Climate scientists should not write their own software, says researcher
Computer scientist urges software developers to help climate scientists produce better modelling tools. From BusinessGreen , part of the Guardian Environment Network A study by a computer scientist at the University of Toronto suggests that the computer models used to predict climate change may be undermined due to a lack of programming expertise. Steve Easterbrook at the University's Department of Computer Science, has had his paper, Climate Change: A Grand Software Challenge, accepted by the 2010 FSE/SDP Workshop on the Future of Software Engineering Research. In the paper, he suggests that because many climate prediction software modelling tools are built by climate scientists rather than software engineers some of the resulting software has room for improvement. Climate scientists commonly use so-called Global Circulation Models (GCMs) that simulate the atmosphere, oceans, cryosphere and biosphere at a global scale, Easterbrook said. Underpinning them are data analysis tools designed to crunch the underlying numbers. "Most of this software is built by the climate scientists themselves, who have little or no training in software engineering," said Easterbrook in his paper. "As a result the quality of this software varies tremendously: The GCMs tend to be exceptionally well engineered, while some data processing tools are barely even tested." Easterbrook called for climate scientists to use applications written by experts in software design that would enable cross-disciplinary work to address climate change questions. These analysis tools would be proven capable of processing "earth models", he said. Secondly, Easterbrook argued that information sharing systems, such as games, reputation analysis software, and crowdsourcing tools could help to disseminate information on climate change efficiently and responsibly. Finally, he said that energy efficient green IT systems are needed to reduce power consumption in all areas where climate modelling software is used. "A massive mobilisation of talent will be needed
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Climate scientists should not write their own software, says researcher
John Aris obituary
Computer engineer who encouraged the use of PCs in business John Aris, who has died aged 76, was a pioneer of the application of computers for business use. In the late 1970s, he was one of the first to recognise that the future of business computing lay with smaller, cheaper machines more than with mainframes; and with widely available pre-programmed applications rather than custom-built software. Working at the Imperial Tobacco Group, he was one of the first computing managers in the world to oust a mainframe in favour of end-user-managed minis and to encourage the advent of personal computers. John's career in computing began in 1958 when he was recruited to the Leo (Lyons Electronic Office) computer team by J Lyons, then the major food business in the UK, and initiators of the notion that the future of computers lay in their use as a business tool. At the time, the prevailing view was that work with computers required a trained mathematician. The Leo management thought otherwise and recruited using an aptitude test. John, an Oxford classics graduate, passed with flying colours, noting that "the great advantage of studying classics is that it does not fit you for anything specific". When a series of mergers brought about the formation of International Computers Ltd (ICL) in 1968, John became chief systems engineer and had the unusual experience of explaining to the board of the new company what, in the eyes of its customers, its products were for. After a spell as ICL's technical director for western Europe, based in Paris, in 1975 he joined Imperial as head of computer development. With this move from a supplier to a user company, John discovered that he had underestimated the knowledge and skill of users at all levels. He used that insight at first within Imperial, and subsequently, from 1985, as full-time director of the National Computing Centre (NCC), set up by the government to encourage computer use, and of the computer club Impact, a forum for users. Many of the UK's leading companies and public sector bodies participated in Impact: in reviews, detailed comparisons with best practice, seminars, debates and lectures. As NCC director, John had to concentrate on moving away from a heavy financial dependence on government contracts. Perhaps the most striking achievement of his term of office was selling NCC-developed telecommunications standards-testing software to the official standards bodies of both the US and Japan as their main enforcement tool. He succeeded in raising the NCC's non-government revenue by 71%. Nonetheless, he had to reduce the workforce substantially when the government contracts dried up, and in 1990 he resigned. Born in London, John was a clever child, and his parents, an insurance executive and a painter, who were far from rich, gambled on his winning an Eton scholarship, which he did. His father was a keen amateur actor and John's brother Ben became a well-known professional actor, but John's stage career never progressed beyond schoolboy productions. Aged 15, he decided that classics was more interesting than mathematics, his best subject, and pursued it, despite teachers' disapproval
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John Aris obituary
Alien life – but not as we know it | Seth Shostak
Don't be fooled by Hollywood aliens: any extra-terrestrial intelligence we encounter is likely to be artificial, not biological Nine out of 10 Hollywood aliens look like us. Oh, sure, they might be short, big-eyed and hairless – decked out in skin smoother than gourmet prosciutto. But really, these creatures from afar are usually so anthropomorphic (aside from their grey complexions), they could pass for hominid relatives, freshly flushed from some cryptic, jungle habitat. You should expect that from movie-makers. After all, the alien characters in films should be "readable". The audience needs to look at their faces (note that they have faces) and instantly judge whether these beings are happy, hungry or homicidal. Subconsciously, the researchers who look for sentience beyond Earth in the effort known as Seti (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence ), make a similar mental picture of their quarry.
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Alien life – but not as we know it | Seth Shostak
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in web furore over bogus rape claim
• False allegation spreads across internet after leak • Story garners 1m hits before prosecutor steps in The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, was himself the subject of a rapidly spreading online story when news cascaded across the internet for several hours at the weekend mistakenly saying he was being sought in Sweden on rape charges. Before Stockholm's chief prosecutor made clear on Saturday afternoon that Assange was in fact neither charged with rape nor due to be arrested, the story had spread, generating more than 1,200 articles, available through internet news search, that received more than 1m hits. "It was 7am when a friend who is Swedish and has been out on the net told me about the allegations," Assange told Stockholm daily newspaper Aftonbladet, which has hired him as a columnist : "It was shocking. I have been accused of various things in recent years, but nothing so serious as this." He said none of his sexual relations had ever been built on anything other than totally consensual activity. The preliminary allegation, made on the Friday night, and not further investigated at that stage, was apparently leaked by police to a tabloid in Stockholm, which published dramatic claims on Saturday morning that Assange was to be arrested. The Swedish Prosecution Authority todaysaid an "on-call" prosecutor issued an arrest warrant for Assange late on Friday only to see it revoked the next day by a higher-ranked prosecutor, who found no grounds to suspect him of rape. "The prosecutor who took over the case had more information, and that is why she made a different assessment than the on-call prosecutor," said Karin Rosander, a spokeswoman for the authority. One of two women involved told Aftonbladet in an interview published today that she had never intended Assange to be charged with rape. She was quoted as saying: "It is quite wrong that we were afraid of him. He is not violent and I do not feel threatened by him." In her interview, she dismissed the idea, seized on by many conspiracy theorists that 'dirty tricks' lay behind the rape allegations, because of WikiLeaks' defiance of the US government. She said: "The charges against Assange are of course not orchestrated by the Pentagon." Swedish prosecutors said today that a decision would be taken early this week whether to continue investigations into lesser possible charges against the nomadic Assange, which he also denies. Some of WikiLeaks' computer servers are currently based in Sweden, and he has sought to shelter under Sweden's journalistic source protection laws for the organisation's crusade to promote worldwide leaking of information. Assange and his co-activists at WikiLeaks have refused US defense department demands that they cease publishing thousands of leaked military documents about the US war in Afghanistan, and making accusations of murder of civilians. US generals have accused WikiLeaks of wholesale leaking that does too little to protect informants and the identities of Afghan villagers who co-operated with US and British forces. Assange has riposted that it is US soldiers who have "blood on their hands" and he is seeking to edit sensitive files before posting them on-line. A former US army intelligence analyst, Bradley Manning, is in military custody at Quantico, Virginia, accused of turning over to outsiders a huge quantity of classified material which subsequently appeared on WikiLeaks. Bradley reportedly told fellow computer enthusiasts that he was horrified by what he found. WikiLeaks Sweden Digital media Internet Computing David Leigh guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in web furore over bogus rape claim
My bright idea: Dennis Shasha: Nature can improve our computers
The professor of computer science believes the next great leap in computing will be programming machines to behave in almost evolutionary ways Robots on Mars that can fix themselves and computers built from DNA: not science fiction but the work of scientists at the forefront of computing. Dennis Shasha, 55, is a professor of computer science at New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and the author, with Cathy Lazere, of Natural Computing: DNA, Quantum Bits and the Future of Smart Machines (Norton), a survey of research in fields as disparate as engineering and medicine. This New Yorker sees an emerging common theme: that the future of computing lies in a synthesis with nature. What can computers learn from biology? We should look at the history of the two fields and how surprising it is that they should come together. Computing was really born of physics and of this "clean-room" mentality – and a lot of computing is still like that. When one tries to control every bit of accuracy and tries to ensure that nothing could possibly go wrong – well, this is very different from the messiness of nature. But as computers become more mobile and autonomous – either they can gain their own power from the environment or they have a long battery or are wireless – their problems become quite different. Instead of problems being algorithmic, which means they can be expressed as a recipe – you do one step and then the next and you finally arrive at an answer – now their problem can be: how do I survive? If the problem is how do I survive, then all of the survival mechanisms that organic nature uses become relevant. And robots that can repair themselves are an example of this? In the history of space travel, it's been easier to build a computer program to guide a spaceship to Mars than it has been to build a robot that can navigate the terrain there with anything like the skill of goat. A professor of robotics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) called Rodney Brooks saw a problem with what's known as the "monarch" model: sensors provide data to some kind of higher intelligence, which in turn figures out a model of the world before sending a set of decisions to a set of actuators (wheels, for instance). But it's very hard to construct a model of the real world. Brooks thought that the real world is its own best model, and that it's much better to have very low-level intelligences, which can work together. One intelligence may say: "Do not collide with anything" – something fundamental to avoid a bad outcome – whereas another one may say: "Explore as much as possible." But if that one conflicts with the first one, than the first one wins. And so on. As a result, in the 80s, Brooks was able to construct very simple robots that didn't need much computing power but which were able to achieve things that other robots couldn't. He suggested sending lots of little robots to Mars, which should just be let go, as opposed to highly controlled robots, which would be very expensive, could easily break and would in fact be very hard to control over all that distance
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My bright idea: Dennis Shasha: Nature can improve our computers
Robby Krieger: ‘You have to keep upgrading’ | Celebrity squares
The Doors guitarist Robby Krieger is annoyed by built-in obsolesence, but is keen to get his hands on a 3D TV What's your favourite piece of technology, and how has it improved your life? In my studio I've got Pro Tools on my Mac, and it's made it a lot easier to record. Pro Tools was a big leap in digital recording. When was the last time you used it, and what for? I've just been recording my son's band, called Darkroom, and we did about 10 songs – written by my son, Waylan, and some of his bandmates
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Robby Krieger: 'You have to keep upgrading' | Celebrity squares
How the internet is altering your mind
A new book claims the amount of time we spend on the internet is changing the very structure of our brains – damaging our ability to think and to learn Like nearly all the Guardian's content, what you are about to read was – and this will hardly be a revelation – written using a computer connected to the internet. Obviously, this had no end of benefits, mostly pertaining to the relative ease of my research and the simplicity of contacting the people whose thoughts and opinions you are about to read. Modern communications technology is now so familiar as to seem utterly banal, but set against my clear memories of a time before it arrived, there is still something magical about, say, optimistically sending an email to a scientist in southern California, and then talking to him within an hour. But then there is the downside. The tool I use to write not only serves as my word processor and digital postbox, but can also double as – among other things – a radio, TV, news-wire portal and shop. Thus, as I put together the following 2,000-ish words, I was entertained in my more idle moments by no end of distractions. I watched YouTube videos of Manic Street Preachers, Yoko Ono, and the Labour leadership candidates. Via Amazon, I bought a £4.99 teach-yourself-to-spell DVD-Rom for my son, which turned out to be rubbish.
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How the internet is altering your mind
Apple manager denies bribery charge
Executive pleads not guilty in US court to charges that he took bribes from Asian suppliers in return for inside information An Apple executive pleaded not guilty last night to charges that he took bribes from Asian suppliers in return for inside information. Paul Devine, a global supply manager at the company, is accused of accepting more than $1m (£639,000) in kickbacks over several years from manufacturers keen to supply accessories for iPhones and iPods. He was arrested last Friday, and appeared in federal court in San Jose in handcuffs yesterday to face 27 charges including money-laundering and wire fraud
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Will the loss of Becta give schools a fresh chance to make technology click?
Becta, the education technology quango is on its way out. Is this an opportunity to be more creative about how we use computers in schools? The parents' evening at our local secondary was going well until we came to the art department. I pointed out that our 12-year-old greatly enjoys making videos — cutting together films taken with a Flip video camera, choosing songs for the soundtrack, and synchronising them with frame-quality accuracy using free software that came on her hand-me-down computer. Could she, I asked, do a film-making course? The school had some computers apparently dedicated to film-making. And it is art. Sort of. No, we were told sternly. Those were for the A-level course. As we drove home, our daughter complained about the school's clunky computers, and the apparently pointless tasks to be done on them, such as spreadsheets, presented as a task to be learned rather than as a means to find things out (or create interesting graphs). Her views are by no means unique. Children are often taught "computer skills" that are really "Microsoft Windows skills" – how to use Microsoft's operating system and its Office suite (its two monopolies) – rather than the possibilities of making computers do what you want. As such, children are being equipped to be uncreative office workers, just as those at the end of the 19th century were equipped for the routine of adding up huge lists of numbers in the accounts departments of big companies. Schools, it would seem, don't always have the right attitude to computers, especially given that IT underpins so much of what we do. It's very easy to forget the computer revolution, and the resistance caused when Kenneth Baker, the education secretary in 1981, introduced the idea of a computer in every school. At the time, nobody – not teachers, not pupils – knew what to make of the technology, though the pupils were markedly more eager to use it.
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Will the loss of Becta give schools a fresh chance to make technology click?
Concert pianist Lang Lang: ‘I feel left behind all the time’ | Celebrity squares
Concert pianist Lang Lang wishes he could spend more time practising video games What's your favourite piece of technology, and how has it improved your life? The new 3D television – I just got the Sony Bravia, and it's really cool. I can play games and watch football games in 3D – I watched them during the World Cup. You enjoy the distance and the way the third dimension works – you feel like you are inside that world. When was the last time you used it, and what for? I watched the games of the World Cup – many games were shown in 3D, as was the final. What additional features would you add if you could? I believe that with 3D TV, in addition to watching football and playing video games, we need to do live-streaming of events, such as concerts, in 3D. Do you think it will be obsolete in 10 years' time? Maybe we'll have 4D TV by then? Who knows – probably. We will have everything in 3D in 10 years, such as computers and so on. And by then, we won't need the glasses to watch 3D TV any more. What always frustrates you about technology in general? Sometimes technology is developing much faster than our abilities – we have to learn how to use it all the time. But the good news is that technology is helping us to get faster results
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Concert pianist Lang Lang: 'I feel left behind all the time' | Celebrity squares