Communications of the ACM
The opinion archive provides access to past opinion stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
March 2013
From ACM Opinion
Rethinking Objects and Form Are Key to 3D Printing Revolution
3D printing has already changed the game for manufacturing specialized products such as medical devices but the real revolution will come when designers start to rethink the shapes of objects.
From ACM Opinion
Steve Mann: My 'augmediated' Life
Back in 2004, I was awakened early one morning by a loud clatter. I ran outside, only to discover that a car had smashed into the corner of my house.
From ACM Opinion
Why the Pencil Is Still the Most Important Tool For Digital Designers
Looking for digital inspiration, or staring at an empty computer screen?
From ACM Opinion
Can Your Boss Read Your Email?
Harvard faculty members responded with shock after the Boston Globe revealed that theuniversity’s administration had searched 16 faculty deans’ email accounts to try to determine the source of a media leak during a cheating scandal…
From ACM Opinion
Kim Dotcom Is the Anti-Zuckerberg: Share Nothing, Encrypt Everything, Be Happy
Appearing like a retro-futuristic apparition, digitally transmitted through pneumatic tubes from a future that was but will never be, the disembodied head of Kim Dotcom, the Osama bin Laden of file sharing, bobbed and hovered…
From ACM Opinion
How Samsung Broke Away from the Android Pack
As successful as Samsung's Galaxy S franchise is now, it's easy to forget the Korean consumer electronics giant's first attempt at the American smartphone market was met with an apathetic shrug.
From ACM Opinion
Homunculism
According to Wikipedia, Ray Kurzweil is an "American author, inventor, futurist, and director of engineering at Google. Aside from futurology, he is involved in such fields as optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech…
From ACM Opinion
Sxsw: Google's Amit Singhal Talks Natural-Language Search, Mobile
How do you build a search engine that's more attuned to natural language, capable of divining what you mean, and giving back what you want?
From ACM Opinion
Tim Berners-Lee on the Making of New Worlds
The Internet should be open.
From ACM Opinion
Miyamoto: I Couldn't Have Imagined Where We've Ended p
Where do you go when you're arguably history’s most famous video game designer in a medium that's witnessed explosive growth since its halcyon days?
From ACM News
Everything We Know About What Data Brokers Know About You
Data companies are scooping up enormous amounts of information about almost every American. They sell information about whether you're pregnant or divorced or trying to lose weight, about how rich you are and what kinds of cars…
From ACM Opinion
Why Private Companies Won't Make p For Cuts in Government Science Funding
The budget cuts that took effect last week could wipe out as much as $54 billion in federal funding of science, research, and innovation over the next five years, calculates the American Association for the Advancement of Science…
From ACM Opinion
Lars Rasmussen: The Brains Behind Facebook's Future
For a man that made his career out of helping millions of people find their way around, Lars Rasmussen is frank about his own navigational shortcomings.
From ACM Opinion
The Big-Data Interview: Making Sense of the New World Order
In April 2003, British and U.S. researchers declared the Human Genome Project complete.
From ACM Opinion
Google Glass: Is It a Threat to Our Privacy?
If you haven't heard about the excitement around Google Glass—the head-mounted glasses that can shoot video, take pictures, and broadcast what you're seeing to the world—then here's an idea of the interest in them.
From ACM Opinion
6 Things I Want to Do with Nfc
Tapping your phone on a console to pay for fries and a Coke is cool. Yet until the stars align, it's not how you'll be using NFC, the Near Field Communications standard that gets devices talking to one another quickly and in…
From ACM Opinion
Shedding More Light on National Security Letters
Our users trust Google with a lot of very important data, whether it’s emails, photos, documents, posts or videos.
From ACM Opinion
Are We Really Facing Cyberwar?
A few weeks ago I was standing by a railway track in the small town of Gaithersburg in Maryland as a CSX freight train blasted through the level crossing; its horn blaring and bells sounding out a warning.
From ACM Opinion
Eye-Tracking Smartphones Have Arrived. What About the Privacy Implications?
Last March, I wrote in Slate about eye-tracking, which could allow computers and smartphones of the future to collect information not only about what we read, but how we read it.
From ACM Opinion
Computer Interfaces: Tech's Next Great Frontier
Consider the tongue. It's sensitive yet muscular, packed with taste buds and nerves, and without its acrobatic ability humans wouldn’t be able to eat or talk. It's also our most versatile sense organ, and some computer engineers…
From ACM Opinion
Google Services Should Not Require Real Names: Vint Cerf
In the face of increasing government-led crackdowns on social media, Google Inc. should not force Internet users to reveal their real names for some services, including its Google+ social network, said Vint Cerf, a senior Google…
From ACM Opinion
What to Do After You've Been Hacked
Evernote became the latest member of the "we’ve been hacked" club. And the thing is, what was once a pretty exclusive club now lets just about everyone in these days. I’m a member too.
From ACM Opinion
The Best Books About Biotechnology
I've spent the last few weeks creating a syllabus for myself on the world—people, techniques, theory, history—of biotechnology. I've talked with some scholars, accepted some Amazon recommendations, and done some rummaging around…
From ACM Opinion
The Dangerous Logic of the Bradley Manning Case
After 1,000 days in pretrial detention, Private Bradley Manning offered a modified guilty plea for passing classified materials to WikiLeaks. But his case is far from over—not for Manning, and not for the rest of the country.
From ACM Opinion
Why Teens Are Tiring of Facebook
To understand where teens like to spend their virtual time nowadways, just watch them on their smartphones.
From ACM Opinion
Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow on 'homeland,' Printed Guns, and Heart Hacking
I had the pleasure of spending some time with Cory Doctorow on Feb. 25 at the Jefferson Hotel here in the nation's capital.
From ACM Opinion
A Museum's Games Are Not on Pedestals
Video games, as their name suggests, combine the ancient human practice of formal play with moving pictures, a younger form.
From ACM Opinion
Mobile Computing Is Just Getting Started
Mobile computers are spreading faster than any other consumer technology in history.
From ACM Opinion
Wing Surveys Her New Opportunity
A month into her new job as Microsoft vice president and head of Microsoft Research International, Jeannette Wing found time for a wide-ranging discussion about her new role and what she sees ahead.
From ACM Opinion
Nate Silver Presents Forecasting Work as Antidote to 'terrible' Political Pundits
Celebrated political forecaster Nate Silver has shot to fame by letting the data speak loudly about elections.