The Christian Science Monitor has a great article today by Harvard KSG Professor Todd L. Pittinsky on challenges to America’s high-tech leadership.  In the article, Pittinsky urges “both

[presidential] candidates [to articulate] a clear direction – excellence in math, science, and engineering education at all levels – and [specify] the resources they will dedicate to that goal. They do not need to design specific programs; they do need to show strong support for others who come up with such programs.” But, Pittinsky writes, “[u]nfortunately, with vast military spending, entitlements, infrastructure investments, and corporate bailouts looming, neither Senator Obama nor Senator McCain is sticking up for serious money to repair our intangible but critical infrastructure of math, science, and engineering education.”

The Register reports that “[t]he rumors, disinformation and hoaxes that prosper online should be ghettoized by a new website credibility labeling scheme, according to Sir Tim Berners-Lee.  The director of the World Wide Web Consortium told an audience at the launch of his new foundation yesterday he had been in discussions on ‘how the web can help us filter good information from bad.’  In a BBC interview he explained that he is increasingly worried about the proliferation of bogus information facilitated by his creation. Berners-lee said:  ‘On the web the thinking of cults can spread very rapidly and suddenly a cult which was 12 people who had some deep personal issues suddenly find a formula which is very believable.’  […]  Berners-Lee’s proposed answer to this ‘problem’ seems to be some kind of centralised accreditation scheme for websites, and readers incapable of independent critical thought.  ‘I’m not a fan of giving a website a simple number like an IQ rating because like people they can vary in all kinds of different ways,’ he said.  ‘So I’d be interested in different organisations labelling websites in different ways.’”

According to the International Herald Tribune, “[t]he swift, sharp and short-lived collapse of United Airlines shares Sept. 8 has been followed by a week of finger-pointing.  Investors wiped out $1 billion of the market value of UAL, United’s parent, within minutes of an erroneous news flash on Bloomberg screens about a United bankruptcy. Google and the Tribune Co., the owner of The South Florida Sun-Sentinel, whose Web site was the source of the article that led to the headline, soon blamed each other for causing the fiasco.  The stock plunge was instigated by a series of cascading human and machine errors, and it raised new questions about the reliability of automated news services like Google News and the struggles of some traditional media companies to adapt to the Internet age.”

The Guardian writes that “[t]he European commission will today propose updating a 12-year-old global IT trading pact to take account of the explosive growth in hi-tech products and to produce further price-cuts.  The global market in IT products such as flat-panel screens has expanded dramatically in the past decade to $1.5tn (£838bn) of exports or a fifth of total world exports of manufactured goods, the EC said.  When the Information Technology Agreement (ITA) was signed in 1996 it was by 14 signatories who represented trade in IT product exports amounting to $600bn. It has now been signed by 70 countries representing 97% of IT trade.  The EC is proposing, at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in Geneva, to modernise and expand the ITA, originally designed to eliminate tariffs and duties on an agreed range of products by 2000.”

ZDNet.com has an interesting article on how today’s Wall Street meltdown could affect technology.