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January 2009 (Vol. 52, No. 1)
Rural engineering development

Table of Contents

DEPARTMENT: Editor's letter

How Are We Doing?

A rabbinical story tells about an angry reader who stormed into a newspaper office waving the day's paper, asking to see the editor of the obituary column.

Page 5

DEPARTMENT: Letters to the editor

DEPARTMENT: CACM online

COLUMN: News

Calculating the Future

Climate researchers have no shortage of scientific issues on which to expend computer power. The biggest problem is choosing which one to tackle first.

Pages 9-11

The Universe in Your Computer

Two virtual astronomical telescopes promise to transform the way people view and study the cosmos.

Pages 12-14

Context-Aware Smartphones

Future generations of smartphones will be context aware, tracking your behavior, providing information about the immediate environment, and anticipating your intentions.

Pages 15-16

A Pioneer Woman

Programmer Jean Bartik is inducted into the Computer History Museum's Hall of Fellows.

Page 17

COLUMN: Viewpoints

Law and Technology: The End of the Generative Internet

Exploring the expectations and implications for version 2.0 of the Net's new gated communities.

Pages 18-20

Ground Control to Architect Tom . . .

Architecture astronauts habitually speak at extremely high levels of abstraction to avoid engaging in tangible discussions that might lead to disclosing that they really have no idea of what they are talking about. 

Pages 21-22

The Business of Software: The Ontology of Paper

The next generation of software engineering will involve designing systems without using paper-based formats, instead using software to develop software.

Pages 23-24

Technology Strategy and Management: The Legacy of Bill Gates

Assessing the pluses and minuses of the helmsmanship of Microsoft Corporation since its inception.

Pages 25-26

Viewpoint: Scaling the Academic Publication Process to Internet Scale

A proposal to remedy problems in the reviewing process.

Pages 27-30

DEPARTMENT: ACM's FY08 annual report

SECTION: Practice

Eventually Consistent

Building reliable distributed systems at a worldwide scale demands trade-offs between consistency and availability.

Pages 40-44

The Long Road to 64 Bits

The sometimes contentious development of 64-bit systems shows how technology decisions can have unexpected, enduring consequences.

Pages 45-53

SECTION: Contributed articles

Engineering rural development

Information systems enable rural development by increasing the accountability of nongovernmental organizations.

Pages 54-63

wisePad Services for Vision-, Hearing-, and Speech-Impaired Users

The wisePad system is envisioned as a full-service computing platform capable of delivering personalized image, audio, and text services to millions of individuals worldwide with impaired vision or hearing problems.

Pages 64-69

SECTION: Review articles

e-Challenges in e-Commerce

Economic and social sciences will drive Internet protocols and services into the future.

Pages 70-74

SECTION: Research highlights

Technical Perspective: Customizing Media to Displays

A mind-boggling array of displays, from high-resolution LCDs to low-resolution cellphone screens, differ greatly in resolutions and aspect ratios. But  images and videos are captured at fixed resolutions and aspect ratios, and …

Page 76

Seam Carving for Media Retargeting

Traditional image resizing techniques are oblivious to the content of the image when changing its width or height. In contrast, media (i.e., image and video) retargeting take s content into account. For example, one would like …

Pages 77-85

Voyagers and Voyeurs: Supporting asynchronous collaborative visualization

This article describes mechanisms for asynchronous collaboration in the context of information visualization, recasting visualizations as not just analytic tools, but social spaces. We contribute the design and implementation …

Pages 87-97

COLUMN: Last byte

Q&A: The Upper Limit

Jeannette Wing talks about clusters, creativity, and the power of computational thinking.

Pages 112-ff

SECTION: Virtual extension

Automating Commonsense Reasoning Using the Event Calculus

Pages 113-117

Active Citizen Participation Using ICT tools

Pages 118-121

Understanding the Adopters and Non-Adopters of Broadband

Pages 122-125

Improved Security Through Information Security Governance

Pages 126-129

Exploring the Black Box of Task-Technology Fit

Pages 130-135

Disaster Response in Health Care: A design extension for enterprise data warehouse

Pages 136-140

The Relationship Between Software Development Team Size and Software Development Cost

Pages 141-144

Why eBay Lost to TaoBao in China: the Glocal advantage

How Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C) electronic-commerce platforms in China compete and how buyers are stimulated to be both aware and trustful of sellers through buyer-seller communication channels.

Pages 145-148

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