Dr. Dobb's Journal March 2001
The College Board will revise its Advanced Placement Computer Science exams to use Java as the "delivery language," rather than C++. The change will take place in the 2003-2004 academic year. According to the College Board, "a subset of Java approved for use in the AP Computer Science Examinations is under development and will be finalized in spring 2001 after a period of public comment. Information about how to comment on the subset will be available in early 2001." The draft proposal is available at http://www.cs.duke.edu/csed/adhoc/subset.html. For more on College Board Advanced Placement exams, see http://www .collegeboard.com/ap/computer-science/.
Last month, we reported on two Saratoga, California, high-school students, Allan Chu and Chun-Chieh Lin, who had developed a new compression algorithm and won the southwest regional round of the Siemens Westinghouse Science and Technology competition. Alas, the programmers were beat out by astronomers in the national finals. The astronomy team winners were Chris Olbert, Christopher Clearfield, and Nikolas Williams, all seniors at the North Carolina School of Science and Math in Durham, North Carolina. Their project was entitled "Discovery of a Pulsar Bow-Shock Nebula in a Nearby Supernova Remnant." According to Dr. Robert Fessen, astronomy professor at Dartmouth College, "They discovered a brand new pulsar wake — only three such pulsar wakes have ever been seen. It's a truly remarkable discovery, and one that has already changed existing scientific ideas." The individual competition was won by Mariangela Lisanti, of Staples High School in Westport, Connecticut, for her work on "Conductance Quantization in Au Nanocontacts." Congratulations to these remarkable high-school students. For more information, go to http://www.siemens-foundation.org/.
The nonprofit OASIS consortium and United Nations' CEFACT trade organization have jointly announced intentions to deliver the technical core infrastructure of an XML electronic business specification in March of 2001. The goal of the so-called "ebXML initiative," which has wide industry and vendor support, is to provide a technical specification for transport, routing, and packaging (TPR), trading partner agreements (TPA), and registry/repository (REG/REP) components of XML electronic transactions. OASIS is a vendor-sponsored consortium, while UN/CEFACT is a worldwide technical body responsible for establishing electronic business standards such as UN/EDIFACT, the international Electronic Data Interchange Standard.
OASIS is also developing a security specification for XML based on the Security Services Markup Language (S2ML), but there is competition in the XML security standards arena. A notable competitor is AuthXML, which is also sponsored by a group of vendors. For more information, see http://www.oasis-open.org/, http://www.uncefact.org/, and http://www.authxml.org/.
The Systems Administrator's Guild of Australia has proposed an Open Source Developer's Agreement (OSDA) that would enable employees at private companies to develop open source applications. As the Guild's web site correctly points out, "Many employees who are interested in developing Open Source software or contributing to Open Source projects may not realize that there is likely to be a clause in their existing employment contract that effectively says that your employer 'owns' any idea or solution you implement whilst working for them. This even applies to people working at universities and nonprofit organizations." The Guild provides an FAQ and other resources for dealing with this issue. See http://www.sage-au.org.au/osda/faq.html.
NASA and Carnegie-Mellon University have joined forces to form a consortium called the "High Dependability Computing Consortium" (HDCC), charged with the formidable task of eliminating computer failures in "computing systems critical to the welfare of society." The consortium's industry partners include Adobe, Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, ILOG, Marimba, Microsoft, Novell, SGI, Siebel Systems, Sybase, and Sun Microsystems.
Carnegie-Mellon received a $500,000 grant from NASA to start the consortium, which will focus on computer systems for critical functions such as air-traffic control, power generation, health care, and highway safety. Carnegie-Mellon plans to build a 500,000-square-foot facility at the NASA Ames Research Park at Moffett Field in Mountain View, California, to house the consortium.
Sequence analysis is used to study all sorts of contiguously ordered phenomena, from molecular biology and economics, to gaming theory. Dynamic programming algorithms, using recursion and caches for intermediate calculations, successfully solve sequence-analysis problems but at a high computational cost. Emanuel Gaziano now claims to have developed a linear algorithm for sequence analysis, based on new techniques for comparing the content of sequences. A paper describing the algorithm and an open source CGI script that implements it are available at http://publicscience.net/.
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI@home) project, based at the University of California at Berkeley, relies on hundreds of thousands of personal computer users donating their machines' idle time to the hunt for extraterrestrial intelligence. Users simply download the SETI screen-saver software (http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/) and their PCs use that idle screen-saver time to run the SETI application, which analyzes radio signals for extraterrestrial sources. SETI now has over half a million participants.
The concept of using distributed computers to tackle computationally intensive problems is catching on elsewhere. For example, a group at Stanford University is applying the concept to solve the massive computational problem of protein folding. The human body produces thousands of different proteins, which fold into complex geometric shapes such as woven braids or intricate pretzels. Vijay Pande, an assistant professor of chemistry at Stanford, and Michael Shirts, a graduate student in chemistry, have launched folding@home to enlist PCs in the computation of protein folds. They now have some 10,000 participants, whose PCs are calculating how proteins take on their specific shapes. For more information, see http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/Cosm/.