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.

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.