Reed's Ruminations: The Past, Present, and Future
Reflections on science, technology, and computing — leavened by personal experience
Category: Technology
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Consumerization of IT and Research
When a corporate, government or university IT department of the 1970s debated an upgrade to its IBM S/370 mainframes, it is doubtful that the IT director was in any way influenced by the computing experiences or opinions of their teenage children. Today,smartphones, social networks, consumer email, cloud services, community software and tools are blurring the…
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March Madness, The Zone and The Magic
Over the past thirty years, I have asked scientists of varying distinction and age and across cultures and disciplines to explain the rationale for their intellectual passions. After some prodding and embarrassment, most tell a variant of the same story. It’s the shared tale of The Magic. I suspect you know it too.
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Paucity to Plethora: Jevon’s Paradox
Those of us of a certain age (i.e., once able to use a slide rule) remember when the university computer (note the singular) was a scientific and engineering shrine, protected by computer operators and secure doors. We acolytes extended offerings of FORTRAN, ALGOL or COBOL via punched card decks, hoping for the blessings that accrued…
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Computing Invisibility
Like superheroes, successful technologies also become invisible. As technologies mature, market penetration rises, cultural expectations shift and consumer knowledge of the underlying theory and practice generally decline.Today, most computer users know nothing of the halting problem, superscalar pipeline design or object oriented programming. This is success.
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Innovation Via Client Plus Cloud: Microsoft-NSF Partnership
Today, February 4, Microsoft and the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) announced a collaborative project where Microsoft will offer individual researchers and research groups (selected through NSF’s merit review process) free access to advanced client-plus-cloud computing. Our focus is on empowering researchers via intuitive and familiar client tools whose capabilities extend seamlessly in power and…
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Don’t Be A WIMP!
It is time move beyond graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and embrace the brave new world of natural user interfaces (NUIs). As the name suggests, a NUI relies on and exploits the kinds of interactions humans use to interact with their peers, including speech, vision and gesture, as well as mood and social context.