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The starting pay of certain liberal arts majors generally clocks in well below that of graduates in engineering fields, according to a Wall Street Journal study. Graduates with engineering degrees earned average starting pay of $56,000 in their first full-time jobs out of college, topping other majors. Communications and English majors only earned $34,000 in their first jobs. The survey, which was conducted by PayScale.com between April and June of this year, was answered by about 11,000 people who graduated between 1999 and 2010. The reported starting pay was adjusted for inflation to make the salaries of graduates from different...

At least 25 people are reported to have been killed in an explosion on the Metro system in central Moscow, with a second blast coming shortly afterwards. The first blast happened at the city's central Lubyanka station, reports quoting security sources said. A second explosion happened at the Park Kultury station, Russian news agency Tass reported. Ten people were injured in the first blast, Tass said, quoting the emergencies ministry. The number of casualties at the second blast is not yet clear.

A young computer science student has been identified by her parents from a photograph of one of two suicide bombers who killed 40 people on the Moscow metro, a Russian newspaper reported on Sunday. The other woman behind the March 29 attacks has already been identified as the 17-year-old widow of an Islamist militant from the troubled Dagestan region in the North Caucasus. Rassoul Magomedov, whose family is also from Dagestan, recognised his 28-year-old daughter from a photograph published on the internet and sent to him by friends via his mobile phone, the Novaya Gazeta newspaper reported. "My wife and...

COPS fear that 25 British-born Muslims are plotting to bomb Western airliners. The fanatics, in five groups, are now training at secret terror camps in Yemen. It was there London-educated Umar Abdulmutallab, 23, prepared for his Christmas Day bid to blow up a US jet. The British extremists in Yemen are in their early 20s and from Bradford, Luton and Leytonstone, East London. They are due to return to the UK early in 2010 and will then await internet instructions from al-Qaeda on when to strike. A Scotland Yard source said: "The great fear is Abdulmutallab is the first of...

Big news for developers out there: Google has just announced the release of a new, open sourced programming language called Go. The company says that Go is experimental, and that it combines the performance and security benefits associated with using a compiled language like C++ with the speed of a dynamic language like Python. GoÂ’s official mascot is Gordon the gopher, seen here. HereÂ’s how Google describes Go in its blog post: Go attempts to combine the development speed of working in a dynamic language like Python with the performance and safety of a compiled language like C or C++....

Digital Domain ELLEN SPERTUS, a graduate student at M.I.T., wondered why the computer camp she had attended as a girl had a boy-girl ratio of six to one. And why were only 20 percent of computer science undergraduates at M.I.T. female? She published a 124-page paper, “Why Are There So Few Female Computer Scientists?”, that catalogued different cultural biases that discouraged girls and women from pursuing a career in the field. The year was 1991. Computer science has changed considerably since then. Now, there are even fewer women entering the field. Why this is so remains a matter of dispute....

March 5, 2008 (Computerworld) Enrollments in computer science programs, which plunged after the dot-com bust, may have leveled off, according to new data from the Computing Research Association (CRA). The group follows year-over-year enrollment and graduate trends at 170 Ph.D.-granting institutions. But this leveling is happening only after the number of bachelor's degree graduates has apparently hit a trough. In the 2006-'07 academic year, only 8,021 students graduated with computer science degrees from these schools -- the lowest number of graduates this decade. By contrast, in 2003-'04 -- the high point of this decade -- 14,185 students were awarded bachelor's...

To help computers provide faster "second opinions" on mammogram images showing suspicious-looking breast masses, medical physicists at Duke University are employing a Google-like approach that retrieves useful information from an existing mammogram database within three seconds. Rather than comparing the mammogram image in question to every image of breast cancer in a computer database, the new approach compares the mammogram in question to selected images that are most highly ranked for their information content. This is analogous to how a Google search first returns a list of only those websites that it determines to have the most important and useful...

Search engine giant Google recently acquired an advanced text search algorithm invented by Ori Alon, an Israeli student. Sources believe Yahoo and Microsoft were also negotiating with the University of New South Wales in Australia, where Alon is a doctoral student in computer science. Google, Alon and the university all refused to comment, though Google confirmed that "Ori Alon works at Google's Mountain View, California offices." The University acknowledged that Yahoo and Microsoft had conducted negotiations with its business development company. Alon told TheMarker in an interview six months ago that the university had registered a patent on the invention....

[...] Today, Souvaine chairs the Tufts University computer science department, which has more female professors than male. But few younger women have followed in her generation's footsteps. Next spring, when 22 computer science graduates accept their Tufts diplomas, only four will be women. Born in contemporary times, free of the male-dominated legacy common to other sciences and engineering, computer science could have become a model for gender equality. [...] When Tara Espiritu arrived at Tufts, she was the rare young woman planning to become a computer scientist.[...]The same men always spoke up, often to raise some technical point that meant...

The new Internet regulations say China's news Web sites must provide information beneficial to the public and state, and are prohibited from spreading information against China's national security and public interest. The announcement, made Sunday by China's official Xinhua News Agency, gave no further explanation of the new rules, nor what punishments could be faced by those who violate them. But the Beijing News reported that the new rules were targeted at those inciting illegal protests, gatherings and organizations online. The Beijing daily said violators would have to pay fines ranging from $1,237. Internet freedom advocates say the government is...

Computer users are being urged to be on guard for a bogus e-mail that pretends to offer news updates about Hurricane Katrina as a means to infect their PCs. The malicious e-mail gives a brief news bulletin on the disaster before urging people to click "read more" and be taken to the full story on a website. Yet once directed to the website, a virus is sent to the user's computer. People are also being told to watch out for fraudulent e-mail scams pretending to raise cash for Katrina victims. It's sickening to think that hackers are prepared to exploit...

A few weeks ago, the web world was captivated by the stunning images produced by Google Earth, an interactive 3D model of the globe. The ground detail is a montage of satellite images, which means you can zoom in to very, very high detail. In some cities this is complemented by 3D models of individual buildings. And because it would be crazy not to, it can also be overlaid with road maps to give you directions from A to B. If you insist, it will even fly the route for you. It is certainly a far cry from the online...

IBM and North Carolina's Research Park Triangle are whining and moaning about the paucity of students entering computer science: "With a critical shortage of [IT] workers projected in the coming years, it's crucial that [universities] attract top students to the field, a local IBM official said..." Irony, thy name is IBM. Allow me to quote from another article, dated May 19th: "IBM's headcount in India is inching closer to the 25,000 mark..." Gee, I wonder if IBM's Everest-sized outsourcing effort has dampened the enthusiasm of any would-be computer science majors? ...

Survey results from the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles (HERI/UCLA) show that the popularity of computer science (CS) as a major among incoming freshmen has dropped significantly in the past four years. Alarmingly, the proportion of women who thought that they might major in CS has fallen to levels unseen since the early 1970s. The percentage of incoming undergraduates indicating that they would major in CS declined by over 60 percent between the Fall of 2000 and 2004, and is now 70 percent lower than its peak in the early 1980s (Figure 1).Freshmen...

FEBRUARY 28, 2005 (COMPUTERWORLD) - An argument cited by H-1B supporters for raising the visa cap stems from the high number of foreign students -- especially from China and India -- who come to the U.S. to study. Foreign student enrollments account for about 70% of the masters and Ph.D. computer science students at Texas Tech University, according to John Borrelli, dean of the graduate school at the 28,000-student university in Lubbock. Last year, the number of foreign students who applied for graduate admissions was more than three times the number of U.S. residents who did so, Borrelli said. In...

Jef Raskin, the human-computer interface expert largely credited with beginning the Macintosh project for Apple Computer, died Saturday at age 61. Raskin, the author of The Humane Interface, died of cancer, according to a man who answered the telephone Sunday at Raskin's Pacifica, Calif., home. Raskin joined Apple in January 1978 as employee No. 31, but left the company in 1982 amid a well-documented dispute with Steve Jobs. The Macintosh was launched in 1984. Reskin was an assistant professor at the University of California, San Diego, and a visiting scholar at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the 1970s when...

John Miano's career course is the sort of thing to make tech industry leaders wince and worry about their future work force. Miano was a programmer who tried for years to get into computer science doctoral programs. Despite earning a "B" average in college and publishing two technical books, he never was accepted. So he took the law school admission test and promptly won a full scholarship to Seton Hall. The result: one less computer scientist, one more lawyer. Discussion about technology's future in the United States often centers on problems that eighth graders have in algebra. But there also...

The information technology slump has reached the halls of academia. Students who once flocked to computer-related majors are rethinking their plans. Informal surveys suggest enrollments of students majoring in computer science have declined 20 percent from the height of the boom, say faculty leaders. Are comp-sci profs lamenting the trend? Guess again. "Most faculty would say, 'Yippee!'" says Maria Klawe, dean of engineering and applied science at Princeton University and president of the ACM, a leading professional organization for computing. Computer science departments were stretched thin by many IT wannabes who, according to their teachers, were drawn to the industry...

Preview: University of Texas students and their counterparts across the country are giving up on computer sciences and engineering programs amid concerns about a soft job market and the loss of tech jobs to other countries. Article: University of Texas students and their counterparts across the country are giving up on computer sciences and engineering programs amid concerns about a soft job market and the loss of tech jobs to other countries. According to a new survey by the Computing Research Association, enrollment in computer technology and engineering dropped by 19 percent in 2003, and some industry experts warn of...