September 2008 - Vol. 51 No. 9

Features

Opinion President's letter Sep 1 2008

ACM's new president intends to make international initiatives a top priority, hoping to share the Association's riches with a greater global audience.

Wendy Hall

Computing Applications

Opinion Publisher's corner Sep 1 2008

50 Years Young

I've received dozens of email messages providing feedback on the July issue.

Scott E. Delman

Computing Applications

Opinion Letters to the editor Sep 1 2008

Knuth’s Art of Recovering from Errors

I really enjoyed Donald E. Knuth reminiscing in Edward Feigenbaum’s interview with him ("The ‘Art’ of Being Donald Knuth," July 2008). Who…

CACM Staff

Computing Applications

Opinion CACM online Sep 1 2008

Current Features

Our readers are a most opinionated audience and we value those opinions. Feel free to share your thoughts or get something off your chest. There are many ways to present…

David Roman

Computing Applications

News Sep 1 2008

Finding Diamonds in the Rough

Spectral graph theory has proven to be very useful for text search and retrieval and for refining predictive-analysis systems.

Kirk L. Kroeker

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

News Sep 1 2008

Ubiquitous Video

Scalable and distributed video coding offers the promise of two-way, real-time video.

Logan Kugler

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

News Sep 1 2008

Privacy Matters

As concerns about protecting personal data increase, differential privacy offers a promising solution.

Samuel Greengard

Computing Applications

News Sep 1 2008

Wisdom from Randy Pausch

Randy Pausch, author of the best-selling The Last Lecture and a virtual-world innovator, on computer science, Alice, and teaching.

Leah Hoffmann

Computing Applications

Opinion Viewpoints Sep 1 2008

Technology Strategy and Management: The Puzzle of Apple

Given Apple's unique characteristics, should it strive to be a platform or a product leader?

Michael Cusumano

Architecture and Hardware

Opinion Viewpoints Sep 1 2008

Kode Vicious: Pride and Prejudice (The Vasa)

Navigating the well-traveled course of communication failure that often leads to engineering disasters.

George Neville-Neil

Computing Applications

Opinion Viewpoints Sep 1 2008

IT Policy: Science Policy Isn’t Always About Science

What is the appropriate role and level of influence for science and technical advice in policy deliberations?

Cameron Wilson and Peter Harsha

Computing Applications

Opinion Viewpoints Sep 1 2008

Viewpoint: Global Warming Toward Open Educational Resources

Seeking to realize the potential for significantly improving and advancing the world's standard of education.

Richard G. Baraniuk and C. Sidney Burrus

Computing Applications

Practice Sep 1 2008

How Do I Model State?: Let Me Count the Ways

A study of the technology and sociology of Web service specifications.

Ian Foster, Savas Parastatidis, Paul Watson, and Mark Mckeown

Computing Applications

Practice Sep 1 2008

Powering Down

Smart power management is all about doing more with the resources we have.

Matthew Garrett

Architecture and Hardware

Practice Sep 1 2008

CTO Storage Roundtable, Part Two

Leaders in the storage industry ponder upcoming technologies and trends.

Mache Creeger

Architecture and Hardware

Practice Sep 1 2008

Software Engineering and Formal Methods

The answer to software reliability concerns may lie in formal methods.

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Contributed articles Sep 1 2008

Beyond Keywords: Automated Question Answering on the Web

Beyond Google, emerging question-answering systems respond to natural-language queries.

Dmitri Roussinov, Weiguo Fan, and José Robles-Flores

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Contributed articles Sep 1 2008

Design and Code Reviews in the Age of the Internet

New collaboration tools allow geographically distributed software-development teams to boost the venerable concept of code review.

Bertrand Meyer

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Review articles Sep 1 2008

Information Integration in the Enterprise

A guide to the tools and core technologies for merging information from disparate sources.

Philip A. Bernstein and Laura M. Haas

Computing Applications

Research and Advances Research highlights Sep 1 2008

Technical Perspective: Transactional Memory in the Operating System

The long tradition of building ever-faster processors is ending, with the computer industry instead putting more …

Mark Moir

Architecture and Hardware

Research and Advances Research highlights Sep 1 2008

TxLinux and MetaTM: Transactional Memory and the Operating System

TxLinux is the first operating system to use hardware transactional memory (HTM) as a synchronization primitive, and the first to manage HTM in the scheduler. TxLinux, a…

Architecture and Hardware

Research and Advances Research highlights Sep 1 2008

Technical Perspective: Distributing Your Data and Having It, Too

Interconnected Systems—the Internet, wireless networks, or sensor nets—embrace virtually all computing environments. Thus our data no longer needs to be…

Hagit Attiya

Architecture and Hardware

Research and Advances Research highlights Sep 1 2008

Distributed Selection: A Missing Piece of Data Aggregation

In this article, we study the problem of distributed selection from a theoretical point of view. Given a general connected graph of diameter D consisting of n nodes in…

Fabian Kuhn, Thomas Locher, and Roger Wattenhofer

Architecture and Hardware

Opinion Last byte Sep 1 2008

Puzzled: Solutions and Sources

Last month (August 2008, p. 104) Peter Winkler posed a trio of brain teasers in his "Puzzled" column. Here, he offers some solutions. How well did you do?

Peter Winkler

Opinion Last byte Sep 1 2008

Future Tense: Will

Expect virtual immortality through enduring, realistic avatars based on published work and archived memory.

William Sims Bainbridge

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning