“The agreement does reduce the increase in the Department of Energy’s Office of Science by $100 million (so, +$330 million instead of +$430 million), and NIST’s increase would be reduced by $100 million (so +$495 million instead of +$595 million). But given the reports we were receiving as recently as yesterday evening about the possibility of no increase for the science agencies in the bill, this is a remarkable turn of events. The increase for NSF in the Senate bill will still be far less than the $3 billion called for in the House version of the bill, but NSF will be in far better shape in the conference between the two chambers coming in with $1.2 billion from the Senate instead of zero.”

Scientists and Engineers for America (a 501(c)(3) organization) has a detailed breakdown of the the stimulus package that passed the Senate Friday in Senate-passed stimulus package by the numbers. They also have a downloadable excel spreadsheet in case you want to crunch the data yourself. Here are some science highlights from their post:

NSF Research: $1.2 billion total for NSF including: $1 billion to help America compete globally; $150 million for scientific infrastructure; and $50 million for competitive grants to improve the quality of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education.

NASA: $1.3 billion total for NASA including: $450 million for Earth science missions to provide critical data about the Earth’s resources and climate; $200 million to enable research and testing of environmentally responsible aircraft and for verification and validation methods for complex aerospace systems and software; $450 million to reduce the gap in time that the U.S. does not have a vehicle to access the International Space Station; and $200 million for repair, upgrade and construction at NASA facilities.

NOAA: $1 billion total for NOAA, including $645 million to construct and repair NOAA facilities, equipment and vessels to reduce the Nation’s coastal charting backlog, upgrade supercomputer infrastructure for climate research, and restore critical habitat around the Nation.

NIST: $475 million total for NIST including: $307 million for renovation of NIST facilities and new laboratories using green technologies; $168 million for scientific and technical research at NIST to strengthen the agency’s IT infrastructure; provide additional NIST research fellowships; provide substantial funding for advanced research and measurement equipment and supplies; increase external grants for NIST-related research.

DOE: The Department of Energy’s Science program sees $330 million for laboratory infrastructure and construction.

“As Semantic Web technologies mature and become more accepted by researchers and developers alike, the widespread growth of the Semantic Web seems inevitable. However, this growth is currently hampered by the lack of well-defined security protocols and specifications. Though the Web does include fairly robust security mechanisms, they do not translate appropriately to the Semantic Web as they do not support autonomous machine access to data and resources and usually require some kind of human input. Also, the ease of retrieval and aggregation of distributed information made possible by the Semantic Web raises privacy questions as it is not always possible to prevent misuse of sensitive information. In order to realize it’s full potential as a powerful distributed model for publishing, utilizing, and extending information, it is important to develop security and privacy mechanisms for the Semantic Web. Policy frameworks built around machine-understandable policy languages, with their promise of flexibility, expressivity and automatable enforcement appear to be the obvious choice.
…
It is clear that these two technologies – Semantic Web and Policy – complement each other and together will give rise to security infrastructures that provide more flexible management, are able to accommodate heterogeneous information, have improved communication, and are able to dynamically adapt to variations in the environment. These infrastructures could be used for a wide spectrum of applications ranging from network management, quality of information, to security, privacy and trust. This special issue of the Journal of Web Semantics is focused on the impact of Semantic Web technologies on policy management, and the specification, analysis and application of these Semantic Web-based policy frameworks.”

In addition to the editors’ Introduction, the special issue includes five papers:

• Christian Bizer and Richard Cyganiak, Quality-driven information filtering using the WIQA policy framework
• Sudhir Agarwal, Steffen Lamparter and Rudi Studer, Making Web services tradable: A policy-based approach for specifying preferences on Web service properties
• Filip Perich and Mark McHenry, Policy-based spectrum access control for dynamic spectrum access network radios
• Zhen Liu, Anand Ranganathan and Anton Riabov, Specifying and enforcing high-level semantic obligation policies
• Jinghai Rao, Alberto Sardinha and Norman Sadeh, A meta-control architecture for orchestrating policy enforcement across heterogeneous information sources

The UMBC team is lead by Tim Finin, and includes several of us. The other participants are UIUC (led by Jiawei Han), Purdue (led by Elisa Bertino),  UTSA (led by Ravi Sandhu), UTDallas (led by Bhavani Thurasingham), Michigan (Lada Adamic).

So I went to the lecture with great anticipation. I reached a few minutes late, and the room was already full. The presentation itself was good, but a bit of a letdown. Perhaps because he didn’t want to be too controversial in a “distinguished lecture” type setting ? He presented data (increase in immigration since 1964, concentration of that immigration in select areas making the effect local, confounding factors when you try to analyze wage effects of immigrants, the fact that the wage depressing effects of immigration have most hurt the lower strata of society, the fact that an average immigrant today earns less than the native born, which is a change from the 60s and so on). However, he didn’t go much further by saying something which is both true and a copout — namely that what policy implications you derive from this data will depend on what your objective function is. He joked about letting everyone in if the goal was to alleviate world poverty or somesuch.

I also noticed that he did not split his data into effects of legal and illegal immigration. It would be interesting to know if there are differences ? Amongst legal immigrants, does employment based versus family based immigration make a difference ? Especially when one of the things that the now dead “comprehensive immigration reform” bill was discussing was a points based system for immigration.

“Several academic institutions and major tech companies have teamed up to thwart ‘badware’, a phrase they have coined that encompasses spyware and adware. The new website, StopBadware.org, is promoted as a “Neighborhood Watch” campaign and seeks to provide reliable, objective information about downloadable applications in order to help consumers to make better choices about what they download on to their computers. We want to work with both experts and the broader internet community (.orgs and .edus) to define and understand the problem.”

“There are three types of lies – lies, damn lies, and facts found on the Web.” — anon

“As it gets easier to add information to the web via html pages, wikis, blogs, and other documents, it gets tougher to distinguish accurate information from inaccurate or untrustworthy information. A search engine query usually results in several hits that are outdated and/or from unreliable sources and the user is forced to go through the results and pick what she/he considers the most reliable information based on her/his trust requirements. With the introduction of web services, the problem is further exacerbated as users have to come up with a new set of requirements for trusting web services and web services themselves require a more automated way of trusting each other. Apart from inaccurate or outdated information, we also need to anticipate Semantic Web Spam (SWAM) — where spammers publish false facts and scams to deliberately mislead users. This workshop is interested in all aspects of enabling trust on the web.”

• Phishing is becoming an increasing threat as 3 to 4% of users respond to such mails — much higher than traditional e-mail spam.
• In the first half of 2005 phishing increased from 2.99 Million e-mails/day to 5.7 Million e-mails/day.
• 31% of online consumers are buying less due to increased web security threat.
• US leads in the number of hacked machine reports followed closely by Germany.
• Broadband penetration is actually increasing security threats. Many personal machines are now vulnerable to hackers using them as web bots for DOS attacks.
• DOS Attacks are now a business. Such attacks are now available for as low as US $300. Where?

Some other interesting comments ..

• The increasing speed at which worms propogate are now demanding better use of proactive measures.
• In the absence of such measures Akamai and it’s expandable bandwith pipes are the only solution against DOS Attacks. Looks like more revenues to Akamai in the days to come! Maybe Akamai’s stock is in for a ride.

Finally, and of importance to us — Symantec is now working on compating web (and blog) spam. They see this as being one of the next big security threat.