Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
December 2010
From ACM TechNews
Su Receives $3.4 Million Federal Grant to Benefit Women in Sciences
Syracuse University recently received a five-year, $3.4 million U.S. National Science Foundation grant to study ways to attract and retain more female professors in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields…
From ACM TechNews
Privacy Project ses Cryptography to Reduce Shared Info
An electronic wallet that encrypts the owner's personal information is being developed by IBM researchers. The device will only allow the sharing of information that is strictly necessary to complete a transaction.
From ACM TechNews
Python 3.2 Tweaked For Parallel Development
Python's developers plan to offer greater support for writing multithreaded applications in the 3.2 version of the open source programming language. The pre-release version offers functions that could make concurrent programming…
From ACM News
War for Tech Talent Hits 'White Hot' New York Startup Scene
It's a good time to be a software programmer in New York City.
From ACM News
Rensselaer Research Leader Francine Berman Named Fellow of Ieee
Cyber infrastructure pioneer Francine Berman, the vice president for research at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has been named a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers for her leadership in high-performance…
From ACM News
Doe Awards Nist Millions of Supercomputing Hours, Aims For 'concrete Results'
The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded a NIST team of researchers millions of hours of supercomputing time to analyze concrete flow, with the aim of improving the common material, which is the basis for a $100 billion industry…
From ACM News
Task Force Praises Bowles-Simpson Report's Commitment to Research and Education
The Task Force on American Innovation commends the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform for recommending that the United States make predictable and sustained federal investments in research and education a…
From ACM TechNews
Sartre Car Platoon Road Tests to Begin
The Safe Road Trains for the Environment (SARTRE) project in Europe has begun to integrate software and hardware into two vehicles that will be used in its first on-road tests before the end of the year.
From ACM News
New Application Allows Scientists Easy Access to Government Data
Computer scientists within the Tetherless World Research Constellation at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed an application that provides scientists with easy and direct access to data sets within Data.gov, the U…
From ACM TechNews
How Rare Is that Fingerprint? Computational Forensics Provides the First Clues
University at Buffalo researchers have developed a method to computationally determine how rare a particular fingerprint is and how likely it is to belong to a specific crime suspect.
From ACM News
.S. Government, Businesses Are Poorly Prepared for Cyber Attacks, Experts Say at AAAS
The United States is ill-prepared to defend its vital infrastructure against a cyber attack, a former top cybersecurity official said during a recent panel discussion at AAAS.
From ACM News
Umd Launches Maryland Cybersecurity Center
The path to assuring the security of vital cyber networks lies in interdisciplinary collaboration of IT and legal, policy, business and behavioral experts, co-director Patrick O'Shea said at the launch of the University of Maryland's…
From ACM News
Collective Memory
An MIT project provides a way to preserve information in constantly changing networks, without resorting to a shared server.
From ACM News
Next Generation of Algorithms Inspired By Problem-Solving Ants
An ant colony is the last place you'd expect to find a maths whiz, but University of Sydney researchers have shown that the humble ant is capable of solving difficult mathematical problems.
From ACM News
Military Bans Disks, Threatens Courts-Martial to Stop New Leaks
It’s too late to stop WikiLeaks from publishing thousands more classified documents, nabbed from the Pentagon’s secret network. But the U.S. military is telling its troops to stop using CDs, DVDs, thumb drives and every other…
From ACM News
Pa College: Social Media Blackout Wins Converts
Forty-two percent of students responding to in-house surveys at Harrisburg University of Science and Technology said they supported a weeklong blackout of social media sites like Twitter and Facebook on campus.
From ACM TechNews
Diminishing Returns? U.s. Science Productivity Continues to Decline
U.S. science research efficiency is trending downward, according to a National Science Foundation study. U.S. research output, as measured by scientific publication trends, is declining despite dramatically increased research…
From ACM Opinion
The 24-Hour Athenian Democracy
"I'm aware of your need to stay anonymous, but I have to be able to describe the scope of this movement. Can any of you tell me where you're typing from?"
From ACM TechNews
It Hiring Projected to Increase in Q1 2011
Information technology (IT) employment is expected to rise next year as 11 percent of 1,400 CIOs from U.S. companies surveyed by Robert Half Technology said they plan to increase IT hiring in the first quarter of 2011.
From ACM TechNews
U.s. Students Show Significant Gains in Math, Science Results
U.S. math and science scores for students significantly improved on the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development's Program for International Student Assessment since the last assessment in 2006.
From ACM TechNews
Elusive Spintronics Success Could Lead to Single Chip For Processing and Memory
The proactive control of magnetically polarized current has been demonstrated for the first time, raising the possibility of combining computer memory and processing power on the same chip.
From ACM TechNews
Alto Protocol Could Improve Peer-to-Peer Networks
The Internet Engineering Task Force is developing Application-Layer Traffic Optimization (ALTO), a peer-to-peer system designed to improve the performance of client applications and help resolve disputes between Internet service…
From ACM TechNews
Ua-Linked Effort Aims to Retool Workings of Net
Researchers and colleagues from 10 institutions are collaborating on the Named Data Networking project to restructure the Internet's architecture, with changes focused on improving performance, security, and usability.
From ACM News
Iphone Games: Kids nknowingly Spend Real Money in 'smurf's Village'
"The Smurfs' Village," a game for the iPhone and other Apple gadgets, was released a month ago and quickly became the highest-grossing application in the iTunes store. Yet it's free to download.
From ACM News
Supercomputing Research Opens Doors for Drug Discovery
A quicker and cheaper technique to scan molecular databases developed at the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory could put scientists on the fast track to developing new drug treatments.
From ACM News
Diminishing Returns?: U.s. Science Productivity Continues to Drop
A historic downward shift in U.S. research efficiency is described in a new report on science publication trends, showing that while funding rose, the quantity of research yielded, measured by an analysis of published scientific…
From ACM News
Technique Turns Computer Chip Defects Into An Advantage
Physicists at Ohio State University have discovered that tiny defects inside a computer chip can be used to tune the properties of key atoms in the chip.
From ACM News
Avant-Garde Music Offers A Gateway to Artificial Intelligence
Stretching their boundaries, artificial intelligence researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have teamed up with musicians on an unlikely project: a digital conductor of improvised avant-garde performances.
From ACM News
Assange's 'Poison Pill' File Impossible to Stop, Expert Says
The Poison Pill. The Doomsday Files. Or simply, The Insurance.
From ACM News
Apple to Tap Intel's Graphics For Future Macbooks
Apple has decided to use Intel's upcoming Sandy Bridge processors in its MacBook line, a transition that will occur in 2011, squeezing out Nvidia's graphics processors in at least some models of the popular laptops, sources…