Communications of the ACM
DEPARTMENT: Editor's letter
DEPARTMENT: Letters to the editor
DEPARTMENT: In the Virtual Extension
DEPARTMENT: BLOG@CACM
DEPARTMENT: CACM online
COLUMN: News
COLUMN: Viewpoints
SECTION: Practice
SECTION: Contributed articles
SECTION: Review article
SECTION: Research highlights
COLUMN: Last byte
SECTION: Virtual extension
The Financial Meltdown and Computing
For many of us, the past year has been one of the most unsettling in our lifetime. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, we watched communism collapse of its own dead weight. In late 2008, we saw capitalism nearly crumble. Lehman …DEPARTMENT: Letters to the editor
Computer Science Does Matter
It was disappointing that two competent computer scientists — Matthias Felleisen and Shiram Krishnamurthi — took such a narrow view in their Viewpoint "Why Computer Science Doesn't Matter" (July 2009).DEPARTMENT: In the Virtual Extension
In the Virtual Extension
Communications' Virtual Extension brings more quality articles to ACM members. These articles are now available in the ACM Digital Library.DEPARTMENT: BLOG@CACM
Saying Good-Bye to DBMSs, Designing Effective Interfaces
Michael Stonebraker discusses the problems with relational database management systems and possible solutions, and Jason Hong writes about interfaces and usable privacy and security.DEPARTMENT: CACM online
What You Read on Your Summer Vacation
Here are the most popular articles and sections from the Communications site this past summer as indicated by our latest site statistics.COLUMN: News
Entering a Parallel Universe
The promise of parallel computing has run afoul of the harsh reality of Amdahl's Law, which puts a ceiling on the benefit of converting sequential code to parallel code. The upshot is that parallelism will not necessarily reap …Medical Nanobots
Researchers working in medical nanorobotics are creating technologies that could lead to novel health-care applications, such as new ways of accessing areas of the human body that would otherwise be unreachable without invasive …Facing an Age-Old Problem
Researchers are addressing the computing challenges of older individuals, whose needs are different — and too often disregarded.Computer Science Meets Environmental Science
Scientists share knowledge and seek collaborators at computational sustainability conference.COLUMN: Viewpoints
Keeping Track of Telecommunications Surveillance
The creation of a statistical index of U.S. telecommunications surveillance activities and their results will benefit both civil liberties and law enforcement.Computing: The Fourth Great Domain of Science
Computing is as fundamental as the physical, life, and social sciences.How ICT Advances Might Help Developing Nations
Some predictions for technology developments, deployments, and the associated societal implications.The Long Road to Computer Science Education Reform
Viewing the factors impeding improvements to CS education from kindergarten through grade 12 from a policy perspective.Face the Inevitable, Embrace Parallelism
Hardware, software, and applications must all evolve in anticipation of the proliferation of parallelism.An Interview with Maurice Wilkes
Maurice Wilkes, the designer and builder of the EDSAC, passed away on Nov. 29 at age 97. He reflects on his career in this 2009 interview.SECTION: Practice
Reveling in Constraints
The Google Web Toolkit is an end-run around Web development obstacles.Monitoring and Control of Large Systems With MonALISA
MonALISA developers describe how it works, the key design principles behind it, and the biggest technical challenges in building it.Making Sense of Revision-Control Systems
All revision-control systems come with complicated sets of trade-offs. How do you find the best match between tool and team?SECTION: Contributed articles
Sound Index: Charts For the People, By the People
Mining the wisdom of the online crowds generates music business intelligence, identifying what's hot and what's not.What Intellectual Property Law Should Learn from Software
Software's close encounters with the law provide some lessons for our future.SECTION: Review article
The Status of the P Versus NP Problem
It's one of the fundamental mathematical problems of our time, and its importance grows with the rise of powerful computers.SECTION: Research highlights
Technical Perspective: Abstraction For Parallelism
Looking for some new insight into an old problem? The familiar problem of writing parallel applications and a fresh approach based on data abstraction allows some …Optimistic Parallelism Requires Abstractions
Writing software for multicore processors is greatly simplified if we could automatically parallelize sequential programs. Although auto-parallelization has been studied for many decades, it has succeeded only in a few application …Technical Perspective: They Do Click, Don't They?
You never click on advertisements received in spam or in phishing messages, do you? Nobody does. So, if that is true, why are we still getting an enormous amount of unsolicited …Spamalytics: An Empirical Analysis of Spam Marketing Conversion
We all receive spam advertisements, but few of us have encountered a person who admits to following through on an offer and making a purchase. And yet, the relentlessness by which such spam continually clogs Internet inboxes …COLUMN: Last byte
Puzzled: Solutions and Sources
Last month (August 2009, p. 104) we posted a trio of brainteasers, including one as yet unsolved, concerning probability and intuition.Future Tense: Confusions of the Hive Mind
Be cautious about the artificial intelligence approach to computer science. It is impossible to differentiate the actual achievement of AI from the degree to which people change …SECTION: Virtual extension
