Communications of the ACM
The opinion archive provides access to past opinion stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
March 2011
From ACM Opinion
Have Computers Made Architects Less Disciplined?
We generally assume that technological advances save time, boost efficiency, increase productivity, and so on. Once we get used to the latest conveniences, we can't imagine life without them. I've been writing a book chronicling…
From ACM Opinion
The Anti-Predictor: A Chat with Mathematical Sociologist Duncan Watts
The Yahoo! Labs scientist and author explains why the "law of the few" is bunk, why history is full of failed hedgehogs, and why we can't make good predictions about just those things we most want to predict.
From ACM Opinion
Why the Basis of the niverse Isn't Matter or Energy
Information flows everywhere, through wires and genes, through brain cells and quarks. But while it may appear ubiquitous to us now, until recently we had no awareness of what information was or how it worked.
From ACM Opinion
Three Cheers For the Judge Who Smacked Down Google Books
For a company with the audacity to make "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible" its mission statement, it takes a lot to take Google down a peg.
From ACM News
How Did a British Polytechnic Graduate Become the Design Genius Behind
Few Westerners have ever seen the forging of a Japanese samurai sword. It's considered a sacred practice in Japan; one of the few traditional arts that has yet to be bettered by modern science. Japanese smiths work through…
From ACM Opinion
Teaching to the Text Message
I've been teaching college freshmen to write the five-paragraph essay and its bully of a cousin, the research paper, for years. But these forms invite font-size manipulation, plagiarism and clichés. We need to set our sights…
From ACM Opinion
Berners-Lee Warns Isps on Net Neutrality
The inventor of the world wide web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has warned internet service providers (ISPs) that plans for a "two-speed" Internet go against the principles that have let the net grow so rapidly in the past two decades…
From ACM Opinion
The Future of Mobile Gadgets
I got my first cell phone a little more than a decade ago, just as I was finishing college and looking for my first job. I didn't need a mobile phone; none of my friends had them, and I was pretty sure they'd all mock me for…
From ACM News
Japan Has Shifted 13 Feet!
What does Japan's earthquake mean for GPS? Friday's 9.0-magnitude earthquake was so powerful that it actually widened Japan. While parts of the country barely moved, other regions are now 13 feet closer to the United States…
From ACM Opinion
Cell Phones Are 'stalin's Dream,' Says Free Software Movement Founder
Nearly three decades into his quest to rid the world of proprietary software, Richard Stallman sees a new threat to user freedom: smartphones.
From ACM Opinion
The Future of Things "cyber"
Years ago, when I was an ROTC instructor, the first unit of instruction for rising juniors dealt with communication skills. Near the beginning of the unit, I would quote Confucius to my new students: "The rectification of…
From ACM Opinion
Al Franken: 'they're Coming After the Internet'
Sen. Al Franken claimed Monday that big corporations are "hoping to destroy" the Internet and issued a call to arms to several hundred tech-savvy South by Southwest attendees to preserve net neutrality.
From ACM Opinion
New Ceo Wants Faster, More Relevant W3c
Jeff Jaffe's job requires both patience and impatience. Patience, because the World Wide Web Consortium—of which he's been chief executive for nearly a year—is an unwieldy standards group trying to encompass the disparate agendas…
From ACM News
Search Undergoing Biggest Disruption Since the Dawn of Google
Facing criticism over the quality of search results, Google recently tweaked its famously secretive algorithm to weed out spam sites and so-called "content farms." For all the attention this issue got, however, it's only one…
From ACM Opinion
Is It Better to Buy Apple Products or Apple Stock?
Sometimes, people have the most wonderful ideas. And not merely people at Apple. A software-engineering intern at Twilio (who also happens to be a computer science student at UC Berkeley) got it into his head to work out what…
From ACM Opinion
No Moammar, No Fly: How to Stop Gadhafi
Keep the surveillance planes flying. Fry the radar. While the sun hangs in the sky, let Libya’s pilots know they’re on borrowed time if they take off.
From ACM Opinion
Another Win For Artificial Intelligence: The Turing Award
It's been a banner year or so for artificial intelligence, from the recent triumph of I.B.M.'s Jeopardy-winning supercomputer to a wave of news coverage of the field, like the “Smarter Than You Think” series in The Times, but…
From ACM Opinion
Factcheck.org's Brooks Jackson on Overcoming Motivated Skepticism
Once upon a time, before the age of the Internet, we lived in a world of "many economists." If a newspaper reporter was writing a story on inflation, for instance, he or she would call up a number of experts and relay their…
From ACM Opinion
Troll, Reveal Thyself
Why we need to get rid of anonymous comments.
From ACM Opinion
Social Media: 'essential Tool' In .s. Foreign Policy
What role do social media and other non-state actors play in foreign policy? James Lewis, director of technology and public policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, tells Ari Shapiro that websites like…
From ACM Opinion
The Internet Is a Tyrant's Friend
As recent events in Egypt and Tunisia so aptly demonstrate, technology is a double-edged sword: while pro-democracy protesters used sites like Facebook to organise, their governments used the same sites to suppress dissent…
From ACM Opinion
Reply All: The Button Everyone Loves to Hate
I answered my phone recently to hear a friend shrieking in my ear. "Check your inbox for the email I just sent you," he wailed. "And please, please tell me I didn't hit Reply All."
From ACM Opinion
Eric Schmidt: What I Read
What I read varies widely based on what kind of information I’m looking for at the time.
From ACM Opinion
Google Schools Its Algorithm
To humans, computer intelligence is a puzzle, as if the machines have split personalities. They can be so remarkably smart at times, yet so bafflingly dumb at others.
From ACM News
The 'Panda' That Hates Farms: A Q&A With Google
Google's new update to its search engine addressed the growing complaint that low-quality content sites (derisively referred to as content farms) were ranked higher than higher-quality sites that seemed to be more important to…
From ACM News
Is the Navy Trying to Start the Robot Apocalypse?
Whenever the military rolls out a new robot program, folks like to joke about SkyNet or the Rise of the Machines. But this time, the military really is starting to venture into robot-apocalypse territory: swarms of little…
From ACM Opinion
Keep the Internet Fair
The government's net neutrality compromise fell flat. Here's a simple fix.
From ACM News
10 Questions For David Ferrucci
Why aren't you letting Watson speak for himself today?
Watson is trained to answer questions for Jeopardy! It's not an interactive dialogue system, so it can't conduct its own interviews. You can imagine giving it information…From ACM Opinion
Psych-Out Sexism
The innocent, unconscious bias that discourages girls from math and science.
From ACM News
Wiring in a Wireless Age
Is Intel's Thunderbolt cable a brilliant innovation or a worthless grasp at the past?