November 2004 - Vol. 47 No. 11

November 2004 issue cover image

Features

Opinion Editorial pointers

Editorial Pointers

It’s a humbling fact that the potential to unravel the mysteries of a single microscopic molecule can take every FLOPS of computational power in existence—and then some. Even more humbling is that it can happen only because of this extreme level of computational power, which allows scientists to visualize and comprehend vast volumes of biological […]
News News track

News Track

Computational biologists at IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center have created an anti-spam filter inspired by the way scientists analyze genetic sequences. BBC News reports the formula automatically learns patterns of spam vocabulary with a proven 96.5% success rate. Indeed, in a recent test the filter misidentified only one message in 6,000 as spam. The formula, […]
Opinion Forum

Forum

Although the Viewpoint by Peter Freeman and David Hart ("A Science of Design for Software-Intensive Systems," Aug. 2004) explored the idea that design must account for such factors as style and innovation, it didn’t say that the underlying tools of computer science and engineering, on which design is based, are unstable, and that this is […]
Opinion Hot links

Top 10 Downloads from Acm’s Portal

Communications of the ACM Volume 47, Number 11 (2004), Pages 21-22 Hot links: Top 10 downloads from ACM’s portal Diane Crawford Table of Contents Tables Back to Top Tables Table. The Top 10 Most Popular Papers from ACM’s Refereed Journals and Conference Proceedings Downloaded in August 2004 Table. THe 10 Most Popular Courses and Books […]
Opinion Inside risks

Evaluation of Voting Systems

The recent spate of security issues and allegations of "lost votes" in the U.S. demonstrates the inadequacy of the standards used to evaluate our election systems. The current standards (the FEC Voting Systems Standards) along with the revision being developed by IEEE 1583 (see the article by Deutsch and Berger in last month’s Communications) are […]

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