Wired covers remarks by DeForest B. Soaries Jr., chairman of the newly formed federal Election Assistance Commission, praising computer scientists for calling attention to security problems with e-voting machines and for helping develop new standards for building machines that might be more secure in the future.
CRA’s affiliate organization the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has been very successful through it’s U.S. Public Policy Committee (USACM) in making its membership aware of the controversy surrounding e-voting. They’ve got a good page detailing the issue and their activities, with good links to other resources.
On August 23, 2004, In Policy, By Peter Harsha
On August 23, 2004, In People, By Peter Harsha
CNet has this story on new employment figures released by the Department of Labor that shows a drop in the rate of unemployment for “computer and mathematical occupations” and “electrical and electronic engineers.” But the change might not be because of the most favorable reasons:
The unemployment rate for computer and mathematical occupations–a category that includes computer programmers, computer software engineers and computer scientists and systems analysts–fell from 5.7 percent in the first half of 2003 to 5 percent in the first half of this year, according to the Labor Department. Unemployment dropped even more dramatically for electrical and electronic engineers–from 6.7 percent in the first half of 2003 to 3.1 percent in the first half of 2004.
But unemployment levels alone don’t tell the whole story for workers still recovering from the dot-com bust. For example, the average number of people employed in computer and math jobs dropped by 72,000 from the first half of 2003 to the first half of this year, to 3,038,000. A similar trend occurred among electrical and electronic engineers over the same period. Their average employment fell by 39,000, to 339,000.
In other words, if employment and the jobless rate are both dropping, it may not mean better times in these tech-related fields. It may just mean that unemployed tech workers are giving up fruitless job searches.
It’s again worth pointing out the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics continues to project growth in IT fields through 2012 will outstrip all other science and engineering occupations.
On August 23, 2004, In Policy, By Peter Harsha
An update to a story we mentioned way back in January, the Army’s inspector general found that an Army data-mining project using data offered by JetBlue and a private data broker didn’t violate federal privacy rules. This may say more about the need to update federal privacy rules than it does about the privacy implications of the project.
Wired News has the story.
From the CCC Blog
- NSF Searching for Assistant Director for CISE Ran Libeskind-Hadas
- MIT’s Subra Suresh reportedly to be nominated as new Director of NSF Ran Libeskind-Hadas
- Eric Brewer wins ACM – Infosys Foundation Award Ed Lazowska
- Chuck Thacker wins Turing Award Ed Lazowska