Communications of the ACM
The opinion archive provides access to past opinion stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
January 2013
From ACM News
'hashtag' Is the 2012 Word of the Year
In its 23rd annual words of the year vote, the American Dialect Society voted "hashtag" as the word of the year for 2012. Hashtag refers to the practice used on Twitter for marking topics or making commentary by means of a hash…
From ACM TechNews
Google Glass Features and Apps Still in Flux
In an interview, Google Glass project leader Babak Parviz discusses where the wearable device is heading in the near future.
From ACM TechNews
The Places You'll Go
In an interview, Google chief technology advocate Michael Jones discusses new technology in digital mapping and how it will change travel. Jones says the major change in mapping over the last 10 years is that it has become personal…
From ACM Opinion
Six Innovators to Watch in 2013
In the spirit of the post-holiday season, allow me to present my final list of 2012: six innovators who are pushing technology in fresh directions, some to solve stubborn problems, others to make our lives a little fuller.
From ACM Opinion
The Future of Medicine Is Now
In our era of instant gratification, the world of medicine seems like an outlier.
From ACM Opinion
The Legacy of Next Lives On in Os X
In the 1990s, Apple struggled to bring the original Mac OS—originally written in 1984 for the resource-constrained Macintosh 128K machine—up to modern operating system standards.
From ACM Careers
5 Nerds to Watch in 2013
When Steve Jobs died, there was a lot of talk about who would be the next Steve Jobs. But the truth is, rarely can one person reshape the future. And breakthroughs are almost never the work of corporate titans.
From ACM Opinion
The Father of Fractals
In nature,technology and art the most common form of regularity is repetition: a single element repeated many times, as on a tile floor. But another form is possible, in which smaller and smaller copies of a pattern are successively…
From ACM Opinion
What Turned Jaron Lanier Against the Web?
I couldn't help thinking of John Le Carré's spy novels as I awaited my rendezvous with Jaron Lanier in a corner of the lobby of the stylish W Hotel just off Union Square in Manhattan.
From ACM Opinion
2012: What We Learned
There's a natural inclination for people at the end of each year to look back, take stock and try to draw some grand meaning or life lessons out of the events of the past 12 months. This is a particularly risky and difficult…
From ACM Opinion
10 Raspberry Pi Creations That Show How Amazing the Tiny Pc Can Be
The Raspberry Pi, the $35 credit card-size computer, has lived an interesting life despite being less than a year old.
From ACM Opinion
2013: Talk Gets Cheaper, Tv Gets Smarter
Personal technology never stops changing.
From ACM Opinion
Marking the Birth of the Modern-Day Internet
A long time ago, my colleagues and I became part of a great adventure, teamed with a small band of scientists and technologists in the U.S. and elsewhere.
From ACM Opinion
How To Charge Your Laptop
Whether they're in our computers, cell phones, or cars, the only time we think about batteries is when they're almost dead and we need to find some place to charge them—and then we're not thinking nice things.
From ACM Opinion
How Big Data Can Solve America's Gun Problem
Big data might have stopped the massacres in Newtown, Aurora, and Oak Creek.
From ACM Opinion
Five Developments That Could Rewire Your World
Google is good at doing amazing.
From Communications of the ACM
The Apple-Samsung Lawsuits
In search of a middle ground in the intellectual property wars.
From Communications of the ACM
How We Build Things: . . . and Why Things Are 90% Complete
It seems to be a law of software development that things always take longer than we expect. When a project manager talks to a designer, programmer, or tester and tries to get a sense of how "complete" the assigned task is…
From Communications of the ACM
Beyond Location: Data Security in the 21st Century
Viewing evolving data security issues as engineering problems to be solved.
From Communications of the ACM
What College Could Be Like
Imagining an optimized education model.
From Communications of the ACM
Conference-Journal Hybrids
Considering how to combine the best elements of conferences and journals.
From Communications of the ACM
Five Lessons from Really Good History
Lessons learned from four award-winning books on the history of information technology.