicians may soon have an alternative to worn-out karaoke-style backing tracks and drum machines with a new artificial musical accompanist called Jambot.

PhD researcher Toby Gifford, from Queensland University of Technology’s (QUT) faculty of creative industries, has created an artificial musical accompanist, called Jambot, which can listen to music and improvise musical rhythms and melodies.

Gifford’s prototype was named a runner-up in the Ideas Competition, run by Queensland’s commercialisation company bluebox, winning him Australian USD 7,500 to help commercialise his concept, according to a QUT release.

“It is common for a band or solo musician to have a computer-based backing track or use looping pedals, but these kinds of technology are not very flexible or responsive to what’s happening on stage,” Gifford said.

“Jambot is a musical robot, but it’s not made of metal and it doesn’t blow smoke. It is a piece of computer software that could play along to a soloist, providing a backing track, or improvising a conga drum solo over recorded music being played by a DJ, for example.

“It could also allow a live band to have a fuller sound when they can’t have as many band members as they would like on stage,” added Gifford.

Gifford said Jambot utilised some recent discoveries in audio music perception combined with his own clever algorithms to keep up with musicians as they played.

“Under the hood, I have created new algorithms which quickly identify what’s going on in the music as its being played,” he said.

“It keeps track of tempo changes as they occur during a performance. It also judges pitch and users will be able to choose the particular instruments they wish to jam with.”

<!– /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:”Cambria Math”; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:1; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:0 0 0 0 0 0;} @font-face {font-family:Calibri; panose-1:2 15 5 2 2 2 4 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:swiss; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:-1610611985 1073750139 0 0 159 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-unhide:no; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:”"; margin-top:0in; margin-right:0in; margin-bottom:10.0pt; margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:”Calibri”,”sans-serif”; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:”Times New Roman”; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} a:link, span.MsoHyperlink {mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; color:blue; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed {mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; color:purple; mso-themecolor:followedhyperlink; text-decoration:underline; text-underline:single;} p {mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-margin-top-alt:auto; margin-right:0in; mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto; margin-left:0in; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:”Times New Roman”,”serif”; mso-fareast-font-family:”Times New Roman”;} .MsoChpDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; mso-default-props:yes; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:Calibri; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:”Times New Roman”; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} .MsoPapDefault {mso-style-type:export-only; margin-bottom:10.0pt; line-height:115%;} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.0in 1.0in 1.0in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} –> Microsoft office is an incredibly useful software suite. It contains a mix of programs that just about everyone could find a use for. It isn’t just limited to the common businessperson. Any family will find some use for a mix of word processors and spreadsheet programs. The real trick is getting over the first hurdle and actually learning about what you can do with them.

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All of this should work well for your Microsoft office training needs. Just a few lessons should have you ready to go with some of the more advanced features of the program. They are also a good thing to use if you are teaching someone more about Microsoft office. These programs make really good training aids.

Even as the world is grappling with a financial crisis, Kerala has opened up investment in its IT industry with the target of generating over 200,000 jobs in the next five years.

‘In these tumultuous times, there is a chance for smaller players to go up and we want to move up to the leader’s spot,’ Ajay Kumar, Kerala information technology secretary, told IANS during a visit here.

Kumar is leading a high level delegation from Kerala at the ongoing Gitex 2008 show here, which is the Middle East’s largest technology fair, to promote the south Indian state as an IT hub among prospective investors here.

He said that the Kerala government was in the process of scaling up its operations in the IT sector multi-fold and is seeking investors for this.

‘There are three types of investment opportunities. One is investment in IT townships and SEZs (special economic zones). Second is investment in standalone IT parks and the third is investment by IT companies and carrying out their operations from Kerala,’ Kumar said.

‘Today we have two IT parks - Technopark in Thiruvananthapuram and Infopark in Kochi. We are scaling up (the number of parks in the state) from two to 10 over the next 10 years.’

He said as these parks take shape, employment opportunities in the state’s IT sector will grow immensely.

‘Today we have 40,000-45,000 employees in the IT sector. Our plan is to multiply this several fold, at least fivefold in the next five years or so,’ he said.

Stating that Kerala’s IT department was showcasing the state as a premier IT destination for the first time ever through its participation in GITEX, he said Malayalis in the Gulf are being targeted as potential investors.

‘Till now, our focus was on Technopark and Infopark in Kerala. But now, for the first time, we are opening up investment opportunities. The standalone IT parks offer a unique opportunity.

‘We are basically targeting Malayalis in the Gulf who may be interested in making safe investments back home,’ he said.

A large number of the over 4.8 million expatriate Indians in the Gulf hail from Kerala.

Kumar explained that creating standalone parks required far lower investment than facilities like Technopark and Infopark.

He said the idea was to spread the IT sector from Thiruvananthpuram and Kochi to other parts of the state.

‘Typically, a standalone park can come up on one or two acres of land and will require investment of Rs.5-20 crore (Rs.50-200 million). The land will be given on lease to investors who can run the park on BOT (build, operate and transfer) basis,’ he said, adding that the government has already identified around 10 places for this.

The other investment opportunity of creating IT companies or BPOs, he said, was aimed at generating investment in the sector in interior and rural areas.

Kumar said that though the global financial crisis has affected Kerala like everyone else, it also offered the state a chance to catapult itself to the top league of the IT sector.

‘Nothing is insulated these days, so, if anything global happens, it affects everyone. But Kerala has not been badly affected for two reasons. One is, a large part of Kerala’s industries is homegrown, so they are not affected.

‘Second is, we are relatively small. So in crises like this, big players fall more heavily than smaller players,’ he said.

Kumar added that Kerala, with its good connectivity - 85 percent of its villages have broadband connection - and quality human resources offered an ideal investment climate in the IT sector.

He said the current crisis has only slightly affected Kerala’s growth path and so it now has an opportunity to capitalise on the scene.

‘In several surveys, we have been put in challenger category - the number two category - and not the number one category as Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Chennai and Pune. In such tumultuous times, which offer smaller players a chance to grow, we want to jump from the challenger category to the leader category,’ he said.

Furthering its open source SOA middleware, MuleSource this week upgraded both its SOA governance platform, enabling custom extensions, and its ESB, which offers REST (Representational State Transfer) support.

Mule Galaxy 1.5 is the latest version of the company’s SOA governance platform, featuring a registry/repository. It adds a scripting shell for writing custom extensions. Also, an event API enables changes to services or artifacts to trigger an event that can send notifications or apply remote policies. A typed properties capability stores properties as strings, lists, users, lifecycles, or links between artifacts.

The Galaxy query language has been improved to support more sophisticated queries, MuleSource said. An auto upgrade capability makes it easier to upgrade from previous versions of Galaxy.

Also, metadata in version 1.5 can be stored to describe such services as RESTful services, TCP, Java Message Service, and others. An improved Atom API enables operations to be performed on services and artifacts.

The platform also features federation capabilities involving multiple instances of Galaxy, such as remote workspaces attached to a local instance of Galaxy. Users can browse other Galaxy instances. Replication across Galaxy instances enables additional lifecycle management capabilities, the company said.

“With Galaxy 1.5, we have listened to the hundreds of Galaxy users who have given us direct feedback on how to further enhance the product to meet the needs of the enterprise,” Dan Deiphouse, MuleSource senior architect, in a statement released by the company.

Galaxy 1.5 is offered in a Community version, which is free download, and an Enterprise edition. The Enterprise edition offers a commercial license to relieve customers from obligations associated with GNU General Public License version 2. A performance warranty also is featured.

The Mule 2.1 Enterprise ESB supports Mule RESTpack, for building REST-style services, and retry policies designed for enterprise deployments, the company said. Retry policies allow for development of self-healing connections based on predefined policies.

Offered via an annual subscription, release 2.1 also includes connectors for JDBC and WebSphere MQ. Subscribers to the ESB have access to a Mule 2.x migration tool to automate conversion from Mule 1.x configurations. They also can access Mule HQ, a management and monitoring tool.

Mule 2.1 Enterprise is available for a free 30-day trial by accessing MuleSource’s Web site.

A federal judge questioned why a white Ivy League student found during a computer hacking probe with thousands of images of child pornography was not charged with that crime, sparing him a decade-long prison sentence that a black convicted child pornographer faced at the same hearing.

University of Pennsylvania senior Ryan Goldstein, 22, of Ambler, was sentenced Tuesday to three months in prison and five years of probation for a hacking scheme that caused a Penn engineering school server to crash in 2006.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Levy said the decision not to charge Goldstein for the child pornography was appropriate given his extensive cooperation.

Voicing concerns about fairness, the judge took the unusual step of sentencing Goldstein alongside a Philadelphia man, Derrick Williams, who was facing eight to 10 years in prison for child pornography in an unrelated case.

Both men were found with several thousand images of child pornography, and each had copied some of the images, though Williams had also posted about 15 of them on a Web site, prosecutors said.

The judge said he could not help noting that Williams is black and Goldstein is white.

“This has weighed very heavily on my mind, as I think it would most judges,” U.S. District Judge Michael Baylson said. “That’s why I’ve brought this case together with the Williams case.”

However, he said the sentencing disparities were not connected to race. Baylson gave Williams a two-year prison term, noting his steady work history and minor criminal record.

Goldstein pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge and spent long hours helping the FBI investigate a worldwide hacking enterprise, lawyers for both sides agreed. But even as he was cooperating, Goldstein twice engaged in unspecified mischief with FBI computers, Baylson said.

“It was very detrimental to the investigation,” said Baylson, who heard details of the misconduct behind closed doors at the start of the sentencing hearing. “It’s very disturbing.”

According to the FBI, Goldstein worked with a New Zealand teen who allegedly gained control of thousands of computers and amassed them into clusters known as botnets.

Owen Thor Walker, known by the online name “AKILL,” was ordered this summer to pay more than $11,000 in fines in New Zealand but avoided a conviction so he can help police solve computer crimes.

Goldstein acknowledged at the hearing that he has been viewing child pornography since he was 11 or 12. A therapist who testified Tuesday described him as a bright but asocial child who spent long hours on the computer and rarely played with friends.

“Unfortunately, I didn’t begin to emerge from that computer world until the FBI knocked on my door,” Goldstein told the judge. “This actually may have saved me from a life of computer addiction.”

The case was part of an international crackdown on hackers who steal credit card information, manipulate stock trades and even crash industry computers, authorities said.

Goldstein’s parents, who attended the hearing, declined comment afterward, as did lawyers for both sides. Williams and his lawyer, Max Kramer, also declined comment.