> I thought you wanted to go to New York and start working on Gary's project > I am still waiting your response to my email pointing out flaws that needed > to be addressed before these moves/activities could start! Sorry - I have been working on drafting a response with current status, suggestions, etc but things keep cropping up for me to deal with. First I had to do the NSTA conference, which took virtually a whole week. Then when I got back there were some fires to put out. Ade is moving and reconfiguring the Infomall Web server and I was helping him a bit with this, plus spent a whole day figuring out why a lot of the CGI scripts on the Infomall server suddenly stopped working, which elicited a number of cries for help. Also the SCCS Mac -> Web download stopped working which also garnered a number of complaints from people who needed their papers up on the Web ASAP. These are now fixed. There were also various emails today demanding immediate response, including one for attendance of the CRPC annual meeting. I would like to attend (I have never been to one). Do you want me to give a demo of NHSE Roadmap? I notice there are slots for demos as well as talks. > Has Gary delayed his work? I have had a couple more discussions with him and Denny about what he wants done, and did a couple of small things for him that he requested for important demos he was giving (for New York State Dept of Education and some venture capitalists, including a billion-dollar Japanese educational company). But the main deadline he has for NYS Dept of Ed and Goals 2000 schools has been delayed until end of May, so it wasn't necessary for me to spend much time on this after all. However he asked me if I could have some things done by the end of this month so he has time to give feedback and make changes in order to have good working products by end of May. I should be able to do this and keep him happy with a fairly low level of effort in the next few weeks, so I can concentrate on NHSE, and then perhaps spend a bit more time on CSN stuff after the CRPC meeting. > How was Conference? Not too good, really. I had to make travel arrangements at the last minute, and since this is a huge conference (around 15,000 attendees, I was told), there were no hotel rooms available in St Louis. I ended up getting a room in a town 30 miles away, and it took me over an hour to get to and from the conference each day. We only had dialup Internet access over a modem from a Mac, so we couldn't demo any VOD or Java applets like Visible Human. I spent the first day (and evening) there helping set up the booth, setting up the computer and dialup access, making a page of demos that could be run over a dialup connection, and then caching as many pages as I could for good measure. I was the only technical person there - others were Theresa Chatman plus a couple of secretaries and a teacher (who didn't seem to know too much about computers). I was rather surprised that apart from the educational Web stuff I was demoing, the booth seemed virtually the same as the one used for Supercomputing. This struck me as rather odd, since the target audience for the two conferences is completely different. So thousands of teachers streamed by and saw a large backdrop saying "Center for Research on Parallel Computation - Making Parallel Computing Truly Usable", and 99% of them kept right on walking because they didn't even know what parallel computing is, let alone how it might affect their science teaching. There were also some videos running - NPAC's education one plus the (very long) one with Chuck Koelbel juggling (I only saw one person look at that video for more than about 10 seconds, and he was watching for quite a while, then came up to talk to me - I thought he must be really interested in paralel computing, but it turned out he was interested in juggling!). A few people stopped to chat because they have programs with places like NCSA or San Diego Supercomputer Center (some kids will program the supercomputers or something like that) so they had some idea of what we were about. Once guy was very interesting - he was trying to teach his kids the concepts of combined problem solving using parallel computing types of approaches. He gave an example of a problem he assigns to a group of students, where he takes one card out of a deck of cards, and asks them to come up with a strategy for finding what the missing card is, and to see whether the group can combine to solve the problem faster than a single individual. A few more people stopped to chat about the Web demos. Most of them said things like "our school is getting connected to the Internet soon" or "we've just gotten connected to the Internet but I haven't really used it much yet". But a lot of these people were really excited about it, and liked the demos, even though most of them didn't know too much about it. A number of people stopped by just to find out about us and gather up all the info to take home - these were mostly more senior people who were head of science departments etc, or who were just on a mission to gather as much stuff as possible to take back to their school. I suspect we would have attracted a lot more attention if we had had a booth setup that was more targeted at education, and at a level that high-school teachers could relate to, e.g. having some relevant posters about the various projects (Living Schoolbook, GirlTech, etc) and a banner that said something like `Applying high-speed computers and networks to education', or something about the Internet or the Information Highway or the K-12 Classroom of the Future or similar kinds of buzzwords, rather than `Making Parallel Computing Truly Usable' and some pictures of Hilary Clinton and people standing around supercomputers, which is great for a Supercomputing conference but not very relevant for K-12 science teachers. > How is > 1)NHSE planning > 2)CPS713 foils > 3)Su Paper > etc! These got delayed due to NSTA conference, Web problems etc, but I have made some progress. I am reviewing and editing student contributions to NHSE Roadmap and should have this new material online fairly soon. Mark and I discussed NHSE Review with Lowell and Shirley. They want to get first issue out before the end of April and thus wanted contributions by mid-April. I told them I was doubful I could get my random numbers review finished by then, but they said Jack Dongarra has written a supercomputer review which he wanted to use in the first issue (along with Mark's cluster computing review), so my paper could be used in the second issue in July. So I said that was fine with me, and means I can concentrate on improving the Roadmap in time for the CRPC Annual Review, then have plenty of time to get the review done by July. I made a start on final edits for Saleh's paper, which I hope to have pretty much finished by end of next week. Su still hasn't given me the latest version of his paper, although he says he has made some improvements and has fixed most of the figures. He faxed me a draft of a new proof of the complexity of his algorithm (which is the main problem still to be fixed) but I don't understand some of it and the bits I do understand still seem wrong to me. I will write a response and email it to him sometime this week. I'm afraid I haven't gotten CPS713 done yet - I was thinking of devoting the weekend to trying to finish that. > Ps agree NHSE badly staffed -- who should we redirect? Hard for me to say, since I'm not sure who has the time available to contribute to this, but I guess everyone has a full (or overflowing) plate so it's a matter of adjusting priorities of what they are doing. In the short term (i.e. before CRPC meeting) Hon may be the best person to work on this, since he has done some work on it before and knows about what we are doing, and also could work on helping better integrate the HPFA stuff, since he is working on HPFA. I will also get more help from the students. Longer term I think Mark would be the best person to work on it, and he seems quite keen to do so. Hon could perhaps also help out long term, but perhaps just with a small percentage of his time.