Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
February 2011
From ACM News
Saudi Women in .s. Seek Segregation on Facebook
A 22,000-member group for Saudis studying in the US on the social networking website Facebook has been split into two groups, one for women and one for men. The split follows a request from the group’s female members who wanted…
From ACM News
Web Words That Lure the Readers
The Huffington Post has hired veteran journalists to beef up its news coverage. But a significant chunk of its readers come instead for articles like one published last week: "Chelsy Davy & Prince Harry: So Happy Together?"
From ACM News
Print Me a Stradivarius
The industrial revolution of the late 18th century made possible the mass production of goods, thereby creating economies of scale which changed the economy—and society—in ways that nobody could have imagined at the time.…
From ACM News
Thought Police? DARPA Wants to Know How Stories Influence Human Mind, Actions
Since it sounds like a not-so-basic- science fiction script, you won't be surprised that the scientific masterminds at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency are behind it. DARPA in a nutshell wants to know about how…
From ACM TechNews
Computing Science Rewriting the Program to Get Girls in the Game
University of Alberta researchers have found that high school girls become more interested in computer science if video game creation is incorporated into the lesson plans.
From ACM TechNews
Hp's Open Innovation Strategy: Leveraging Academic Labs
Hewlett-Packard Labs launched the Innovation Research Program as part of its effort to embrace ideas and technologies that come from other sources, and to enable other researchers to adopt its technology.
From ACM TechNews
Can 'Encrypted Blobs' Help With Secure Cloud Computing?
IBM researchers say cloud computing security can be improved by using fully homomorphic encryption to send data as encrypted blobs, which can be understood without actually having to be decrypted.
From ACM News
Heading Into the Bonus Round
A bonus round is something one usually associates with the likes of a TV game show, not a pioneering deep space mission. "We are definitely in the bonus round," said Stardust-NExT Project Manager Tim Larson of NASA's Jet Propulsion…
From ACM News
Extracting Business Ideas From It Logs
Many companies' IT infrastructure is automatically gathering a comprehensive picture of their whole business, in the form of everything from Web server and phone logs to internal network traffic to the email system.
From ACM News
California High Court: Retailers Can't Request Cardholders' Zip Code
California's high court ruled Thursday that retailers don't have the right to ask customers for their ZIP code while completing credit card transactions, saying that doing so violates a cardholders' right to protect his or her…
From ACM News
Pentagon
In the past three years, America’s military and intelligence agencies have spent more than $125 million on computer models that are supposed to forecast political unrest.
From ACM News
Researchers Inventory a World of Information
Data is the common currency that unites all fields of science.
From ACM News
Innovation Far Removed From the Lab
Daniel Reetz loves trash bins. A big one in Fargo, N.D., was where he found most of the materials he used to build a scanner that was fast enough to scan a 400-page book in about 20 minutes without cracking the binding.
From ACM TechNews
Major Step Taken Towards an Open and Shared Digital Brain Atlasing Framework
International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility researchers have developed a standard toolset that allows different types of neuroscience data to be compared in the form of a digital mouse brain.
From ACM TechNews
Driving Blind at Daytona
Virginia Tech researchers are competing in the National Federation of the Blind's Blind Driver challenge, aimed at developing a car that blind people can drive independently.
From ACM TechNews
Making Bad Search Results History
Microsoft researchers are developing personalized search engines that can help users find Web sites by analyzing their past search queries.
From ACM News
For Watson Technology, What Happens After 'jeopardy!'?
Wouldn't it be nice to have your very own supercomputer in your pocket?
From ACM TechNews
Cloud Services Could Bolster National Cyber Security
U.S. cybersecurity could be significantly fortified by a move to cloud computing, which would focus cybersecurity on a small number of service providers rather than individual businesses, according to the Center for Strategic…
From ACM TechNews
Roaches Inspire Robotics
Tel Aviv University researchers are studying the way cockroaches move to develop more advanced robotic technology. Although robots have been based on cockroaches in the past, the walking techniques were influenced by observation…
From ACM TechNews
Female Scientists Face New Career Challenges
A new Cornell University report examines female representation in the sciences and the factors that affect the inequalities in the field between men and women.
From ACM News
Behind-the-Scenes with Ibm's 'jeopardy!' Computer, Watson
His name is Watson. He's bad with puns. Great at math. And, next week, he will compete on the game show "Jeopardy!" against real, live, breathing, thinking humans.
From ACM News
.s. Has Secret Tools to Force Internet on Dictators
When Hosni Mubarak shut down Egypt’s internet and cellphone communications, it seemed that all U.S. officials could do was ask him politely to change his mind.
From ACM TechNews
Mozilla Working on Making Its Applications 'Attack-Aware'
Mozilla is developing a system that will notify users of its Web applications when those applications are being attacked. The system will use a blacklist to identify unusual user actions that are caused by attacks against the…
From ACM TechNews
Coming Next: A Supercomputer Saves Your Life
IBM's Watson supercomputer uses parallel computing to connect highly specialized pieces of software to work simultaneously to answer questions posed by the Jeopardy! game show.
From ACM TechNews
Smart Servers Spot and Block Botnet Attacks
New software will enable a computer server to determine when it is under a distributed denial of service attack and block traffic from culpable Internet protocol addresses until the threat subsides.
From ACM News
Mind vs. Machine
In the race to build computers that can think like humans, the proving ground is the Turing Test—an annual battle between the world’s most advanced artificial-intelligence programs and ordinary people.
From ACM News
Rediscovering Wwii's Female 'computers'
In all the interviews and conversations, it hadn't come up. To the sisters, it was just a job they'd held a long time ago, when they were teens with a talent for numbers.
From ACM Opinion
Susan Wojcicki: The Most Important Googler You've Never Heard Of
Yes, Google started in Susan Wojcicki's rented garage. But in her mind, that might be the single least important fact about her long and deep relationship with the Internet giant.
From ACM News
Billboards Join Wired Age
Billboards and posters are one of world's oldest forms of advertising. Now, some marketers and start-ups say wireless technology could revamp outdoor advertising by bringing interactivity and pay-for-performance models.
From ACM TechNews
Next-Generation Supercomputers
Supercomputing performance upgrades are unlikely to be as spectacular in the next decade as they were in the last two, writes University of Notre Dame professor Peter Kogge.