This months stories

Three NIST IT Leaders Are Honored with 2013 Federal 100 Awards

Jon Boyens, Jeremy Grant and Adam Sedgewick

Three members of the National Institute of Standards and Technology's (NIST) Information Technology Laboratory were named to the 2013 list of the top 100 government, industry and academic leaders in the federal government IT community. The award recognizes individuals who are making a difference in the way technology has transformed their agency or accelerated their agency's mission. The Federal 100 Awards are sponsored by Federal Computer Week. Recipients are chosen by a panel of government and industry leaders. They will be formally honored at a gala on March 20, 2013. Jon Boyens is a senior information technology security specialist in the Computer Security Division. As lead for NIST's Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Supply Chain Risk Management (SCRM) project, he…

Nanoelectronics Conference Will Focus on Semiconductor Industry's Future

How the semiconductor industry can create the next generations of nanoscale computing technology will be one of the themes of the 2013 International Conference on Frontiers of Characterization and Metrology for Nanoelectronics, to be held at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), March 25-28, 2013, at its campus in Gaithersburg, Md. As the devices lying at the heart of computing shrink ever closer to fundamental limits, the semiconductor industry must confront the problem of what to do when conventional microprocessors simply cannot shrink any further. The bi-yearly conference, which will be attended by international representatives from industry, government and academia, should be of interest to anyone concerned about the future of semiconductor manufacturing—a $300 billion industry and a…

March Conference Focuses on New Trends in Cybersecurity and Information Security Education

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will host the 26th annual conference of the Federal Information Systems Security Educators’ Association (FISSEA) March 19-21, 2013, at its Gaithersburg, Md., headquarters.FISSEA promotes cybersecurity awareness, training and education. The annual meeting is geared toward both new and seasoned security officers, IT managers, information security educators and researchers, cybersecurity trainers and teachers, and those involved in instructional design and curriculum development. It is open to individuals in government, industry and academia.Cybersecurity awareness has never been more keenly on the minds of employers than today, and this year, planning for and developing a cyber-savvy workforce is a main theme throughout the meeting.Key talks include “How to Use the National Cybersecurity Workforce Framework” and…

Statistical physics offers a new way to look at climate

Scientists are using ever more complex models running on ever more powerful computers to simulate the earth's climate. But new research suggests that basic physics could offer a simpler and more meaningful way to model key elements of climate. The research, published in the journal Physical Review Letters, shows that a technique called direct statistical simulation does a good job of modeling fluid jets, fast-moving flows that form naturally in oceans and in the atmosphere. Brad Marston, professor of physics at Brown University and one of the authors of the paper, says the findings are a key step toward bringing powerful statistical models rooted in basic physics to bear on climate science. In addition to the Physical Review Letters paper,…

Kirk, Spock together: Putting emotion, logic into computational words

Neuroimaging study shows cold reasoning, hot feelings intimately connected Kirk and Spock may not need a Vulcan mind meld to share cognition: Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute scientists have found that our cold reasoning and hot feelings may be more intimately connected than previously thought. "We tend to believe we have rational parts, like Spock, and separate emotional parts, like Kirk. But our research suggests that's not true," said Read Montague, director of the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute, who led the study. "We're all a combination of logical Spock and intuitive Kirk. Cold computations and feelings are coupled in our brains, and this connection is dynamic: when one changes, so does the other. This…