Fair Access
Now that the sound and fury in the Open Access movement has quieted down a bit, we can revisit the arguments for open access. The basic question I would like to address is what ACM's stance should be with respect to open-access …
Moshe Y. Vardi
Page 5
DEPARTMENT:
[email protected]
Likert-Type Scales, Statistical Methods, and Effect Sizes
Judy Robertson writes about researchers' use of the wrong statistical techniques to analyze attitude questionnaires.
Judy Robertson
Pages 6-7
COLUMN:
News
Automating Scientific Discovery
Computer scientists are teaching machines to run experiments, make inferences from the data, and use the results to conduct new experiments.
Neil Savage
Pages 9-11
Robots Like Us
Thanks to new research initiatives, autonomous humanoid robots are inching closer to reality.
Alex Wright
Pages 12-13
Digitally Possessed
Virtual possessions play an increasingly important role in our daily lives. How we think about them and deal with them is changing the way we think and interact with others.
Samuel Greengard
Pages 14-16
A Workshop Revival
The success of Germany's Dagstuhl Seminars has inspired a proliferation of Dagstuhl-like venues, especially in India.
Paul Hyman
Page 17
DEPARTMENT:
ACM election
ACM's 2012 General Election
Meet the candidates who introduce their plans — and stands — for the Association. Please take this opportunity to vote.
Gerald Segal
Pages 19-29
COLUMN:
Law and technology
Design For Symbiosis
Promoting more harmonious paths for technological innovators and expressive creators in the Internet age.
Peter S. Menell
Pages 30-32
COLUMN:
Historical reflections
The Future of the Past
Reflections on the changing face of the history of computing.
David Anderson
Pages 33-34
COLUMN:
Economic and business dimensions
Digitization and Copyright: Some Recent Evidence from Music
Examining the effects of stealing on producers and consumers.
Joel Waldfogel
Pages 35-37
COLUMN:
Education
Programming Goes Back to School
Broadening participation by integrating game design into middle school curricula. View a video featuring author Alexander Repenning about using games to introduce teachers and students to programming.
Alexander Repenning
Pages 38-40
COLUMN:
Viewpoint
Programming the Global Brain
Considering how we can improve our understanding and utilization of the emerging human-computer network constituting the global brain.
Abraham Bernstein, Mark Klein, Thomas W. Malone
Pages 41-43
Crossing the Software Education Chasm
An Agile approach that exploits cloud computing.
Armando Fox, David Patterson
Pages 44-49
SECTION:
Practice
Managing Technical Debt
Shortcuts that save money and time today can cost you down the road.
Eric Allman
Pages 50-55
Idempotence Is Not a Medical Condition
Messages may be retried. Idempotence means that's OK.
Pat Helland
Pages 56-65
Your Mouse Is a Database
Web and mobile applications are increasingly composed of asynchronous and real-time streaming services and push notifications.
Erik Meijer
Pages 66-73
SECTION:
Contributed articles
Social Media Evolution of the Egyptian Revolution
Twitter sentiment was revealed, along with popularity of Egypt-related subjects and tweeter influence on the 2011 revolution.
Alok Choudhary, William Hendrix, Kathy Lee, Diana Palsetia, Wei-Keng Liao
Pages 74-80
An n-Gram Analysis of Communications 2000?2010
Applied to almost 3,500 articles it reveals computing's (and Communications') culture, identity, and evolution.
Daniel S. Soper, Ofir Turel
Pages 81-87
SECTION:
Review articles
Comparative Analysis of Protein Networks: Hard Problems, Practical Solutions
Examining tools that provide valuable insight about molecular components within a cell.
Nir Atias, Roded Sharan
Pages 88-97
SECTION:
Research highlights
Technical Perspective: Best Algorithms + Best Computers = Powerful Match
Say you want to simulate the motion over time of the stars in a galaxy to learn about how galaxies formed and why the universe appears as it does. Is it feasible on a single processor? Sadly, even using today's fastest single …
William Gropp
Page 100
A Massively Parallel Adaptive Fast Multipole Method on Heterogeneous Architectures
We describe a parallel fast multipole method for highly nonuniform distributions of particles. We employ both distributed memory parallelism and shared memory parallelism to rapidly evaluate two-body nonoscillatory potentials …
Ilya Lashuk, Aparna Chandramowlishwaran, Harper Langston, Tuan-Anh Nguyen, Rahul Sampath, Aashay Shringarpure, Richard Vuduc, Lexing Ying, Denis Zorin, George Biros
Pages 101-109
Technical Perspective: An Experiment in Determinism
It is widely held that parallel programming is far more difficult and error prone than writing sequential code. In particular, the myriad allowable interleavings of thread execution mean that different runs of a program can …
Steven Hand
Page 110
Efficient System-Enforced Deterministic Parallelism
We introduce a new parallel programming model addressing the issues facing current methods of executing parallel programs deterministically, and use Determinator, a proof-of-concept OS, to demonstrate the model's practicality …
Amittai Aviram, Shu-Chun Weng, Sen Hu, Bryan Ford
Pages 111-119
COLUMN:
Last byte
Puzzled: Designs on Square Grids
Welcome to, as usual, three new puzzles. However, unlike previous columns, where solutions to two were known (and included in the related Solutions and Sources in the next issue), this time expect to see solutions to all three …
Peter Winkler
Page 120