Now that the sound and fury in the Open Access movement has quieted down a bit, we can revisit the arguments for open access. The basic question I would like to address is what ACM's stance should be with respect to open-access publishing models.
May 2012 - Vol. 55 No. 5
Features
Likert-Type Scales, Statistical Methods, and Effect Sizes
Judy Robertson writes about researchers' use of the wrong statistical techniques to analyze attitude questionnaires.
Automating Scientific Discovery
Computer scientists are teaching machines to run experiments, make inferences from the data, and use the results to conduct new experiments.
Thanks to new research initiatives, autonomous humanoid robots are inching closer to reality.
Virtual possessions play an increasingly important role in our daily lives. How we think about them and deal with them is changing the way we think and interact with others.
The success of Germany's Dagstuhl Seminars has inspired a proliferation of Dagstuhl-like venues, especially in India.
News ACM election
Meet the candidates who introduce their plans — and stands — for the Association. Please take this opportunity to vote.
Opinion Law and technology
Promoting more harmonious paths for technological innovators and expressive creators in the Internet age.
Opinion Historical reflections
Reflections on the changing face of the history of computing.
Opinion Economic and business dimensions
Digitization and Copyright: Some Recent Evidence from Music
Examining the effects of stealing on producers and consumers.
Opinion Education
Programming Goes Back to School
Broadening participation by integrating game design into middle school curricula. View a video featuring author Alexander Repenning about using games to introduce teachers and students to programming.
Opinion Viewpoint
Considering how we can improve our understanding and utilization of the emerging human-computer network constituting the global brain.
Opinion Viewpoint
Crossing the Software Education Chasm
An Agile approach that exploits cloud computing.
Shortcuts that save money and time today can cost you down the road.
Idempotence Is Not a Medical Condition
Messages may be retried. Idempotence means that's OK.
Web and mobile applications are increasingly composed of asynchronous and real-time streaming services and push notifications.
Research and Advances Contributed articles
Social Media Evolution of the Egyptian Revolution
Twitter sentiment was revealed, along with popularity of Egypt-related subjects and tweeter influence on the 2011 revolution.
Research and Advances Contributed articles
An n-Gram Analysis of Communications 2000?2010
Applied to almost 3,500 articles it reveals computing's (and Communications') culture, identity, and evolution.
Research and Advances Review articles
Comparative Analysis of Protein Networks: Hard Problems, Practical Solutions
Examining tools that provide valuable insight about molecular components within a cell.
Research and Advances Research highlights
Technical Perspective: Best Algorithms + Best Computers = Powerful Match
Say you want to simulate the motion over time of the stars in a galaxy to learn about how galaxies formed and why the universe appears as it does. Is it feasible on a single processor? Sadly, even using today's fastest single processor, the answer is "no."
Research and Advances Research highlights
A Massively Parallel Adaptive Fast Multipole Method on Heterogeneous Architectures
We describe a parallel fast multipole method for highly nonuniform distributions of particles. We employ both distributed memory parallelism and shared memory parallelism to rapidly evaluate two-body nonoscillatory potentials in three dimensions on heterogeneous high performance computing architectures.
Research and Advances Research highlights
Technical Perspective: An Experiment in Determinism
It is widely held that parallel programming is far more difficult and error prone than writing sequential code. In particular, the myriad allowable interleavings of thread execution mean that different runs of a program can produce different behaviors.
Research and Advances Research highlights
Efficient System-Enforced Deterministic Parallelism
We introduce a new parallel programming model addressing the issues facing current methods of executing parallel programs deterministically, and use Determinator, a proof-of-concept OS, to demonstrate the model's practicality.
Opinion Last byte
Puzzled: Designs on Square Grids
Welcome to, as usual, three new puzzles. However, unlike previous columns, where solutions to two were known (and included in the related Solutions and Sources in the next issue), this time expect to see solutions to all three in June.
