Read a short article about computer science

Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems.

It is frequently described as the systematic study of algorithmic processes that create, describe, and transform information. Computer science has many sub-fields; some, such as computer graphics, emphasize the computation of specific results, while others, such as computational complexity theory, study the properties of computational problems. Still others focus on the challenges in implementing computations.

The general public sometimes confuses computer science with careers that deal with computers (such as information technology), or think that it relates to their own experience of computers, which typically involves activities such as gaming, web-browsing, and word-processing. However, the focus of computer science is more on understanding the properties of the programs used to implement software such as games and web-browsers, and using that understanding to create new programs or improve existing ones.

Listen to an interview of James Heather, a lecturer in computer science at the University of Surry, speaking about his invention and fill in the gaps

1. We have an election in South Australia coming up in March and a federal election next year some time, all of which makes one ask if there is a better way of doing it using the new ………….., and one which minimizes corruption, as seen in too many places these days.

2. So the system as a whole can recover that ordering and find out how you voted, but no individual ……………. of the system can.

3. You can see on the …………. what you're supposed to be voting for, and on the right-hand side you put your X, then you tear it apart.

4. So if we were running this in a general election we would have one machine in each of the major party …………… and then one in the United Nations, something like that, so that in order for the system as a whole to decrypt your vote and find out who you voted for, all of them would need to cooperate.

5. She is my mark of how ………….. and how ……….. a system needs to be in order to be accessible to the general public.

6. We're hoping that in a few years time this will see …………..

7. There's no ………. when a vote comes in over the Internet from an unsupervised location that somebody wasn't standing behind the voter with a baseball bat insisting on them voting in a particular way.

8. So when you vote in the ………… it will then go over the Internet to the central database of votes, and it's the fact that it's encrypted in transit that will protect against that kind of hacking.

Answer the questions

1. What kind of invention has James Heather made? Describe it.

2. What are the advantages of Heather’s invention?

3. Is it possible for ordinary public to use James Heather’s invention?

4. Is it reasonable to call the invention «electronic voting»? When will his system be applied?

5. What is your opinion about James Heather’s invention?