Communications of the ACM
Innovation Is Overrated: A Provocation
Digital innovation is not working in the interest of the whole of society. It is time to radically rethink its purpose without…
From ACM News
Why Cisco's Flip Flopped in the Camera Business
Cisco is shutting down a business unit that it bought for over half-a-billion dollars: the Flip camcorder division. That's a shame, considering how high the Flip...
From ACM Opinion
Forget Space Travel: It's Just a Dream
The clash of two titans—physics and chemistry—are major barriers to human space travel to Mars and beyond, and may well make it impossible... at least with current...
From ACM Opinion
Mars Science Laboratory + Curiosity Rover: Interview with Nasa Jpl's Ashwin Vasavada
Boing Boing visited NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory for a peek inside the clean room where NASA's next Mars rover, Curiosity, and other components of the Mars...
From ACM Opinion
Disappearing Act
Jack Dorsey is the creator and executive chairman of the popular communications network Twitter. In 2009, he cofounded another company, called Square, which lets...
From ACM Opinion
Matt Cutts, Google Engineer
It was the usual standing-room-only crowd as Google's Matt Cutts appeared at the South By Southwest technology conference to talk about the inner workings of...
From ACM Opinion
No More Privacy Paranoia
Want Web companies to stop using our personal data? Be ready to suffer the consequences.
From ACM Opinion
biquity Symposium: What Have We Said About Computation?
A recent ACM Ubiquity symposium considered the question: “What is computation?” In this closing article, Ubiquity's editor-in-chief Peter J. Denning shares what...
From ACM Opinion
Why I Don't Own a Kindle
I've done my part to prop up the consumer-electronics industry in recent years: a flat-panel TV downstairs and one upstairs, his and hers smartphones, not-too...
From ACM Opinion
The Problem with Design Education
University industrial design programs are usually cloistered in schools of art or architecture, and students in such programs are rarely required to study science...
From ACM Opinion
In Praise of Distraction
For many Americans, March Madness has been a time to worry about office pools, busted brackets, and buzzer beaters. For American businesses, though, the N.C.A...
From ACM Opinion
Patents and Innovation
The tech world has recently seen an explosion in patent litigation, often involving low-quality software patents, which threatens to stifle innovation.
From ACM Opinion
Where Will Larry Page Lead Google?
In the 10 years since the last time Larry Page was Google's chief executive, the company has changed a bit. It has gone from an ambitious startup to a publicly...
From ACM Opinion
When Will Sci-Fi Tech Become Real? Sooner Than You Think
Growing up, physicist Michio Kaku had two heroes. The first, predictably enough for the man who co-founded a branch of string theory, was Albert Einstein. "Second...
From ACM Opinion
China's War in Cyberspace, August
Strategic theorists frequently lament that military planners are very effective at preparing for the last war, not the next one. Planners today must cope with...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
From ACM Opinion