An anonymous reader writes "Accurate face recognition is coming. Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition, a face recognition start-up spun out from Carnegie Mellon University, has posted a tech demo showing an analysis of the entire original Star Trek series using face recognition. The online visualization includes various annotated clips of the series with clickable thumbnails of each character's appearance. They also have a separate page showing the full data of all the prominent characters in every episode including extracting thumbnails of each appearance." Their software can recognize frontal or near-frontal face instances.

Coach Wei writes "An industry wishlist for future browsers has been collected and developed by OpenAjax Alliance. Using wiki as an open collaboration tool, the feature list now lists 37 separate feature requests, covering a wide range of technology areas, such as security, Comet, multimedia, CSS, interactivity, and performance. The goal is to inform the browser vendors about what the Ajax developer community feels are most important for the next round of browsers (i.e., FF4, IE9, Safari4, and Opera10) and to provide supplemental details relative to the feature requests. Currently, the top three voted features are: 2D Drawing/Vector Graphics, The Two HTTP Connection Limit Issue, and HTML DOM Operation Performance In General . OpenAjax Alliance is calling for everyone to vote for his/her favorite features. The alliance also strongly encourages people to comment on the wiki pages for each of the existing features and to add any important new features that are not yet on the list."

Ben Rothke writes "Security policies are like fiber, that is, the kind you eat. Everyone agrees that fiber is good for you, but no one really wants to eat it. So too with information security policies. They are sorely needed, but most users don't go out of their way to comply with them. And in many firms, they are not even trained in what they have to do. But failure to have adequate information security policies can lead to myriad risks for an organization." Keep reading for the rest of Ben's review.

An anonymous reader writes "Abramowitz & Stegun has been one of the most authoritative references for special functions and engineering mathematics since the 1960s, when it was published by the US Bureau of Standards (now NIST). NIST has been working on an freely-available online updated version to this legendary reference for years. A preview of the digital library of mathematical functions (which uses MathML and requires some of its fonts) is now available from NIST's website."