Links for "The Profession," 2002
The links here supplement or repeat the links given from time to time in the column "The Profession", which appears in the IEEE Computer Society's house magazine, Computer.  Where there is more than one list for an essay, the first list is of links cited in the column, others are, in particular, of links provided by readers.  Comments and additions can be sent here.
Before   2000   2001
2002  Jan   Feb   Mar   Apr   May   Jun   Jul   Aug   Sep   Oct   Nov   Dec
2003   2004   2005   2006
2007
To See Ourselves As Others See Us,   2002 January, pp.144,142-3
Top
  • Simon Caulkin, A bubble we need to burst The Observer, 2001 August 19 (the on-line version of Caulkin's article cited in Computer as "Make Computers Our Servants, Not Our Masters")
    Representative Democracy and the Profession,   2002 February, pp.120,118-9
    		Top
  • Naomi Klein, No Logo, New York: Picador, 2000 (and others)
  • Thomas G Alexander, Legislative Malapportionment and Rural Domination ("By the 1960's, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah shamed themselves with the most malapportioned state houses of representatives in the west.")
  • Kevin O'Malley, MDC/ICPR links (a link list maintained for Illinois Citizens for Proportional Representation)
  • Micah Altman, What are Judicially Manageable Standards for Redistricting? Evidence from History (argues "that unlike population-equality measures, compactness standards are not easily manageable by the judiciary.")
  • Micah Altman, Traditional Districting Principles: Judicial Myths vs. Reality (examines " this question in the light of historical evidence from all [US Congressional district] plans 1789 to 1913, and decal redistricting plans from 1923 to 1993.")
  • Peter Brain, The Australian Federation 2001: Political Structures and Economic Policy (argues for the adoption of representative democracy)
  • Lee Naish (pr.), Proportional Representation Society of Australia (promotes the Hare Clark Quota Preferential method of Proportional Representation)
  • Enron part of "genius of capitalism" O'Neill (2002Ja14 AFR: "Republican Senator Mr John McCain, also speaking on CBS, said the collapse of Enron was "tainted" by the firm's massive contributions to politicians.")
  • Karen Bartlett, Whose democracy is it anyway? The Observer, 2002 October 27 (sets out the themes of Charter 88 and Observer Future of Democracy conference, asks if it is any surprise that out politics turns so many people off)
  • Jim Rutenberg, Many Questions on the Day After a Technology Fiasco The New York Times, 2002 November 7 (network news executives spent Wednesday trying to find out why their vote-tabulation system was so plagued with problems on Election Day)
  • Editorial, Campaign Finance Secrets, New York Times, 2002 November 30 (even before the campaign finance law challenge is decided, the American public is already losing, because the court has allowed parts of the record to be kept secret)
  • Richard A. Oppel and Neil A. Lewis, Campaign Law Set for Big Test, New York Times, 2002 December 3 (a showdown on the constitutionality of the new campaign finance law will feature some of the nation's most accomplished lawyers)
  • Katharine Q. Seelye, Industry Seeking Rewards From G.O.P.-Led Congress, New York Times, 2002 December 3 (businesses and industries that donated millions of dollars to elect Republicans are mapping strategies to take advantage of the party's sweep in Washington)
  • Editorial, Campaign Reform on Trial, New York Times, 2002 December 4 (it would be a sad day for democracy if a court struck down the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, a landmark attempt to rein in the corrupting influence of money on politics)
    Computers, Programming, and People,   2002 March, pp.112,110-1
    		Top
  • A Lingua Franca for the Internet (Economist's Technical Quarterly article, 2001 September 21, for sale)
  • Robert L Glass, Practical programmer: Of model changeovers, style, and fatware, Comm ACM, Vol.44, No.9 (September 2001) pp17-20
  • Microsoft to tackle security failings 2002 January 17, BBC News (security now to take top priority over adding features)
  • A Story (about problems with copyright over obsolete software experienced by the PCs for Kids organisation; also News.Com)
  • Bruce McKinney, Saying Goodbye to Hardcore Visual Basic
  • The IAS machine:  description,  paper,  biography, a  colour photo, and a  B&W photo.
  • Some collections of "Hello World" code are from the UK and Germany, and this from GNU is like the Economist coding examples in the item cited above.  Jason Che-han Yip alerted me to this, which uses AWT rather than Swing.
    From Mark Crawshaw:
  • A shorter and improved version of the Hello World Java program from Sun
  • A straight DOS version (sans GUI)
      public class HelloWorld
    {   public static void main (String[] args)
        {   System.out.println ("Hello World!");
    }   }
    A very similar version was sent by Jason Che-han Yip.

    Some readers have pointed out that simple computer simulators have long been used for teaching computer architecture. Perhaps the best known of these is Donald Knuth's MIX, described in the first volume of his encyclopaedic The Art of Computer Programming. A MIX simulator is available though GNU (MDK), but see also SourceForge. For the new millenium, and new editions of his encyclopaedia, Knuth has designed MMIX along RISC lines, and this is being implemented by volunteers. However, the purpose of the simple computer suggested in my essay is not essentially pedagogic, and an educational simulation is not necessarily the best, and in any case would not be enough in itself, for my wider purposes.

    V. Chitradevi has alerted me to the Indian designed and developed Simputer(TM), which seems to be a highly commendable project to bring an up-to-date Internet device to poor communities. Some news reports of this enterprise are from News-India, Wired, Asia1, Time, especially the BBC, and more recently the Guardian.

    Tom Murray has alerted me to the Parrot project, a register-based virtual machine intended to execute bytecode for interpreted coding schemes.

    Side Effects of Digital Technology,   2002 April, pp.104,102-3
    		Top
  • Jonathan Margolis' cited article doesn't appear to be on-line. Hovever, he is the author of A Brief History of Tomorrow (also here and here) The books he reviewed in the article were
      - James Gleick, The Acceleration of Just About Everything (see particularly his FasterBook.com, also a review from Dartmouth College, another from Salon, and another from the Smithsonian, otherwise you can Google)
      - Ilse Crawford, The Sensual Home (see also The Age)
      - Mark Forster, Get Everything Done (And Still Have Time to Play) (see also review)
  • The 10 National Privacy Principles from the Privacy Amendement (Private Sector) Act 2000 No.155, Schedule 3
  • John Naughton, "Just kidding we thought. Then we got the message", The Observer, 2002 February 3 (with footnotes) and, more recently, John Arlidge, The revolution in your pocket, 2002 September 22
  • New Scientist  Hot Topics  Phones
        Dial M for Mugger (an editorial) and   Ian Sample and Duncan Graham-Rowe, Mobile Targets
  • Steven Morris, Web drug dealers rattle cyber cops, Guardian, 2002 March 2 (drug gangs are making increasing use of the internet and exploiting the lack of cooperation between international law enforcement agencies to improve their operations, a new UN report claims: Globalization and new technologies)
  • Jeremy Rifkin, Goodbye cruel world, Guardian, 2002 March 1 (We live in a world that has become so desensitised by watching calamities unfold on global television - both natural and human-induced - that it takes something really spectacular even to get our attention; his comments seem to be based on a report, Abrupt Climate Change, from the National Academies)
  • Roger Clarke's links on Data Surveillance and Information Privacy
  • James Meek, "Hi, I'm in G2" Guardian, 2002 November 11 (kicking off a G2 special on the rise of the mobile phone, looks at how the gadgets have changed our world)
  • Tanya Mohn, Westchester: The Yakety-Yak Backlash, New York Times, 2002 November 24 (in their book "Once Upon a Telephone: An Illustrated Social History," Ellen Stern and Emily Gwathmey suggest that the incessanr ring and chatter from cellphones may have displeased Alexander Graham Bell) It has an assembler which Murray suggests would be a useful pedagogical tool.
    Would a Digital Brain Have a Mind ?   2002 May, pp.112,110-1
    (Originally "Having a Mind to Computing")
    		Top
  • Giorgio Buttazzo, Artificial Consciousness: Utopia or Real Possibility ?
  • Bob Colwell, Engineering, Science, and Quantum Mechanics  (Letter)
  • Macquarie Dictionary to look for "mind"
  • The Tree in the Quad
  • Mind: Wordsmyth  HTTP Webster  Merriam-Webster  Dict.Org  Roget
  • Brain: Wordsmyth  HTTP Webster  Merriam-Webster  Dict.Org  Roget
  • The "Brain in a Vat":  Heythrop  McCormick  WUSTL  Bostrum  Patton
  • The "Tree in the Quad":  Baird  Oakley  Bob Ames  about Berkeley
  • Colin Tudge, Conscious objector, The Guardian, 2003 January 30 (the ultra-modern view of consciousness turns science upside down)
  • What is it like to be a bat ?:  Thomas Nagel  (same  same)
      Commentary:  Laurence BonJour  Aaron Sloman  Max Velmans
  • Consciousness & perception:  ASSC (Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness)  Psyche (journal of research on consciousness)
     Freeman, The Physiology of Perception
  • Neuroscience:  The Society for Neuroscience,  Brain Briefings:  The Mind-body Link  Monash
     Some idea of the complexity of neural signalling can be got from looking at the research summaries of university neuroscience schools, for example,  Harvard  Carnegie Mellon
  • Some resources:
      - Calvin & Bickerton, Lingua ex Machina
      - David J Chalmers, Contemporary Philosophy of Mind: An Annotated Bibliography
    Using Computers in Our Daily Life,   2002 June, pp.104,102-3
    Ana Asuaga
    		Top
    Seven Great Blunders of the Computing World,   2002 July, 112,110-1
    		Top
    Introduction: Vanity and Guilt, Humility and Pride
    6. Text Encoding: Toward Decent Text Encoding
    5. Scientific Programming: Ken Iverson, A Programming Language, John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1962 (citations)
    -----, Notation as a Tool of Thought
    3. The Processor: Composite Arithmetic
    1. Terminology: The Great Term Robbery

    7. Numeric Encoding
    On the blunder of the wrong number base (ten digits instead of twelve), see The Dozenal Society of America and The Dozenal Society of Great Britain
    For an illustration of the negative sign and subtraction symbol conflation blunder, see or TI83 Introduction or TI-82/TI-83.  Incidentally, this blunder is the direct cause of those stupid and ugly comma separated lists programmers have to use
    On the back-front-digits blunder, background information can be got from items in a fine bibliography on numeration is available from the Phrontistery (which is the label an old friend used to put on the toilet in his home), among which I particularly recommend Karl Menninger's classic book, Number Words and Number Symbols (see also Dover).  Menninger describes and gives many examples of number expressions with digits in increasing significance, but the most familiar modern example (in Western ears) is in German, where digits are frequently spoken in pairs like "drei und achtzig," though our English 'teens are other examples.  For my information on modern Arabic usage I am indebted to Tariq Jamil.
    6. Text Encoding:
    The arguments given in the citation above are detailed in the unpublished paper Sortemic Text Encoding which also details the principles which could be applied in encoding for writing systems.
    5. Scientific Programming:
    Some other relevant articles by Ken Iverson are A Personal View of APL, IBM Systems Journal, Vol.30, No.4, 1991 and Computers and Mathematical Notation
    ACM has a Special Interest Group, SIGAPL, and the British APL Society publishes Vector
    For an interesting recollection of some of the history of APL see the beginning of Walt Niehoff's APL Graphpak
    For J material see J Software's resources, but see also Skip Cave's links and Trinity CS301
    4. Commercial Programming:
    The Macro Assembly Program for the IBM 7080 was reportedly one of the best, and the Assemblers for the successor Systems/360 were rather poor by comparison until Assembler H came out, which was an unplanned product.  It's ironical that IBM's adoption of the wild duck H was prompted only by its vastly faster operating system generation (sysgen, in the jargon of the time), where macrodefinitions were heavily used and were a great illustration of the benefit of the approach.  IBM missed the lesson and adopted instead the grotesque PL/M for a while.
    Curiously, IBM has recently, many decades later, produced a replacement for H: High Level Assembler, HLASM.  It's interesting that HLASM has led Bixoft in Holland to offer a course in Macro Programming
    Higher level coding schemes with macrofacilities more generally became known as extensible, and the most thorough of these was Algol 68, which deserved a better fate than it actually earned, mainly because of the opacity of its definition
    Macrofacilities were provided with microprocessor assemblers, but these were pathetic
    3. The Processor:
    Burroughs had an interesting architecture in which integers automatically converted into floating point rather than going into overflow.  This approach was not popular.
    2. The Computer:
    Much has been written about keyboards, and an excellent guide is Bibliography: Keyboards and keying: An annotated bibliography of the literature from 1878 to 1999 (PDF).  Human Control of Systems (pdf) is an interesting bullet point presentation
    The real story on QWERTY is not the one that everyone "knows," and there are times when "Natural" is unnatural
    Many different keyboards are described online in a Typing Injury FAQ and discussed in Q&A on Alternative Keyboards.  There are  chording keyboards, including one, OrbiTouch, with domes instead of keys, but most popular are those that rearrange the keys (like Typematrix, Dvorak) or reshape the keyboard profile (best known is perhaps the Maltron, but see also Benjamin Rossen's) but little attention has been given to correcting the blunder I describe
    The point about chording for human hands is that, by providing 8 finger keys for the eight bits in the most common byte, with two thumb keys for bit inversion, ASCII or EBCDIC or any other 8-bit code can be keyed directly.  Furthermore, by using both the make and break key signals for each key, finger movement can be greatly reduced from the naive (see explanation)
    Subsequent links of interest:
    BBC, Handy future for gesture sensor 2002 October 18 (the familiar keyboard and computer mouse could soon be redundant)
  • Jack Schofield, The keys to productivity, The Guardian, 2003 October 30 (Ctrl-Z; if you know what that does in Microsoft Windows, and you are a friend of Tony Blair, you could save UK businesses hundreds of millions of pounds a year)
    Towards Adequate Online Privacy Safeguards,   2002 August, pp.112,110-1
    Diana Mayer Orrick
    		Top
    References

    Diana M. Orrick and Joseph A. Lazor, A Survey of Methods to Protect Personal Privacy Within Higher Education Institutions, Proceedings of the SSGRR International Conference on Advances in Infrastructure for Electronic Business, Education, Science and Medicine on the Internet, L'Aquila, Italy, January, 2002
    Trust and Privacy Online: Why Americans want to rewrite the rules, Pew Internet Project, 2000 August 20
    Christine M. Henke, Privacy of Student Information
    Privacy and the Handling of Student Information in the Electronic Networked Environments of Colleges and Universities,   EDUCAUSE, 1997

    Useful links on privacy

    UN guidelines on data protection
    EU data protection home
    EU data protection useful links
    Hong Kong Ordinance on Personal Data Protection
    Privacy International
    Electronic Privacy Information Center
    Privacy2000.org "Eye on Privacy"
    Center for Democracy & Technology
    Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility
    National Information Infrastructure (NII) paper
    Dept of Commerce document on privacy
    Privacy discussion paper by Robert Gellman

    Recent News Items

    Top US Colleges in hacking row (and Hollywood tries hacking tactics makes an interesting accompaniment)

    Jobs, Trades, Skills, and the Profession,   2002 September, pp.112,110-1
    		Top
    Graeme Philipson, IT skills: a shortage or a scam?, 2002 June 18, The Age
    Graeme Philipson, Testimonials put the lie to the myth of IT skills shortage, 2002 July 16, The Business Review Weekly
    ZaZona, H1B Hall of Shame (an extensive website)
    Norman Matloff, Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage, Testimony to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, presented 1998 April 21, updated 2002 July 12
  • Australia
    Graeme Philipson, Too easy to target scapegoats, 2002 October 1, The Age ("there has been a fair bit of debate about the myth of the IT skills shortage, the upshot of which has been an admission on most people's part that there is no longer a shortage")
    Stan Beer, Demanding Jokes, 2002 July 23, The Age (later news from Australia, and acidic comments; makes an interesting contrast to the next item)
    Centre for International Economics, Breaking the Skills Barrier: Demonstrating the Benefits of Investment in ICT Higher Education in Australia (commissioned by The Australian Information Industry Association, an 83 page PDF dated 2001 April 3; an expensive fulsome report giving "a more conservative estimate of the size of the shortfall . . . "in the order of 27 500 graduates over five years.")
    Karin Derkley, Pre-loved PCs are just the job and Old life left on the shelf, The Age, 2002 September 3 (an example of the potential of trade training in one area of computing, and a demonstration of the nonsense of clamour for imported skills)
  • U.S.A.
    Stephen Barlas, "How Critical Is the Shortage of IT Workers?," Computer, Vol.30, No.5, pp.14-16 (abstract links to HTML/PDF)
    Margie Wylie, The skills shortage that isn't 1998 February 4 (or at Kent State)
    Philip Hyde, Timesizing (an interesting suggestion)
    Steve Lohr, Technology Climate is Gloomy, but Its Future Still Seems Bright, 2002 July 29, New York Times (upbeat on digital technology, but reveals the error of equating this to jobs and skills in computing)
    Anne Field, When a Job Hunt Is Measured in Seasons or Even a Year, New York Times, 2002 December 8 (it used to be that laid-off professionals had an easier time of finding jobs, even in rough economic imes, than less-skilled blue-collar workers, but that is changing)
    Lawrence M. Fisher, Job-Rich Silicon Valley Has Turned Fallow, New York Times, 2002 January 20 (Silicon Valley lost 127,000 jobs, or about 9 percent of its total employment, from the first quarter of 2001 to the second quarter of 2002)
  • Europe
    Tech workers win jobs battle 2002 August 28 (computer consultants win their fight with the UK government over claims that their jobs were being taken by cheaper foreign workers; contrast this with the next item, and most of the remaining ones)
    GTSLearning, The IT skills shortage - is it really a crisis? (contrast this with the previous item)
    UK tightens requirements for IT work permits, The Age, 2002 August 29 (the British government has removed all IT jobs from its shortage occupation list, thus making it harder for overseas IT workers to obtain job permits for working in the UK)
    BBC, Europe's skills headache, 2002 March 22 (Western Europe, with its increasingly elderly population and declining birth rate, needs migrants to offset labour shortages; in particular demand are IT personnel, ...)
    Contractor UK, Are IT skills shortage schemes being abused? 2002 January 7
    Stockholm European Council, The IT Skills Gap, 2001 March 23-24
    BBC, Europe tackles IT skills shortage, 2000 March 23 (work permits ...)   German jobless stuck above 4 million 2002 September 5 (... and they're not retraining the unemployed - see the Karin Derkley stories above)
    Sa'ad Medhat, Technical questions The Guardian, 2002 November 5 (it's time to champion the cause of the technician in the UK)
    Rethinking the Digital Divide,   2002 October
    Laura Briggs and Kari Boyd McBride
    		Top
    Kari Boyd McBride and Laura Briggs, Distance Education at the Margins, Redrawing the Map of Cyberspace, SSGRR 2002w Conference, L'Aquila, 2002 January 22-27
  • Peter Rojas, Hungry for technology, The Guardian, 2002 December 12 (do the world's poorest really need a $250 handheld?)
    The Profession and the World,   2002 November
    		Top
    The Guardian and ActionAid, Earth, Guardian Weekly 16pp. supplement, 2002 August 22 (health check for a planet and its people under pressure)
  • United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 2002, Chapter 1 The state and progress of human development (from Box 1.1: "Between 1970 and the 1990s the world was more unequal than at any time before 1950")
  • Matthew Collin, Down and nearly out in Key West and London, Guardian Weekly, 2002 September 12, p.17 (Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed and Fran Abram's Below the Breadline expose the grim banality of life on the minimum wage on each side of the Atlantic; also a talk with Ehrenreich).   A similar review available online is by Jerry Kloby: Wealth Gap Woes, Monthly Review, Vol.53, No.8, 2002 January (a review of Shifting Fortunes: The Perils of the Growing American Wealth Gap, by Chuck Collins, Betsy Leondar-Wright, and Holly Sklar)
  • Larry Rohter, A New Intrusion Threatens a Tribe in Amazon: Soldiers? The New York Times, 2002 October 1 (as part of a program to strengthen the military's presence along Brazil's vast and largely undefended northern Amazon border, the Brazilian Armed Forces are building new bases and expanding old ones in territories set aside for the Yanomami and other tribes)
  • R H Tawney, Equality, George Allen & Unwin, 1931 (the quote in the essay is from the opening paragraph of the second chapter)
  • Damien McCrystal, Milton Friedman - the most influential post-war economist in the world The Observer, 2002 September 22 (criticises Friedman's widely respected neo-classical economic theories)
  • Roy F Harrod, Money, Macmillan, 1969 (VSCCAT)
  • Milton Friedman, "The Fed and the Natural Rate," Wall Street Journal, 1996 September 25 (transcription), James Kenneth Galbraith, "Time to ditch the NAIRU," Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1997, Vol.11, Iss.1 (excerpts)
  • Alex Kirby, World poverty fight "in danger", BBC, 2003 July 8 (the battle to reduce poverty has reached a dangerous turning-point, with some countries now getting poorer, the UN says)
  • Thabo Mbeki, The icy ideological grip, The Guardian, 2003 July 9 (if progressive politics is to have any meaning, it must start from the reality that you can't overcome global poverty through reliance on the market)
    The references above are those either cited or mentioned in the essay, or in subsequent Letters. Given elsewhere is an accumulation of relevant items gathered while the essay was being written, and after. They are offered, not rigorously organised, as a matter of interest and as support for the implication that there are many people around the (English-writing) world concerned about the state of the world.
    Using Language More Responsibly,   2002 December
    Simone Santini
    		Top
    Claude Shannon, A Mathematical Theory of Communication, 1948
    Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics 1948 (this is an excerpt with links but mainly giving the origin of "cybernetics")
    William Safire, On Language: W.S.J.: G.O.P., R.I.P., New York Times, 2002 December 15 (initialisms and acronyms)