Communications of the ACM: October 2012 Issue

[Re Huamaní Aguilar]

Communications of the ACM Newsletter – New Digital Edition October 2012 Dear Rene Huamani: Welcome to the Digital Edition of the October 2012 Communications of the ACM. To access the Digital Edition, please click on the cover image at left or on the link at the top of this email. Also see the Table of Contents at the bottom of this email. Can computationally challenging tasks be solved collectively by groups of subjects using only local information and interactions? Yes, writes Michael Kearns in "Experiments in Social Computation," this month's cover story. Kearns explores the kinds of computational problems such populations can solve in a distributed manner, and whether complexity theory or a variant of same provides any guidance. Also in this issue: "Internet Voting in the U.S.," by Barbara Simons and Douglas W. Jones, states that Internet voting is fundamentally insecure, and is being pushed in many countries by vendors, officials, and advocates who do not understand the risks. "The Tyranny of the Clock," by Ivan Sutherland, advocates for a clock-free design paradigm, which must eventually prevail, Sutherland says. Casting off the tyranny of the clock offers freedom to optimize the separate parts of a design, he says. "Redesigning the Data Center," by Gregory Mone, reveals the technological tricks companies take to bring greater efficiencies to those energy squanderers known as data centers. "Where is the Science in Computer Science?" by Vinton G. Cerf, Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google Inc. and President of ACM, discusses the responsibility to pursue the science in computer science. Communications is also available through our mobile applications, including the ACM CACM app for Android devices, at http://bit.ly/QythPc, the ACM CACM app for the iPhone, at http://bit.ly/HWEAfw, and the ACM CACM HD app for the iPad, at http://bit.ly/MEa0JR. We also invite you to visit the Communications Web site, a digital hub of industry news, commentary, observations, and practical research. As always, we welcome and appreciate your thoughts and comments on Communications of the ACM. Please forward your feedback to: cacmfe...@acm.org Sincerely, Scott Delman Director, Group Publishing Association for Computing Machinery Table of Contents   Where is the science in computer science? Vinton G. Cerf Pages: 5-5 Full text: Html  PDF Other formats: Digital Edition DEPARTMENT: Letters to the Editor When harm to conference reputation is self-inflicted CACM Staff Pages: 6-7 Full text: Html  PDF Other formats: Digital Edition DEPARTMENT: BLOG@CACM Online privacy; replicating research results Daniel Reed, Ed H. Chi Pages: 8-9 Full text: Html  PDF Other formats: Digital Edition The Communications Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of Communications, we'll publish selected posts or excerpts.twitterFollow us on Twitter ... COLUMN: News Digging for drug facts Neil Savage Pages: 11-13 Full text: Html  PDF Other formats: Digital Edition With the right approach, data mining can discover unexpected side effects and drug interactions. Redesigning the data center Gregory Mone Pages: 14-16 Full text: Html  PDF Other formats: Digital Edition Faced with rising electricity costs, leading companies have begun revolutionizing the way data centers work, from the hardware to the buildings themselves. Computer science and the three Rs Leah Hoffmann Pages: 17-19 Full text: Html  PDF Other formats: Digital Edition A growing sense of crisis prevails as computer science searches for its place in the K--12 curriculum. COLUMN: Technology strategy and management Reflecting on the Facebook IPO Michael A. Cusumano Pages: 20-23 Full text: Html  PDF Other formats: Digital Edition Exploring some factors that reflect a company's worth. COLUMN: The business of software The Goldilocks estimate Phillip G. Armour Pages: 24-25 Full text: Html  PDF Other formats: Digital Edition Balancing two extremes in project estimation. COLUMN: Inside risks The foresight saga, redux Peter G. Neumann Pages: 26-29 Full text: Html  PDF Other formats: Digital Edition Short-term thinking is the enemy of the long-term future. COLUMN: Kode Vicious A nice piece of code George V. Neville-Neil Pages: 30-31 Full text: Html  PDF Other formats: Digital Edition Colorful metaphors and properly reusing functions. COLUMN: Viewpoint Computing as if infrastructure mattered Jean-François Blanchette Pages: 32-34 Full text: Html  PDF Other formats: Digital Edition Understanding the technical and social fundamentals of the computing infrastructure is essential in the continuously evolving technological realm. The tyranny of the clock Ivan Sutherland Pages: 35-36 Full text: Html  PDF Other formats: Digital Edition Promoting a clock-free paradigm that fits everything learned about programming since Turing. SECTION: Practice Toward higher precision Rick Ratzel, Rodney Greenstreet Pages: 38-47 Full text: Html  PDF Other formats: Digital Edition An introduction to PTP and its significance to NTP practitioners. Fault injection in production John Allspaw Pages: 48-52 Full text: Html  PDF Other formats: Digital Edition Making the case for resilience testing. A generation lost in the bazaar Poul-Henning Kamp Pages: 53-55 Full text: Html  PDF Other formats: Digital Edition Quality happens only when someone is responsible for it. SECTION: Contributed articles Experiments in social computation Michael Kearns Pages: 56-67 Full text: Html  PDF Other formats: Digital Edition Human subjects perform a computationally wide range of tasks from only local, networked interactions. Internet voting in the U.S. Barbara Simons, Douglas W. Jones Pages: 68-77 Full text: Html  PDF Other formats: Digital Edition Internet voting is unachievable for the foreseeable future and therefore not inevitable. SECTION: Review articles A few useful things to know about machine learning Pedro Domingos Pages: 78-87 Full text: Html  PDF Other formats: Digital Edition Tapping into the "folk knowledge" needed to advance machine learning applications. SECTION: Research highlights A high-dimensional surprise: technical perspective Rocco A. Servedio Pages: 89-89 Full text: Html  PDF Other formats: Digital Edition Spherical cubes: optimal foams from computational hardness amplification Guy Kindler, Anup Rao, Ryan O'Donnell, Avi Wigderson Pages: 90-97 Full text: Html  PDF Other formats: Digital Edition Foam problems are about how to best partition space into bubbles of minimal surface area. We investigate the case where one unit-volume bubble is required to tile d-dimensional space in a periodic fashion according to the standard, cubical lattice. ... Graph embeddings and linear equations: technical perspective Bruce Hendrickson Pages: 98-98 Full text: Html  PDF Other formats: Digital Edition A fast solver for a class of linear systems Ioannis Koutis, Gary L. Miller, Richard Peng Pages: 99-107 Full text: Html  PDF Other formats: Digital Edition The solution of linear systems is a problem of fundamental theoretical importance but also one with a myriad of applications in numerical mathematics, engineering, and science. Linear systems that are generated by real-world applications frequently fall ... COLUMN: Last byte Future tense Geoffrey A. Landis Pages: 112-112 Full text: Html  PDF Other formats: Digital Edition From the intersection of computational science and technological speculation, with boundaries limited only by our ability to imagine what could be.How to colonize the galaxy, one electron spin state at a time.