Communications of the ACM
The news archive provides access to past news stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
March 2010
From ACM News
Designer Lauded For Guidance in 'accessible' Web Sites
Medical communications expert Alicia Lane-Outlaw has been recognized in part for her expertise in making Web sites accessible to people with disabilities as well as mobile phone users.
From ACM News
Maryland and Arkansas Teams Win ORNL Global Venture Challenge
Graduate students from the University of Arkansas and the University of Maryland received first place at the 2010 Global Venture Challenge that was hosted at Oak Ridge National Laboratory March 24-26.
From ACM News
The Man Who Made a Copy of Himself
Roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro, one of the world's most brilliant—and controversial—android makers, has built android copies of a child, a woman, and now, himself.
From ACM News
Doing Business in China Getting Tougher For U.s. Companies
China's allure is stronger than ever. But a country already known for obstacles is becoming less welcoming to foreign businesses. Some American companies are reviewing their commitments to China.
From ACM TechNews
Funding For Wwii Code-Breaking Centre Bletchley Park
The U.K. government has provided a 250,000-pound grant to repair Bletchley Park, where British mathematicians, including Alan Turing, worked to break Germany's Enigma codes in World War II.
From ACM TechNews
Imec Team Shows Wireless 'thought-to-Text' Cap
A prototype of a device that enables people with motor disabilities to communicate with just their thoughts was on display at the Medtech Conference in Stuttgart, Germany.
From ACM TechNews
Laser Security for the Internet
Jacob Scheuer at Tel Aviv University's School of Electrical Engineering has developed an information security system that acts as a type of key bearer.
From ACM TechNews
Html 5 Could Challenge Flash
The Adobe Flash plugin has maintained its status as one of the most common ways for developers to create complex interactive Web features, but experts point to new browser technologies such as the HTML 5 open Web standard as…
From ACM News
Nasa Mars Rover Getting Smarter as It Gets Older
Software uploaded to NASA's Mars exploration rover Opportunity gives the rover the ability to make its own choices about whether to make additional observations of rocks that it spots on arrival at a new location.
From ACM TechNews
pc Students Try to Send a Spherical Robot to the Moon
Students at the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya's Castelldefels School of Technology are working with Team FREDNET to place a small robot named PicoRover on the Moon.
From ACM News
Tjx Hacker Gets 20 Years in Prison
Convicted TJX hacker Albert Gonzalez was sentenced to 20 years in prison on Thursday for leading a gang of cyberthieves who stole more than 90 million credit and debit card numbers from TJX and other retailers.
The sentence…From ACM News
Iphone App to Sidestep At&t
For a little $1 iPhone app, Line2 sure has the potential to shake up an entire industry.
It can save you money. It can make calls where AT&T’s signal is weak, like indoors. It can turn an iPod Touch into a full-blown cellphone…From ICT Results
Getting Families and Friends Together Again, Virtually
Digital media designed for individuals has hastened the demise of collective social events, but it could enable their revival as well.
From ACM News
Dell Says India May Become New Technology Manufacturing Hub
Dell Inc. Chief Executive Officer Michael Dell said in a conversation with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh that the south Asian nation is poised to become a technology manufacturing center.
From ACM News
Improved Nanogenerators Enable Self-Powered Nanosensors
By combining a new generation of piezoelectric nanogenerators with two types of nanowire sensors, researchers have created what they believe are the first self-powered nanometer-scale sensing devices that draw power from the…
From ACM News
Swarms of Helicopter Robots Could Create Huge 3-D Displays
The Flyfire project at MIT's SENSEable City Laboratory is creating tiny LED-equipped helicopters that will move in concert to create dramatic, free-form displays.
From ACM TechNews
Fast, Strong Deltabot Moves Forward in the Robotics Market
A research team at the University of Waterloo has built DeltaBot, a robot that uses cables for arms instead of rigid components and has a cylinder in the middle to keep the cables in tension.
From ACM TechNews
Law Enforcement Lobbies Hard For Icann Change
U.S. and U.K. law enforcement officials are lobbying ICANN to impose more stringent regulations on registrars for generic top-level domains.
From ACM TechNews
A System That's Worth Its Salt
Researchers at MIT and in Korea have developed an approach to water desalination that could lead to small, portable units powered by solar cells or batteries that produce enough fresh water to supply a family or small village…
From ACM TechNews
Researchers Give pdate on Road to Parallelism
University of Illinois researchers have taken several small steps toward developing new parallel programming models to tap the many-core processors of the future.
From ACM TechNews
Move to Incorporate Computing in Math Curriculum
The first official public draft of the Common Core State Standards Initiative's K-12 standards has been released.
From ACM TechNews
3-D Haptics to Help Surgeons Feel the Cutting Edge
Deakin University robotics engineer James Mullins is leading a research effort to develop haptics technology with the goal of making a simulation as realistic as possible for use in medical training exercises.
From ACM TechNews
Legislators Propose International Cybercrime Cooperation Laws
The recently introduced International Cybercrime Reporting and Cooperation Act would require the U.S. government to study the cybercrime policies of other nations and either aid or punish those countries according to the findings…
From ACM TechNews
New Statistical Method Could Cut Computation Time for Genetic Studies
UCLA researchers have developed a new computational strategy for genome-wide association studies, which enables the scanning of up to a million genetic markers in thousands of individuals and corrects for population structure…
From ACM TechNews
Gender Discrimination Linked to Poor Project Management
A new Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology report suggests that technically oriented women may face gender discrimination in their jobs at high-tech firms in part because of mismanaged projects.
From ACM News
Google's Brin Talks About China Gamble
Behind Google Inc.'s dramatic decision to shutter its China-based search engine this week was co-founder Sergey Brin's change of heart about the compromises required to do business in a land that was increasingly reminding him…
From ACM News
Clinical Trials Now Using Social Media to Attract Trial Participants
Clinic sites in 13 cities across the U.S. are looking for men to participate in an HIV vaccine study and are using social media to help reach participants where they are, which is increasingly online.
From ACM TechNews
Spain Positioned in Europe as a Sponsor of Open Source Software
The Vulcano Project is a collaborative effort between Spanish higher education institutions, technology transfer centers, and industrial partners to develop open source software with the reliability and quality of proprietary…
From ACM News
Cyber Attack on U.s. Firms, Google Traced to China
An Obama administration official told The Washington Times the U.S. was able, with some confidence, to link the cyber attack on Google and other U.S. companies to Chinese government organs.
From ACM News
Artists Mine Scientific Clues to Paint Intricate Portraits of the Past
Artists are still painting things they cannot see in real life. Rather than being separated from their subjects by thousands of miles, though, today’s artists are separated by thousands of years—even millions of them. Fortunately…