Computerworld has fantastic coverage of the 50th anniversary of the Sputnik launch (Oct. 4th, 1957) and why, in a sense, we can thank the Soviets for helping create the conditions that led the U.S. to become the technological superpower we’ve become. Computerworld’s Gary Anthes’ piece “Happy Birthday Sputnik! (Thanks for the Internet)” does a great […]
Long-time readers of this blog, or anyone familiar with CRA’s policy efforts, will know that we’ve spent a lot of time raising concerns about policy shifts at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) that have cut university participation rates in DARPA-funded computer science research. In congressional testimony and blog posts, we’ve pointed out that […]
Forbes.com has an interesting article about a survey on the role of women in patents. The survey (PDF), from the National Center for Women & Information Technology, shows that patents by mixed-gender teams are cited more often than those of single-gender teams. Not a lot of new information in the article but it points out […]
John Schwartz of the New York Times has an interesting piece today on the rise in complexity of networked applications and the risks that complexity poses. Headlined Who Needs Hackers?, the piece makes the point that the biggest threat to these systems isn’t malicious users, but complexity itself. Understanding how these giant interconnected systems work […]
It’s done! It’s done! By now, I expect that everyone has heard that both the House and Senate have agreed on the conference report for H.R. 2272, The America COMPETES Act and that the measure is headed to the President for his signature. Word comes from the White House today that the President will sign […]
The National Science Foundation has published two reports on American research and the decline of journals publishing it. The reports show that beginning in 1992 journals began to publish less American based research with a corresponding rise in research from Europe and Asia being published. In 1992, the share of American research published in journals […]
The Chronicle of Higher Education (sub. reqd.) has a great article on the future of the Internet and the Global Environment for Network Innovations or GENI. It contains quotes from many participants of the new Computing Community Consortium (CCC) that CRA helped launch. The article talks about the problems with the current state of the […]
The computing community has had these concerns for quite a while, so it’s not surprising to see other disciplines noting similar issues with DARPA in this OpEd written by David Ignatius in Friday’s Washington Post: DARPA once liked to boast that it took on impossible problems and wasn’t interested in the merely difficult. But in […]
David Broder writes about the America COMPETES Act in his column today at the Washington Post. It contains this great quote from Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), one of the sponsors of the Act: “Last week,” he said, “while the media covered Iraq and U.S. attorneys, the Senate spent three days debating and passing perhaps the […]
Interesting article (requires free registration) on the innovation agenda in the San Jose Mercury News. While it does focus mostly on the energy and environmental areas that could be helped, it also touches on almost all aspects of the overall innovation agenda such as funding basic research and increasing STEM K-12 teachers. There is also […]
