A startup venture, EndGame Technologies, has designed novel computer modeling software to assist National Football League coaches with critical play-calling decisions--the kind that often determine the outcome of the game. Should a team punt on fourth down--or go for it? Or attempt a two-point conversion after a touchdown? The software, called ZEUS, is designed to answer such questions by calculating the consequences of each decision in a matter of seconds.

Head ZEUS researchers Chuck Bower and Frank Frigo want to revolutionize football by changing the way plays are called. Already, their statistics on past NFL games have revealed that teams consistently lose approximately one game per season by making the wrong play calls in critical situations. And with only 16 games in an NFL season, each win or loss is of paramount importance.

Football is a game of strategy and risk management. Each coach goes into a game with a plan, explains Dwight Smith, head football coach at MIT. Although every variable is considered beforehand, adjustments have to be made as the game progresses. ZEUS is meant to help coaches make those on-the-fly decisions. The software was created by mining historical NFL data and developing distribution curves of success rates for individual actions, such as how far a running back carries the ball.

Coaches could use ZEUS at any point in the game, by entering a set of variables, such as the score, field position, possession, down, and time remaining on the clock. Then the user enters two play-call options and the software analyzes each one separately, playing the game to its conclusion 100,000 times. During each iteration, ZEUS considers a different scenario.

All the decisions about play calls that occur after the initial play are based on historical NFL data. This data isn't specific to a particular coach, though; it's based on records from a wide variety of coaches. (The researchers call this algorithm the "generic" NFL coach.) In a matter of seconds, ZEUS displays the Game Winning Chance--the play that gives the team the highest probability of winning.

Unlike interactive football simulations, which require about the same amount of time to play out as a real game, ZEUS performs its calculations and recommendations in real time, displaying the computer's results before the next snap.

According to Bower, the challenge for them now lies not in the technology, but in getting NFL teams to adopt it. "We have shown it to 10 NFL teams, [everyone] from managers to head coaches," he says. "But at this point no one has stepped forward and said we are ready to pay for the product."

The problem: ZEUS is still illegal under NFL guidelines. The league doesn't permit computers on the sidelines or in the coach's booth on game day. Although there are no restrictions on using high-tech analytical tools off the field, the traditional elements of strategy continue to be preserved on game day.

PRINCE KLEMENS VON METTERNICH, foreign minister of the Austrian Empire during the Napoleonic era and its aftermath, would have no trouble recognising Google. To him, the world's most popular web-search engine would closely resemble the Napoleonic France that in his youth humiliated Austria and Europe's other powers. Its rivals—Yahoo!, the largest of the traditional web gateways, eBay, the biggest online auction and trading site, and Microsoft, a software empire that owns MSN, a struggling web portal—would look a lot like Russia, Prussia, and Austria. Metternich responded by forging an alliance among those three monarchies to create a “balance of power” against France. Google's enemies, he might say, ought now to do the same thing.

Google announced two new conquests on August 7th. It struck a deal with Viacom, an “old” media firm, under which it will syndicate video clips from Viacom brands such as MTV and Nickelodeon to other websites, and integrate advertisements into them. This makes Google the clear leader in the fledgling but promising market for web-video advertising. It also announced a deal with News Corporation, another media giant, under which it will provide all the search and text-advertising technology on News Corporation's websites, including MySpace, an enormously popular social-networking site.

These are hard blows for Yahoo! and MSN, which had also been negotiating with News Corporation. Both firms have been losing market share in web search to Google over the past year—Google now has half the market. They have also fallen further behind in their advertising technologies and networks, so that both make less money than Google does from the same number of searches. Safa Rashtchy, an analyst at Piper Jaffray, a securities firm, estimates that for every advertising dollar that Google makes on a search query, Yahoo! makes only 60-70 cents. Last month Yahoo! said that a new advertising algorithm that it had designed to close the gap in profitability will be delayed, and its share price fell by 22%, its biggest-ever one-day drop.

MSN is further behind Google than Yahoo! in search, and its parent, Microsoft, faces an even more fundamental threat from the expansionist new power. Many of Google's new ventures beyond web search enable users to do things free of charge through their web browsers that they now do using Microsoft software on their personal computers. Google offers a rudimentary but free online word processor and spreadsheet, for instance.

The smaller eBay, on the other hand, might in one sense claim Google as an ally. Google's search results send a lot of traffic to eBay's auction site, and eBay is one of the biggest advertisers on Google's network. But the relationship is imbalanced. An influential recent study from Berkeley's Haas School of Business estimated that about 12% of eBay's revenues come indirectly from Google, whereas Google gets only 3% of its revenues from eBay. Worst of all for eBay, Google is starting to undercut its core business. Sellers are setting up their own websites and buying text advertisements from Google, and buyers are using its search rather than eBay to connect with sellers directly. As a result, “eBay would be wise to strike a deep partnership with Yahoo! or Microsoft in order to regain a balance of power in the industry,” said the study's authors, Julien Decot and Steve Lee, sounding like diplomats at the Congress of Vienna in 1814.

The alliances are already being struck. Last year Yahoo! and Microsoft announced that they would connect their instant-messaging systems—both of which are much more popular than Google's alternative—and in July they said that they would extend this co-operation to “voice chat” (formerly known as “calling”). In May, Yahoo! and eBay struck an alliance in which eBay will use technology from Yahoo! to place advertisements on its auction site. On the other side of the bargain, Yahoo! will use PayPal, eBay's online payment mechanism, for transactions from Yahoo!'s pages. (Google recently launched a rival payment system of its own.)

The strongest alliance, of course, would be a merger or takeover. MSN and Yahoo! both wanted to buy some or all of AOL, a big, troubled internet-access company owned by Time Warner, a media conglomerate. But Google pre-empted its rivals last winter and bought a defensive stake in AOL. It still has its search and advertising technology stationed on AOL's site. Google may also make its instant-messaging service interoperable with AOL's, the most popular in the world.

Ally or annex?

With AOL lost to the enemy, what of a deal between Microsoft and either Yahoo! or eBay? Justin Post, an analyst at Merrill Lynch, said recently that Microsoft's “acquisition probability” is now so high that it may soon start pushing up the share prices of eBay and Yahoo! Mr Post thinks that Microsoft is most likely to bid for Yahoo! This would help Microsoft strategically, he says. Others are not sure. “I don't see it as a terribly good merger,” says Mr Rashtchy. There would be big cultural differences between a media company and a software firm. He thinks that a merger of Yahoo! and eBay, on the other hand, might make sense because both live mainly from serving online communities.

Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley analyst and a fellow of the Institute for the Future, a research group, thinks that any merger between the three middle powers would be a “grand dramatic gesture” that would only hasten their decline. AOL's merger with Time Warner in 2000 is the relevant warning from recent history. Big mergers also run counter to a number of other trends on the internet today, which are collectively known as “Web 2.0”. “This is the age of mash-ups not mergers, open over closed,” says Mr Saffo, referring to the open internet standards that allow users to combine, or “mash” services.

Another argument against full-blown mergers is that the bigger and more self-absorbed the established powers become, the less likely they are to spot new insurgencies—start-ups such as YouTube, an online video site, for instance, or MySpace. Their equivalents in Prince Metternich's day were the nationalist and liberal movements that troubled the continental monarchies, and erupted in the revolutions of 1848—forcing Metternich to resign and flee into exile in Britain.

Mac OS Xに実装されている開発環境の一つ。Mac OS X開発の基盤となった旧NeXT社のOS「OPENSTEP」の流れを受け継ぐ環境で、Mac OS Xの機能をフルに引き出したソフトウェアをオブジェクト指向に基づいて開発することができる。

Drupal is software that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a great variety of content on a website. Tens of thousands of people and organizations have used Drupal to set up scores of different kinds of web sites, including

• community web portals and discussion sites
• corporate web sites/intranet portals
• personal web sites
• aficionado sites
• e-commerce applications
• resource directories

Drupal includes features to enable

• content management systems
• blogs
• collaborative authoring environments
• forums
• newsletters
• picture galleries
• file uploads and download

and much more.

Drupal is open source software licensed under the GPL, and is maintained and developed by a community of thousands of users and developers. Drupal is free to download and use. If you like what Drupal can do for you, please work with us to expand and refine Drupal to suit your needs.

CakePHP

Cake is a rapid development framework for PHP which uses commonly known design patterns like ActiveRecord, Association Data Mapping, Front Controller and MVC. Our primary goal is to provide a structured framework that enables PHP users at all levels to rapidly develop robust web applications, without any loss to flexibility.

The number of images recorded by security cameras each day vastly exceeds human analysts' ability to examine them. "Computer vision" systems aren't much help: they're still far too primitive to tell a prowler from a postman. But researchers say the human brain can subconsciously register an anomaly in a scene -- say, a shadow where there shouldn't be one -- much faster than a person can visually and verbally identify it. If computers could somehow monitor the brain and flag these "aha" moments, surveillance analysts might be able to scan many times more images per hour.

That's what Paul Sajda, a bioengineer at Columbia University's Laboratory for Intelligent Imaging and Neural Computing, hopes to enable with his "cortically coupled computer vision" system, or "C3Vision." Sajda's prototype, built with a grant from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, includes a bonnet of electrodes that is placed on a subject's head, where it monitors changes in the brain's electrical activity. A computer scrutinizes those changes for the neural signatures of interesting events and images, as the subject watches a video running at 10 times its normal speed. The flagged images are picked out for a more intensive examination.

"We are aiming to speed up [visual] search by 300 percent," says Sajda. "The system is designed not only for finding very specific targets but also things image analysts think are 'unusual,' which is very difficult to do with a computer vision system."

Such devices could help law enforcement or counterterrorism officials spot signs of suspicious activity that would otherwise slip by as they scanned surveillance images. "Any system that can help process those images and prioritize them as to likelihood of containing important data is a vast improvement over the current situation," says Leif Finkel, a professor of bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania, who was Sajda's doctoral thesis advisor.

Outside the security realm, radiologists hooked up to the C3Vision system could quickly screen hundreds of mammograms to identify those requiring a closer look, and photo researchers could use it to single out pictures of a particular person among the millions of photographs on the Web. "People are amazingly accurate at identifying whether a particular image -- say, of Marilyn Monroe, or the Washington Monument -- was presented as one photo" in a series of hundreds, even at a speed of 10 to 20 images per second, says Finkel.

According to Sajda's recent tests, subjects spotted 90 percent of the "suspicious" images in a series running at 10 images per second.

"I think that it is too early to tell whether this particular approach is going to work in real applications," says Misha Pavel, a professor of biomedical engineering at Oregon Health Sciences University. "But I have no doubt that we will learn from this approach, and the consequences may be entirely unexpected, novel applications."