Dr. Dobb's Journal March 1998
More than 200 contestants and 61 countries were represented at the 1997 International Olympiad on Informatics (IOI) in Cape Town, South Africa this winter. Problems to be solved at this year's competition dealt more with artificial intelligence than in the past, and scoring was based on a "very good" rather than perfect solution. Poland, Denmark, and Sweden each had two gold medalists. The U.S. team brought home one gold (Matthew Craighead, a high-school senior from Mendota Heights, Minnesota), one silver (MIT freshman Dan Adkins), and one bronze (Harvard freshman Russell Cox). The IOI is an annual event sponsored by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
Geoffrey Davidian is suing the city of Cookeville, Tennessee, for not going public about the cookies on city-owned computers connected to the Internet. Davidian is basing his suit on the state's open public records law and wants to find out if city employees are using taxpayer-funded equipment and services to examine nonwork related web sites (pornography, hate, and the like). So far, city officials have refused to make the cookie files public.
The PC/SC Workgroup, a consortium of computer and smart-card companies including Bull, Gemplus, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, Schlumberger, Siemens-Nixdorf, Sun, Toshiba, and VeriFone, has released Version 1.0 of its PC/SC specifications describing how the interface between smart cards and PCs ought to be. The implementation (initially available for Win32) defines low-level device interfaces, device-independent application APIs, and resource management so that multiple applications can share smart-card devices. The PC/SC Workgroup specifications are available online at http://www.smartcardsys.com/.
Decao Mao, a self-taught Chinese computer scientist, has reportedly been awarded a U.S. patent aimed at solving the Year 2000 problem. Mao's patent assumes there's no need to change legacy systems. Instead, his approach makes small changes to the way computers represent numbers. Mao's "hybrid radix" technique is called the "19T0 Solution;" details on Mao's work are available online at http://www.19T0.com/. During the 14 years he spent in the Chinese countryside due to the Cultural Revolution, Mao taught himself English and learned about computers by translating English computer books to Chinese. He came to the U.S. as a graduate student and earned a master's degree in computer science.
Apple's Steve Jobs and Oracle's Larry Ellison are sure a couple of cards. Why just before Christmas, Ellison sent out a prank e-mail message to computer consultant Michael Murdock who had been campaigning for the Apple CEO slot. "OK. You can have the job. -Larry." Jobs followed up with a note saying "Yep, Mike, it's all yours. When can you start?" Murdock took the job offers seriously, saying he was ready to start on January 5. Jobs quickly replied: "Please do not come to Apple. You will be asked to leave, and if you don't, you will be arrested."
Monsanto and IBM have announced a technology alliance that includes genomics research collaboration. Scientists from the two companies will work together to develop and apply advanced information technologies to identify and map the genetic structure of major plant groups and human diseases, building on Monsanto's existing genomics research. Using Teiresias, a pattern-discovery (an NP-hard problem, as opposed to pattern matching, which is a problem solvable in polynomial time) algorithm developed by IBM Research, scientists expect to speed discovery of hidden patterns in DNA and protein databases.
The Infrared Data Association (IrDA) has published reference documents detailing application interoperability between systems using the IrDA specification. The Infrared Mobile Communications standard (IrMC) defines common data exchange formats and protocols for mobile communication devices to interoperate. IrDA protocols are supported by Apple, Geoworks, IBM, Microsoft (Windows 95/CE), Phoenix, Sharp, and several embedded-system providers. The IrMC standard was defined by IrDA members such as Ericsson, Matsushita/Panasonic, Motorola, NEC, Nokia, NTT DoCoMo, Phillips Consumer Communications, Puma, and TU-KA Phone Kansai. The IrDA specification is available online at http://www.irda.org/.
President Clinton has presented the United States' most prestigious technology and science honors -- the National Medal of Technology and the National Medal of Science -- to 14 scientists from around the country.
Recipients of the 1997 National Medal of Technology include: Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn, for their work in the development of Internet protocols; Ray Dolby, for inventing technologies that have improved sound recording and reproduction; Robert Ledley, for his contributions to biomedical computing and engineering (including inventing the whole-body CT scanner); and Norman Augustine, for his pioneering work in the aerospace industry and civil and defense systems.
1997 National Medal of Science recipients include: Shing-Tung Yau, for contributions to mathematics; William Estes, for fundamental theories of cognition and learning in experimental psychology; Darleane Hoffman, for her discovery of plutonium in nature; Harold Johnston, for his investigations into the chemistry of nitrogen compounds and their role and reactions in the earth's stratosphere and in urban areas; Marshall Rosenbluth, for his fundamental contributions to plasma physics; Martin Schwarzschild (deceased), for his contributions to the theory of the evolution of stars; James Watson, for scientific leadership in molecular biology (including his codiscovery of the double-helix structure of DNA); Robert Weinberg, for discoveries that clarified the genetic basis of human cancers; and George Wetherill, for his fundamental contributions to measuring astronomical time scales and to understanding earth-like planets.
DDJ