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subjectComputers And Society
authorThe New York Times
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Patently Obvious
From ACM Opinion

Patently Obvious

On Monday the Supreme Court will consider whether to fundamentally alter the way American patent law is litigated. Specifically, in the context of an otherwise...

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...

Another Win For Artificial Intelligence: The Turing Award
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...

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...

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

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 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...

25 Years of Digital Vandalism
From ACM Opinion

25 Years of Digital Vandalism

In January 1986, Basit and Amjad Alvi, sibling programmers living near the main train station in Lahore, Pakistan, wrote a piece of code to safeguard the latest...

Dealing With Assange and the Secrets He Spilled
From ACM News

Dealing With Assange and the Secrets He Spilled

This past June, Alan Rusbridger, the editor of The Guardian, phoned me and asked, mysteriously, whether I had any idea how to arrange a secure communication....

From ACM Opinion

Careful When Shooting the Messenger

In May 2009, The Daily Telegraph set off a political storm in Britain when it detailed widespread expense-account abuse by members of Parliament. Among the claims...

From ACM Opinion

The Lessons of 10 Years of Talking Tech

It’s a special week in America. All over the country, families are gathering in warmly lighted homes. They’re sitting down to fancy feasts at decorated tables...

A Business Creator Sees Big Returns From Social Media
From ACM Opinion

A Business Creator Sees Big Returns From Social Media

Asked to name the world’s wealthiest entrepreneurs, few people would think of Eric Lefkofsky, who is 40 and keeps a deliberately low profile in his hometown of...

Web
From ACM Opinion

Web

The origins of our Webified age were hardly auspicious. Two decades ago, Tim Berners-Lee, a British software programmer at the CERN physics-research laboratory...

What Steve Jobs Learned in the Wilderness
From ACM Opinion

What Steve Jobs Learned in the Wilderness

The saga of Steven P. Jobs is so well known that it has entered the nation’s mythology: he’s the prodigal who returned to Apple in 1997, righted a listing ship...

The School of Hard Drives
From ACM Opinion

The School of Hard Drives

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan answers questions pertaining to education and technology.

Google's Earth
From ACM Opinion

Google's Earth

"I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions," said the search giant's chief executive, Eric Schmidt, in a recent and controversial...

The First Church of Robotics
From ACM Opinion

The First Church of Robotics

This constant stream of stories about artificial intelligence suggests that machines are becoming smart and autonomous, a new form of life, and that we should...

I Tweet, Therefore I Am
From ACM Opinion

I Tweet, Therefore I Am

On a recent lazy Saturday morning, my daughter and I lolled on a blanket in our front yard, snacking on apricots, listening to a download of E. B. White reading...

From ACM Opinion

The Google Algorithm

Google handles nearly two-thirds of Internet search queries worldwide. Analysts reckon that most Web sites rely on the search engine for half of their traffic....

From ACM Opinion

Cutting and Pasting: A Senior Thesis By (insert Name)

A friend who teaches at a well-known eastern university told me recently that plagiarism was turning him into a cop.
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