Computing should have same status as science

A couple of related items to point teachers to today. One is an article from TechWorld.com that discusses the need to bring computing into the area of general science that all (or at least more) students learn. I like this quote:

Education will also play a key role in how computer science is integrated into the natural sciences, said Andrew Parker, a professor of high-energy physics and director of Cambridge University's eScience Center. Parker said his doctorate students lack training in data handling and analysis, inference and statistics.

"They need computational science courses which are relevant to analysing large data collections," Parker said.

The article references a report that was funded my Microsoft Research. The report is the focus of a special issue of Nature on Future Computing. Microsoft Research paid to allow free access to the issue but did not have any editorial control over it. There are a number of articles that tie computing into other fields and discuss how they might change over the next 15 years.

I really beleive that computing skills and the ability to process large amounts of data in ways that have until now been limited to computer scientests is going to become more important for people in all areas of science. And in business as well. marketing people are going to have to understand datamining to get any real value from all the data now available to them and that is just one example.