Outsourcing May Mean More IT Jobs for US?


ACM’s Queue has an article by Catherine L. Mann, of the Institute for International Economics here in DC, on the potential positive effect of the “global sourcing” trend in IT. Mann argues that just as outsourcing IT hardware production during the 1990s lowered product costs (by 20%), encouraging increased IT investment throughout the economy, the […]

Nuturing Innovation


Just a quick pointer to two interesting posts on innovation on Ed Felten’s Freedom to Tinker blog. Nurturing Innovation Nurturing Innovation II Here’s a good bit: Internet email was invented in 1971. Back then, could you have found even one single person in Washington who would point to this fledgling technology as one day being […]

Elections Chairman Thanks Computer Scientists for Work Raising E-voting Concerns


Wired covers remarks by DeForest B. Soaries Jr., chairman of the newly formed federal Election Assistance Commission, praising computer scientists for calling attention to security problems with e-voting machines and for helping develop new standards for building machines that might be more secure in the future. CRA’s affiliate organization the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) […]

Tech Employment Numbers Improve?


CNet has this story on new employment figures released by the Department of Labor that shows a drop in the rate of unemployment for “computer and mathematical occupations” and “electrical and electronic engineers.” But the change might not be because of the most favorable reasons: The unemployment rate for computer and mathematical occupations–a category that […]

JetBlue Disclosure Didn’t Violate Federal Law


An update to a story we mentioned way back in January, the Army’s inspector general found that an Army data-mining project using data offered by JetBlue and a private data broker didn’t violate federal privacy rules. This may say more about the need to update federal privacy rules than it does about the privacy implications […]

OMB Guidance to Agencies: High End Computing, Cyberinfrastructure are Priorities


The White House Office of Management and Budget — the gatekeepers of agency budgets in the executive branch — and OSTP have issued guidance to federal science agencies (pdf, 360kb) directing them to make high end computing and cyberinfrastructure investments a priority in their FY 2006 budget requests, even at the expense of “lower-priority” research […]

NSF Funding: Get Involved!


Apologies for the slow pace of updates recently. Things are a bit slow around DC this time of year. Congress is in recess for the month of August so that the Members can head home to their respective districts for primaries and lots of campaigning. They’ll be back September 7th, hoping to “wrap up” work […]

Tech Firms Want More Female Computer Whizzes


Great article in US News and World Report on the “corporate wake up call” regarding the participation of women in computer science. CRA’s Jan Cuny (and CRA’s Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research (CRA-W)) gets a nice mention. Here’s a sample: That sense of isolation and inadequacy is one reason the number […]

Brain Drain in Tech’s Future?


ZDNet covers the drop in tech-related doctoral degrees in an article today that quotes CRA Board Chair Jim Foley. The article cites some reasons for the current downturn in doctoral degrees, including declining interest in the sciences among Americans, a temporary shift in the labor markets, and financial disincentives to pursue science and engineering doctorates. […]