ACM
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DOI: 10.1145/1538788.1538793
David Roman
Moving forward and Backward
My old boss was thrilled the first time he saw the image of a spinning globe
online. But that was long ago, when Web users were explorers, the Internet was
a place of discovery, and an animated .gif could muster boyish enthusiasm. Expectations are much higher and far more sophisticated now that users have visited hundreds of sites that demonstrate the core truth of the cliché that notes
the Web is about constant change, with users like kids in a candy store pointing
out cool features they’d like to see.
We can now explore some of those user expectations in the results of a Reader
Profile Study conducted last April by Harvey Research Inc. for Communications
of the ACM. The study shows that Web readers have an eye on the future and
a foot in the past. Indeed, that sentiment is embodied in one reader’s suggestion that ACM reintroduce self-assessment procedures and put them online.
These questionnaires, designed to help a person appraise and develop his or
her knowledge of a particular topic, were first launched over 30 years ago.
Other findings from the study show a split affinity for the old and the new.
Half of the survey’s respondents say they will use Communications’ Web site to
request RSS feeds or email alerts, fast and easy ways to get new articles. A greater
number, 77.1%, will use it to access the magazine’s archive of 50-plus years of articles. (For more information about this readership survey, see Scott Delman’s
“Publisher’s Corner” on page 7.)
Recent site usage analysis reinforces the pushme-pullyu preferences of our
users. Alerts and feeds get more clicks than any other item on the ACM Resources page. Those electronic formats are balanced by old-fashioned printouts. The “Print” button is consistently the
most popular click in the Tools for Readers, and that’s
true for both 4,000-word Contributed Articles and
350-word blog entries as well. These contrasting tendencies would be reconciled if users
were printing their e-material. But who
would do that?
GöDeL PRize WinneRs
omer reingold, salil Vadhan,
and avi wigderson won the
2009 Gödel prize for developing
a new type of graph that enables
the construction of large
expander graphs, which play
an important role in designing
robust computer networks
and constructing theories of
error-correcting computer
codes. the award, presented by
aCM’s special interest Group
on algorithms and Computing
theory and the european
association for theoretical
Computer science, recognized
their work on the zig-zag graph—
a technique able to solve one
of the most intriguing open
problems in computational
complexity theory, that of
detecting a path from one node
to another in very small storage
for undirected graphs (in which
the nodes are connected by lines
with no direction).
5
9
10
sTART
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siGiR 09
the 32nd annual aCM special
interest Group on information
retrieval (siGir) conference, the
major international forum for
the presentation of new research
results and the demonstration of
new systems and techniques in the
field of information retrieval, will
be held in Boston from July 19–23.
networks and human
behavior will be the subject
of the siGir keynote speech
by albert-lászló Barabási,
a professor at northeastern
university and director
of its Center for Complex
network research. “Highly
interconnected networks with
amazingly complex topology
describe systems as diverse
as the world wide web, our
cells, social systems, or the
economy,” notes Barabási.
“recent studies indicate that
these networks are the result
of self-organizing processes
governed by simple but generic
laws, resulting in architectural
features that make them much
more similar to each other
than one would have expected
by chance. i will discuss the
amazing order characterizing
our interconnected world
and its implications to
network robustness and
spreading processes.”
