Introduction to web computing
The World Wide Web offers many opportunities for computing in science and engineering. Interpreting my charge as department editor quite broadly, I'd like to review some of these possibilities. If I omit areas of particular interest to you, please let me know.
WebFEM: A Web Application for Distributed Numerical Simulations
In this work we present the research project aimed to designing and implementing WebFEM, a Web application for the efficient simulation of engineering problems whose solution is based on the Finite Element Method (FEM). WebFEM is accessible through the Web, and the final user interfaces are the most common Web browser pages. The architecture of the simulator has been accurately designed in order to allow an easy distribution of the computation over cluster of computers linked on the Web. The programming tools used for the implementation have been chosen in order to get portable and flexible Web software, also suited for educational purposes. The distributed architecture allows using WebFEM in advanced application contexts, like distance learning and simulation activities of distributed working teams.
Time and Heritage
As a historian studying what can be considered a form of intellectual history, I have slowly come to adopt Michel de Certeau’s observation made at the end of the 1980s that ‘objectifying the past, for the last three centuries, has undoubtedly left unconsidered time within a discipline that has continued to use it as a taxonomic instrument’. To a certain degree, time has become commonplace for the historian who has preserved or instrumentalized it. It is not considered because it is inconceivable, but because we do not think of it or, more simply, we do not think about it. As a historian attempting to pay attention to the time I’m living in, I have thus, like many others, noticed the swift development of the category of the present until it has become obvious that the present is omnipresent. This is what I refer to here as ‘presentism’.