Estrin warned the audience of software developers and others that there are a number of fundamental problems wrong with the economy and infrastructure that are holding back innovation and the larger economy. And while computers and communications technology have long been the main drivers of growth, that’s changing.

“I believe in the future the key drivers will be different, said Estrin. “Clearly energy and the environment are key areas and also healthcare — that’s different than just medicine but the delivery of those system and how to provide it. And there are other drivers we don’t even know of yet.

“That doesn’t mean the computer industry is dead. But you have to be thinking more about interdisciplinary ways to address these new problems.”

Estrin doesn’t think globabilization is bad for the U.S. economy in theory, but it could be if we don’t start measuring up.

“Closing the innovation gap is not about the U.S. versus other countries, we want the whole world to be innovative. But it’s a disaster if others are innovative and we’re not. You don’t partner well from a position of weakness, but one of strength.”

Rodney Joffe, senior vice president with Neustar, described the ongoing battles with the worm Conficker he has been engaged in through the Conficker Working Group, a public-private consortium of security researchers working to stamp out the fast-mutating worm.

"As a sobering side note on this, last month in collaboration with one of the members of Conficker Working Group from Georgia Tech, we identified at least 300 critical medical devices from a single manufacturer ... that were infected with Conficker," Joffe said.

"The hospitals had no idea. The manufacturer had no idea. When we called them they were honestly shocked."

The infected devices, which are used to read high-density images like MRIs and CT scans in intensive-care units, became infected because they were connected to a local area network.

"They should never have been connected to the Internet," Joffe said.

Worse still, when members of the working group tried to fix the problem, Joffe said they were told they had to wait 90 days to modify the machines due to an arcane FDA rule.

"In some cases clearly there can be a disconnect between government rules, which are meant to protect consumers, and today's cyber threats," he said.

Similarly, noted security researcher Dan Kaminsky warned of potential threats to the energy grid as the industry moves toward remote power meters that communicate with each other through what is essentially a peer-to-peer mesh network.

But the energy industry has been largely removed from the rising tide of threats to networked systems, Kaminsky noted.

"This technology is being done by people who frankly have not had to deal with the last 10 years of attacks," he said.

"On analysis we've seen these meters actually able to be compromised remotely," he added. "The only thing preventing pretty widespread attack is a lack of connectivity."

But connectivity is coming, and with it a host of security scares like the recent Wall Street Journal report describing the exploits of Russian and Chinese hackers who managed to map the critical parts of the nation's energy infrastructure.

Lawmakers in the House and Senate introduced matching legislation last week that would direct the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to take a stronger role in shoring up the defenses of the electrical grid against cyber attacks.

As the World Health Organization raises the swine flu alert level to 5, meaning "pandemic imminent," government officials noted that it means that although the disease is contagious, it is not at pandemic level at this time.

At press time, the CDC's Swine Flu Wiki recorded 109 confirmed cases of swine flu in 11 states with one confirmed death.

Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of Health and Human Services, noted on a CDC webcast that while that number may seem high, it's far lower than the annual toll of regular flu, which is about 36,000 dead and millions infected.

The CDC provides health guidance, but anyone who is concerned about whether they have the flu or wants to know what to do about it should consult a doctor, said Dr. Rich Besser, acting director of the CDC.

The officials urged preparedness. Have a contingency plan in place your school sends you children home. Monitor yourself and stay informed.

Help contain the virus if you or your family members catch it. If your kids are sent home from school, don't send them to the mall or to the movies. If you're sick, don't take an airplane or use public transportation.

A sick individual should self-isolate at home, said Dr. Besser, for at least seven days or for one day after they recover, whichever is longer, and to decrease their contact with others as much as possible.

Don't expect to see border closures or travel restrictions, officials said, because the flu outbreak is already in the United States and therefore cannot be contained that way.

[I]t will also produce a neat page of related information – all properly sourced – such as geographical location and nearby towns, and other mountains, complete with graphs and charts.

The real innovation, however, is in its ability to work things out "on the fly," according to its British inventor, Dr Stephen Wolfram. If you ask it to compare the height of Mount Everest to the length of the Golden Gate Bridge, it will tell you. Or ask what the weather was like in London on the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated, it will cross-check and provide the answer. Ask it about D sharp major, it will play the scale. Type in "10 flips for four heads" and it will guess that you need to know the probability of coin-tossing. If you want to know when the next solar eclipse over Chicago is, or the exact current location of the International Space Station, it can work it out.

Dr Wolfram, an award-winning physicist who is based in America, added that the information is "curated", meaning it is assessed first by experts. This means that the weaknesses of sites such as Wikipedia, where doubts are cast on the information because anyone can contribute, are taken out. It is based on his best-selling Mathematica software, a standard tool for scientists, engineers and academics for crunching complex maths.

There is no reason that one MUST use the Semantic Web stack to build something like Wolfram Alpha. In fact, in my opinion it would be far too difficult to try to explicitly represent everything Wolfram Alpha knows and can compute using OWL ontologies. It is too wide a range of human knowledge and giant OWL ontologies are just too difficult to build and curate.

It would of course at some point be beneficial to integrate with the Semantic Web so that the knowledge in Wolfram Alpha could be accessed, linked with, and reasoned with, by other semantic applications on the Web, and perhaps to make it easier to pull knowledge in from outside as well. In this area, the standards of the Semantic Web could be quite useful to the project. However for the internal knowledge representation and reasoning that takes places in the system, it appears Wolfram has found a pragmatic and efficient representation of his own, and I don't think he needs the Semantic Web at that level. It seems to be doing just fine without it.

What I glean from this is that Wolfram Alpha and the Semantic Web are two different animals that could work together, but don't necessarily need to at the moment. (If someone else has a different interpretation, by all means leave a comment.) It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Yes I'm a user
And I'm not the only one
I'm not a loser
With help from Puffy Tron

Clyburn, the daughter of House Majority Whip James Clyburn, has served on South Carolina's Public Service Commission since 1998. She currently heads the Washington arm of the National Association of Regulatory Commissioners.

The nomination of Clyburn, a Democrat, for commissioner leaves Obama with one Republican spot to fill on the five-person panel.

Obama has already tapped Julius Genachowski to chair the agency, but his nomination has yet to be considered by the Senate.

Two Republican commissioners, including Chairman Kevin Martin, recently stepped down, and Jonathan Adelstein, a Democrat, has been appointed to head the Rural Utilities Service, a division of the Department of Agriculture that is responsible for administering about a third of the money in the economic stimulus package allocated for broadband networks.

The FCC, currently under the interim chairmanship of Michael Copps, has been in limbo as it waits the Senate confirm of the permanent chairman. That confirmation hearing could be delayed until Obama produces a Republican nominee to round out the agency.

The agenda for the FCC's next meeting, scheduled for May 13, is relatively light. The most immediate task for the agency is the nationwide transition to digital television, scheduled for June 12. Down the road, the FCC is tasked with advising RUS and the National Teleommunications Information Administration in the dispersal of broadband stimulus money, and developing and reporting to Congress a national broadband strategy.

During the first quarter of 2009, investment in green technologies by venture capitalists, who drive a disproportionate amount of financing in new technologies, shriveled.

How bad was it? Venture capitalists invested $154 million in 33 startup companies in the first three months of 2009, compared with $971 million invested in 67 companies in the last quarter of 2008. That’s an 84 percent drop in financing.

These numbers are important because they reveal the extent of the damage the credit crisis has wrought on venture capitalists. We all know that it’s harder now to get a loan to do anything, but venture capital has always staked out a different piece of the market. Venture capital firms are largely unknown to the public, preferring to stay incognito under names like Sequoia and Cerberus. Behind these unknown names are some pretty heavy brand names like 3Com and Avid Technology. When a company funded by venture capital becomes successful, the venture capital firm can make a lot of money by selling the company or going public. High risk, high reward.

By definition, venture capital seeks to invest in businesses that other investors would shy away from. A success rate of 10% (1 out of 10 businesses survive, the other 9 fail) would be considered an excellent rate of success for a venture capital firm. In other words, these guys (and women) invest in firms that fail, and they do it routinely! The only way that they can stay in business, however, is to access huge lines of capital. Sometimes the capital can come from other investors (so-called “angel” investors), but typically the capital comes from credit. The credit crisis has severely dried up the capital available, and venture capitalists are suddenly very cautious about where they invest their money.

Another interesting excerpt from the article:

More than half of clean-tech investments have been in alternative energy like solar and biofuels, which typically require building big factories. These projects depend on capital like project finance loans as well as tax equity investments, whereby corporations back green energy projects and reap the tax credits.

Indeed, the term “clean tech” is used loosely these days, and typically refers to solar and wind electricity production, huge projects with huge problems. What strikes me is how absent clean tech, as those of us in Green IT know it, is from venture capital’s radar. Wind, solar, and biofuel gets all the attention because it’s sexy and grabs headlines, but it seems to me that there are equally huge opportunities to be made in server virtualization, cloud computing, green data centers, client power management, and so forth. I can’t pinpoint as yet why Green IT has failed to ignite venture capital. If some of Green IT’s more aggressive ideas are to find breathing room, however, then we’ve got to start competing with solar and wind for those dollars.