According to this report at Space.com, NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe will step down this week and may take a position at Lousiana State University. Apparently the former head of DOD’s anti-ballistic missile shield program, Air Force Lt. Gen. Ronald Kadish, is the leading candidate to replace him, though the others mentioned as possibilities are interesting: […]
His name is Sam Bodman, formerly Deputy Secretary of Commerce and a former Associate Professor in chemical engineering at MIT. That’s about all I know about him at the moment. If confirmed, he’ll replace current Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham. The President’s announcement is here. Abraham’s press release is here. And Sherry Boehlert, Chair of […]
Things have been a bit busy around CRA world headquarters recently, which is why blogging has been a little infrequent. Apologies to those who’ve noticed. 🙂 One of the recent events worth mentioning was the 2004 edition of the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing conference held two weeks ago in Chicago. This year’s […]
The DC rumor mill (well, the science community subset) is buzzing about an Administration announcement tomorrow of a new NSF Director nominee to replace Acting Director Arden Bement. Bement has been “Acting” director since Rita Colwell resigned the post in February, but current law apparently precludes anyone from serving as an “Acting” director for more […]
The New York Times has an interesting article today that discusses a forthcoming paper by Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul A. Samuelson that challenges the orthodoxy surrounding outsourcing. In the piece, Samuelson argues against the “assumption that the laws of economics dictate that the American economy will benefit in the long run from all forms of […]
A new study by the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) apparently* indicates that US employers added 213,639 IT jobs between the first quarter of 2003 and the first quarter this year. However, the same report also indicates that hiring managers don’t plan to add nearly as many IT jobs this year. Overall, the number […]
Thanks to Richard Jones at the American Institute of Physics for pointing out this report put together by RAND on The U.S. Scientific and Technical Workforce: Improving Data for Decisionmaking. The report is an interesting collection of papers on the current controversy surrounding the adequacy of the science and engineering workforce and very relevant to […]
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 […]
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 […]
News.com has the story on a new report by NSF’s Science Resources Statistics group that shows more than one-fifth of U.S. science and engineering workers do not have a bachelor’s degree. The percentage without degrees is even higher in computer and math science fields, with approximately 40 percent of workers without a four-year degree. I […]
