Bill Gasarch sends in some links on recent activities at
Harvard. The Harvard alumni magazine has an "objective"
(according to Gasarch) article The
End of a Presidency. Also former Harvard
College Dean (and Gasarch's Advisor) Harry Lewis has a new book Excellence
Without a Soul with an excerpt in the Chronicle, Has Harvard
Lost Its Way?
Meanwhile Nature has a online section 2020
– Future of Computing.
An editorial
about the section
talks about an interesting relationship between science and the
computer industry.
The computer industry knows that scientists can come up with strange
ideas and requirements that may well, in time, have broader commercial
application elsewhere. This is one of the reasons why Microsoft is
engaging the scientific community with its new
Towards
2020 Science report on computers in science. That report
inspired this week's focus on computing in Nature. Microsoft is
sponsoring free web access to our articles on the subject, although,
as always, the content is exclusively Nature's responsibility.
As computing gets ever cheaper, quicker and more powerful, scientists
would do well to remember that, by being a demanding and stimulating
"user community" that engages the interest of companies such as
Microsoft, Google and Intel, they can influence the development of the
field, to everybody's benefit.
Only in complexity world, I found so many interesting problems and the solutions of them cannot be faded by the time and space.Though I am a new commer in this field, I believed one day I will be the older man in this field.
In other news, the cover story on the current Scientific American concerns quantum computation. Some of the ideas it talks about are due to Microsoft Research theorists, such as Michael H. Freedman.