Forum for Academic Software Engineering Volume 4, Number 6, Fri Feb 25 15:59:06 CST 1994 Topics: Re: EW-ED Conference position announcement ComputerWorld Article A------------------------------------------------------- From: Peter Brusilovsky Subject: Re: EW-ED Conference **************************************************** * * * East-West Conference * * on Computer Technologies in Education * * * * EW-ED'94 * * * * September 19-23, 1994 * Crimea, Ukraine * * * * CALL FOR PARTICIPATION * * * * Papers Posters Tutorials Demonstrations * * * **************************************************** ____________________ INVITATION ____________________ The East-West Conference on Computer Technologies in Education (EW-ED'94) is the third in the series of conferences designed to report the best research in the field of Computer Technologies and Education and to provide opportunities for the exchange of information and ideas between Eastern and Western scientists. EW-ED'94 is the successor to EW'92 and ICCTE'93 Conferences which were held in Moscow in April 1992 and in Kiev in September 1993. The Conference is organised by: - Simferopol State University, Simferopol, Crimea, Ukraine - International Training and Research Center UNESCO//IIP at Glushkov Institute for Cybernetics, Kiev, Ukraine - International Center of Scientific and Technical Information (ICSTI), Moscow, Russia The Conference will be held at the Conference Hall in one of the holiday-homes located on the Black Sea Coast, near Yalta. We invite you to participate in the EW-ED'94 conference and submit proposals for papers, panels, tutorials, and demonstration posters. MAJOR TOPICS The conference will address the problems associated with the five main directions: - Educational Hypermedia and Multimedia - Telecommunication and Education - Artificial Intelligence in Education - Cognitive and Environmental Principles of Verbal Communication - Social, Psychological and Cultural Aspects of Computer-Assisted Learning Areas of Interest include but are not limited to: Cognitive Models and Student Modeling Computer-Assisted Language Learning Computer-Assisted Reading and Writing Computer-Assisted Teaching and Learning Programming Computer-Aided Educational Planning and Scheduling Computers for Science Education in Secondary and High School Evaluation of Instructional Computer Systems Expert Systems Application in Education Natural Language Interfaces Teaching and Learning Business Communication Theories of Teaching and Computer Technologies SUBMISSION: Authors intending to present full papers should submit an EXTENDED abstract of up to 2000 words (of text only). Those intending to submit tutorial proposals, posters, or demonstrations should submit an abstract of up to 750 words. An abstract should include the title of the submission, type (tutorial, paper, poster, or demonstration), names and addresses of the authors e-mail of the author who is responsible for all correspondence, and a list of keywords. Please, indicate clearly one or two of five main conference directions on your submission and list all related areas of interest from the list above when possible. All abstracts should be prepared in electronic form in ASCII format and sent by e-mail to Peter Brusilovsky (edtech@icsti.msk.su) or (if e-mail is not awailable) on a PC diskette to Helen Ilovayskaya Univ. of Simferopol, Computer Center, Yaltinskaya 4, Simferopol, Crimea, Ukraine, 333036. Authors of accepted papers will be requested to prepare a full version for publication in the conference proceedings. Instructions will be sent concerning the final camera-ready format for their papers. For those who wish to attend the conference without submitting an abstract, please contact the Local Organising Committee as soon as possible. EW-ED'94 CONFERENCE SCHEDULE: Papers and tutorials deadline 1st April 1994 Papers and tutorials acceptance 10th May 1994 Posters and demonstrations deadline 1st May 1994 Posters and demonstrations acceptance 20th May 1994 Camera ready papers 20th June 1994 Registration Early 1st June 1994 Late 20th Aug. 1994 Conference 19th-23rd September 1994 Venue EW-ED'94 will be held in the Crimea, which is one of the most beautiful places in the world. There is a mild climate, azure sea, tasty and very famous wines, many interesting historical and modern places, and other pleasant things. Welcome to the Crimea, to the best region for the rest, the health and the ideas' exchange! To Yalta through Moscow, Kiev and Simferopol. You are welcome to visit Moscow, Kiev or Simferopol before/after the Conference. ICSTI, Moscow and ITRC, Kiev being co-organisers of the Conference provide Russian and Ukrainian visa support, hotel accomodation, arival/departure transportation and special cultural and social programme. In the week right before the EW-ED'94 ICSTI is organizing another related international conference on hypermedia, telemedia and virtual reality for business and education. Queries about other international conferences organized or co-organized by ICSTI in 1994 can be sent to edtech@icsti.msk.su For further information, contact: Simferopol: Dr Svetlana Dikareva Computer Center, Simferopol State University Yaltinskaya, 4, Simferopol Crimea, Ukraine 333036 E-mail: cted94%ccssu.crimea.ua@ussr.eu.net Phone: (0652) 23-23-82 Fax: (0652) 23-23-10 Moscow: Dr Peter Brusilovsky E-mail: plb@plb.icsti.su Kiev: Dr Valery Petrushin E-mail: petr%itslab.kiev.ua@ussr.eu.net A------------------------------------------------------- From: "CHARLES E. CARLSON" <3IJEF26@CMUVM.CSV.CMICH.EDU> Subject: position announcement Central Michigan University's College of Extended Learning is recruiting part time instructors to conduct the following graduate courses: Software Systems Engineering, Computerized Health Care Systems, Computer Information Systems Software Verification and Validation, Software Project Management, Specification of Software Systems, Principles and Appliccaation of Software Design, and Software Generation and Maintence. With over fifty program centers located in seventeen states, CMU enrolls over 10,000 students yearly in programs leading to a Master of Science in Administration with several areas of concentration, including Software Engineering. Courses are offered at night and on weekends in a compressed format. A Masters degree in Computer Science and significant work experience is required and an appropriate PhD is preferred. Faculty are contrracted on a percourse basis at a base rate plus expenses. For further information, call Chuck Carlson at 1-800-950-1144, ext. 3491 or E-Mail: 3IJEF26@CMUVM.CSV.CMICH.EDU A------------------------------------------------------- From: pdejager@uunorth.north.net (Peter de Jager) Subject: ComputerWorld Article [ED: Although it does not address SE Education directly, the submission is a wonderful case study in software design for change!] ============================================================================ ComputerWorld Sept 6th 1993 - In Depth article Doomsday 2000 ------------- by Peter de Jager Have you ever been in a car accident? Time seems to slow down as you realize you're going to crash into the car ahead of you. It's too late to avoid it -- you're going to crash. All you can do now is watch it happen. The information systems community is heading toward an event more devastating than a car crash. We are heading toward the year 2000. We are heading toward a failure of our standard date format: MM/DD/YY. Unfortunately, unlike the car crash, time will not slow down for us. If anything, we're accelerating toward disaster. This is a good news/bad news story. First the bad news: There is very little good news. There is no way to avoid the fact that our information systems are based on a faulty standard that will cost the worldwide computer community billions of dollars in programming effort. Perhaps more importantly, we are going to suffer a credibility crisis. We and our computers were supposed to make life easier; this was our promise. What we have delivered is a catastrophe. The problem is twofold: the date issue itself and, more importantly, our reluctance to address the problem Problem ID: ----------- What exactly is the "problem"? To save storage space -- and perhaps reduce the amount of keystrokes necessary to enter a year -- most IS groups have allocated two digits to the year. For example, "1993" is stored as "93" in our data files, and "2000" will be stored as "00". These two-digit dates exist on millions of data files used as input to milions of applications. This two-digit date affects data manipulation, primarily substractions and comparisons. For instance, I was born in 1955. If I ask the computer to calculate how old I am today, it substracts 55 from 93 and announces that I'm 38. So far so good. But what happens in the year 2000? The computer will subtract 55 from 00 and will state that I am -55 years old. This error will affect any calculation that produces or uses time spans, such as an interest calculation. If you have some data records and want to sort them by date (e.g., 1965, 1905, 1966), the resulting sequence would be 1905, 1965, 1966. However, if you add in a date record such as 2015, the computer, which reads only the last two digits of the date, sees 05, 15, 65, 66 and sorts them incorrectly. These are just two types of calculations that are going to produce garbage. There are others. The task facing us is to identify and correct all the date data and check the integrity of all calculations involving date information. We must correct the data residing in all data files or write code to handle the problem. The starting point: ------------------- How do we identify the problem data and the associated calculations? We have few, if any, standards for labeling data used in date calculations. The only choice we have is to examine each line of code and make the necessary changes. One IS person I know of, performed an internal survey and came up with the following results: of 104 systems, 18 would fail in the year 2000. These 18 mission-critical systems were made up of 8,174 programs and data-entry screens as well as some 3,313 databases. With less than seven years to go, someone is going to be working overtime. By the way, this initial survey required 10 weeks of effort. Ten weeks just to identify the problem areas. How many systems do you have? How many lines of code do you have in your organization? How many data files? How many maintenance programmers? The problem extends beyond mere calculations and into the I/O processes of every application. Can you enter 2000 into your data screen, or can you enter only two digits, forcing the input of 00? Can your hard-copy reports print four digits? The crisis is very real and potentially very costly. Ken Orr, principal at the Ken Orr Institutes, and Larry Martin, President of Data Dimensions, Inc., estimate that Fortune 50 organizations will each have to spend about 35 to 40 cents per line of code to convert all their existing systems to accept the change from the year 1999 to 2000. That translates into about $50 million to $100 million for each company. The mind boggles at a maintenance problem with that price tag. And the costs could be even higher. "The truth is, until we work through a complete cycle with some large organization we are not going to really know," Orr says. I have spoken at association meetings and seminars and when I ask for a show of hands of people addressing the problem, the response is underwhelming. If I get one in 10 respondents, I'm facing an enlightened group. Typically, all I get are snickers and comments such as, "I won't be in this position or this company in the year 2000. It's not my problem." This attitude in the computing community is the real problem. It is very difficult for us to acknowledge that we made a "little" error that will cost companies millions of dollars. It is also a "pay me now or pay me later" situation. "We in the IS industry have not been paying our way," says Gerald Weinberg, author of Quality Software Management and winner of the 1991 J.D. Warnier Prize for Excellence in Information Science. "We have been building up a 'national debt' just as surely as the U.S. has been building up a money debt. It will be paid by our children -- our successors -- one way or another," Weinberg says. We don't have a choice. We must start addressing the problem today or there won't be enough time to solve it. Status quo means applications that will produce meaningless results in the new millennium. Weinberg says he believes this procrastination is an indication of deep management malaise. "If software engineering managers cannot manage a change that they've had 1,000 years to prepare for, how can we expect them to manage a change that happens without notice? In other words, if this change causes a crisis in your organization, everything will cause a crisis in your organization -- and often nothing will cause a crisis." The inability of the industry to even think about such a project is troublesome. "No one wants to step up to the issue -- not [IS] management, not the vendors, not the industry gurus," Orr says. "As with all legacy systems, this problem is messy, expensive and unromantic. No one wants to go in and tell management they have a multimillion-dollar requirement just to keep the business running and that they really have no options." The reason nothing is being done, says Caper Jones, chairman at Software Productivity Research, Inc., is that the software industry isnt't used to taking long-term preventative steps. "I expect that most companies will not start worrying about the problem until 1999," Jones says. "For some, this will be too late." Now the good news: ------------------ There is no good news. Object-oriented systems may be able to help. Faced with the huge maintenance costs of fixing their systems, firms may opt to rewrite systems from scratch using object-oriented programming techniques. Tom Love, IBM vice president of the Object-Oriented Group, is a proponent of this theory. Some companies are unveiling testing and inventory tools that may ease the identification of trouble spots. Others are hoping that bombarding people with information is the best remedy. to that end, William Goodwin in Brooklyn, N.Y., publishes a newsletter entitled "Tick, Tick, Tick," which bings together people in the IS industry concerned about the impact of the year 2000. But is the warning falling on deaf ears? "I feel like a lone voice crying in the wilderness," says Brian Pitts, one of Goodwin's subscribers and project manager at Berry Co. in Dayton, Ohio. "Current economic conditions are making this problem more difficult to address. Management is focused on short-term results and is placing long-term negative consequences on the back burner." The next seven years will be filled with dire predictions. "You are going to become very, very tired of millennium moaners telling you that your software will fail as it enters the new millennium," says Nicholas Zvegintzov, publisher of Software Maintenance News. "But be patient with them. There really is something to be said for them." "Copyright 1994 by CW Publishing, Inc. , 375 Cochituate Road, Framingham, Mass. 01701. Reprinted by permission of Computerworld." Sept 6th 1993 - In Depth article Author: Peter de Jager Speaker on Change & Creativity & Issues relating to Computers Brampton, Ont, Canada Tel: (905) 792-8706 Fax: (905) 792-9818 Internet: pdejager@mail.north.net This article may be reposted on two conditions. 1) The author is notified of the reposting 2) The complete copyright notice is included in the reposting ========================================================================= ------------------------------------------------ / Peter de Jager - Speaker on Change & Creativity \ / pdejager@mail.north.net \ / Tel: (905) 792-8706 Fax: (905) 792-9818 \ ----- To embrace the Future... Let go of the Past ------ E------------------------------------------------------------------- FASE Volume 4 Number 6 Send newsletter articles to fase-submit@d.umn.edu or fase@d.umn.edu Send requests to add, delete, or modify a subscription to fase-request@d.umn.edu Send problem reports, returned mail, or other correspondence about this newsletter to fase-owner@d.umn.edu or kpierce@d.umn.edu Keith Pierce, Editor Laurie Werth, Advisory Committee Department of Computer Science Dept. of Computer Science University of Minnesota, Duluth Taylor Hall 2.124 Duluth, MN 55812-2496 University of Texas at Austin Telephone: (218) 726-7194 Austin, Texas 78712 Fax: (218) 726-6360 Telephone: (512) 471-9535 Email: kpierce@d.umn.edu Fax: (512)471-8885 Email: lwerth@cs.utexas.edu