We Must Do More to Encourage Girls to Pursue Science Careers

San Jose Mercury News (CA) (08/19/08) Cheng, Josephine

Despite recent studies showing that girls are doing as well as boys in math from grades two through 11, more must be done to encourage girls to pursue science and technology fields as a career, writes Josephine Cheng, IBM Fellow and lab director at the IBM Almaden Research Center. Although outnumbered, women have made significant contributions to computer science. For example, Grace Murray Hopper invented the first computer compiler in 1952. In 1991, Hopper became the first woman to receive the National Medal of Technology.

One reason why more young women are not pursuing science and technology careers may be that many people still believe that girls are not as good at math and science as boys, despite evidence to the contrary. Many companies, schools, and industry role models are working to change this perception. IBM, for example, hosts a science and technology summer camp for girls. A recent camp at IBM's Almaden Research Center and Silicon Valley Lab was geared specifically toward middle-school-aged girls. Another effort, Nerd Girls, a club founded by women engineering students at Tuft's University, is working to dispel negative stereotypes about girls and technology with the intention of showing that young women can be athletic, fun, and outgoing while being extremely intelligent in science and math.

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Comprehensive Study Shows IPv6 Shift Isn't Happening

When just under 1,200 people attending a meeting can produce the largest spike in IPv6 traffic in the last year, you know that something is wrong.

Arbor Networks measured IPv6 traffic across nearly 2,400 backbone and peering routers, across 87 ISPs scattered worldwide, at five-minute intervals for June 2007 through June 2008. The resulting data was used to produce what the company considers to be the most comprehensive study of IPv6 data to date.

And the news is quite grim.

According to Arbor, the amount of inter-domain IPv6 traffic measured over the entire year was just 0.0026 percent of overall IPv4 traffic. Two spikes were also measured, between Nov. 4 and Christmas 2007, pushing the peak percentage to 0.012 percent. Put another way, about 600 Mbits/s of IPv6 traffic was recorded, versus 4 terabytes per second of IPv4 traffic. In total, Arbor tracked 15 exabytes of traffic; the sum of all human knowledge is generally considered to be 4 exabytes, Arbor executives said.

Overall, the proportion of IPv4 traffic to IPv6 traffic remained relatively constant over the life of the study.

Read more here...Comprehensive Study Shows IPv6 Shift Isn't Happening

 

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Macs Are PCs, Dammit!

Macs Are PCs, Dammit! - Lance Ulanoff has an very good rant here.
Because it seems as if people ignore what PC means - personal computer.
So  - is a Mac not a personal computer? Does it not have the same bits and pieces (keyboard, mouse, CPU, screen, disk drive) , and do the same functions (email websurfing, program running, photos, video, etc )? It even has the same processor manufacturer (Intel)!
So why is a computer that runs Windows a PC and a computer that runs OSX not a PC? what about Linux OS computers that do the same functions? Are they yet another term?

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