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Communications of the ACM

Table of Contents


Fair Access

Now that the sound and fury in the Open Access movement has quieted down a bit, we can revisit the arguments for open access. The basic question I would like to address is what ACM's stance should be with respect to open-access …
DEPARTMENT: BLOG@CACM

Likert-Type Scales, Statistical Methods, and Effect Sizes

Judy Robertson writes about researchers' use of the wrong statistical techniques to analyze attitude questionnaires.
COLUMN: News

Automating Scientific Discovery

Computer scientists are teaching machines to run experiments, make inferences from the data, and use the results to conduct new experiments.

Robots Like Us

Thanks to new research initiatives, autonomous humanoid robots are inching closer to reality.

Digitally Possessed

Virtual possessions play an increasingly important role in our daily lives. How we think about them and deal with them is changing the way we think and interact with others.

A Workshop Revival

The success of Germany's Dagstuhl Seminars has inspired a proliferation of Dagstuhl-like venues, especially in India.
DEPARTMENT: ACM election

ACM's 2012 General Election

Meet the candidates who introduce their plans — and stands — for the Association. Please take this opportunity to vote.
COLUMN: Law and technology

Design For Symbiosis

Promoting more harmonious paths for technological innovators and expressive creators in the Internet age.
COLUMN: Historical reflections

The Future of the Past

Reflections on the changing face of the history of computing.
COLUMN: Economic and business dimensions

Digitization and Copyright: Some Recent Evidence from Music

Examining the effects of stealing on producers and consumers.
COLUMN: Education

Programming Goes Back to School

Broadening participation by integrating game design into middle school curricula. View a video featuring author Alexander Repenning about using games to introduce teachers and students to programming.
COLUMN: Viewpoint

Programming the Global Brain

Considering how we can improve our understanding and utilization of the emerging human-computer network constituting the global brain.

Crossing the Software Education Chasm

An Agile approach that exploits cloud computing.
SECTION: Practice

Managing Technical Debt

Shortcuts that save money and time today can cost you down the road.

Idempotence Is Not a Medical Condition

Messages may be retried. Idempotence means that's OK.

Your Mouse Is a Database

Web and mobile applications are increasingly composed of asynchronous and real-time streaming services and push notifications.
SECTION: Contributed articles

Social Media Evolution of the Egyptian Revolution

Twitter sentiment was revealed, along with popularity of Egypt-related subjects and tweeter influence on the 2011 revolution.

An n-Gram Analysis of Communications 2000?2010

Applied to almost 3,500 articles it reveals computing's (and Communications') culture, identity, and evolution.
SECTION: Review articles

Comparative Analysis of Protein Networks: Hard Problems, Practical Solutions

Examining tools that provide valuable insight about molecular components within a cell.
SECTION: Research highlights

Technical Perspective: Best Algorithms + Best Computers = Powerful Match

Say you want to simulate the motion over time of the stars in a galaxy to learn about how galaxies formed and why the universe appears as it does. Is it feasible on a single processor? Sadly, even using today's fastest single …

A Massively Parallel Adaptive Fast Multipole Method on Heterogeneous Architectures

We describe a parallel fast multipole method for highly nonuniform distributions of particles. We employ both distributed memory parallelism and shared memory parallelism to rapidly evaluate two-body nonoscillatory potentials …

Technical Perspective: An Experiment in Determinism

It is widely held that parallel programming is far more difficult and error prone than writing sequential code. In particular, the myriad allowable interleavings of thread execution mean that different runs of a program can …

Efficient System-Enforced Deterministic Parallelism

We introduce a new parallel programming model addressing the issues facing current methods of executing parallel programs deterministically, and use Determinator, a proof-of-concept OS, to demonstrate the model's practicality …
COLUMN: Last byte

Puzzled: Designs on Square Grids

Welcome to, as usual, three new puzzles. However, unlike previous columns, where solutions to two were known (and included in the related Solutions and Sources in the next issue), this time expect to see solutions to all three …