Collaboratory tools need several more years of research until they will be mature enough to be acceptable to end users.

WE PREDICT THAT COLLABORATORIES will be part of our future, that they will be rich telepresent environments, and that virtual laboratories will proliferate. We also conjecture that complexity will drive the need for increased collaboration in scientific endeavors and new research funding models. As educators, we will be faced with training our students to work in a multidisciplinary world of complex problems, which will cause us to adopt new educational strategies. The collaboratory concept is a qualitatively different way of using communication and information technologies. It has the potential to remove the walls around departments and organizations, and it will lead to the creation of a metalaboratory with capabilities that far exceed those available in any single laboratory. In the next few years, a growing community of scientists from multiple universities and national laboratories will be conducting serious scientific research in cyberspace.

NOTES:

1. NSF – National Science Foundation — национальный научный фонд.

2. DOE – Department of Energy — министерство энергии.

3. DCEE – Distributed Collaboratory Experiment Environments— экспериментальные среды распределенных систем сотрудничества.

4. PNNL – Pacific Northwest National Laboratory – Тихоокеанская Северо-западная национальная лаборатория.

1. Drag-and-drop facility – технологическое решение, позволяющее выполнять действия в компьютере путем переноса объектов из одного места в другое.

2. On-line instruments – инструменты, работающие в реальном времени.

I. Answer the following questions:

1. Who is the author of the word "collaboratory", and what does it mean?

2. What influence can computers render on scientific interaction and collaboration? What problems are on this way?

3. Why should the developers of computer collaboratory systems know the features of each type?

4. In what type of collaboration is me remoted instrumental control especially important?

5. How is the Internet involved in collaboratories?

6. What do you think of whether this artificial environment is acceptable socially and psychologically to the majority of the scientists? What is the reason for misunderstanding among scientists during discussions?

1. Can you give an example of collaboration that involves researches in different disciplines?

2. Which means can foster close communication among scientists in various fields?

3. Can you describe flexibility that should be provided by electronic collaboratory environment?

4. What kinds of instruments should collaboratory environments contain?

5. Do you really think that collaboratory tools need only several more years of research?

6. What are the main barriers for collaboration?

7. Which of crossplatform tools you know can be regarded as synchronous and asynchronous?

8. What are the most important designations of the network infrastructure?

9. Which ways is development of collaboration systems being advanced in? Give an example of collaboratory system that is presented nowadays.

10. What tools allow the users to see and hear each other in real-time mode?

11. What are the shared computer display and whiteboard?

12. What are the differences between paper notebook and electronic notebook?

13. What capabilities can be provided by web browser synchronization?

14. Should cooperation tools be integrated into a user-friendly environment and why? Describe both technical and sociological (or psycological) barriers to implementing cooperation-oriented environments.

15. Why does technology often exist without being used (or embedded)?

16. Why is videoconferencing not attractive for scientists?

17. What does Mbone-based freeware application deal with?

18. What is your opinion of the collaboratory systems future?

II. Write a summary in English.

Stage A

1. Look through the text (scheming reading).

2. Divide it into introduction, principle part, conclusion.

3. Find and write down the main idea(s) of the text.

Stage В

1. Read the text again but now attentively (close reading).

2. Give detailed answers to the questions.

3. Write the items of the plan.

Stage С

1. Write out kernel sentences to illustrate the items of the plan.

2. Join kernel sentences together, use connective words if necessary.

3. Re-read your summary and make sure that the sentences are presented in a logical order.

Make any changes that you think are necessary.

III. Read the text. Agree or disagree with what is told in the text. Write about your attitude to the problem. Give arguments in favour of your point of view.

The computers and communication tools have great impact on the scientific community indeed and Internet is developing so quickly, that this idea sounds naturally. Collaboration is at the heart of science, with a tradition spanning centuries. However, while science has benefited greatly from the computing revolution of the last decades, technology's impact on the collaborative process itself has been insignificant. So the time has come for it. Here the new phenomena "collaboratory"- ...center without walls, in which the nation's researches can perform their research without regarding to geographical location -- interacting with colleagues, accessing instrumentation, sharing data and computational resource and accessing information in digital libraries - is discussed. In USA there are already such groups, and the authors consider some of them and the problems scientists already came across. The main problem in developing systems to facilitate collaboration is to avoid the widely spread situation disproving thesis "build it and they will come". Technology often exists without being used because it is perceived as adding little or no value. First of all such technology must be adopted to the user. It must be taken into account that many scientific leaders grew up without computers and may stop using it because of any psychological conflict within it. Some of the requirements are presented in this article: autonomy, trust, sense of place, attention to ritual. The scientific collaboration has its international traditions that must be retranslated into the formal rules without losing their sense. These rules formulating requires a great deal of classification work. The authors try to classify different collaboration into 4 types: peer-to-peer, mentor-student, interdisciplinary, producer-consumer. Of course it is not the full list but it is good for an example of the approach. Thus different Internet technique satisfies different types of collaboration. A little of fantasy of course exists in author's predicting of the collaboration future, but it can't be avoided in such articles. Another interesting phenomenon which hasn't been considered by the authors is that young scientists, students will adopt to such collaboration systems quicker, so the scientific researches will be free from orthodoxity and this can imply revolution in some branches. An education system will have to adapt to this new style too. Security problem of course will not be the last one.

I want to be optimistic about this collaboration development.

CHAPTER 4

In this chapter you will gain practice in rendering the texts on computer science.

Unit 1

Computer Science and its Perspectives

The discipline and profession of computer science has undergone dramatic changes in its short 50-year life. As the field has matured, new areas of research and development have emerged and joined with older areas to revitalize the discipline. In the 1930s. fundamental mathematical concepts of computing were developed by Turing and Church. Early computers implemented by von Neumann, Eckert, Atanasoff, and others in the 1940s led to the birth of commercial computing in the 1950s and to numerical programming languages like Fortran, commercial languages like COBOL, and artificial intelligence languages like LISP. In the 1960s the rapid development and consolidation of the subjects of algorithms, data structures, databases, and operating systems formed the core of what we now call traditional computer science; the 1970s saw the emergence of software engineering, structured programming, and object-oriented programming. The emergence of personal computing and networks in the 1980s set the stage for dramatic advances in computer graphics, software technology, and parallelism. The computer industry has experienced tremendous growth and change over the last several decades. The transition that began in the 1980s, from centralized mainframes to a decentralized networked microcomputer-server technology, was accompanied by the rise and fall of major corporations. The old monopolistic, vertically integrated industry epitomized by IBM's comprehensive client services gave way to a highly competitive industry in which the major players changed almost overnight. In 1992 alone, emergent companies like Dell and Microsoft had spectacular profit gains of 77% and 53%. In contrast, traditional companies like IBM and DEC suffered combined record losses of $7.1 billion in the same year The exponential decrease in computer cost and increase in power by a factor of two every eighteen months, known as Moore's law, shows no signs of abating, though underlying physical limits must eventually be reached.

Computers have had a powerful impact on our world and are destined to shape our future. This observation, now commonplace, is the starting place for any discussion of professionalism and ethics in computing. Professionals who work with computers have special knowledge and that knowledge, when combined with computers, has significant power to change people's lives.

Computers, digital data, and telecommunications have changed work, travel, education, business, entertainment, government manufacturing.

The change is so radical that traditional moral concepts, distinctions, and theories, if not abandoned, must be significantly reinterpreted and extended. For example, they must be extended to computer-mediated relationships, computer software, computer art, electronic bulletin boards, and so on. Computer technology makes possible a scale of activities not possible before. This includes a larger scale of record keeping of personal information, as well as larger scale calculations which, in turn, allow us to build and do things not possible before, such as undertaking space travel and operating a global communication system. In addition to scale, computer technology has involved the creation of new kinds of entities for which no rules initially existed, entities such as computer files, computer programs, and user interfaces. The unique argument can also be made in terms of the power and pervasiveness of computer technology. It seems to be bringing about a magnitude of changes comparable to that which took place during the Industrial Revolution, transforming our social, economic, and political institutions, our understanding of what it means to be human, and the distribution of power in the world.

The future holds great promise for the next generations of computer scientists and engineers. To address these problems, and to extend these solutions in a way that benefits the lives of significant numbers of the world's population, will require substantial energy, commitment, and real investment on the part of institutions and professionals throughout the world. The challenges are complex, and the solutions are not likely to be obvious.

NOTES:

1. to revitalize (v.) — вдохнуть новую жизнь

2. to set the stage — зд. создавать условия

3. to epitomize (v.) — книжн. кратко излагать, конспектировать

4. to give way to ... — уступить место ...

5. competitive (adj.) — конкурентноспособный(ая)

6. almost overnight — почти неожиданно, сразу же

7. exponential (adj.) — показательный

8. by a factor of— на коэффициент

9. to show no signs of abating — не показывать признаков ослабевания

10. commonplace (adj.) — обычный

11. computer-mediated relationships — отношения посредством компьютера

12. entity (n.) — понятие, сущность

I. Answer the following questions:

1. What are the main stages in the history of computer technology?

2. Had you ever heard of so-called Moore's law before you read the text?

3. Which human activities did computer technology make possible?

4. What are the new kinds of entities which computer technology has involved?

5. How can you compare the changes brought by computers with those having taken place during the industrial revolution?

II. Give the main ideas of the text in logic order.