Predatory Scholarly Publishing
In a typical business, you have two parties: sellers and buyers. In scholarly publishing you also have sellers and buyers, these are the publishers and the research libraries. However, you have two additional parties. On one …
Moshe Y. Vardi
Page 5
DEPARTMENT:
Letters to the Editor
An Integral Number and Its Consequences
Pondering Moshe Y. Vardi's "What Is an Algorithm?" (Mar. 2012), one should consider that in its most abstract and tangible form an algorithm is simply an integral number and that an interpretation of an algorithm as an abstract …
CACM Staff
Pages 7-8
DEPARTMENT:
[email protected]
CS and Popular Culture; Learning From Console Games
Mark Guzdial writes about why computer science should permeate popular culture. Judy Robertson discusses the educational benefits of using console games in the classroom.
Mark Guzdial, Judy Robertson
Pages 10-11
COLUMN:
News
Degrees of Separation
Researchers now have the capability to look at the small-world problem from both the traditional algorithmic approach and the new topological approach.
Gregory Goth
Pages 13-15
HTML5 Leads a Web Revolution
Propelled by a proliferation of mobile devices and social networks, an enhanced family of Web specifications is bringing new power to developers and new capabilities to users.
Gary Anthes
Pages 16-17
Patently Inadequate
The biggest change to U.S. patent law in nearly 60 years brings many changes, but fails to solve the software industry's most vexing problems.
Marina Krakovsky
Pages 18-20
Lost and Found
Researchers discover computer pioneer Konrad Zuse's long-forgotten Z9, the world's first program-controlled binary relay calculator using floating-point arithmetic.
Paul Hyman
Page 21
COLUMN:
Technology strategy and management
Business Models For Strategy and Innovation
While often ambiguously defined, business models are central to innovation.
Mari Sako
Pages 22-24
COLUMN:
Legally speaking
Can Online Piracy Be Stopped By Laws?
Considering the legal responsibilities of Internet intermediaries in the aftermath of the Stop Online Privacy Act controversy.
Pamela Samuelson
Pages 25-27
COLUMN:
Computing ethics
An Information Strategy For Environmental Sustainability
Many proposed solutions to the species-threatening transformations born of human industrialization have an engineering orientation. Often the suggested remedies do not adequately recognize the potential of information systems …
R. T. Watson, J. Corbett, M. C. Boudreau, J. Webster
Pages 28-30
COLUMN:
Historical reflections
Alan Turing's Other Universal Machine
All computer scientists know about the Universal Turing Machine, one of the foundation stones of theoretical computer science. Much less well known is the practical stored program computer Turing proposed after the war in February …
Martin Campbell-Kelly
Pages 31-33
COLUMN:
Viewpoint
Google's Hybrid Approach to Research
By closely connecting research and development Google is able to conduct experiments on an unprecedented scale, often resulting in new capabilities for the company.
Alfred Spector, Peter Norvig, Slav Petrov
Pages 34-37
The Challenges of Privacy By Design
Heralded by regulators, Privacy by Design holds the promise to solve the digital world's privacy problems. But there are immense challenges, including management commitment and step-by-step methods to integrate privacy into systems …
Sarah Spiekermann
Pages 38-40
SECTION:
Practice
Controlling Queue Delay
Active queue management is just one piece of the solution to persistently full buffers.
Kathleen Nichols, Van Jacobson
Pages 42-50
My Compiler Does Not Understand Me
Until our programming languages catch up, code will be full of horrors.
Poul-Henning Kamp
Pages 51-53
Getting What You Measure
There are four common pitfalls to avoid when using software metrics in a project management setting.
Eric Bouwers, Joost Visser, Arie van Deursen
Pages 54-59
SECTION:
Contributed articles
Computational Folkloristics
A searchable meta-graph can connect even troublesome house elves and other supernatural beings to scholarly folk categories.
James Abello, Peter Broadwell, Timothy R. Tangherlini
Pages 60-70
Large-Scale Complex IT Systems
The reductionism behind today's software-engineering methods breaks down in the face of systems complexity.
Ian Sommerville, Dave Cliff, Radu Calinescu, Justin Keen, Tim Kelly, Marta Kwiatkowska, John Mcdermid, Richard Paige
Pages 71-77
Why On-Chip Cache Coherence Is Here to Stay
On-chip hardware coherence can scale gracefully as the number of cores increases.
Milo M. K. Martin, Mark D. Hill, Daniel J. Sorin
Pages 78-89
SECTION:
Review articles
Behavioral Programming
A novel paradigm for programming reactive systems centered on naturally specified modular behavior.
David Harel, Assaf Marron, Gera Weiss
Pages 90-100
SECTION:
Research highlights
Technical Perspective: For Better or Worse, Benchmarks Shape a Field
Like other IT fields, computer architects initially reported incomparable results. We quickly saw the folly of this approach. We then went through a sequence of performance metrics. When a field has good benchmarks, we settle …
David Patterson
Page 104
Looking Back and Looking Forward: Power, Performance, and Upheaval
The past 10 years have delivered two significant revolutions. Microprocessor design has been transformed — leading to multicore processors. And an entirely new software landscape has emerged — revolutionizing how software is …
Hadi Esmaeilzadeh, Ting Cao, Xi Yang, Stephen M. Blackburn, Kathryn S. McKinley
Pages 105-114
Technical Perspective: Why Study the Price of Anarchy?
In 1999, Elias Koutsoupias and Christos Papadimitriou initiated the study of "How much worse off are we due to selfishness?" They compared the worst case pure Nash equilibria to the optimal solution. This ratio was later called …
Amos Fiat
Page 115
Intrinsic Robustness of the Price of Anarchy
The price of anarchy, defined as the ratio of the worst-case objective function value of a Nash equilibrium of a game and that of an optimal outcome, quantifies the inefficiency of selfish behavior.
Tim Roughgarden
Pages 116-123
COLUMN:
Last byte
Future Tense: They Just Click
When glasses track glances, will eyes still meet across a crowded room?
Ken MacLeod
Pages 128-ff
SECTION:
Contributed articles: Virtual extension
Do Small IT Firms Benefit From Higher Process Capability?
Evidence suggests small firms can reap rewards from developing a high level of formal process capability.
Matthew Swinarski, Diane H. Parente, Rajiv Kishore
Pages 129-134