I caught an interview with Tom Cruise on TV the other day, out promoting his latest box-office boon Mission Impossible 2. Clips from the film’s action-packed scenes show Cruise scaling treacherous mountains thousands of feet high with nothing more than his fingernails, his megawatt smile, and a piece of chalk. Cut to Tom leaping from […]
July 2000 - Vol. 43 No. 7
Features
The U.S. agriculture industry has been one of the slowest to embrace the Internet age, with farmers, who tend to be fiercely loyal to local merchants and banks, wary of e-commerce, reports BusinessWeek. But such a link is as inevitable as spring planting: of 2.1 million farmers in the U.S., the 380,000 largest ones produce […]
In the old days, academicians were (at least, supposedly) "disinterested" seekers of truth. Since the nationalization of scientific research in the U.S., they have, unfortunately, become parties at interest to the political process. The way to get grants and, therefore, the way to remain employed in an academic role, is to toe the line of […]
Practical Programmer: On Personal Technical Obsolescence
In the fast-moving and ever-changing field of programming, what's your plan for the inevitable?
International Perspectives: From Via Maris to Electronic Highway: the Internet in Canaan
ISPs, governments, and telecos work to link the old world to the new in a volatile region.
On Site: Deliberating on ICANN
The Internet's development must benefit all members of the global electronic community.
Viewpoint: E2a Is Worse Than Y2k
Thank the U.S. military for the "ever-expanding" acronym, the most insidious threat of all.
Physically Based Computer Animation: Introduction
How can images be made to create the visual illusion of physical force?
Physics in Computer Games (Title Only)
The pleasures of immersive interactive entertainment increasingly demand game designers deliver a physically consistent and convincing experience—solving fundamental computational problems along the way.
Cognitive Modeling For Games and Animation
Give virtual characters an intellectual and sensory boost to improve their chances of survival in and control over their environments—and an enhanced sense of physical reality.
Controlling Physics in Realistic Character Animation
To solve the problem of generating realistic human motion, animation software has to not only produce realistic movement but provide full control of the process to the animator.
Modeling Water For Computer Animation
Simulated water flows, swirls, mixes, falls, refracts light, and interacts with objects in games, movie special effects, and commercials.
These fracture patterns propagate arbitrarily in 3D solid objects as they break, crack, or tear realistically.
Interacting with Smoke and Fire in Real Time
These simulated fluids move around randomly while interacting with such everyday objects as a human hand in surprisingly realistic swirls, flows, and vortices.
Simulation Modeling of Plants and Plant Ecosystems
The modeling of plants and plant ecosystems has the captivating appeal of reproducing the visual beauty of nature while providing insights into the way nature works. This interplay between art and science is rooted in history and can be traced at least as far back as Leonardo da Vinci, whose notes about plant architecture 500 […]
This high-performance computer simulation of Europe's largest aquarium lets its human visitors interact with 25 species and about 1,000 individual creatures and plants.
Simplifying human-computer interaction by using hand gestures.
Prepare Your Mind For Creativity
An asset in most cases, extensive experience can trip up the adoption of new technology—when fresh thinking is needed above all else. But methods exist to recognize impediments to creativity and to sharpen rusty creative skills.
A Conceptual Investigation of the E-Commerce Industry
Classifying structures for providing products and services in the electronic marketplace.
Technical Opinion: Information System Security Management in the New Millennium
Future users of information systems must address organizational problems at a time when the organizational form is being revolutionized.
Inside Risks: Risks in Retrospect
Having now completed 10 years of "Inside Risks," we reflect here on what has happened in that time. In short, our basic conclusions have not changed much over the years—despite many advances in the technology. Indeed, this lack of change itself seems like a serious risk. Overall, the potential risks have monotonously if not monotonically […]
