May 2015 - Vol. 58 No. 5

Features

Opinion May 1 2015

Incentivizing Quality and Impact in Computing Research

Developing consensus on how the computing-research publication culture should be changed has proven to be exceedingly hard. The Computing Research Association has now addressed this issue head-on in its new Best Practice Memo.

Moshe Y. Vardi

Computing Applications

Opinion May 1 2015

Cascade Failure

Anyone with a collection of DVD or CD-ROM disks will appreciate that we cannot rely in the long term on specialized format devices being available. It is worth some effort to pay attention to the nature of these dependencies, their scope, and the potential side effects.

Vinton G. Cerf

Architecture and Hardware

Opinion Letters to the Editor May 1 2015

Abolish Software Warranty Disclaimers

Carl Landwehr was right to suggest in his Viewpoint "We Need a Building Code for Building Code" (Feb. 2015) that there should be a building code for software.

CACM Staff

Computing Applications

BLOG@CACM May 1 2015

Introducing Young Women to CS, and Supporting Advanced Research Environments

Joel Adams talks about starting a chapter of Girls Who Code, while Daniel A. Reed considers an issue with cyberinfrastructure.

Joel Adams and Daniel A. Reed

Computing Applications

News May 1 2015

Is ‘Good Enough’ Computing Good Enough?

The energy-accuracy trade-off in approximate computing.

Logan Kugler

Architecture and Hardware

Is 'Good Enough' Computing Good Enough? illustration

News May 1 2015

Putting the Data Science Into Journalism

News organizations increasingly use techniques like data mining, Web scraping, and data visualization to uncover information that would be impossible to identify and present manually.

Keith Kirkpatrick

Computing Applications

Putting the Data Science into Journalism, illustration

News May 1 2015

Robots With a Human Touch

Empowering smart machines with tactile feedback could lead to tremendous new applications.

Gregory Mone

Architecture and Hardware

Opinion Economic and business dimensions May 1 2015

Life of IP

Seeking to balance intellectual property protection with incentives for investment in innovation.

Michael Schrage and Marshall Van Alstyne

Computing Applications

Opinion Education May 1 2015

What Are We Doing When We Teach Computing in Schools?

Research on the cognitive, educational, and policy dimensions of teaching computing is critical to achieving "computer literacy."

Sally Fincher

Computing Applications

What Are We Doing When We Teach Computing in Schools? illustration

Opinion Law and technology May 1 2015

Oracle v. Google: A High-Stakes Legal Fight For the Software Industry

Copyrighting APIs threatens significant harm to both consumers and the software industry.

Christopher Jon Sprigman

Computing Applications

Opinion Viewpoint May 1 2015

Teach Foundational Language Principles

Industry is ready and waiting for more graduates educated in the principles of programming languages.

Thomas Ball and Benjamin Zorn

Computing Applications

Teach Foundational Language Principles, illustration

Opinion Viewpoint May 1 2015

Managing Your Digital Life

Everyone should be able to manage their personal data with a personal information management system.

Serge Abiteboul, Benjamin André, and Daniel Kaplan

Computing Applications

Managing Your Digital Life, illustration

Practice May 1 2015

There Is No Now

Problems with simultaneity in distributed systems.

Justin Sheehy

Computing Applications

Practice May 1 2015

Parallel Processing with Promises

A simple method of writing a collaborative system.

Spencer Rathbun

Computing Applications

Parallel Processing with Promises, illustration

Research and Advances Contributed articles May 1 2015

Privacy Behaviors After Snowden

Despite continuing media coverage, the public's privacy behaviors have hardly changed.

Sören Preibusch

Architecture and Hardware

Privacy Behaviors After Snowden, illustration

Research and Advances Contributed articles May 1 2015

Decoding Femininity in Computer Science in India

The benefits in school and the job market so far outweigh any potential gender bias that few women are deterred.

Roli Varma and Deepak Kapur

Computing Applications

Decoding Femininity in Computer Science in India, illustrative photo

Research and Advances Review articles May 1 2015

Optimization as Motion Selection Principle in Robot Action

Robots move to act. While actions operate in a physical space, motions begin in a motor control space. So how do robots express actions in terms of motions?

Jean-Paul Laumond, Nicolas Mansard, and Jean-Bernard Lasserre

Architecture and Hardware

Optimization as Motion Selection Principle in Robot Action, illustration

Research and Advances Research highlights May 1 2015

Technical Perspective: Programming Multicore Computers

"Can Traditional Programming Bridge the Ninja Performance Gap for Parallel Computing Applications" advocates an appealing division of labor between a developer and a compiler to increase the opportunities for the compiler to generate and optimize parallel machine code.

James Larus

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Research highlights May 1 2015

Can Traditional Programming Bridge the Ninja Performance Gap For Parallel Computing Applications?

Current processor trends of integrating more cores with SIMD units have made it more to extract performance from applications. It is believed that traditional approaches to programming do not apply to these processors. We question this thinking.

Computing Applications

Opinion Last byte May 1 2015

Upstart Puzzles: Strategic Friendship

Consider the following game (first posed to my close friend Dr. Ecco) played among several entities. Each entity Ei has a certain force Fi and a certain wealth Wi.

Dennis Shasha

Computing Applications

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