Election Integrity Organizations, Leaders Urge States to
Plan for Emergency Paper Ballots, Procedures for November Election
U.S Newswire (10/13/06)
Letters were sent out on Friday to all 50 governors, secretaries of state,
and directors of elections, asking that they provide emergency paper
ballots for the upcoming general election and for these to count as
regular, not provisional, ballots. Over 50 election integrity groups and
individuals including Robert F. Kenney Jr., Sen. John Kerry, Rep. Rush
Holt, Leon County, Florida election supervisor Ion Sancho, and computer
scientist Doug Jones signed the letter. The call for paper ballots is a
response to the primaries when many electronic voting machines, which will
be used by 80 percent of voters in the upcoming election, malfunctioned and
voters were given provisional ballots that may not have been counted or
even sent home. Brad Friedman, investigative journalist and co-founder of
velvetrevolution.us says, "No legally registered voter should ever be sent
away from the polls without being able to cast their vote. With these new
electronic voting machines failing across the country, it's just common
sense to make sure there are back-up plans and procedures in place."
Congress recently failed to pass a bill that would have reimbursed states
for the cost of emergency paper ballots. Maryland Republican Gov. Robert
Erlich has called for statewide paper ballots after the problems during the
primaries.
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How to Say 'Don't Shoot' in Iraq
InternetNews.com (10/13/06) Hickins, Michael
IBM has developed a translation system that allows U.S. forces to speak
directly to Iraqis in plain, conversational language. The system, dubbed
the Multilingual Automatic Speech-to-Speech Translator (MASTOR), will be
loaded onto laptops and consists of two microphones. Users speak into one
of the microphones to have their voice translated by the computer using
algorithms that take into account pitch, dialect, and health or emotional
status, and then said aloud in the language of the other person they are
speaking with. MASTOR also creates a textual account of conversations.
Previous speech-to-speech technology required the use of set phrases, but
MASTOR is able to process any speech and figure out what is meant and
convey the meaning. "This is not a weapon. The world has been divided and
had so much conflict, and so much of that has been because of language
barriers," says Yuqing Gao, manager of the speech recognition and
understanding research group at IBM Research. MASTOR is able to translate
a vocabulary of over 50,000 English words and 100,000 Iraqi Arabic words.
MASTOR is part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA)
Spoken Language Communication and Translation System for Tactical Use
(TRANSTAC). The technology is a response to the limited supply of
military linguists, and is available in English to Modern Standard Arabic,
and English to Mandarin Chinese.
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Safe Internet Requires Total Network Security, Prof.
Says
Wisconsin Technology Network (10/11/06) Plas, Joe Vanden
As Internet security threats change from being recognition-driven to being
profit-driven, entire networks must be secured. Those writing malicious
code are becoming increasingly motivated and innovative. "It is very clear
now that there are people who are making a lot of money by malicious
activity, that organized crime is getting involved in malicious activity,
and this represents a very, very serious development from the standpoint
that it also means that the bad guys are getting much more organized and
focused in their activities," says Paul Barford, assistant professor in the
University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Computer Sciences and the
school's Advance Internet Laboratory. With hacking software becoming
increasingly easier to use for less-than-professionals, businesses must
change their approach to security. Simply using firewalls and security
software is no longer enough, even with such products becoming more
automated and easier to use. What is needed to combat the rising threat is
a combination of security that is present at all levels, placing barrier
after barrier in the way of potential hackers, says security architect Mark
Hartmann. "It's security in depth. Every device has its own role to play
in security, from a laptop, to the network, to your firewall, to your
applications," Hartmann says. At the Advanced Internet Laboratory, Barford
leads a research team working on various projects that could lead to an
improved Internet that can defend itself against attacks. The group's
DOMINO project is focused on intrusion detection and monitoring, while the
Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) project is tracking
malicious activity. Barford says that "right now we have a significant
lack of deployment of security in networks, and as we move forward with
deploying the latest technology in networks, the wholistic approach to
security is something that's really going to solve a lot of problems."
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SC06 Announces HPC Analytics Challenge Finalists
Business Wire (10/10/06)
This year's HPC Analytics Challenge has been whittled down to three
finalists to demonstrate cutting-edge data analysis techniques that can be
used to solve difficult, real-world problems. Researchers from Carnegie
Mellon University, the University of California, Davis, the University of
Texas at Austin, and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center will show a
1,024-processsor simulation of an earthquake in real time and on the fly
from a remote laptop computer. A team from Osaka University, Japan's
National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Osaka
University Dental Hospital, and the National Center for Microscopy and
Imaging Research at the University of California, San Diego, will present
an E-science infrastructure that can be used to gather speech sound from
computer speech simulations. And researchers from the Pacific Northwest
National Laboratory will show an end-to-end solution for turning biological
data into knowledge for applications in minutes. The SC06 Analytics
Challenge will take place Tuesday, Nov. 14, during the SC2006 international
conference. ACM and IEEE are sponsoring the supercomputer conference,
which is scheduled for Nov. 11-17, 2006, in Tampa. "The response to this
year's challenge has been fantastic, with interest from all over the globe,
and in eight distinct areas of technology," says Paul Fussell, co-chair of
the SC06 Analytics Challenge. "The diversity and quality of the finalist
submissions reflects what we have seen throughout the Challenge: every
entry was noteworthy." For more information about SC06, or to register,
visit
http://www.sc-conference.org/
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Geek Speak Birdles Information Security
Computerworld Australia (10/12/06) Gedda, Rodney
At this year's Australian Unix Users Group (AUUG) conference in Melbourne
on Wednesday, software developers discussed the negative effects that a
lack of usability has on cybersecurity. "A lot of the security stuff is
designed by crypto geeks [and] because of a lack of usability, people can't
apply them correctly," said University of Auckland computer scientist Peter
Gutmann. Gutmann notes that a good deal of security standards were
composed 10 years ago, without usability in mind, and have only been
tweaked since then. "They would rather have 100 percent perfect software
that's unusable than 99 percent perfect software that is usable," said
Gutmann. Open BSD developer Ryan McBride spoke out against intrusion
detection systems, saying the technique has no ability of detecting whether
a virus is attacking or not. "I do IDS work for a Fortune 50 company and
it's a case of 'Oh look, another box has a virus--go turn it off'...It's
very hard to automate turning things off in security," McBride says. He
believes the problem must be solved within the software, not IDS. An
enormous amount of the body of modern software is not safe, and people
continue to use it, says Dr. Lawrie Brown, University of NSW School of IT
senior lecturer. She adds that most people see computers as relatively new
and do not understand the necessity of information security measures.
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Managing Knowledge for the New Economy
IST Results (10/12/06)
Two EU research projects have been established to provide access to
critical business information and to help employees and companies with
skill-set management. The APOSDLE project is intended to aid employees by
gathering all of the knowledge capital available in the workplace.
Resources utilized include databases, publications, presentations and
documents, lists of courses available, access to company documents, and the
insight of experienced employees. "APOSDLE will work in the background,
intuiting what information the employee needs and then providing a menu of
resources," says Stefanie Lindstaedt, scientific coordinator for the
APOSDLE project. "A worker might see the name of a colleague who is an
expert in her area of interest. She could record an interview with the
colleague, and the recording itself would become a new resource," she adds.
The system is aware of available resources and alerts employees to those
that are relevant. PROLIX is a skill-set management project that deals
with the problem of fitting structured content to an employee's training
necessities. "Right now most learning issues are dealt with by the HR
department," says Volker Zimmerman, CEO of e-learning company IMC and
coordinator of PROLIX. However, "company-based learning needs to be
imbedded in business needs, so when a company changes its processes or
procedures, the employee-training required to execute the changes develops
in parallel," explains Zimmerman. The order processing department claims
that "the system will deliver the exact skill-set required to execute a
new, optimized business process."
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Speed Is the Name of the Game for Researchers
University of Manchester (10/11/06)
Scientific and engineering researchers at the University of Manchester
will use a prototype of IBM's BladeCentre QS20 system as they pursue
projects involving sophisticated bioinformatics, molecular modeling, and
engineering applications. The powerful hardware will provide researchers
with supercomputer-like performance as they run their programs. The IBM
BladeCentre QS20 system has super-fast Cell Broadband Engine (Cell BE)
processors, which will enable ultra high-speed 3D rendering, compression,
encryption, imaging, and other tasks. IBM, Sony, and Toshiba initially
developed the Cell BE chip for the next round of game consoles, such as
Sony's PlayStation 3, giving it the architecture and communications
capabilities needed to deliver highly visual and immersive graphics in real
time and at great speed. "We are early adopters of the IBM Cell BE system
because it has the potential to give us significantly improved performance,
take up less space, and consume less power," says Terry Hewitt, director of
research computing at Manchester. "High performance computing systems
built from systems based on the Cell Broadband Engine have the potential to
change the economics associated with supercomputing."
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Pixel-Efficient Digital Cameras
Technology Review (10/11/06) Greene, Katie
When a digital camera captures an image, 90 percent of the information
gathered is lost when the image is converted into a JPEG file. Richard
Baraniuk, professor of electrical engineering at Rice University, sees the
process as wasteful, and an unnecessary strain that decreases a camera's
lifespan. Along with his colleagues at Rice, Baraniuk is developing a
camera that collects just enough information to recreate the image. The
prototype the team developed uses micromirror technology, developed by
Texas Instruments and used in HD projection TVs, that directs a small
amount of information onto the camera's single sensor. Algorithms then
recreate the image. Functionally, this is a single-pixel camera, but the
image recreated has 100 times the resolution of what would traditionally be
contained in a single pixel. The technology being explored is known as
"compressive sensing." Hardware developed by Texas Instruments is based on
thousands of micromirrors; when a picture is taken, the mirrors flip back
and forth randomly up to 100,000 times per second, giving the algorithm an
ideal sampling from which to recreate the image. Only a few hundred
samples are needed in order to recreate the image with tens of thousands
or hundreds of thousands of pixels. Currently, the speed at which the
algorithms are executed needs to be increased, as well as the number of
micromirrors and the speed at which they flip. A colleague of Baraniuk's
at Rice, Kevin Kelly, foresees a version of the algorithms created by the
team to appear in commercial cameras. He says, "You might buy a camera
with a 2-megapixel sensor, but [the software] might give you a 20- or
30-megapixel image."
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Robot Car to Tackle City Streets
Stanford Daily (10/11/06) Kanakia, Rahul
The Stanford Racing Team plans to develop a car that is able to navigate a
simulated urban environment for 60 miles in under six hours, with no human
guidance. The robot car must be able to operate just as an experienced
human driver would: recognizing and avoiding pedestrians, bicycles, curbs,
and holes, all while obeying traffic signals and laws. The team is
involved in this technology for the "humanitarian aspect," says David
Stevens, a fifth year Ph.D. candidate in computer science. With 43,000
deaths occurring on the road every day, automatic cars that would be far
less prone to mistakes could save many lives. A robot car would save time
and money in countless ways, specifically, the ability to "drop you off and
go park itself some distance away," or allow several people to share a ride
to work, because the car could take itself between the different locations,
or allow people to get work done on their long drive home, rather than
having their attention devoted to the road, says Stevens. Michael
Montemerlo, senior researcher for Stanford's AI Labs and software leader
for the Racing Team, notes that traffic and other problems could also be
improved. "With communication between vehicles, you could increase
[traffic flow] substantially so you actually get places faster on the
highway. And you can imagine people driving who can't drive today, such as
elderly people who can't see very well. Or even kids. Their parents could
put them in the car and send them where they need to go," says Montemerlo.
Despite the advancements in robot cars, Montemerlo does not think that the
full scope of the technology will be realized in the immediate future, but
he says incremental advances such as anti-lock brakes will ultimately lead
to the point that "one day you'll wake up, and you'll have a car that's
able to drive itself."
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Warning Over 'Broken Up' Internet
BBC News (10/11/06) Waters, Darren
As the Internet grows globally, the possibility of separation into
distinct networks looms. "If I look at the Internet in five years from now
there are going to be very, very, very more Internet users in Asia than
Europe or America," says Nitin Desai, chair of the UN Internet Governance
Forum, an open body that technically has no membership, and thus no
decision making power. "The types of uses for the Internet in India and
China are very different from western countries--they are not commerce or
media; they are essentially public service applications," Desai said,
speaking at a conference this week in London arranged by .uk registry
Nominet. The conference precedes the first-ever Internet Governance Forum,
which takes place later this month in Athens. Concern arises from the fact
that governments will need to be assured the system they use is "secure,
safe, and reliable--that they cannot be suddenly thrown out of that system
by some attack," Desai says. Additionally, many Chinese do not know the
Latin alphabet, which is currently needed to access Web sites. Desai
refers to the potential split-up as "Balkanization" of the Internet, made
up of independent systems, such as a Chinese system using Chinese
characters. Professor Howard Williams, who does work with the World Bank,
points out that discussion of future Internet regulation is based upon the
assumption of a single Internet. He asks, "Why would the technology we
have at the moment be the ubiquitous technology across the world in the
future?" In a related issue, the idea of Net neutrality "raises the
prospect of a different sort of Web," Williams adds. Many have attacked
the Senate's passing of a bill that allows Internet providers to give
preferential treatment, including bandwidth and speed, claiming equal
access is needed.
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So You Want to Have a Career in IT? I Do�
ComputerWeekly.com (10/10/2006) Smith, Margaret
IT careers have now fallen out of favor with students, after a stint in
the 1970s and 1980s when computing opportunities led young people to study
math and science, and in the 1990s when telecoms, e-security, and Web
design became a draw, writes Margaret Smith, former chief executive of CIO
Connect. She says students have a negative perception of the IT industry
today. Smith, who currently advises businesses and the U.K. government on
IT and skills issues, acknowledges that she thought computing was boring
when she was in school. Girls do not want to pursue computer science
studies because they believe computers are for boys and nerds, and they
have no interest in sitting in front of a computer all day. Students say
learning how to build or fix a computer is not necessary, when they learn
in other classes how to use a computer to complete assignments. Meanwhile,
students are aware that tech jobs are being outsourced to India, and they
say job opportunities are limited. The industry needs to do a better job
of showing the public that IT is an exciting field with a range of career
opportunities and also pays well, says Smith.
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'Smart' Table Could Boost Brainstorming
New Scientist (10/09/06) Simonite, Tom
Researchers at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands are
optimistic about the prospects for a "smart" table that could be used to
digitally move, stretch, and animate images. Jean-Bernard Marten, a visual
interaction specialist who heads the project, says designers have taken to
placing an object onto the board, importing its image into the system, and
then manipulating it in early trials. "They especially liked the feeling
of having the images under their hands," says Marten. The Blue Eye table
was the subject of a presentation at the British Computing Society's Human
Computer Interaction Group Conference at Queen Mary, University of London,
in the United Kingdom in September. The system makes use of a glass
surface with a digital camera overhead, and a video display underneath that
consists of a projector and a mirror. After placing an object on the
table, a user presses a button to have the system copy the image to the
screen below, with the software working in the background to distinguish
the image from its surroundings. "You can take objects, put them onto the
board and they are instantly imported into the digital screen," says
researcher Bart Naaijkens, who adds that existing digital images can be
added to the system.
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Sending Secret Messages Over Public Internet Lines Can
Take Place With New Technique
Newswise (10/10/06)
Messages can be sent so faint over existing public fiber-optic networks
such as those operated by Internet service providers that they would be
extremely difficult to detect, or even decode. Princeton University
researchers Evgenii Narimanov and Bernard Wu plan to present the technique
during this week's Optical Society of America annual meeting in Rochester,
N.Y. The researchers' method buries a secret message in the low levels of
noise of real-world fiber-optic networks. The sender translates the
message into an intense, ultrashort pulse of light, and then uses a
commercially available optical CDMA encoder to spread it into a faint
stream of optical data that can hide in the random jitters of the light
waves that transmit information through a network. The recipient uses
information on how the secret message was spread out to decode it, and uses
an optical device to compress it into its original format. The public
signal would be too intense for eavesdroppers to detect the message, even
if they knew it was being sent. "As the method uses optical CDMA
technology, which is still undergoing significant research, I don't think
any government or corporation is implementing this technique yet," says Wu.
They believe consumers could also use the inexpensive method when sending
sensitive information to their bank.
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Can Machines Have a Soul?
The Record (Ontario) (10/06/06) Simone, Rose
Physicists such as Janna Levin at Columbia University in New York continue
to search for a "theory of everything," although 20th-century
mathematicians Kurt Godel and Alan Turing believed there could never be a
set of mathematical equations that explain how all forces and particles in
the universe work. Speaking recently at the Perimeter Institute for
Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, Levin says she is intrigued by the
questions of whether a machine has a soul, whether humans are biological
machines, and whether the universe is a huge quantum computer program.
However, Levin and other physicists realize that nature itself has placed
some limits on knowledge, considering quantum mechanics' "uncertainty
principle" suggests everything about a particle cannot be known at one
time. Moreover, subatomic particles can spin in "up" and "down" directions
at the same time. Building a quantum computer, which would compute in more
than one state at the same time, may allow physicists to come closer to an
answer. Some physicists already believe the universe uses "bits" of
information in such states. Nonetheless, Levin says new knowledge and
discoveries have always resulted from what researchers considered to be the
limits of knowledge in physics.
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Are You Game?
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (10/08/06) David, Brian
Students in Pittsburgh Technical Institute's inaugural video design class
use a program called Unreal Tournament to design battlefields on which they
play a game of capture the flag involving firearms. Now that each student
has finished creating an environment, class time is spent playing, but
professor James Madine likens the class to "putting a pill in an apple and
giving it to a horse. They're having fun and we're teaching computer
science." The programming skills Madine teaches are applicable to fields
such as of architecture, virtual tours, navigational systems that are
visual rather than audio, and countless others. Next semester, Madine
plans to focus on creating and modifying characters. While the world of
professional video game design is as competitive as a professional sport to
break into, Madine's students see it as a hobby that gives them skills
which could be valuable when looking for careers. "This has enhanced the
environmental atmosphere greatly," says Jeff Belsley, computer programming
department chairman. "This makes the principles fun, something you want to
do, and once you learn the concepts, you can use them out in the field."
The biggest challenge for Madine is keeping up with the world of computer
gaming, in which flexibility is a necessity. He says that it would be
impossible to publish a textbook in the field because the two years needed
to get it finished and published would mean it would be obsolete before
being released.
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Making Big Iron Fit the User at NCSA
HPC Wire (10/06/06) Vol. 15, No. 40, Bell, J. William
Tailored allocation management of NCSA's Tungsten cluster computer
fulfills a critical need of the user community's research workflow,
according to NCSA director Thom Dunning. "We planned for this sort of
approach when we installed Tungsten, and the popularity and productivity
among users really showed us that it was the right way to go," he explains.
In a tailored allocation management scheme, specific pieces of the machine
are reserved for specific users for given periods of time through advance
planning. This enables users to complete important computations that must
be performed in a particular timeframe, that require an inordinate amount
of processors, or that otherwise are burdensome to the queuing system. "We
want to be responsive to individual requests while still ensuring success
for a broad range of people and disciplines," notes John Towns with NCSA's
Persistent Infrastructure Directorate. "When we strike that balance, our
users do special things." Around 40 percent of Tungsten is currently
committed to tailored allocations. In one example, tailored allocations
delivered more than sufficient capacity to University of Washington
researcher David Baker and his team, who are refining protein structures by
combining experimental data with bottom-up structure simulation.
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Tackling Highjacking With Technology
CNN.com (10/06/06) Rosenblatt, Dana
A revolutionary in-flight security system called the Security of Aircraft
in the Future European Environment (SAFEE) is being developed that could
not only detect the presence of a terrorist threat, but safely land the
plane in the case of an attempted hijacking. SAFEE uses sensors, cameras,
microphones, and biometric devices to detect the presence of biological and
chemical agents and monitor the behavior of passengers. The system even
has an autopilot function that could lock the controls and take over flying
the plane. Psychologists have found evidence that certain biometric "red
flags" exist, including body language, visible stress, and even odors
released, which can allow someone about to commit a terrorist act to be
identified. "You cannot make a security system based only on technology,
you have to focus on [the behavior of] people," says Omer Laviv of Athena
GS3 Security Implementations. With regard to the recent hijacking of a
Turkish airline by an unarmed man, which ended peacefully, "the SAFEE
system would have alerted the crew to the issue before the hijacker was
able to enter the cockpit," Laviv says. Although SAFEE is scheduled for
completion between 2008 and 2010, developers must still win over passengers
who are not happy with the prospect of being observed to such a degree.
Currently, the system would include a memory bank, similar to a black box,
that would erase all passenger information after the flight landed.
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Nightmare Scenarios
Economist (10/05/06) Vol. 381, No. 8498, P. 14
The American fear of losing high-paying jobs to developing nations such as
China and India may not be as well founded as many believe. Norman
Augustine, a former boss of Lockheed Martin, says that "virtually no one's
job seems safe." However, a large-scale study released by the McKinsey
Global Institute reveals that the number of service job being taken
offshore will probably only rise from 1.5 million in 2003 to 4.1 million in
2008, but, with 4.6 million American beginning new jobs every month, this
figure is not alarming. The institute claims that only 13 percent of the
educated developing world is currently capable of working for a Western
multinational corporation in a high-level job. The reason for this is
cultural, specifically language in China, a country that has twice the
amount of engineers as America, but only 10 percent of which are equipped
to work for a Western company. Weak intellectual property laws that
discourage many corporations from moving operations business to China will
also play a big role in the country's struggle to grow into a service
powerhouse. India has its own difficulties, mostly stemming from poor
government, and an infrastructure that is falling to pieces. A graduate
unemployment rate of 17 percent, at a time when the tech industry is
thriving, displays a lack of quality education. The other chief American
fear is the inability to attract and retain skilled foreign workers.
America remains the world's largest destination for foreign students, with
30 percent of the worldwide supply. The Hong Kong University of Science
and Technology's David Zweig says the conception that a majority of
talented foreign students leave America to work is not true. America's
Universities, which are the global standard, give it a considerable edge in
the battle for talent, and its business environment is far and away
superior, in both availability of venture capital and the ability of
companies to pay for the best employees. Robert Huggins Associates, a UK
economics consulting firm found that all seven of the world's top
"knowledge economies," which take into account patent registrations,
investment in R&D, and the proportion of knowledge workers, are in the
U.S.
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Cobol Coders: Going, Going, Gone?
Computerworld (10/09/06)
Cobol is far from the preferred system of today's programmers and IT
professionals, yet remains an essential part of business programming. A
recent Computerworld survey found that 62 percent of IT managers questioned
say they actively use Cobol; about 75 percent of those say they use it "a
lot," and 58 percent say they're using it to create new programs. However,
36 percent of companies using Cobol said they are "gradually migrating
away" from it, 16 percent said they get rid of it "every chance we get,"
and 25 percent said they would replace it, but find the task too risky or
expensive. The dilemma presented by Cobol is that most of the programmers
familiar with it are of retirement age (the survey shows that 52 percent of
Cobol programmers hired in the past year are between 45 years old and 55
years old), while younger programmers would rather using other languages.
Analysts say possible solutions to lack of Cobol programmers include
outsourcing Cobol work, motivating existing workers to learn and use the
language, and simply hiring the most well-qualified, business-oriented
programmers available, regardless of Cobol experience. Terry Walker,
manager of the application department at the Connecticut Judicial Branch,
points out that training young programmers is no small-task, because Cobol
is not even taught in school, and the experienced programmers don't have
proper training skills. However, Phil Murphy, an analyst at Forrester
Research, claims that hiring young programmers and converting the senior
programmers' role into that of mentor, is a way around the dilemma.
Consultant Mark Washik says that although it can be an inconvenience, Cobol
is going to be here around a while longer.
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