DEPARTMENT:
Editor's letter
How Are We Doing?
A rabbinical story tells about an angry reader who stormed into a newspaper office waving the day's paper, asking to see the editor of the obituary column.
Moshe Y. Vardi
Page 5
DEPARTMENT:
Letters to the editor
True Seeds of Open-Source Software
Though I appreciated Martin Campbell-Kelly's "Viewpoint" "Will the Future of Software Be Open Source?" (Oct. 2008), we must still rectify a small piece of history to apportion credit correctly.
CACM Staff
Page 6
DEPARTMENT:
CACM online
Communications Preps Web-Enhanced Articles
The soon to launch Communications Web site will break the bounds of the printed monthly.
David Roman
Page 8
COLUMN:
News
Calculating the Future
Climate researchers have no shortage of scientific issues on which to expend computer power. The biggest problem is choosing which one to tackle first.
David Lindley
Pages 9-11
The Universe in Your Computer
Two virtual astronomical telescopes promise to transform the way people view and study the cosmos.
Jeff Kanipe
Pages 12-14
Context-Aware Smartphones
Future generations of smartphones will be context aware, tracking your behavior, providing information about the immediate environment, and anticipating your intentions.
Alex Wright
Pages 15-16
A Pioneer Woman
Programmer Jean Bartik is inducted into the Computer History Museum's Hall of Fellows.
Michael Ross
Page 17
COLUMN:
Viewpoints
Law and Technology: The End of the Generative Internet
Exploring the expectations and implications for version 2.0 of the Net's new gated communities.
Jonathan Zittrain
Pages 18-20
Ground Control to Architect Tom . . .
Architecture astronauts habitually speak at extremely high levels of abstraction to avoid engaging in tangible discussions that might lead to disclosing that they really have no idea of what they are talking about.
Alex E. Bell
Pages 21-22
The Business of Software: The Ontology of Paper
The next generation of software engineering will involve designing systems without using paper-based formats, instead using software to develop software.
Phillip G. Armour
Pages 23-24
Technology Strategy and Management: The Legacy of Bill Gates
Assessing the pluses and minuses of the helmsmanship of Microsoft Corporation since its inception.
Michael Cusumano
Pages 25-26
Viewpoint: Scaling the Academic Publication Process to Internet Scale
A proposal to remedy problems in the reviewing process.
Jon Crowcroft, S. Keshav, Nick McKeown
Pages 27-30
DEPARTMENT:
ACM's FY08 annual report
ACM's Annual Report
I would be hard-pressed to recall in my four decades as an ACM member a time as eventful and exceptional as recorded by ACM in FY08.
Stuart I. Feldman
Pages 33-37
SECTION:
Practice
Eventually Consistent
Building reliable distributed systems at a worldwide scale demands trade-offs between consistency and availability.
Werner Vogels
Pages 40-44
The Long Road to 64 Bits
The sometimes contentious development of 64-bit systems shows how technology decisions can have unexpected, enduring consequences.
John Mashey
Pages 45-53
SECTION:
Contributed articles
Engineering Rural Development
Information systems enable rural development by increasing the accountability of nongovernmental organizations.
Tapan S. Parikh
Pages 54-63
wisePad Services For Vision-, Hearing-, and Speech-Impaired Users
The wisePad system is envisioned as a full-service computing platform capable of delivering personalized image, audio, and text services to millions of individuals worldwide with impaired vision or hearing problems.
Dawn N. Jutla, Dimitri Kanevsky
Pages 64-69
SECTION:
Review articles
Computational Challenges in E-Commerce
Economic and social sciences will drive Internet protocols and services into the future.
Joan Feigenbaum, David C. Parkes, David M. Pennock
Pages 70-74
SECTION:
Research highlights
Technical Perspective: Customizing Media to Displays
A mind-boggling array of displays differ greatly in resolutions and aspect ratios. But images and videos are captured at fixed resolutions and aspect ratios, and viewing them properly in a display can be a challenge.
Harry Shum
Page 76
Seam Carving For Media Retargeting
Traditional image resizing techniques are oblivious to the content of the image when changing its width or height. In contrast, media (i.e., image and video) retargeting takes content into account.
Ariel Shamir, Shai Avidan
Pages 77-85
Technical Perspective: Finding and Telling Stories with Data
Visual analysis, a powerful method for finding and telling stories with data, is moving from research into widespread use.
Jock D. Mackinlay
Page 86
Voyagers and Voyeurs: Supporting Asynchronous Collaborative Visualization
This article describes mechanisms for asynchronous collaboration in the context of information visualization, recasting visualizations as not just analytic tools, but social spaces.
Jeffrey Heer, Fernanda B. Viégas, Martin Wattenberg
Pages 87-97
COLUMN:
Last byte
Q&A: The Upper Limit
Jeannette Wing talks about clusters, creativity, and the power of computational thinking.
Leah Hoffmann
Pages 112-ff
SECTION:
Virtual extension
Automating Commonsense Reasoning Using the Event Calculus
Erik T. Mueller
Pages 113-117
Active Citizen Participation Using ICT Tools
Information technology has the potential to profoundly affect democracy and civic discourse through active citizen participation.
Nanda Kumar, Roumen Vragov
Pages 118-121
Understanding the Adopters and Non-Adopters of Broadband
Despite policy level mandates by some Governments to motivate gains in broadband diffusion, rates and levels of support differ greatly. Such policy decisions appear now to be contributing towards a digital divide.
Yogesh Dwivedi, Zahir Irani
Pages 122-125
Improved Security Through Information Security Governance
Allen C. Johnston, Ron Hale
Pages 126-129
Exploring the Black Box of Task-Technology Fit
Judith Gebauer, Mark Ginsburg
Pages 130-135
Disaster Response in Health Care: A Design Extension For Enterprise Data Warehouse
Hillol Bala, Viswanath Venkatesh, Srinivasan Venkatraman, Jack Bates, Steven H. Brown
Pages 136-140
The Relationship Between Software Development Team Size and Software Development Cost
Parag C. Pendharkar, James A. Rodger
Pages 141-144
Why Ebay Lost to Taobao in China: The Glocal Advantage
How Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C) electronic-commerce platforms in China compete and how buyers are stimulated to be both aware and trustful of sellers through buyer-seller communication channels.
Carol Xiaojuan Ou, Robert M. Davison
Pages 145-148