Focus: Science and Engineering

I must say this issue ended up being more science than engineering, but perhaps that is not surprising considering my scientific leanings. I thought about dropping the word “engineering”, but since the S&E focus has become traditional, I decided to keep the word and wave my hands a bit. Our main feature article is from Dr. Steve Mann of wearable computer fame, and he has certainly pulled off a slick piece of engineering in his videophone watch shown on our cover. Dr. Mann is an accomplished photographer as well as inventor, and he gets credit for the picture of the watch on the cover and the one with his article. Dr. Mann certainly lives on the leading edge of this technology, and we are happy to have another article from him to keep us abreast of developments in wearable computers.

For those readers who like to watch the skies, we have a little of everything: satellite tracking, astronomy (even our French chef, Marcel, has something to say on this one), storms and lightning. Science articles can be found everywhere: in Features, Forum and Strictly On-Line—enjoy!

Linley Gwennap becomes a regular columnist for us this month with his column “Linley on Linux”, where he will keep us up to date on some of the latest happenings in the electronics market for Linux. This month, he tells us what's happening in the field of voice recognition.

Speaking of columnists, Moshe Bar will also be joining us on a regular basis to teach us about kernel issues in Kernel Korner, and next month, we'll have an all-new column on cross-platform programming written by Michael D. Crawford. Both should keep our inner penguin quite happy.

—Marjorie Richardson, Editor in Chief

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