Communications of the ACM
The opinion archive provides access to past opinion stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
February 2011
From ACM News
How We Know
James Gleick's first chapter has the title "Drums That Talk." It explains the concept of information by looking at a simple example.
From ACM Opinion
Have You Driven a Smartphone Lately?
I’m barreling along a rural Michigan highway at 75 miles per hour in a gray Ford Taurus X when I glance down to check a number on a screen.
From ACM Opinion
Gaming Social Networks For Influence and Propaganda
For a while now I have argued that the contemporary operating environment has two dimensions: "the first is the actual tactical field of battle in which bullets fly, bombs explode and blood is shed; the second is the virtual…
From ACM Opinion
Tech Revolutionaries
The Arab Revolt shows that Google's and Twitter's corporate values are better than Facebook's.
From ACM Opinion
How the Internet Gets Inside s
When the first Harry Potter book appeared, in 1997, it was just a year before the universal search engine Google was launched. And so Hermione Granger, that charming grind, still goes to the Hogwarts library and spends hours…
From ACM Opinion
Cubelets: Modular, Affordable Robotics For Kids and Students
Robotics can be a tricky subject to teach children, and it's hard to know where to start. Cubelets is a system of modular cubes that each have one use, interaction, or behavior, and by linking them together you can create…
From ACM Opinion
My Puny Human Brain
Jeopardy! genius Ken Jennings on what it's like to play against a supercomputer.
From ACM News
An Html For Numbers
The Age of Data is just around the corner, right where it has been for years. As someone who spends a lot his time creating visualizations, I've been hoping for this day to come for a very long time.
From ACM Opinion
Gadget Politics: Why Tech Fans Share the Love and Hate
I’ve been a consumer technology critic for over 10 years. During that time, hate mail has been part of my job every day.
From ACM Opinion
A Worthwhile Contest For Artificial Intelligence
If IBM's Watson machine defeats people on TV's Jeopardy this week, does that mean that computers are smarter than humans? Maybe not. But the performance could tell us something far more interesting.
From ACM Opinion
Vint Cerf Re-Thinks the Internet in Stanford Talk
To most, a wine cellar is just a cool place to keep some vintage vino. For Vint Cerf, the revered former Stanford engineering professor and graduate of the university, it is a portal into the future.
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 Opinion
Nasa's Kepler Astronomer Geoff Marcy Discusses Latest Exoplanet Discoveries
Does life exist anywhere in the universe except on Earth?
From ACM News
Bipartisan Alliance Beats Back Patriot Act Sneak Attack in House Vote
Tuesday in the U.S. House of Representatives, an unlikely alliance of House Democrats and Republicans stood up for civil liberties and successfully beat back a fast-track attempt to reauthorize the USA PATRIOT Act without…
From ACM Opinion
Forgive Me, Father, For I Have Linked
Our Father, who art in pixels, linked be Thy name, Thy Web site come, Thy Net be done, on Explorer as it is on Firefox.
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 Opinion
World Web War I: Why Egypt's Digital prising Is Different
We've seen cyberwar declared before, but the one playing out in Egypt is my own candidate for World Web War I.
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 Opinion
Keep Assange Free, Keep Internet Free
It is time for the United States to drop the case against WikiLeaks. Pressing forward with efforts to prosecute an Internet publisher at home while standing up for an open Internet in Egypt and the world at large is an increasingly…
From ACM Opinion
What Is Artificial Intelligence?
In the category "What Do You Know?," for $1 million: This four-year-old upstart the size of a small R.V. has digested 200 million pages of data about everything in existence and it means to give a couple of the world’s quickest…
From ACM Opinion
Space Stasis
What the strange persistence of rockets can teach us about innovation.
From ACM Opinion
Bing Is Copying Your Clicks, Not Google's Results
Google's results can be accessed because Bing is snooping on IE users.
From ACM TechNews
How Watson Works: A Conversation With Eric Brown, IBM Research Manager
IBM's deep Question Answering system, codenamed Watson, will compete against humans in Jeopardy! tournaments in February. IBM's Eric Brown says that Jeopardy! is a benchmark for driving and measuring the progress of the DeepQA…
From ACM News
Was Egypt Oversold as Top Offshoring Spot?
Before Egypt turned off the Internet, the country had received increasingly high marks from leading analysis firms as a promising offshore outsourcing destination, despite the nation's political risk.
From ACM Opinion
Beware the Cyber War Boomerang?
Stuxnet, most sophisticated cyber weapon ever developed, could turn on vulnerable U.S. infrastructure.
From Communications of the ACM
The Need For a New Graduation Rite of Passage
A new organization is being proposed that is solely intended to promote and recognize the ethical and moral behavior in graduates of computing-related degree programs as they transition to careers of service to society.
From Communications of the ACM
The Growing Harm of Not Teaching Malware
Revisiting the need to educate professionals to defend against malware in its various guises.
From Communications of the ACM
From Science to Engineering
A series of recent reports claim the U.S. education system is in a very severe crisis; others suggest the crisis is "overblown." An explanation that…
From Communications of the ACM
Against Cyberterrorism
Cyberterrorism is a concept that appears recurrently in contemporary media. This coverage is particularly interesting if one believes, as I do, that…
From Communications of the ACM
Forest For the Trees
With the amount of disk space available to the modern programmer, and the lack of parental supervision in most workplaces, the time for programmers to "clean your room!" and…