On P, NP, and Computational Complexity
While the P vs. NP quandary is a central problem in computer science, a resolution of the problem may have limited practical impact.
Moshe Y. Vardi
Page 5
DEPARTMENT:
Letters to the editor
How to Think About Objects
Though I agree with Mordechai Ben-Ari's Viewpoint "Objects Never? Well, Hardly Ever!" (Sept. 2010) saying that students should be introduced to procedural programming before …
CACM Staff
Pages 6-7
In the Virtual Extension
Communications' Virtual Extension expands the page limitations of the print edition by bringing readers high-quality articles in an online-only format.
CACM Staff
Page 9
DEPARTMENT:
[email protected]
Rethinking the Systems Review Process
Tessa Lau launches a discussion about the acceptance criteria for HCI systems papers at CHI, UIST, and other conferences.
Tessa Lau
Pages 10-11
DEPARTMENT:
CACM online
A Preference For PDF
When it comes to electronic formats, Communications readers prefer PDF to HTML, according to data on a year's worth of published articles. PDF's faithful reproduction of magazine pages appears to give it an edge. Legacy is another …
David Roman
Page 12
COLUMN:
News
Turning Data Into Knowledge
Today's data deluge is leading to new approaches to visualize, analyze, and catalog enormous datasets.
Gregory Goth
Pages 13-15
Security in the Cloud
Cloud computing offers many advantages, but also involves security risks. Fortunately, researchers are devising some ingenious solutions.
Gary Anthes
Pages 16-18
Career Opportunities
What are the job prospects for today's—and tomorrow's—graduates?
Leah Hoffmann
Pages 19-21
Wide Open Spaces
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission's decision to open frequencies in the broadcast spectrum could enable broadband networks in rural areas, permit smart electric grids, and more.
Neil Savage
Page 23
COLUMN:
Economic and business dimensions
The Divergent Online News Preferences of Journalists and Readers
Reading between the lines of the thematic gap between the supply and demand of online news.
Pablo J. Boczkowski
Pages 24-25
COLUMN:
Education
K-12 Computational Learning
Enhancing student learning and understanding by combining theories of learning with the computer's unique attributes.
Stephen Cooper, Lance C. Pérez, Daphne Rainey
Pages 27-29
COLUMN:
Legally speaking
Why Do Software Startups Patent (or Not)?
Assessing the controversial results of a recent empirical study of the role of intellectual property in software startups.
Pamela Samuelson
Pages 30-32
COLUMN:
Privacy and security
Why Isn't Cyberspace More Secure?
Evaluating governmental actions—and inactions—toward improving cyber security and addressing future challenges.
Joel F. Brenner
Pages 33-35
COLUMN:
Viewpoint
Sensor Networks For the Sciences
Lessons from the field derived from developing wireless sensor networks for monitoring active and hazardous volcanoes.
Matt Welsh
Pages 36-39
COLUMN:
Viewpoints: Virtual extension
In Support of Computer Science Teachers and the CSTA
If we want more computer science students, and if we want computer scientists to be understood for what we are, we must clarify the message about computer science that all students will receive as part of their K–12 education …
Duncan Buell
Pages 113-115
SECTION:
Practice
The Case Against Data Lock-In
Want to keep your users? Just make it easy for them to leave.
Brian W. Fitzpatrick, JJ Lueck
Pages 42-46
Keeping Bits Safe: How Hard Can It Be?
As storage systems grow larger and larger, protecting their data for long-term storage is becoming ever more challenging.
David S. H. Rosenthal
Pages 47-55
Sir, Please Step Away from the ASR-33!
To move forward with programming languages we must first break free from the tyranny of ASCII.
Poul-Henning Kamp
Pages 56-57
SECTION:
Contributed articles
Understanding Throughput-Oriented Architectures
For workloads with abundant parallelism, GPUs deliver higher peak computational throughput than latency-oriented CPUs.
Michael Garland, David B. Kirk
Pages 58-66
Regulating the Information Gatekeepers
Concerns about biased manipulation of search results may require intervention involving government regulation.
Patrick Vogl, Michael Barrett
Pages 67-72
SECTION:
Contributed articles: Virtual extension
Supporting Ubiquitous Location Information in Interworking 3G and Wireless Networks
Positioning mobile devices in the third generation of wireless communication networks is crucial to many commercial services. However, positioning techniques vary by accuracy, implementation cost, and typical application scenarios …
Massimo Ficco, Roberto Pietrantuono, Stefano Russo
Pages 116-123
Relative Status of Journal and Conference Publications in Computer Science
Though computer scientists agree that conference publications enjoy greater status in computer science than in other disciplines, there is little quantitative evidence to support this view.
Jill Freyne, Lorcan Coyle, Barry Smyth, Padraig Cunningham
Pages 124-132
SECTION:
Review articles
Using Complexity to Protect Elections
Computational complexity may truly be the shield against election manipulation.
Piotr Faliszewski, Edith Hemaspaandra, Lane A. Hemaspaandra
Pages 74-82
SECTION:
Research highlights
Technical Perspective: Data Races Are Evil with No Exceptions
Exploiting parallelism has become the primary means to higher performance. Shared memory is a pervasively used programming model. Unfortunately, shared-memory programs are …
Sarita Adve
Page 84
Goldilocks: A Race-Aware Java Runtime
GOLDILOCKS is a Java runtime that monitors program executions and throws a DataRaceException when a data race is about to occur. This prevents racy accesses from taking place …
Tayfun Elmas, Shaz Qadeer, Serdar Tasiran
Pages 85-92
FastTrack: Efficient and Precise Dynamic Race Detection
Multithreaded programs are notoriously prone to race conditions. Prior work developed precise dynamic race detectors that never report false alarms. However, these checkers employ expensive data structures that result in significant …
Cormac Flanagan, Stephen N. Freund
Pages 93-101
COLUMN:
Last byte
Puzzled: Rectangles Galore
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