Reed's Ruminations: A Blog by Dan Reed

PCAST (President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology)

The President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) is charged by executive order to conduct a review of the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) program, with PCAST serving in this role as the President's IT Advisory Committee (PITAC).

Twitter and Tweets

I've been playing with Twitter over the weekend. Twitter, for those who don't know, can be viewed as SMS meets blogging (i.e., microposts on current or daily activities). The Sunday New York Times had an article on Twitter and Twittervision, a Google maps mashup with Twitter that shows near real-time Twitter posts around the world.

HPC: Competitive Advantage

The Council on Competitiveness is a consortium of industry and academic leaders focused on continuing to secure the competitive economic position of the United States. As part of these activities, the Council coordinates a high-performance computing (HPC) initiative; I am a member of the initiative's advisory committee. The Council has sponsored HPC surveys on users and software, and it and released a video (targeting a non-technical audience) on the economic benefits of HPC.

Drowning in Data

Once upon a time, a megabyte was huge. One of my prized photographs (now digitized) shows me standing by a single platter from the head per track disk system for ILLIAC IV, once the world’s fastest computer. The platter and parts of ILLIAC IV are now in the Computer History Museum. Things change quickly.

CRA Columns

I write a quarterly column for the Computing Research Association (CRA)'s newsletter, Computing Research News (CRN). This column muses on computing research, education, federal research funding and a variety of other issues that catch my fancy. I hope some of these are of broader interest.

• Why We Go to the Woods (March 2007)
• Random Ramblings (January 2007)
• A Clarion Call within the Cacophony (November 2006)
• Education: Research by Another Name (September 2006)
• Research: On Being the Right Size (May 2006)
• The Future of American Innovation: The Gathering Storm (March 2006)
• Computing Education and Careers: Perceptions, Myth, and Reality (November 2005)
• Computing: Our Role in the 21st Century Universities and the Knowledge Economy (September 2005)