DEPARTMENT:
Editor's letter
Is the Image Crisis Over?
When Communications relaunched in July 2008, the issue included a "Viewpoint" column by Rick Rashid, entitled "Image Crisis: Inspiring a New Generation of Computer Scientists." Has anything changed in that regard in the last …
Moshe Y. Vardi
Page 5
DEPARTMENT:
Letters to the editor
Pay For Editorial Independence
Though Moshe Y. Vardi's Editor's Letter "Open, Closed, or Clopen Access?" (July 2009) addressed the question of who pays the bills, we must also address the price of quality.
CACM Staff
Pages 6-7
DEPARTMENT:
In the virtual extension
In the Virtual Extension
Communications' Virtual Extension brings more quality articles to ACM members. These articles are now available in the ACM Digital Library.
CACM Staff
Page 9
DEPARTMENT:
blog@CACM
Computer Science Curriculum, Deceptive Advertising
Each issue of Communications publishes excerpts from selected BLOG@CACM posts to the Communications Web site. In this issue, Ramana Rao writes about the evolution of computer science curriculum and Greg Linden reflects on ethics …
Ramana Rao, Greg Linden
Pages 10-11
DEPARTMENT:
CACM online
Internet Addiction: It's Spreading, but Is It Real?
The number of Internet addiction treatment centers is growing to treat behaviors worthy of a 12-step program. But neither the American Psychiatric Association's DSM nor theICD …
David Roman
Page 12
COLUMN:
News
Deep Data Dives Discover Natural Laws
Computer scientists have found a way to bootstrap science, using evolutionary computation to find fundamental meaning in massive amounts of raw data.
Gary Anthes
Pages 13-14
Electronic Paper's Next Chapter
The technological challenge for researchers working on the next generation of electronic paper is to render color as brightly as traditional paper, without increasing power requirements or end-user costs.
Kirk L. Kroeker
Pages 15-17
Implementing Electronic Medical Records
Despite a number of challenges, patients' medical records are slowly making the transition to the digital age.
Leah Hoffmann
Pages 18-20
Exploring New Frontiers
The Expeditions in Computing program provides scientists with the funding to work on ambitious, often multidisciplinary research.
Gregory Goth
Pages 21-23
COLUMN:
Viewpoints
Usable Security: How to Get It
Why does your computer bother you so much about security, but still isn't secure? It's because users don't have a model for security, or a simple way to keep important things safe.
Butler Lampson
Pages 25-27
Are Business Methods Patentable?
How the U.S. Supreme Court's forthcoming decision in the Bilski v. Doll case is expected to affect existing and future software patents.
Pamela Samuelson
Pages 28-30
The Broadband Price Is Not Right
Developing an effective pricing index is essential to understanding the value of broadband connectivity.
Shane Greenstein
Pages 31-33
On Public Service and Computer Science
Members of the computer science community should become more involved in public service by becoming program managers at federal agencies, the opportunities and benefits of which are outlined here.
Jonathan M. Smith
Pages 34-35
An Interview with Ping Fu
Ping Fu, CEO of the digital shape sampling and processing company Geomagic, discusses her background, achievements, and challenges managing a company during a period of dynamic growth.
Bob Cramblitt, Ping Fu
Pages 36-39
SECTION:
Practice
Communications Surveillance: Privacy and Security at Risk
As the sophistication of wiretapping technology grows, so too do the risks it poses to our privacy and security.
Whitfield Diffie, Susan Landau
Pages 42-47
Four Billion Little Brothers?: Privacy, Mobile Phones, and Ubiquitous Data Collection
Participatory sensing technologies could improve our lives and our communities, but at what cost to our privacy?
Katie Shilton
Pages 48-53
You Don't Know Jack About Software Maintenance
Long considered an afterthought, software maintenance is easiest and most effective when built into a system from the ground up.
Paul Stachour, David Collier-Brown
Pages 54-58
SECTION:
Contributed articles
Scratch: Programming For All
"Digital fluency" should mean designing, creating, and remixing, not just browsing, chatting, and interacting.
Mitchel Resnick, John Maloney, Andrés Monroy-Hernández, Natalie Rusk, Evelyn Eastmond, Karen Brennan, Amon Millner, Eric Rosenbaum, Jay Silver, Brian Silverman, Yasmin Kafai
Pages 60-67
Why IT Managers Don't Go For Cyber-Insurance Products
Proposed contracts tend to be overpriced because insurers are unable to anticipate customers' secondary losses.
Tridib Bandyopadhyay, Vijay S. Mookerjee, Ram C. Rao
Pages 68-73
SECTION:
Review articles
Turing Lecture: Model Checking: Algorithmic Verification and Debugging
Turing Lecture from the winners of the 2007 ACM A.M. Turing Award.
Edmund M. Clarke, E. Allen Emerson, Joseph Sifakis
Pages 74-84
SECTION:
Research highlights
Technical Perspective: Narrowing the Semantic Gap in Distributed Programming
In science, significant advances are often made when researchers from different communities join forces.
Peter Druschel
Page 86
Declarative Networking
Declarative Networking is a programming methodology that enables developers to concisely specify network protocols and services, which are directly compiled to a dataflow framework that executes the specifications.
Boon Thau Loo, Tyson Condie, Minos Garofalakis, David E. Gay, Joseph M. Hellerstein, Petros Maniatis, Raghu Ramakrishnan, Timothy Roscoe, Ion Stoica
Pages 87-95
Technical Perspective: Machine Learning For Complex Predictions
Interest in machine learning can be traced back to the early days of computer science. Alan Turing himself conjectured that some form of automatic learning would be required …
John Shawe-Taylor
Page 96
Predicting Structured Objects with Support Vector Machines
Machine Learning today offers a broad repertoire of methods for classification and regression. But what if we need to predict complex objects like trees, orderings, or alignments? Such problems arise naturally in natural language …
Thorsten Joachims, Thomas Hofmann, Yisong Yue, Chun-Nam Yu
Pages 97-104
COLUMN:
Last byte
Puzzled: Covering the Plane
Welcome to three new puzzles. Solutions to the first two will be published next month; the third is (as yet) unsolved. In each, the issue is how your intuition matches up with the mathematics.
Peter Winkler
Page 112
SECTION:
Virtual extension
Quantifying the Benefits of Investing in Information Security
Malicious attacks on enterprise IT infrastructures have become a serious threat with the growing importance of the Internet.
Lara Khansa, Divakaran Liginlal
Pages 113-117
iCare Home Portal: An Extended Model of Quality Aging E-Services
The quality of life of senior citizens is a critical issue around the world today. Scrutiny of the extant technologies for aging services reveals that they are invariably aimed at or electronic care (eCare), but overlook social …
Wei-Lun Chang, Soe-Tsyr Yuan, Eldon Y. Li
Pages 118-124
Computing Journals and Their Emerging Roles in Knowledge Exchange
Scholarly journals are reliable means of communicating knowledge and findings in a scientific discipline. This study addresses the interconnectedness of journals from four perspectives …
Aakash Taneja, Anil Singh, M. K. Raja
Pages 125-131
Offshoring and the New World Order
Outsourcing as a means of meeting organizational information technology (IT) needs is a commonly accepted and growing practice; one that is continually evolving to include a much wider set of business functions: logistics, accounting …
Rudy Hirschheim
Pages 132-135
And What Can Context Do For Data?
Common to all actors in today's information world is the problem of lowering the "information noise," both reducing the amount of data to be stored and accessed, and enhancing …
C. Bolchini, C. A. Curino, G. Orsi, E. Quintarelli, R. Rossato, F. A. Schreiber, L. Tanca
Pages 136-140
Why Web Sites Are Lost (and How They're Sometimes Found)
The Web is in constant flux — new pages and Web sites appear daily, and old pages and sites disappear almost as quickly. One study estimates that about two percent of the Web disappears from its current location every week. To …
Frank McCown, Catherine C. Marshall, Michael L. Nelson
Pages 141-145
If Your Pearls of Wisdom Fall in a Forest . . .
The idea of doing things that can improve something is an extremely popular concept in American culture. For example, I found the phrase,
make a difference
, in 129 million Web pages in a Yahoo! search in July 2009. The concept …
Ralph Westfall
Pages 146-149
Steering Self-Learning Distance Algorithms
The concept of distance expresses the distortion measure between any pair of entities lying in a common space. Distances are at the very heart of geometry, and are ubiquitous …
Frank Nielsen
Pages 150-152