DEPARTMENT:
Letter from the Editors-in-Chief of CACM and JACM
What Is a Flagship Publication?
Communications of the ACM has become known as the "flagship magazine of the ACM." While ACM has an impressive collection of other high-quality journals and magazines, the flagship is not leading the fleet!
Moshe Y. Vardi, Victor Vianu
Page 5
DEPARTMENT:
From the president
Computer Science Education - Revisited
ACM has been pursuing an initiative to make computer science acceptable as a core science along with mathematics, physics, biology, and chemistry.
Vinton G. Cerf
Page 7
DEPARTMENT:
Letters to the Editor
Is Computing Science?
Peter J. Denning's "The Science in Computer Science" (May 2013) explored the ongoing dispute over scientific boundaries within computer science. However, the boundaries separating the sciences, and knowledge in general, have …
CACM Staff
Page 9
DEPARTMENT:
BLOG@CACM
Teaching Programming the Way It Works Outside the Classroom
Philip Guo offers programmers 'Opportunistic Programming' tips that typically are not shared in school.
Philip Guo
Pages 10-11
COLUMN:
News
A New Approach to Information Storage
Disk drives and solid-state drives have long served as the foundation for computer storage, but breakthroughs in molecular and DNA science could revolutionize the field.
Samuel Greengard
Pages 13-15
Patient, Heal Thyself
New handheld medical diagnostic tools promise more efficient, lower-cost healthcare — but at what price?
Alex Wright
Pages 16-18
Software Aims to Ensure Fairness in Crowdsourcing Projects
The debate rages on about whether crowdsourcing is a win-win for workers, as well as for employers.
Paul Hyman
Pages 19-21
COLUMN:
Emerging markets
Ultra-Low-Cost Computing and Developing Countries
Raspberry Pi and its potential in the "global South."
Richard Heeks, Andrew Robinson
Pages 22-24
COLUMN:
Economic and business dimensions
Money Models For MOOCs
Considering new business models for massive open online courses.
Chrysanthos Dellarocas, Marshall Van Alstyne
Pages 25-28
COLUMN:
Privacy and security
The Air Gap: SCADA's Enduring Security Myth
Attempting to use isolation as a security strategy for critical systems is unrealistic in an increasingly connected world.
Eric Byres
Pages 29-31
COLUMN:
Kode vicious
Cherry-Picking and the Scientific Method
Software is supposed be a part of computer science, and science demands proof.
George V. Neville-Neil
Pages 32-33
COLUMN:
Education
Success in Introductory Programming: What Works?
How pair programming, peer instruction, and media computation have improved computer science education.
Leo Porter, Mark Guzdial, Charlie McDowell, Beth Simon
Pages 34-36
COLUMN:
Viewpoint
Overt Censorship: A Fatal Mistake?
Censorship of information often has the opposite effect by drawing attention to the censored material.
Jean-Loup Richet
Pages 37-38
SECTION:
Practice
The Antifragile Organization
Embracing failure to improve resilience and maximize availability.
Ariel Tseitlin
Pages 40-44
Best Practices on the Move: Building Web Apps For Mobile Devices
Which practices should be modified or avoided altogether by developers for the mobile Web?
Alex Nicolaou
Pages 45-51
Rules For Mobile Performance Optimization
An overview of techniques to speed page loading.
Tammy Everts
Pages 52-59
SECTION:
Contributed articles
Are We Free to Code the Law?
We should be, for the sake of millions of people with pressing legal needs.
Marc Lauritsen
Pages 60-66
How Productivity and Impact Differ Across Computer Science Subareas
How to understand evaluation criteria for CS researchers.
Jacques Wainer, Michael Eckmann, Siome Goldenstein, Anderson Rocha
Pages 67-73
SECTION:
Review articles
Evolutionary Robotics
Taking a biologically inspired approach to the design of autonomous, adaptive machines.
Josh C. Bongard
Pages 74-83
SECTION:
Research highlights
Technical Perspective: Every Graph Is Essentially Sparse
The following paper by Batson, Spielman, Srivastava, and Teng surveys one of the most important recent intellectual achievements of theoretical computer science, demonstrating that every weighted graph is close to a sparse …
Assaf Naor
Page 86
Spectral Sparsification of Graphs: Theory and Algorithms
Graph sparsification is the approximation of an arbitrary graph by a sparse graph. We explain what it means for one graph to be a spectral approximation of another and review the development of algorithms for spectral sparsification …
Joshua Batson, Daniel A. Spielman, Nikhil Srivastava, Shang-Hua Teng
Pages 87-94
COLUMN:
Last byte
Puzzled: Wins in a Row
Each of these puzzles involves game-playing strategy. If you are sufficiently clever — and sufficiently unmotivated to work hard at being clever — you can solve them all without resorting to algebra.
Peter Winkler
Page 96