July 2012
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Predatory Scholarly Publishing
Moshe Y. Vardi
In a typical business, you have two parties: sellers and buyers. In scholarly publishing you also have sellers and buyers, these...
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An Integral Number and Its Consequences
CACM Staff
Pondering Moshe Y. Vardi's "What Is an Algorithm?" (Mar. 2012), one should consider that in its most abstract and tangible form...
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CS and Popular Culture; Learning From Console Games
Mark Guzdial, Judy Robertson
Mark Guzdial writes about why computer science should permeate popular culture. Judy Robertson discusses the educational benefits...
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Degrees of Separation
Gregory Goth
Researchers now have the capability to look at the small-world problem from both the traditional algorithmic approach and the...
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HTML5 Leads a Web Revolution
Gary Anthes
Propelled by a proliferation of mobile devices and social networks, an enhanced family of Web specifications is bringing new...
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Patently Inadequate
Marina Krakovsky
The biggest change to U.S. patent law in nearly 60 years brings many changes, but fails to solve the software industry's most...
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Lost and Found
Paul Hyman
Researchers discover computer pioneer Konrad Zuse's long-forgotten Z9, the world's first program-controlled binary relay calculator...
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Business Models for Strategy and Innovation
Mari Sako
While often ambiguously defined, business models are central to innovation.
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Can Online Piracy Be Stopped by Laws?
Pamela Samuelson
Considering the legal responsibilities of Internet intermediaries in the aftermath of the Stop Online Privacy Act controversy...
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An Information Strategy for Environmental Sustainability
R. T. Watson, J. Corbett, M. C. Boudreau, J. Webster
Many proposed solutions to the species-threatening transformations born of human industrialization have an engineering orientation...
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Alan Turing's Other Universal Machine
Martin Campbell-Kelly
All computer scientists know about the Universal Turing Machine, one of the foundation stones of theoretical computer science...
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Google's Hybrid Approach to Research
Alfred Spector, Peter Norvig, Slav Petrov
By closely connecting research and development Google is able to conduct experiments on an unprecedented scale, often resulting...
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The Challenges of Privacy by Design
Sarah Spiekermann
Heralded by regulators, Privacy by Design holds the promise to solve the digital world's privacy problems. But there are immense...
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Controlling Queue Delay
Kathleen Nichols, Van Jacobson
Active queue management is just one piece of the solution to persistently full buffers.
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My Compiler Does Not Understand Me
Poul-Henning Kamp
Until our programming languages catch up, code will be full of horrors.
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Getting What You Measure
Eric Bouwers, Joost Visser, Arie van Deursen
There are four common pitfalls to avoid when using software metrics in a project management setting.
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Computational Folkloristics
James Abello, Peter Broadwell, Timothy R. Tangherlini
A searchable meta-graph can connect even troublesome house elves and other supernatural beings to scholarly folk categories.
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Large-Scale Complex IT Systems
Ian Sommerville, Dave Cliff, Radu Calinescu, Justin Keen, Tim Kelly, Marta Kwiatkowska, John Mcdermid, Richard Paige
The reductionism behind today's software-engineering methods breaks down in the face of systems complexity.
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Why On-Chip Cache Coherence is Here to Stay
Milo M. K. Martin, Mark D. Hill, Daniel J. Sorin
On-chip hardware coherence can scale gracefully as the number of cores increases.
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Behavioral Programming
David Harel, Assaf Marron, Gera Weiss
A novel paradigm for programming reactive systems centered on naturally specified modular behavior.
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Technical Perspective: For Better or Worse, Benchmarks Shape a Field
David Patterson
Like other IT fields, computer architects initially reported incomparable results. We quickly saw the folly of this approach....
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Looking Back and Looking Forward: Power, Performance, and Upheaval
Hadi Esmaeilzadeh, Ting Cao, Xi Yang, Stephen M. Blackburn, Kathryn S. McKinley
The past 10 years have delivered two significant revolutions. Microprocessor design has been transformed — leading to multicore...
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Technical Perspective: Why Study the Price of Anarchy?
Amos Fiat
In 1999, Elias Koutsoupias and Christos Papadimitriou initiated the study of "How much worse off are we due to selfishness?"...
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Intrinsic Robustness of the Price of Anarchy
Tim Roughgarden
The price of anarchy, defined as the ratio of the worst-case objective function value of a Nash equilibrium of a game and that...
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Future Tense: They Just Click
Ken MacLeod
When glasses track glances, will eyes still meet across a crowded room?
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Do Small IT Firms Benefit From Higher Process Capability?
Matthew Swinarski, Diane H. Parente, Rajiv Kishore
Evidence suggests small firms can reap rewards from developing a high level of formal process capability.