For many of us, the past year has been one of the most unsettling in our lifetime. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, we watched communism collapse of its own dead weight. In late 2008, we saw capitalism nearly crumble. Lehman …

It was disappointing that two competent computer scientists — Matthias Felleisen and Shiram Krishnamurthi — took such a narrow view in their Viewpoint …

Communications' Virtual Extension brings more quality articles to ACM members. These articles are now available in the ACM Digital Library.

Michael Stonebraker discusses the problems with relational database management systems and possible solutions, and Jason Hong writes about interfaces and usable privacy and security.

Here are the most popular articles and sections from the Communications site this past summer as indicated by our latest site statistics.

The promise of parallel computing has run afoul of the harsh reality of Amdahl's Law, which puts a ceiling on the benefit of converting sequential code to parallel code. The upshot is that parallelism will not necessarily reap …

Researchers working in medical nanorobotics are creating technologies that could lead to novel health-care applications, such as new ways of accessing areas of the human body that would otherwise be unreachable without invasive …

Researchers are addressing the computing challenges of older individuals, whose needs are different — and too often disregarded.

Scientists share knowledge and seek collaborators at computational sustainability conference.

The creation of a statistical index of U.S. telecommunications surveillance activities and their results will benefit both civil liberties and law enforcement.

Computing is as fundamental as the physical, life, and social sciences.

Some predictions for technology developments, deployments, and the associated societal implications.

Viewing the factors impeding improvements to CS education from kindergarten through grade 12 from a policy perspective.

Hardware, software, and applications must all evolve in anticipation of the proliferation of parallelism.

Maurice Wilkes, the designer and builder of the EDSAC — the first computer with an internally stored program — reflects on his career.

The Google Web Toolkit is an end-run around Web development obstacles.

MonALISA developers describe how it works, the key design principles behind it, and the biggest technical challenges in building it.

All revision-control systems come with complicated sets of trade-offs. How do you find the best match between tool and team?

Mining the wisdom of the online crowds generates music business intelligence, identifying what's hot and what's not.

Software's close encounters with the law provide some lessons for our future.

It's one of the fundamental mathematical problems of our time, and its importance grows with the rise of powerful computers.

Looking for some new insight into an old problem? The  familiar problem of writing parallel applications and a fresh approach based on data abstraction allows some …

The problem of writing software for multicore processors is greatly simplified if we could automatically parallelize sequential programs. Although auto-parallelization has been studied for many decades, it has succeeded only

You never click on advertisements received in spam or in phishing messages, do you? Nobody does. So, if that is true, why are we still getting an enormous amount of unsolicited …

Spam-based marketing is a curious beast. We all receive the advertisements — "Excellent hardness is easy!" — but few of us have encountered a person who admits to following through on this offer and making a purchase. And yet …

Last month (August 2009, p. 104) we posted a trio of brainteasers, including one as yet unsolved, concerning probability and intuition.

Be cautious about the artificial intelligence approach to computer science. It is impossible to differentiate the actual achievement of AI from the degree to which people change …

Ms. Perez was giving a PowerPoint presentation to her potential clients in the hope of landing a big contract. She was presenting a new advertising campaign for a mutual fund company and had spent three months with her team on …

It is a digital age, especially for children and students who can be called the world's first truly digital generation. Accordingly a new generation education technology with a particular emphasis on visual thinking and specific …

The web has become the largest data repository on the planet. An important factor contributing to its success is its openness and ease of use: anyone can contribute data to, and consume data from, the Web. As Tim Berners-Lee, …

Web accessibility continues to have important social, legal and economic implications for ecommerce. Over 50 million Americans have disabilities and so do around 600 million world-wide (www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/c2kbr-17.pdf …

Information security has become increasingly important for organizations, given their dependence on ICT. Not surprisingly, therefore, the external threats posed by hackers and viruses have received extensive coverage in the mass …

The participation of individual users in online communities is one of the most noted features in the recent explosive growth of popular online communities ranging from picture and video sharing (Flickr.com and YouTube.com) and …

Frustration with the bureaucratic nature of the disciplined approach has led to the call for agile development. The new approach is defined by the Agile Manifesto (http://agilemanifesto.org/), which values individuals and interactions …

In 1999, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration report Falling through the Net noted that "NTIA has found that there is still a significant "digital divide" separating American information "haves" andwidened …