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There is one major example or government funding GPL'ed code: NSA Secure Linux. While I agree that NSA Secure Linux is one of the more eggregious examples of the Government developing code which isn't released as public domain information, there are plenty of other cases as well. How would you consider Squid, which is GPL'd code whose development is funded entirely by the National Science Foundation? Granted, the farther away from the OS you get the less distasteful it is, but the issue still stands that public funds have payed for substantial development which is inaccessable to much of the public.

http://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/news/press/00/pr0025.htm

The EduCommons project at Utah State University is comprised maily of an educational P2P application that allows teachers, students, and researchers to share syllabi, lecture notes, research instruments, and data sets they already have laying around their machine directly with each other. After securing some funding from the University itself to get the project going, the project team is expecting to hear regarding two seperate NSF grants within the next month or so.

This is just the type of legitimate app you are looking for. NSF spends millions each year on the development of collections of digital educational resources through its NSDL initiative, when many of those resources already exist on Joe Professor's computer in Nebraska...

This spring I spent most of my Internet2 talk time in front of university NOC folks saying "Sure, you're planning ways to shut down Napster now, but in 6 months we're going to have a P2P app directly in line with your organization's mission that you won't be able to just 'turn off'. You'll actually have to deal with it".

By the way, the project is all open source, and we're still looking for client/peer programmers on the Linux and Win32 side. =) EduCommons project.
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http://davidwiley.com/

Some good, general information on [Lake Vostok].

Tidbits:
It's way the hell under the antarctic icecap.

It's been sealed off from the rest of earth for a helluva long time.

It's probably got uniquely-evolved microbes and stuff.

It's *really* *fucking* *cold* in that part of the Antarctic: record low of -88C (-127F).

The lake is about the size of Lake Ontario, or the island of Corsica.

Scientists are, for once, being a bit sensible: they could have tapped the lake by now, but they first want to make sure they don't contanimate it.

However, it seems they haven't thought about whether it might contanimate us...


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I'm going to break the general trend of comments which are telling these kids to suck it up and get used to getting shit on because they are young.

The National Science Foundation offers a wide variety of grants for undergraduates and high school students to perform research at major academic institutions. I did one at Carnegie Mellon's computer science department after my sophomore year at college, and it was fantastic. My mentor basically handed me a problem that didn't have a clear solution, and told me to find one. I got to draw on the resources of some of the most brilliant computer scientists in the world to assist me. A good friend of mine spent 9 months working at Lawrence Livermore National Labs in California, and is co-authoring two papers, one of which he is lead author on.

A couple of cautions: not all of these programs are amazing, but they are reviewed every couple of years, so the overall quality is pretty high. Two, academia has its own variety of office politics and things that suck (think grant writing)- but there are many institutions out there that give smart, young people a chance to prove themselves, which I believe is what you want most. I would highly recommend looking into these opportunities at the NSF website. Best of luck to all of you.

if we can spend a trillion dollars for a missile defense system, can't we sponsor a little research?

like nsf?

use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that

Actually, the numbers by themselves illustrate very little. I don't deny the possibility that Microsoft might indeed have discriminated against the plaintiffs (though I find it quite unlikely, and in any case it's for the courts to decide); however, the lawyers' heated rhetoric is unjustified. Data from the National Science Foundation shows that blacks make up only about 3 percent of all scientists and engineers, or 4 percent of computer and mathematical scientists. It also points out that "Black scientists and engineers have, on average, a lower level of educational attainment than scientists and engineers of other racial/ethnic groups". Of course, not *every* MS employee is an engineer, but the bottom line is that the percentages of MS employees who are black may not really be far out of line with the percentages in the pool of qualified candidates.

I've encountered this personally: In my prior position as a senior manager at a big dot-com, I, and the managers reporting to me, interviewed many hundreds of candidates. But although there was a lot of ethnic diversity in that group, I could count on one hand (and probably with fingers left over) the number of black candidates we saw.

The real issue, of course, is that for one reason or another black students are not choosing to enter technical fields at the same rate as other ethnicities -- not only whites, but Asians and Indians. To some extent that's undoubtedly a personal choice, but I'm sure it also has a lot to do with educational opportunities and cultural norms. I do believe this industry is generally pragmatic about its need to simply hire smart, hard-working people, and is thus rather accommodating about people regardless of ethnicity, sex, sexual preference, even disability; the one real exception is probably age. I'm expect most hiring managers would tell you they'd love to have more qualified black candidates -- or more qualified candidates, period! So the real question is, what can we do to address the root causes that turn blacks away from technical careers to begin with?

I attended the Virtual Observatories of the Future conference this past summer and would like to note that:

• Jim Gray has been collabortaing with the astronomical data community for some time.
• The spacial-indexing schemes Jim helped develop for Terraserver will be key to performant queries for a Virtual Observatory
• Jim Gray was well-known in the database community as the guru of pe rforman ce metrics, long before joining Microsoft

The take-home lesson from the Virtual Observatories conference was that the amount of data required to do science with a "virtual observatory" leads to interesting problems in computer science, problems which are only tractable when analyzed by collaborations between statisticians, computer science people, and the astronomers themselves.

Finally, note that this year's historic increase in the National Science Foundation budget is largely due to the new Information Technology Research Initiative. The need for new methods of data managment in the sciences is real.

In 1994, Len Adleman did an experiment involving getting DNA to solve a simple 7 city "travelling salesman" problem ( finding the shortest route between cities) using parallel processing.
The DNA computer he used consisted of 7 DNA strands each representing a "city" and 14 strands representing the "roads" connecting the cities. The calculation took about 1 second to complete. Cool huh?
Another interesting tidbit about DNA is that it is estimated that one cubic centimeter of DNA can store one trillion bits of information.

There's also an NSF study here and another study discussed on CNN in which a panel of climatologists disprove dissenters' arguments against global warming. It should be noted that most scientists nowadays believe global warming has been occurring.

- A.P.
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"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

• Industrial processes
• Environmental toxins and pollutants
• Space station air quality
• Medicine / body functions
• Food processing
• Military enviromnent
• Toxicology

• Quotidiano: Researchers developing an electronic nose
• JSOnline: Electronic nose takes on a higher profile
• Electronic Nose Club
• Electronic Nose Inspects Cheese, Hints At Human Sense of Smell Caltech Microelectronic Research Group
• Warwick-Southampton Electronic Nose Group
• Isoen2000 Olfactory and Electronic Nose 2000
• Press Releases: Electronic Nose Sniffs Out Fresh Fruit
• Electronic Nose Workshop
• Food Explorer Electronic Nose
• Electronic Nose User Forum
• An Electronic Nose For Business, NSF, NASA, and Others
• Wired: Electronic Nose

Despite the Librarian's comments, the Library of Congress is a sponsor of the National Science Foundation's Digital Libraries Project. Although the project doesn't attempt to provide all of LOC digitally, it does attempt to address the technological issues of a Stephensonesque `library.' Currently, this is done mainly through providing small online libraries on special topics. It's pretty cool, since it doesn't limit itself to text.

NSF = The National Science Foundation.

Noel

RootPrompt.org -- Nothing but Unix

I hope I'm not breaking some unwritten rule by actually providing data, but here goes...

Based on the information in Tables 3.2 and 3.3 in NSF Report Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering (1998) covering the years 1967-1995, the percentage of bachelor's degrees in "mathematical/computer sciences" going to women peaked at 39.5% in 1985. In nine of the next ten years, the percentage of such degrees going to women decreased slightly, with 35.1% going to women in 1995.

Anybody have any data for outside of the U.S.?

I hope I'm not breaking some unwritten rule by actually providing data, but here goes...

Based on the information in Tables 3.2 and 3.3 in NSF Report Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering (1998) covering the years 1967-1995, the percentage of bachelor's degrees in "mathematical/computer sciences" going to women peaked at 39.5% in 1985. In nine of the next ten years, the percentage of such degrees going to women decreased slightly, with 35.1% going to women in 1995.

Anybody have any data for outside of the U.S.?

I hope I'm not breaking some unwritten rule by actually providing data, but here goes...

Based on the information in Tables 3.2 and 3.3 in NSF Report Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering (1998) covering the years 1967-1995, the percentage of bachelor's degrees in "mathematical/computer sciences" going to women peaked at 39.5% in 1985. In nine of the next ten years, the percentage of such degrees going to women decreased slightly, with 35.1% going to women in 1995.

Anybody have any data for outside of the U.S.?

Ironically, I was having this same conversation with Juris Hartmanis the other day. When he was heading the NSF study on the future of computing, everyone was going nuts about the forecast of quantum computers destroying our current infrastructure. However, he was confident that no one alive today will ever see a quantum computer. If we make leaps and strides in physics, we may be able to build a 100 million dollar one, but that's about as practical it will get in our lifetime.

However, it's an interesting problem in computer science to think that there could be a computer that is fast enough to shred even our most "secure" algorithms. But, realize that even non-factoring-based encryption methods will be vulnerable, for a quantum computer could essentially solve any problem by brute force. However, there are computer scientists studying truly "quantum" encryption methods. The basis behind these algorithms, though, is the assumption that we have super-fast networks, too. For, I assume, they require a much, much larger cyphertext-to-text ratio.

So, instead of relying on our hardware to be slow, we will need to establish good theory (and software) to provide security and privacy.

Other species of birds found on the islands exhibit great changes among their populations over periods as short as a few years. I wish I could find a reference to research done on this (I first heard of it from this month's Scientific American Frontiers). The short of it that variances in food supplies (seeds) over just a few years directly affects the overall appearance (physical size) of future generations of the birds. Smaller birds have less body to fuel, require fewer seeds to feed themselves, and possess beaks more adapted to cracking open their small food. Larger birds, when all available food is small seeds, can't eat enough to stay alive. The larger of the species die out, the smaller reproduce, and the physical properties of the smaller population are passed on to the following generation. Over periods of just 3 or 4 years, the populations of this island physically change to adapt to changes in their environment. The average bird becomes smaller. In food surplus (when larger, more varied foods are available), the opposite happens.

If you're up for a good laugh, visit Creation Research Society, a bunch of "scientists" out to prove that Creation is right. They have an scanning electron microscope, so I guess it's just a matter of time before they re-publish the Bible and prove science wrong, right?

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Just finished to read a bit outdated but still interesting and actuall poll from december 1998, here named "AMERICANS AND THE Y2K MILLENNIUM COMPUTERBUG"

In the poll there was a question asking :
"Will you withdraw all your money from the bank ?"
16% told that they will ! And 31% told that they will "withdraw and set aside a large amount of cash "So i afaraid it can be a LOT MORE people rioting !

The biggest danger to our society isn't from the actual Y2K problem, it's from the Y2K paranoia.

Totally agree here, but.... writing this makes me thing if this what will happen (collapsing financial system due to the money withdrawal from the banks), maybe it's better to pull the money out of the bank before it's happenes ? ;-/

Oblom

Women have been leaving CS at a faster rate than men. According to the ACM, the percentage of CS bachelor's degrees going to women dropped from 37.1% in 1984 to 28.4% in 1995. For more information, see The Incredible Shrinking Pipeline by Tracy Camp.

A cursory review of the latest NSF data suggests that the percentage of bachelor's degrees in engineering going to women has been holding relatively steady. (According to the NSF, CS is a mathematical science, not an engineering field.)

I teach computer science at Mills College, the first women's college to offer a computer science major. I've also written far too much on this subject.