America’s youth isn’t getting a decent education when it comes to the basics of technology, and now we’re seeing some data on why that’s the case. A survey conducted by Google and Gallup shows that many Americans believe computer science should be taught between kindergarten and the 12th grade. Yet most schools don’t offer the courses due to budget constraints, a lack of teachers, and the need to focus more on subjects included in standardized tests. The results are another mark against standardized tests, which have become a point of contention among parents, students, teachers, principals, and essentially anyone else who doesn’t profit off their continued existence. Yet these reviled constructs aren’t the only cause of computer science courses’ woes.

Educating students to pass standardized tests, which command most school administrators' time, leaves little room for computer science classes to train the next generation of coders and scientists, according to a Google/Gallup study published this week. "It was the number one problem that principals gave," says Gallup's Brandon Busteed. "They're overwhelmed by what they need to be tested on" and do not have the resources to teach non-core curriculum subjects. The study found about 60 percent of students in grades 7-12 said their schools offer dedicated computer science classes, while 52 percent said computer science is taught as part of other classes. However, those statistics differ significantly when accounting for race and income.

Silicon Valley is great at disrupting business norms — except when it comes to its own racial and gender diversity problem. In an open letter last week, the Rev. Jesse Jackson sounded the alarm yet again. He urged tech giants and startups to speed up the hiring of more African-Americans and Latinos — "to change the face of technology so that its leadership, workforce and business partnerships mirror the world in which we live." One nonprofit group, Black Girls CODE, isn't waiting around for more diversity reports. The group is taking action with regular weekend coding seminars for girls of color. And this summer, it's held boot camps where young girls learn the basics of tech design and development.

University of California, Santa Barbara, is the top computer science school in the U.S., according to a new salary-centric report from compensation specialist PayScale. The research company ranked 187 colleges and universities with computer science programs based on the median pay of the schools' compsci alumni. By that measure, University of California, Santa Barbara, led the pack, with its graduates reporting a median mid-career salary of $147,000, PayScale said. Close behind UC Santa Barbara are University of California, Berkeley, which topped last year’s PayScale ranking, and Columbia University.

A bioinformatics researcher at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego, has been awarded a three-year National Institutes of Health grant worth almost $1.4 million to make biological structures more widely available to scientists, educators, and students. The NIH award, as part of the agency’s Targeted Software Development Awards and its Big Data to Knowledge initiative launched in 2012, was granted to Peter Rose, Site Head of the RCSB Protein Data Bank West at SDSC and Project Scientist of the Center’s Structural Bioinformatics Laboratory, and Andreas Prlić, Technical and Scientific Team lead at the RCSB PDB.

To borrow a phrase from paleontology, the HPC community has historically evolved in punctuated equilibrium. In the 1970s we transitioned from serial to vector architectures. In the 1980s parallel architectures blossomed, and in the 1990s MIMD systems became the norm for most supercomputer architectures. From the 1990s until today we have been in a period of relative stasis in terms of system balance and tradeoffs. Now we’re entering a new phase of rapid evolutionary change triggered by the quest for exascale despite the end of Dennard scaling. With clock speeds not increasing – in fact sometimes decreasing – the only way to go from petaflops to exaflops is to increase hardware parallelism.

Does your child spend hours playing Minecraft every day? Now there’s a book and software package that can help them learn computer programming while they’re doing it. “Minecraft Modding for Kids,” part of the For Dummies series, is co-authored by three PhDs. at the University of California, San Diego. “The book teaches many of the concepts taught in introductory computer science classes,” said Sarah Guthals, now a postdoctoral researcher in computer science at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego and lead author. She wrote “Minecraft Modding for Kids” with computer science Ph.D. Stephen Foster and biochemistry Ph.D. Lindsey Handley, both from UC San Diego.

University of Texas at Austin researchers and Japanese government officials are collaborating on a $13-million project aimed at making data centers more energy efficient. The effort will be hosted by the Texas Advanced Computing Center, which will receive about $4 million in additional computing capability thanks to the project. The project also involves installing a 250-kilowatt solar farm to power the new computers on sunny days. Although UT will get more computing power, the Japanese government will study the technology to trim costs and energy use elsewhere. "Through this project, we hope to verify the energy efficiency of the new technology and to disseminate it in the U.S.," says Japanese official Fumio Ueda.

Texas Advanced Computing Center researcher Paul Navratil, with support from the U.S. National Science Foundation, is leading an effort to design GraviT, a new framework that would enable tens of thousands of scientists and engineers who use the U.S.'s supercomputers to add ray tracing visualizations to their research, regardless of the type of computing systems or hardware they are using. Ray tracing simulates the photons of light as they bounce from a light source off an object and into the eye, based on the laws of optics. Ray tracing's physically realistic rendering creates more realistic reflections and shading than rasterization-based visualizations, and helps people understand the spatial relationships between the parts of the visualization.

SC15 today announced that Intel’s Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s Data Center Group, has been selected as the HPC Matters plenary speaker at the 27th annual SC15 conference on high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis. Starting in 2013, the SC conference organizers launched “HPC Matters” to encourage members of the computational sciences community to share their thoughts, vision, and experiences with how high performance computers are used to improve the lives of people all over the world in more simple terms. Four pillars provide structure to the program: Influencing Daily Lives; Science and Engineering; Economic Impact; and Education.

The Anita Borg Institute (ABI), a non-profit organization focused on the advancement of women in computing, has announced the winners of the 2015 Grace Hopper Celebration ABIE Awards, Each year, the GHC ABIE Awards recognize female leaders in the categories of technical leadership, social impact, innovative teaching practices, emerging leadership and international change agent. The winners are nominated by their peers and chosen by a panel of fellow technologists and past ABIE Award winners based on their extraordinary achievements and commitment to excellence.

France's Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) and Spain's Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) have announced a high-performance computing (HPC) partnership to further the European push toward exascale computing. Both groups entered into an agreement to promote "a globally competitive HPC value chain and flagship industry" aligned with the European Commission's agenda to concentrate on technology, infrastructure, and real-world HPC applications. "BSC and CEA fully support the Commission's strategy of aiming 'to make Europe the world leader in HPC' and ensuring it has 'independent access to this technology'," says CEA's Jean Gonnord.

Although betrayal is a key aspect of the human experience, it also is notoriously difficult to study. "We all know betrayal exists," says Cornell University professor Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil. "But finding relevant data is really hard." The researchers recently found a useful proxy for studying betrayal: the classic strategy game Diplomacy. Players take the role of nations and spend most of the game negotiating, planning, and forming alliances with other players before executing their moves. Betrayal is a fixture of the game, known as "stabbing" a putative ally. The researchers used an algorithm to analyze 145,000 messages between players of 249 games of Diplomacy to see if there were any patterns of behavior that could predict betrayals.

A new way of computing could lead to immediate advances in aerodynamics, climate science, cosmology, materials science and cardiovascular research. The National Science Foundation is providing $2.42 million to develop a unique facility for refining complex, physics-based computer models with big data techniques at the University of Michigan, with the university providing an additional $1.04 million. The focal point of the project will be a new computing resource, called ConFlux, which is designed to enable supercomputer simulations to interface with large datasets while running.

According to a new Gallup research study, "Searching for Computer Science: Access and Barriers in U.S. K-12 Education," while students, parents, and teachers value computer science, administrators don't necessarily perceive that they do. The study reports that less than half of administrators say school board members think computer science education is important. Principals and superintendents cite a lack of time devoted to courses that are directly tied to testing requirements, according to Gallup. They also say that a low availability and budget for computer science teachers is another reason schools don't offer computer science courses.

A study of seven mobile-money applications in Brazil, India, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines by University of Florida researchers found all but one had severely inadequate security measures. "It was worse than we expected," says University of Florida professor Patrick Traynor. One of the apps, India-based MoneyOnMobile, appeared to use encryption to shield data, but did so by transmitting sensitive data to a server unprotected before encrypting it, thus enabling the theft of the data. A second app, Airtel Money, employed encryption but attempted to protect the data using an easily guessable key composed of the same sequence of eight numbers and letters followed by the person's phone number and account number.

Researchers in Europe and the U.S. are developing a bevy of roboticized furniture they think will fill the gap in the market between simpler domestic robots such as iRobot's Roomba and the humanoid Pepper servant robot recently launched by Softbank. For example, an expressive robot trash can developed by Stanford University's Wendy Ju and David Sirkin is designed to patrol fast-food restaurants for trash, approaching tables and wiggling to get patron's attention. A mobile robot named toybox, developed by Francesco Mondada at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, operates on a similar principle: it features expressive "eyes" that it uses to look at toys, then wiggles and flashes to prompt the child who has left it out to put the toy away.

Coding is how technology, including software, apps and websites, is created. There are thousands of coding languages, such as JavaScript, Python and SQL, and early exposure helps young people understand and interact with the devices that provide the means to shape our technology-driven culture. Coding is valuable in that it teaches problem solving, design and innovation. It is practical in that it creates solutions to immediate challenges. It is creative in that it allows people to imagine and invent with few boundaries. It is liberating in that one can go from knowing code to owning one's own company. It is equalizing in that code is not limited by the stigmas humans readily cling to, such as race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation and religion.

About 60 high school girls spent seven weeks this summer learning about coding and computer science at the Girls Who Code Summer Immersion Program held at Georgetown University. The camp was sponsored by the Business Software Alliance, Lockheed Martin, and Georgetown University. It was organized by Girls Who Code, a nonprofit group that is seeking to increase the number of women who pursue careers in technology. "I think if there's a significant portion of the population that is discouraged from going into an industry, then, by definition, you are losing a significant chunk of talent," says BSA president Victoria A. Espinel. "There's a huge population of smart people that are not going into coding, and we need to have them going into coding."

As a mother and a grandmother — and as women who’ve strived for success in the business and education worlds — we want our girls and young women to go out into the world knowing they can do anything. In today’s technology-driven economy, an important part of that is giving them the skills, support, and confidence to pursue education and careers in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM). When we look at today’s young women, we see the next generation of software developers and electrical engineers. The challenge is starting early: 74% of middle-school girls express interest in STEM subjects, but only 0.4% of girls end up pursuing a college major in computer science.

A serious weak point in vehicle security enabled hackers to remotely control a vehicle, according to researchers at the University of California, San Diego. The team demonstrated the vulnerability on a Corvette by turning on the windshield wipers, applying the brakes or even disable them at low speed. The flaw involves the small black dongles that are connected to the onboard diagnostic ports of vehicles to enable insurance companies and fleet operators to track them and collect data such as fuel efficiency and miles driven. The researchers found the dongles could be hacked by sending them short-message-service text messages, which relay commands to the car's internal systems.

The third annual Tech Lady Hackathon was held last month at the Impact Hub co-working space in Washington, D.C. The event attracted more than 150 coders, mostly women in their 20s and 30s, who participated in a day-long slate of collaborative programming projects and training sessions. One project was led by Shannon Turner of Hear Me Code and involved brainstorming ideas for improving her organization's website, while another session took the form of a workshop on data visualization. Other projects on the agenda included learning application program interface programming, and working to clean data and help visualize it for the Rebuilding Re-entry program, which aims to improve outcomes for men and women with criminal records.

Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth are examining the possibility of using smartphone processors as energy-efficient alternatives to current supercomputer components. The team led by professor Gaurav Khanna, associate director of the Center for Scientific Computing and Visualization Research, has a background in finding creative alternatives to standard supercomputers. Khanna and his team were among the first to see the potential of gaming consoles, in particular the Playstation 3, and graphics cards as supercomputer alternatives.

The National Science Foundation has awarded the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego, a one-year extension to continue operating its Gordon supercomputer, providing continued access to the cluster for a wide range of researchers with data-intensive projects. The result of a five-year, $20 million NSF grant awarded in late 2009, Gordon entered operations in early 2012 as one of the 50 fastest supercomputers in the world at the time – and the only one to employ massive amounts of flash-based memory, making it many times faster than conventional high-performance computing systems for some data-intensive analyses.

Researchers at University College London have developed MyScalpel, a software tool they say is capable of automatically isolating the code of a feature in one program and "transplanting" it into another program. Research team leader Mark Harman says that like an organ transplant, a code transplant has a chance of being "rejected" by the new "host." However, because the system is automated, it can retry the transplant, hundreds or thousands of times if necessary, until it gets it right. To demonstrate the new system, Harman's team used MuScalpel to transplant the H.264 video codec from x264 into VLC media player. The automated system was able to complete the task in 26 hours, whereas VLC's manual addition of the codec took 20 days.