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The Scientific Paper Is Obsolete
From ACM Opinion

The Scientific Paper Is Obsolete

The scientific paper—the actual form of it—was one of the enabling inventions of modernity. Before it was developed in the 1600s, results were communicated privately...

19th-Century Paleontology Was at the Forefront of Big Data
From ACM Opinion

19th-Century Paleontology Was at the Forefront of Big Data

In 1981, when I was 9 years old, my father took me to see Raiders of the Lost Ark.

For Google, Everything Is a Popularity Contest
From ACM Opinion

For Google, Everything Is a Popularity Contest

When I saw that Google had introduced a "Classic Papers" section of Google Scholar, its search tool for academic journals, I couldn't help but stroke my chin professorially...

How Trump's Immigration Rules Will Hurt the ­.s. Tech Sector
From ACM Opinion

How Trump's Immigration Rules Will Hurt the ­.s. Tech Sector

When President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Friday issuing a temporary ban on immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries, it went into effect...

Why Technological Innovation Relies on Government Support
From ACM Opinion

Why Technological Innovation Relies on Government Support

Andy Grove, the Silicon Valley pioneer who died last week at age 79, was many things: a survivor of the Nazi occupation of Hungary and refugee of Cold War Eastern...

The Room Where the Internet Was Born
From ACM Opinion

The Room Where the Internet Was Born

Starting a cross-country drive to New York in Los Angeles is pretty inconvenient, unless your cross-country drive is also a vision quest to see the Internet.

The Coming Age of the Internet Naturalist
From ACM Careers

The Coming Age of the Internet Naturalist

Three years ago, Shaun Winterton was looking at photos of bugs on Flickr.

Google Wants to Make 'science Fiction' a Reality—and That's Limiting Their Imagination
From ACM Opinion

Google Wants to Make 'science Fiction' a Reality—and That's Limiting Their Imagination

Self-driving cars, extreme life extension, and global wifi provided by weather balloons: Google makes projects that sound like science fiction into reality at its...

All Can Be Lost: The Risk of Putting Our Knowledge in the Hands of Machines
From ACM Opinion

All Can Be Lost: The Risk of Putting Our Knowledge in the Hands of Machines

On the evening of February 12, 2009, a Continental Connection commuter flight made its way through blustery weather between Newark, New Jersey, and Buffalo, New...

Playing War: How the Military ­ses Video Games
From ACM Opinion

Playing War: How the Military ­ses Video Games

According to popular discourse, video games are either the divine instrument of education’s future or the software of Satan himself, provoking young men to carry...

Students Are 'hacking' Their School-Issued Ipads: Good For Them
From ACM Careers

Students Are 'hacking' Their School-Issued Ipads: Good For Them

Almost immediately after receiving their new school-issued iPads this fall, students in Indiana and in California (and probably elsewhere) managed to bypass the...

Civics For a Digital Age
From ACM Opinion

Civics For a Digital Age

Over half of the world’s population lives in urban environments, and that number is rapidly growing according to the World Health Organization.

The Message Voyager 1 Carries For Alien Civilizations
From ACM Opinion

The Message Voyager 1 Carries For Alien Civilizations

The year was 1977.

Go Ahead, Mess With Texas Instruments
From ACM Opinion

Go Ahead, Mess With Texas Instruments

Last year, while cleaning out the basement of my childhood home, I discovered a plastic storage bin marked "Calcusoft." Inside were piles of notebooks filled with...

Time and Navigation: How We Found Our Way in the World
From ACM Opinion

Time and Navigation: How We Found Our Way in the World

Type an address into your phone, and up will pop a step-by-step route from where you are to where you want to be. This is, in its way, magic—magic that has, at...

The Touch-Screen Generation
From ACM Opinion

The Touch-Screen Generation

On a chilly day last spring, a few dozen developers of children’s apps for phones and tablets gathered at an old beach resort in Monterey, California, to show off...

The Best Books About Biotechnology
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,...

Google News at 10: How the Algorithm Won Over the News Industry
From ACM Opinion

Google News at 10: How the Algorithm Won Over the News Industry

In April of 2010, Eric Schmidt delivered the keynote address at the conference of the American Society of News Editors in Washington, D.C. During the talk, thearticulate...

How Computers Are Creating a Second Economy Without Workers
From ACM Opinion

How Computers Are Creating a Second Economy Without Workers

When the disappointing jobs numbers were reported last week (employers added 120,000 jobs in March, about half the number reported in the two previous months),...

From ACM Opinion

How I Failed, Failed, and Finally Succeeded at Learning How to Code

When Colin Hughes was about 11 years old his parents brought home a rather strange toy. It wasn't colorful or cartoonish; it didn't seem to have any lasers or...
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