The title of the new book is Information and Technology - Where is the Woman? (original Finnish title is Tieto ja tekniikka - Missä on nainen?). I was co-author in two of the articles in the book. There are 34 authors in all, and all the other authors are women. My articles are titled Do You Need Mathematics in the Computer Age? (Tarvitaanko matematiikkaa tietokoneiden aikakaudella?) and Honor the User! (Käyttäjä kunniaan!).

I learned that yesterday a copy of the book was presented to the President of Finland, Tarja Halonen. The book originated from a meeting arranged by President Halonen in the Summer of 2000. One of the questions then presented was the small number of women studying engineering in Finland. This is especially worrisome in the IT and telecommunications sectors. The new book tries to give some sort of answers to this topical question.

TiBooks hit 1GHz, get a SuperDrive. Apple refreshed its laptop line today as expected, with a new 1GHz processor and SuperDrive in the top-of-the-line TiBook and a $200 price drop on all iBook models that help bring the entry-level 700 MHz iBook to $999.

The refreshed professional PowerBook includes two TiBooks: the $2,999 high-end machine with 1 GHz processor and DVD burning SuperDrive, as well as a 867 MHz TiBook with 1MB of Level 3 cache and a DVD/CDRW Combo drive selling for $2,299.

The iBook line has more modest updates, with each model seeing slightly faster G3 processors and the $200 price drop across the line. The $1,599 high-end iBook has an 800 MHz G3 processor coupled with the 14.1-inch LCD, 256MB Ram, a 30GB hard drive and a Combo DVD-ROM/CDRW drive. At $1,299, the mid-range iBook also runs at 800 MHz with a 12.1-inch LCD, 128MB RAM, 30GB hard drive, and Combo drive. The $999 model boosts a 700 MHz processor, a 12.1-inch LCD, 20GB hard drive and a CD-ROM drive. All three iBook models have 512K of level 2 cache and an ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 graphics card, with 32MB RAM on the mid-range and high-end models.

I attended yesterday a lecture by Phil Andrews at the inauguration of the 2.2 teraflop/s supercomputer at CSC, Finland. The new IBMSC system installed at CSC can thus do 2,200,000,000,000 computations per second. This system is the fastest in the Nordic countries, and second fastest academic supercomputer in Europe.

Today I was able to ask Andrews some questions the excellent lecture raised. His comments on the development of the TeraGrid system were revelatory. I liked especially the insight about the "social engineering" of a project of this massive scale. There was a lot to learn, and much which was quite similar to our own experiences of developing the infrastructury for computational science.