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I've heard it said by Dave Winer and many many others: if only Dean had reinvested half the money raised into the Internet, then ...

OK, so you're the Dean Campaign Chief Information Officer in August 2003. The money starts to roll in. $20 million over six months, $2-4 million per month.

What would you spend the money on?

1. What does your monthly budget look like?
2. What is your application and infrastructure portfolio?
3. How much will you allocate to maintenance?
4. You're building from scratch, so what problems do you hope to avoid through wise architecture?
5. What are your big milestones?
6. Who are your key vendors?

How do you spend in consonance with the campaign strategy?

1. How will you use the Internet to bring offline voters into the campaign at the same numbers as radio or television broadcasts?
2. What is your online strategy for responding to attack ads and opposition pundits in radio, television and print?
3. Online community takes time to build and is very hard to organize geographically. What will you do to match the state-by-state primary schedule?
4. What can you do with online services to serve the campaign in caucus states?
5. You are preparing for Bush to launch in Spring 2004. What are your countermeasures to reach out to moderate Republicans online while the GOP uses its advanced voter email systems to barrage 200 million validated email addresses?
6. How will you lower the cost-per-vote vs. the GOP?

: Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.com

LOS ANGELES — Scientific accidents have brought some of the most groundbreaking discoveries — vulcanized rubber, X-rays, penicillin — and now scientists at UCLA have accidentally discovered a material that could make digital cameras as we know them obsolete.

Graduate student Hsiang-Yu Chen was working on a new formula for solar cells when something went wrong. Instead of creating electricity when hit with light, the conductivity of the material she was working with changed.

"The original purpose [was] to make a solar cell more efficient," says Chen. "However, during the research we found the solar cell phenomenon [had] disappeared." Instead, the test material showed high gain photoconductivity, indicating potential use as a photo sensor.

Thanks to this lucky mistake, a new breed of camera sensors that are cheaper, higher-resolution and have lower distortion could be on the horizon. Click through the gallery to learn how this new breakthrough works and tour the labs where the magic happens.

Left: A piece of glass houses five strips of this new material, held between tweezers in a glove box.

: Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.com

Here, materials science Ph.D. student Hsiang-Yu Chen takes a polymer sample from a tray inside a glove box. Researchers in this lab test hundreds of samples before a material with desirable properties is found.

When Chen made the discovery, she was working on plastic-like substances with quantum dots — nanoparticles (roughly the size of a virus) with properties similar to a semiconductor.

The nano-size quantum dots could give photo sensors much higher resolution than current models. And because this new photo-sensing material is a polymer film, it's flexible and could someday be inexpensive to produce.

: Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.com

At left is a pair of stills that concentrate polymer solutions. Later, the solutions will be tested for their response to light.

Currently, the sensor in your camera that detects light and allows you to capture an image is made out of silicon. This makes it relatively expensive as well as flat and inflexible.

Having a flat sensor doesn’t seem like a big deal until you consider how your lens works. Lenses are curved, which shapes the image they see. When you project the spherical image onto a flat surface you get distortion around the edges. A flexible sensor would prevent this distortion.

: Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.com

The polymer- and metal-coated slide from the first photo of the gallery is now placed into an electrode clip (the white, rectangular portion of the setup). The electrodes on the clip will enable sensors to take readings from the material when it's exposed to light.

: Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.com

The sample in the electrode clip is inserted into the test chassis. The wires on the right send any electrical activity from the material to a computer for analysis.

: Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.com

A very bright, wide-spectrum light source is connected to the glove box. It's attached to the portal using a standoff header that keeps the light a fixed distance from the sample. The light appears blue because the light in the room has a yellow cast, it's actually much closer to the color of daylight.

: Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.com

Hsiang-Yu Chen checks the results of the test using a computer and laboratory graphing software. The graphs show the response levels to the light that the material exhibited.

In her initial experiment she was expecting to see electricity produced when the light hit the material, but instead the light stopped the flow of electricity. This means that her material acted as a photo detector instead of a solar cell.

The lab still remains committed to developing a better solar panel, but now that their findings have been published it may only be a matter of time before camera companies take notice of the technology.

: Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.com

An atomic force microscope is used to image the polymer sample to view its physical makeup. The AFM traces the surface of the polymer with a nanoscopic needle, the same way the needle on your record player tracks over vinyl.

This needle is attached to a cantilever that reflects a laser beam, which then determines the three-dimensional topography of the surface. Inset is the resulting micrograph of the surface from the AFM. This view allows researchers to make sure the quantum dots are properly aligning in polymer.

: Photo: Dave Bullock/Wired.com

This tunneling electron microscope (TEM) is used to view the physical makeup of the polymer. The level of detail visible from the TEM micrographs is a few hundred nanometers. Inset is the micrograph created by the TEM of the photosensitive polymer.

MUMBAI (Reuters) - Indian investigators said on Monday the militants who attacked Mumbai underwent months of commando training in Pakistan, raising tensions between the nuclear-armed neighbors as recriminations mounted in India.