From analyzing the contours of the ocean floor to protecting our financial systems from hackers, software is a vital part of the global economy. The men and women who understand the science of computers — computer scientists — will be critical to every industry for the foreseeable future. The career of computer scientist is crosscutting. Computer scientists can work across any of the in-demand fields, from biology to space science.

The general public sometimes confuses computer science with vocational areas that deal with computers (such as information technology), or think that it relates to their own experience of computers, which typically involves activities such as gaming, web-browsing, and word-processing. However, the focus of computer science is more on understanding the properties of the programs used to implement software such as games and web-browsers, and using that understanding to create new programs or improve existing ones.

Computer science deals with the theoretical foundations of information and computation, and of practical techniques for their implementation and application. Computer science has many sub-fields; some, such as computer graphics, emphasize the computation of specific results, while others, such as computational complexity theory, study the properties of computational problems. Still others focus on the challenges in implementing computations. For example, programming language theory studies approaches to describing computations, while computer programming applies specific programming languages to solve specific computational problems, and human-computer interaction focuses on the challenges in making computers and computations useful, usable, and universally accessible to people.

While some computer scientists work for universities, pushing the theoretical boundaries of the science, others become Master Coders. Master Coders write software code with grace and beauty, mastering languages no less elegant than Chinese or Russian. They rule a world that is beyond the imagination of most. Their code and algorithms power all of the hardware that we touch: cars, smartphones and computers. It is their code that brings the greatest animated movies to life and makes our video games seem so real. Even floating digital clouds are brought to life by elegant algorithms.

When I was in high school, we had two choices if we wanted to study a “foreign” language: French and Spanish. Today, there is a new set of languages that should be studied by all students. “Students need to study programming languages to be literate in our increasingly technological society” commented Roderick Weldon Woodruff, Executive Director of the Urban Video Game Academy. Certainly not all students will become Master Coders, but some will be inspired at an early age and go on to push the boundaries of the science, protect us from hackers, and design the software that communicates with life across galaxies. It is a good idea to get your son or daughter involved in a digital arts, video game or computer-oriented summer camp at an early age.

If it isn’t obvious, I am humbled by what Master Coders can do. This article was inspired by a few Master Coders, who I am fortunate to count as friends: Alan Zander of TomoTherapy and Bill T. Becker of SiTEL. In the months to come, I will be interviewing each of them as they are role models for future generations of Master Coders.

If you want to get a glimpse into how they think, there is a great book that was published a few years ago by O’Reilly Media. Beautiful Code answers the question, “How do Master Coders solve difficult problems in software development?” In this unique and insightful book, leading computer scientists offer case studies that reveal how they found unusual, carefully designed solutions to high-profile projects. You will be able to look over the shoulder of major coding and design experts as they work through their project’s architecture, the tradeoffs made in its construction, and when it was important to break rules.

Written by Todd Borghesani

While the human activity of “social networking” has existed since of the dawn of humankind. Today’s students are leveraging social media technologies like no generation before them. This acceptance of social networks, as an essential part of one’s life, offers new collaborative opportunities.

Separating the Signal from the Noise

Unlike today’s monolithic social networks and their incumbent chatter, Career Learning Networks have a body of knowledge — detailed career information — that acts as the centerpiece of conversation. They focus dialogue between students, peers, parents and industry professionals. These networks are purpose-built and go well beyond “social,” offering collective insight into very specific areas. The are designed to be person-centric.

This is Still Social Networking 1.0

As the phenomena of social networking continues to grow, traditional educational establishments are embracing their power. The National School Boards Association encourages educators to take advantage of online social networks because students view them so much and because the sites can benefit student-teacher relationships and increase interest in extracurricular activities.

At a music club in a Missouri school, meeting and event attendance increased by 50 to 60 percent after the club created a Facebook profile. Students preferred going there for notifications rather than checking their school e-mail address, which was seen as uncool.

One teacher who uses Facebook to bridge the communication gap between herself and her students said the relationships with some of her students have expanded in ways that never would have happened had their contact been limited to just the classroom. “The students can see from my interests on my profile that I like Eastern philosophy. One of them listed that as an interest too, so we shared thoughts on a topic that would otherwise never have entered our dialog,” wrote Alyssa Giese in a 2007 Teacher Magazine article.

Ethical Considerations of Social Networking

Students also appreciate the informal setting of online communication. One admitted he never would have contributed to class discussions, but the anonymity of online communication emboldened him to participate. That, in turn, changed his teacher’s perception of his discussion abilities.

While the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, private social networks, such as Career Networks, have a narrow focus, are invite only and offer students, parents and teachers behavioral boundaries. Career Networks are places where students can live and grow as professionals. Rather than imposing on everyone’s right to free speech, it’s better to mark boundaries for expression that everyone accepts. Educating parents and students together on the educational benefits of social networking sites can create a better understanding between them as they explore online communication in a more safe and responsible manner.

Written by Todd Borghesani

Related articles

Meteoric Growth in Social Networking – “It’s a Small World after All,” or Is It? (windmillnetworking.com)
Who Uses Social Networks and What Are They Like? (Part 1) (readwriteweb.com)
The importance of business social networking (socialpress.co.za)

He didn’t need one. Now he’s the company’s game director. Howard oversaw the creation of Fallout 3, a popular coming-of-age video game. As he demonstrates the game to a visitor on his Xbox 360, his avatar, a 10-year-old boy, is treated to a birthday party.

“For our company, there are certain areas where we are hiring very aggressively because we are growing rapidly,” Howard says. The recession forced some game studios to close or make sizable layoffs. But ZeniMax nearly doubled in size during the past year, growing from about 250 employees to more than 400, in part owing to its acquisition of iD Software. Finding a job in the video game industry is a dream come true for many people who grew up playing games on computers and consoles. And the field is swiftly expanding as people turn to mobile devices like the iPhone and social networking sites like Facebook for entertainment.

Emerging From Adolescence

Analysts and developers point to a common thread: The entire video game universe is maturing.”I’d say game industries are sort of coming out of their adolescence,” says Drew Davidson, the director of the entertainment technology center at Carnegie Mellon University. “They’re in their late teens and so there’s still a lot of growing to do.” Game Developer Research says there are about 45,000 total employees in the U.S. video game industry, with an average salary of close to $80,000. Salaries can reach into the six figures, and programmers are among the highest-paid. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that employment for computer software engineers, some of whom develop video games, will grow by nearly a third in the next decade.

Video Gaming Degrees

Davidson says colleges around the country are tuned in. “We’re seeing a huge upswing in terms of universities trying to offer degrees that focus around games or interactive media … just because they’re so popular.” More than 200 institutions from MIT to DigiPen Institute of Technology are offering courses or degrees in video games, according to the Entertainment Software Association, a trade group for the video game industry.

“The U.S. is the No. 1 video game market in the world,” says Michael Gallagher, the chief executive officer for the ESA. “So, here at home we have a very strong market for employment in video games.” The hubs for the industry include Austin, Texas; Boston; Los Angeles; San Francisco; Seattle; North Carolina; and the Washington, D.C., metro area.

The job market is growing because of mainstream demand. Just look around — you can see people of all ages playing games on mobile phones. Social networking games are also wildly popular on Facebook. Some of the companies focused on this niche include Playdom, Playfish and Zynga, which created the popular game Farmville. Broadband access and new digital distribution channels for games have also made it possible for small teams to develop games by working out of a coffee shop or someone’s garage, Davidson says.

A Casual Culture

Howard, of Bethesda Softworks, says people also want jobs in the video game industry because a day at the office is casual — not corporate. “Sometimes I equate it to an organized fraternity,” Howard says. “We play games at lunch, we have a giant movie theater in the building, we have a pool table, [and] we have multiple video game setups.”

They also have their own chef. So, employees effectively live at the office. It’s an industry that values creative collaborations among artists, designers and programmers. The majority of jobs are full time with benefits, and it’s a fluid career with people moving across the country, or the world, to take on new projects. But recruiter Mary-Margaret Walker says these patterns may change. “I think we will see more consulting and more contracting and more virtual working,” Walker says.

That means video game development teams may no longer work and play in the same physical space. At the Bethesda Softworks headquarters, Howard works near his team of nearly 100 developers. With an Xbox 360 controller in his hands, he says, “The greatest feeling in the world is making a game and then going to the store and seeing somebody buy it. It’s very special.”

The journey from start to finish for a big console game can easily take about three years and cost more than $100 million. These high stakes — and new gaming platforms — are among the reasons smaller, independent companies are taking root to produce games for the future.

Adapted from NPR.org by Todd Borghesani

Unsolved problems in physics: What is dark matter? How is it generated? Is it related to supersymmetry?

Can we use Dark Matter as an Energy Source for Rocket Technology?

Current rocket technology can not send the spaceship very far, because the amount of the chemical fuel it can take is limited. Dark matter (DM) may be used as fuel to solve this problem. A DM engine uses dark matter annihilation products as propulsion. The acceleration is proportional to the velocity, which makes the velocity increase exponentially with time in non-relativistic region. The important points for the acceleration are how dense is the DM density and how large is the saturation region. The parameters of the spaceship may also have great influence on the results. We show that the (sub)halos can accelerate the spaceship to velocity $ 10^{- 5} c \sim 10^{- 3} c$.

3D Model of dark matter, reconstructed from measurements of weak gravitational lensing with the Hubble Space Telescope.

Written by Todd Borghesani

NASA Ames Summer 2010 Graduate Student Internship Programs
 
The Systems Teaching Institute is offering a 10- to 12-week summer research program for graduate students in fields relevant to the research done at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California. Selected students will gain hands-on experience working with cutting-edge research and development teams, an increased understanding of the NASA mission, and mentoring in research management skills. Besides working closely with Ames scientists and engineers, students will have the opportunity to attend seminars tailored to their level of expertise, career development workshops, and an end-of-summer symposium where they can share their results with other student interns. Awards (in the form of travel support to a national conference) will be given for the best symposium poster presentations.

For further information about this opportunity, visit http://uarc.ucsc.edu/sti/grad_10.shtml. Questions regarding this opportunity may be submitted by e-mail to Dr. Natalie Batalha at nbatalha@science.sjsu.edu or Amy Gilbert at amy.gilbert@adm.ucsc.edu.

2010 NASA Planetary Biology Internship
 
The NASA Planetary Biology Internship Program provides opportunities each year for 10 interns to undertake research at NASA research centers, NASA-sponsored laboratories, and academic institutions. The pursuit of such studies is expected to broaden the base of this new science by encouraging people in many different fields to take part. Applicants must be enrolled in graduate school.
 
Students accepted in the PBI program will be expected to carry out research with a NASA-sponsored investigator for eight weeks, usually during the summer months. Typical programs in which interns may become involved include: global ecology and remote sensing; microbial ecology and bio-mineralization; advanced life support; and origin and early evolution of life.
 
Applications are due Feb. 15, 2010. For more information, visit http://www.mbl.edu/education/courses/other_programs/pbi.html . Please e-mail questions about this opportunity to Michael Dolan at pbi@geo.umass.edu.

2010 Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships
 
Caltech’s Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships, or SURF, project introduces undergraduate students to research under the guidance of seasoned mentors at Caltech or the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Students experience the process of research as a creative intellectual activity and gain a more realistic view of the opportunities and demands of a professional research career.

Please e-mail any questions about this opportunity to the Caltech Student-Faculty Programs office at sfp@caltech.edu.

Written by Todd Borghesani

“I am an Earth Race guy. I believe that averting catastrophic climate change is a huge scale issue. The only engine big enough to impact Mother Nature is Father Greed: the Market. Only a market, shaped by regulations and incentives to stimulate massive innovation in clean, emission-free power sources can make a dent in global warming. And no market can do that better than America’s.

Therefore, the goal of Earth Racers is to focus on getting the U.S. Senate to pass an energy bill, with a long-term price on carbon that will really stimulate America to become the world leader in clean-tech. If we lead by example, more people will follow us by emulation than by compulsion of some U.N. treaty.”

The Space Race Took Us to the Moon. Where Could the Earth Race Take Us?

“In the cold war, we had the space race: who could be the first to put a man on the moon. Only two countries competed, and there could be only one winner. Today, we need the Earth Race: who can be the first to invent the most clean technologies so men and women can live safely here on Earth. Maybe the best thing President Obama could have done here in Copenhagen was to make clear that America intends to win that race. All he needed to do in his speech was to look China’s prime minister in the eye and say: “I am going to get our Senate to pass an energy bill with a price on carbon so we can clean your clock in clean-tech. This is my moon shot. Game on.”

Because once we get America racing China, China racing Europe, Europe racing Japan, Japan racing Brazil, we can quickly move down the innovation-manufacturing curve and shrink the cost of electric cars, batteries, solar and wind so these are no longer luxury products for the wealthy nations but commodity items the third world can use and even produce.

If you start the conversation with “climate” you might get half of America to sign up for action. If you start the conversation with giving birth to a “whole new industry” — one that will make us more energy independent, prosperous, secure, innovative, respected and able to out-green China in the next great global industry — you get the country. For good reason: Even if the world never warms another degree, population is projected to rise from 6.7 billion to 9 billion between now and 2050, and more and more of those people will want to live like Americans. In this world, demand for clean power and energy efficient cars and buildings will go through the roof.”

* Imagine the Green Careers.

An Earth Race led by America — built on markets, economic competition, national self-interest and strategic advantage — is a more self-sustaining way to reduce carbon emissions. Let the Earth Race begin.

Ecology/Environment
Urban gardeners, Carbon footprint analysts, Solar panel installers, Wind energy construction, Coastal relocation specialists, Water conservationists

Economy/Employment
Emissions traders, Global impact advisors, Green marketing executives, Green job program creators and trainers, Consumption reduction consultants, Environmental literacy specialists, Hemp producers, Sustainability auditors

Education
Personalized education advisors, Online school employees, Environmental literature professors, Environmental historians

Enlightenment
Storytellers, Sleep therapists, Change therapists, Interfaith leadership roles, Interfaith mediators, Retirement counselors, Play therapists

Equality/Equity
Health care advisors, Peacemakers, Foreign culture specialists, Restorative justice practitioners, Community-builders, Migration counselors, specialists

Written by Todd Borghesani

* Dr. Robert Pavlik, a leader in Sustainable Futures Education at the Marquette University’s Institute for the Transformation of Learning, sent me this list of future green careers.

Urban farming is farming in an urban setting. Why would anyone do such a thing? Simply put, urban farming alleviates many of the problems caused by conventional agriculture. Food produced today is less nutritious, has more chemicals and is genetically altered for shelf life – not taste or nutrition. Would you like some Dichlorodiphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT) in your salad? Neither would we. A distinct advantage of urban farms is that they give you control over a city’s food supply. Urban farms have the freedom to grow heirloom varieties that greatly surpass store-bought produce in both taste and nutrition.

The population of the entire Baltimore-Washington Metroplex as of 2007 is 8,241,912. If each person comsumes an average of two lbs of food per day, and no food is produced within the city, then over 16 million pounds of food must be trucked or flown into our region each and every day. The amount of carbon emissions associated with this are staggering. Billions of tons of carbon emissions are emitted during the production and transportation of food. The average vegetable travels 1,434 miles before reaching our plates. With urban farming, food is produced where it will be consumed, greatly reducing the embodied carbon footprint of vegetable produce.

Russia’s top space researchers will hold a closed-door meeting to plan a mission to deflect 99942 Apophis, an asteroid that will fly close to Earth two decades from now, said Anatoly N. Perminov, the head of Russia’s space agency, during an interview on Russian radio on Wednesday.

Mr. Perminov said Apophis, named for the Egyptian god of destruction, is about three times the size of the Tunguska meteorite, apparently the cause of a 1908 explosion in Siberia that knocked over an estimated 80 million trees. He said that according to his experts’ calculation, there was still time to design a spacecraft that could alter Apophis’s path before it made a dangerous swing toward Earth.

“I don’t remember exactly, but it seems to me it could hit the Earth by 2032,” he said, adding, “We’re talking about people’s lives here. It’s better to spend several million dollars and create this system, which would not allow a collision to happen, than wait for it to happen and kill hundreds of thousands of people.”

In fact, Apophis’s chances of hitting Earth have been downgraded since it was discovered in 2004, NASA said this year. Scientists originally thought the orbit of the 1,000-foot-long asteroid gave it a 2.7 percent chance of hitting Earth on its first approach in 2029, but after studying its path they said it would remain 18,300 miles above the planet’s surface.

Find the original article posted on the NY Times

If you’re gearing up for a job search now as an undergraduate or returning student, there are several bright spots where new jobs and promising career paths are expected to emerge in the next few years.

Technology, health care and education will continue to be hot job sectors, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ outlook for job growth between 2008 and 2018. But those and other fields will yield new opportunities, and even some tried-and-true fields will bring some new jobs that will combine a variety of skill sets.

The degrees employers say they’ll most look for include finance, engineering and computer science, says Andrea Koncz, employment-information manager at the National Association of Colleges and Employers. But to land the jobs that will see some of the most growth, job seekers will need to branch out and pick up secondary skills or combine hard science study with softer skills, career experts say, which many students already are doing. “Students are positioned well for future employment, particularly in specialized fields,” Ms. Koncz says.

Career experts say the key to securing jobs in growing fields will be coupling an in-demand degree with expertise in emerging trends. For example, communications pros will have to master social media and the analytics that come with it; nursing students will have to learn about risk management and electronic records; and techies will need to keep up with the latest in Web marketing, user-experience design and other Web-related skills.

Technology Twists

More than two million new technology-related jobs are expected to be created by 2018, according to the BLS. Jobs that are expected to grow faster than average include computer-network administrators, data-communications analysts and Web developers. Recruiters anticipate that data-loss prevention, information technology, online security and risk management will also show strong growth.

A computer-science degree and a working knowledge of data security are critical to landing these jobs. Common areas of undergraduate study for these fields include some of the usual suspects, such as computer science, information science and management-information systems.

Social Media

But those might not be enough. That’s because not all of those jobs will be purely techie in nature. David Foote, chief executive officer of IT research firm Foote Partners, advises current computer-science students to couple their degrees with studies in marketing, accounting or finance. “Before, people widely believed that all you needed to have were deep, nerdy skills,” Mr. Foote says. “But companies are looking for people with multiple skill sets who can move fluidly with marketing or operations.”

Social media has opened the door to the growth of new kinds of jobs. As companies turn to sites like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook to promote their brands, capture new customers and even post job openings, they will need to hire people skilled in harnessing these tools, Mr. Foote says. In most cases, these duties will be folded into a marketing position, although large companies such as Coca-Cola Co. are creating entire teams devoted exclusively to social media.

Energy Technologies

Not surprisingly, green technology, including solar and wind energy and green construction, are also booming areas. Engineers who can mastermind high-voltage electric grids, for example, will have a great advantage over other job applicants, says Greg Netland, who oversees recruiting for the U.S., Latin America and Canada for Sapphire Technologies, an IT staffing firm in Woburn, Mass. that is a division of Randstad.

“Global sustainability will become more important to employers,” Mr. Netland says. “It cuts costs, making experts in the field highly attractive to employers.”

Jobs in alternative-energy systems, including wind and solar energy, will require a variety of skills: engineers to design systems, consultants who will audit companies’ existing energy needs, and those who will install and maintain the systems.

Hospital Upgrades

Health care is expected to continue to see a surge in hiring, with more than four million new openings estimated by 2018, according to the BLS. Hiring for physical and occupational therapists will likely be strongest. But new specialties are popping up, particularly in case management, says Brad Ellis, a partner with Kaye Bassman International, an executive-search firm based in Plano, Texas.

Case managers do everything from managing the flow of information between practitioner and insurance company to mitigating risk to the hospital. “If you’re a licensed nurse, for example, getting a certificate in risk management from the state board of health would make you extremely competitive,” Mr. Ellis says.

Harris Miller, president of the Career College Association in Washington, D.C., says IT will be increasingly important in the quest to drive down health-care costs, too. Students specializing in nursing informatics, which combines general nursing with computer and information sciences, at the master’s degree level will swap a clipboard for a smart phone to manage patient data. Schools like Vanderbilt University are offering nursing informatics degrees via distance learning, and certification is offered through American Nurses Credentialing Center, based in Silver Springs, Md.

The strong push toward making medical records and information more accessible through computerized record-keeping means opportunity, Mr. Miller says. “This is going to require people who are skilled in the hardware and software of nursing informatics.”

They are already aware of the extraordinary problems of 21st century: feeding a growing population with a limited amount of arable land; the green revolution and alternative energy, managing the impacts of global warming and greater energy demands; and the spread of health threats that respect no national borders.

Today’s students have not just changed incrementally from those of the past, nor simply changed their slang, clothes, body adornments, or styles, as has happened between generations previously. A really big discontinuity has taken place. It is the arrival and rapid dissemination of digital technology in the last decades of the 20th century. 

They have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, video games, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age. Today’s average college grads have spent less than 5,000 hours of their lives reading, Playing video games (not to mention 20,000 hours watching TV). Computer games, email, the Internet, cell phones and instant messaging are integral parts of their lives.

The gamer generation will dominate the workforce and they are already changing the rules of business. All the hours immersed in game culture have created masses of employees with unique attributes: bold but measured risk taking, amazing ability to multitask, and unexpected leadership skills: 21st century skills that employers want. 

The Gamer Generation innately understands the nature of online life.

The philosopher Gilles Deleuze is a spring chicken in the history of philosophy, living and working from 1925 to 1995. Yet his influence has surged in the last 20 years, vying today with the most prominent philosophers of the 20th and 21st centuries. He established a different definition of “virtual” that speaks to games and online experience in particular.

The virtual is opposed not to the real but to the actual. The virtual is fully real in so far as it is virtual.

Exactly what Proust said of states of resonance must be said of the virtual: “Real without being actual, ideal without being abstract”; and symbolic without being fictional. Indeed, the virtual must be defined as strictly a part of the object – as though the object had one part of itself in the virtual into which it plunged as though into an objective dimension.” – Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

Deleuze opposed essentialism, that is, the notion that existences, such as human beings, could be distilled into a single common identity. Instead, he saw existence in terms of multiplicity in all its forms – that, for instance, we as human beings are not single selves but multiple selves spread out in time, that life itself exists in a continuum and state of alchemical flow and information exchange.

What we think of as “virtual” is in fact very real and important, accessed on a parallel dimension rife with meaning.

He lifts the virtual up above the “actual,” or the material manifestation of what we observe in metaspace. Deleuze’s virtual is neither intrinsically inferior nor superior to the material, but it is on an incomparably different plane of existence. This is a concept that would resonate with many World of Warcraft players. When we explore worlds online and connect with other players across vast physical distances, we do not become less real. Arguably, for those who have experienced this life, we feel more real – our physical masks pulled down, revealing the structure of ideas, passions and contemplations beneath.

Next time you start to castigate your son or daughter for spending so much time friending on Facebook, playing games, and socializing in Second Life, think about their play as pioneering work.

Excerpted, in part, from Erin Hoffman’s feature article, “Ditching The V-Word,” in Escapist.