A frozen 18.5 million-page snapshot of part of the Web has been created to enable and encourage meaningful and reproducible evaluation of Web search systems and techniques. The snapshot and associated evaluation methods are described and an invitation is extended to participate. Preliminary results are presented for an effectiveness comparison of six TREC systems working on the snapshot collection against five well-known Web search systems working over the current Web. The perceived tradeoff between the speed of development and the technical soundness of the resulting standards may not be relevant to the development of complex software standards. In many cases, software standards are burdened with defects, no matter how much time and effort is spent in their development.
Software standards are difficult to specify because they are written in imprecise English narrative.
The ambiguities in the specifications and the very large number of possible permutations make it difficult to test software for conformance to standards, and test tools are usually not provided by the standards developers. But we may be limited in the future deployment of information technology systems by the defects and complexity of the associated software. Ultimately, we will need a research agenda and new breakthroughs in the supporting base of science and engineering for specifying and testing complex software standards to sustain future IT innovations. We then propose to use the directionality of a spatial light modulator to increase the performance of a joint transfer correlator. This feature is utilized to increase the performance of a joint transform correlator and also prove it by optical experiment.