Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771 

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM 

Monday, October 18, 1999 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium 

Cliff Stoll

ABSTRACT -- Do computers belong in classrooms -- or might they get in the way of learning?  Why do libraries spend so much on multimedia gizmos rather than books, journals and librarians?  If computers are so great for efficiency, how come American business productivity has been essentially flat over the past two decades?  Rather than bringing us together, might our online obsession be isolating us from each other?  Most of all, what's lost when we plop down in front of our keyboard?

SPEAKER -- Dr. Stoll received his PhD in Planetary Science from the University of Arizona in 1980.  His dissertation topic was "Polarization of Jupiter at Large Phase Angles" and he specialized in the numerical modelling of the Jovian South Equatorial Zone using polarimetry data from the NASA Pioneer 10 and 11 missions.

He interned at Kitt Peak National Observatory in the Solar Physics section, where he created the Thorium comparison spectrum for high resolution classical spectroscopy.  In 1980, soon after the opening of China, Dr. Stoll was sponsored as a US-China exchange scholar to Purple Mountain Observatory in Nanjing, where he researched solar wind interactions with comets, as well as analyzing Chinese occultation observations of the Uranian rings.

Later, he helped develop the computational system for the Spacewatch Camera, which has become the premier instrument for detecting near-earth crossing asteroids.  From 1982 to 1984, Dr. Stoll built data analysis software and graphical interfaces at the Space Telescope Science Institute.

From 1985 to 1988, he worked at the Keck Observatory Science Office, where he helped design the computing system for the 10 meter telescope.  In 1988 to 1990, at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, he built astrophysical databases using high-energy astrophysics spacecraft.

During 1986 and 1987, Dr. Stoll tracked an intruder across the nacent Internet, resulting in the convictions of three German computer hackers for espionage.  He wrote of this incident in his best-selling book, The Cuckoo's Egg.  In 1995, he wrote Silicon Snake Oil a critique of the overselling of computers.  In 1999, he wrote High Tech Heretic, a collection of essays questioning the role of digital technology in society.

Dr. Stoll most recent astronomical paper is "Modelling Histories of Chrondrites", written with Guy Consolmagno and Dan Britt, and published in the December 1998 issue of Meteoritics.   He is on the advisory board of SETI, and now  makes glass Klein Bottles, which are single-sided, non-orientable, boundary-free topological manifolds.

He has invited before many groups, including the World Economic Forum, Senate and House subcommittees, the NSA, CIA, and FBI.  He played himself in the PBS Nova television production, "The KGB, the Computer, and Me." For several years, he was a nightly commentator on the MSNBC television network.