December 2013 Table of Contents | Communications of the ACM

Home → Magazine Archive → December 2013 (Vol. 56, No. 12)

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M. Tamer Özsu

Page 5

DEPARTMENT: From the president

Software at Scale

I have been thinking about the implications of the increasing number of programmable devices and appliances that surround us. For one thing, they all require software to function. Who will write all that software?

Vinton G. Cerf

Page 7

DEPARTMENT: Letters to the Editor

Free the Digital Natives

James Geller raised important questions in his letter to the editor "Beware BYOD" (Sept. 2013) but mixed learning and assessment with the practicalities of supporting multiple devices.

CACM Staff

Pages 8-9

DEPARTMENT: [email protected]

The Lure of Live Coding; The Attraction of Small Data

Mark Guzdial ponders a new set of research questions, while Valerie Barr considers the utility of one person's data.

Mark Guzdial, Valerie Barr

Pages 10-11

COLUMN: News

Life Points the Way to a New Template For Chipmaking

While significant obstacles remain, researchers are optimistic about using DNA to guide graphene into complex circuit shapes on silicon.

Chris Edwards

Pages 13-15

Seeing the Big Picture

Lensless cameras and other advances in digital imaging, computational optics, signal processing, and big data are transforming how we think about photography.

Samuel Greengard

Pages 16-18

CS Enrollments Rise . . . at the Expense of the Humanities?

A growing proportion of U.S. college students are earning degrees in computer and information sciences, surprising some in academia.

Karen A. Frenkel

Pages 19-21

COLUMN: Emerging markets

Information Technology Impact Sourcing

New ways to contract IT work to base-of-the-pyramid suppliers.

Richard Heeks

Pages 22-25

COLUMN: Historical reflections

Patrick Blackett: Providing 'White Heat' to the British Computing Revolution

Reflections on a Nobel Prize-winning physicist's early contributions to computing.

David Anderson

Pages 26-28

COLUMN: The profession of IT

Design Thinking

Design thinking is the newest fashion for finding better solutions to problems. Combining it with computational thinking offers some real possibilities for improving software design.

Peter J. Denning

Pages 29-31

COLUMN: Kode Vicious

A Lesson in Resource Management

Waste not memory, want not memory — unless it doesn't matter.

George V. Neville-Neil

Pages 32-33

COLUMN: Broadening participation

Bringing Young Women Into Computing Through the NCWIT Aspirations in Computing Program

A program to encourage and support girls and women in pursuing their computer science interests.

Wendy M. DuBow, Ruthe Farmer, Zhen Wu, Malia Fredrickson

Pages 34-37

COLUMN: Viewpoint

From MOOCs to SPOCs

Supplementing the classroom experience with small private online courses.

Armando Fox

Pages 38-40

SECTION: Practice

Making the Web Faster with HTTP 2.0

HTTP continues to evolve.

Ilya Grigorik

Pages 42-49

The Challenge of Cross-Language Interoperability

Interfacing between languages is becoming more important

David Chisnall

Pages 50-56

Intermediate Representation

The increasing significance of intermediate representations in compilers.

Fred Chow

Pages 57-62

SECTION: Contributed articles

Data Science and Prediction

Big data promises automated actionable knowledge creation and predictive models for use by both humans and computers.

Vasant Dhar

Pages 64-73

Legal Aspects of Interface Accessibility in the U.S.

Accessible information technology is not just good design and a clever way to win new users, it is the law.

Jonathan Lazar, Harry Hochheiser

Pages 74-80

SECTION: Review articles

Replicated Data Consistency Explained Through Baseball

A broader class of consistency guarantees can, and perhaps should, be offered to clients that read shared data.

Doug Terry

Pages 82-89

A Survey of Mobility in Information-Centric Networks

'Where's' in a name?

Gareth Tyson, Nishanth Sastry, Ruben Cuevas, Ivica Rimac, Andreas Mauthe

Pages 90-98

SECTION: Research highlights

Technical Perspective: The Cleanest Garbage Collection

In quite a tour de force, the authors of the following paper have built a provably correct real-time garbage collector for reconfigurable hardware (field programmable gate arrays).

Eliot Moss

Page 100

And Then There Were None: A Stall-Free Real-Time Garbage Collector For Reconfigurable Hardware

We present a garbage collector synthesized directly to hardware, capable of collecting a heap of uniform objects completely concurrently. These heaps are composed entirely of objects of a fixed shape. Thus, the size of the data …

David F. Bacon, Perry Cheng, Sunil Shukla

Pages 101-109

COLUMN: Last byte

Puzzled: Solutions and Sources

Last month (November 2013) we posted three tricky puzzles concerning coin flipping. Here, we offer solutions to all three. How did you do?

Peter Winkler

Page 126

Q&A: Securing the Risk

Peter G. Neumann views computers and their related issues holistically.

Leah Hoffmann

Pages 128-ff

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