DEPARTMENT:
Editor's letter
'Yes, It Can Be Done'
The 2008 presidential campaign slogan "Yes, We Can" is the English translation of the United Farm Workers' 1972 slogan "Sí, se puede," or "Yes, it can be done."
Moshe Y. Vardi
Page 5
DEPARTMENT:
Publisher's corner
Communications' Web Site to Launch in March
Scott E. Delman
Page 7
DEPARTMENT:
Letters to the editor
Children's Magic Won't Deliver the Semantic Web
To explain the nature of "Ontologies and the Semantic Web" (Dec. 2008), Ian Horrocks, a leading figure behind the theory and practice of Description Logics, employed analogous characters and language …
CACM Staff
Pages 8-9
DEPARTMENT:
CACM online
Prepare For Launch
David Roman
Page 12
COLUMN:
News
Betting on Ideas
Advanced computational models are enabling researchers to create increasingly sophisticated prediction markets.
Gregory Goth
Pages 13-15
Crowd Control
Researchers are turning to computers to help us take advantage of our own cognitive abilities and of the wisdom of crowds.
Leah Hoffmann
Pages 16-17
The Evolution of Virtualization
Virtualization is moving out of the data center and making inroads with mobile computing, security, and software delivery.
Kirk L. Kroeker
Pages 18-20
A Difficult, Unforgettable Idea
On the 40th anniversary of Douglas C. Engelbart's "The Mother of All Demos," computer scientists discuss the event's influence — and imagine what could have been.
Karen A. Frenkel
Page 21
ACM Fellows Honored
Forty-four men and women are being inducted this year as 2008 ACM Fellows.
CACM Staff
Page 22
COLUMN:
Viewpoints
Is Software Engineering Engineering?
Software engineering continues to be dogged by claims it is not engineering. Adopting a computer-systems view that embraces hardware, software, and user environment may help.
Peter J. Denning, Richard D. Riehle
Pages 24-26
When Is a 'License' Really a Sale?
Can you resell software even if the package says you can't? What are the implications for copyright law of the U.S. Supreme Court's unanimous June 2008 decision in Quanta v. LG Electronics?
Pamela Samuelson
Pages 27-29
Your Students Are Your Legacy
This Viewpoint boils down into a few magazine pages what I've learned in my 32 years of mentoring Ph.D. students.
David A. Patterson
Pages 30-33
Advising Students For Success
Some advice for those doing the advising (and what the advisors can learn from the advisees).
Jeffrey D. Ullman
Pages 34-37
An Interview With C.A.R. Hoare
C.A.R. Hoare, developer of the Quicksort algorithm and a lifelong contributor to the theory and design of programming languages, discusses the practical application of his theoretical ideas.
Len Shustek, C.A.R. Hoare
Pages 38-41
SECTION:
Practice
Better Scripts, Better Games
Smarter, more powerful scripting languages will improve game performance while making gameplay development more efficient.
Walker White, Christoph Koch, Johannes Gehrke, Alan Demers
Pages 42-47
Erlang For Concurrent Programming
Designed for concurrency from the ground up, the Erlang language can be a valuable tool to help solve concurrent problems.
Jim Larson
Pages 48-56
SECTION:
Contributed articles
Reflecting Human Values in the Digital Age
HCI experts must broaden the field's scope and adopt new methods to be useful in 21st-century sociotechnical environments.
Abigail Sellen, Yvonne Rogers, Richard Harper, Tom Rodden
Pages 58-66
Statecharts in the Making: A Personal Account
How avionics work led to a graphical language for reactive systems where the diagrams themselves define the system's behavior.
David Harel
Pages 67-75
SECTION:
Review articles
Probabilistically Checkable Proofs
Can a proof be checked without reading it?
Madhu Sudan
Pages 76-84
SECTION:
Research highlights
Technical Perspective: The Beauty of Error-Correcting Codes
Error-correcting codes are the means by which we compensate for interference in communication, and are essential for the accurate transmission and storage of digital data.
Daniel A. Spielman
Page 86
Error Correction Up to the Information-Theoretic Limit
Ever since the birth of coding theory almost 60 years ago, researchers have been pursuing the elusive goal of constructing the "best codes," whose encoding introduces the minimum possible redundancy for the level of noise they …
Venkatesan Guruswami, Atri Rudra
Pages 87-95
Technical Perspective: Where Biology Meets Computing
Alan Turing died in 1954 in his laboratory after eating a cyanide-laced apple. During his last years, Turing had become interested in bio-chemical systems. He had proposed a reaction-diffusion model in his 1952 paper entitled …
Bud Mishra
Page 96
Learning and Detecting Emergent Behavior in Networks of Cardiac Myocytes
We address the problem of specifying and detecting emergent behavior in networks of cardiac myocytes, spiral electric waves in particular, a precursor to atrial and ventricular fibrillation.
Radu Grosu, Scott A. Smolka, Flavio Corradini, Anita Wasilewska, Emilia Entcheva, Ezio Bartocci
Pages 97-105
COLUMN:
Last byte
Puzzled: Solutions and Sources
Last month (February 2009, p. 104) we posed a trio of brain teasers concerning algorithm termination. Here, we offer some possible solutions. How did you do?
Peter Winkler
Page 111
Future Tense: Radical Evolution
In 1913, the U.S. Government prosecuted Lee De Forest for telling investors that RCA would soon be able to transmit the human voice across the Atlantic. What similarly preposterous claims are enabled by today's technology?
Joel Garreau
Pages 112-ff
SECTION:
Virtual extension
Digital Inclusion With the McInternet: Would You Like Fries With That?
Should corporations try to "do good" for society?
Alexandre Sacchi, Emerson Giannini, Regiane Bochic, Nicolau Reinhard, Alexandre B. Lopes
Pages 113-116
A New Map For Knowledge Dissemination Channels
The landscape for Information Systems (IS) research spreads across a large, diverse, and growing territory with linkages to other fields and traversed by increasing numbers of researchers. There are well over 500 journals for …
Clyde W. Holsapple
Pages 117-125
Online Privacy Practices in Higher Education: Making the Grade?
In June 2006, the trustees of Ohio University (OU) voted unanimously to spend up to $4 million on enhanced information security. The decision came in the wake of the media coverage about OU's "lax, low-priority attitude toward …
Mary J. Culnan, Thomas J. Carlin
Pages 126-130
Ensuring Transparency in Computational Modeling
Computational models are of great scientific and societal importance because they are used every day in a wide variety of products and policies. However, computational models are not pure abstractions, but rather they are tools …
Kenneth R. Fleischmann, William A. Wallace
Pages 131-134
Open Access Publishing in Science
While the evolving information society is freely opening and sharing its diaries, social networks and source codes, it remains to be seen if the same will come true for scientific knowledge. Despite strong sympathy for the idea …
Florian Mann, Benedikt von Walter, Thomas Hess, Rolf T. Wigand
Pages 135-139
Who Captures Value in a Global Innovation Network?: The Case of Apple's iPod
Innovation is often touted as a key driver of economic growth. However, when firms operate within production and innovation networks that span national and firm boundaries, the question arises as to who actually benefits from …
Greg Linden, Kenneth L. Kraemer, Jason Dedrick
Pages 140-144
Concept Similarity By Evaluating Information Contents and Feature Vectors: A Combined Approach
Evaluating semantic similarity of concepts is a problem that has been extensively investigated in the literature in different areas, such as Artificial Intelligence, Cognitive Science, Databases, and Software Engineering. Currently …
Anna Formica
Pages 145-149
Technical Opinion: Security Threats of Smart Phones and Bluetooth
In a recent security experiment, a computer with a Bluetooth sniffing program was hidden in a suitcase that was wheeled around public places. The objective was to ascertain the number of Bluetooth-enabled mobile devices that …
Alfred Loo
Pages 150-152