Communications - March 2010

COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM

Departments

5 Editor’s Letter

Revisiting the Publication Culture in Computing Research

By Moshe Y. Vardi

6 Letters to the Editor Too Much Debate?

8 In the Virtual Extension

10 BLOG@CACM

Too Much Programming Too Soon? Mark Guzdial and Judy Robertson discuss the role of programming in introductory computer science.

12 CACM Online Granting a Second Life By David Roman

27 Calendar

116 Careers

Last Byte

118 Puzzled

Solutions and Sources By Peter Winkler

120 Future Tense

The Primal Cue Cybersecurity depends on the human dimension. By Ari Juels

Association for Computing Machinery Advancing Computing as a Science & Profession

News

13 CS and Biology’s Growing Pains Biologists can benefit from learning and using the tools of computer science, but several real-world obstacles remain. By Gregory Goth

16 Engineering the Web’s Third Decade As Web technologies move beyond two-way interactive capabilities to facilitate more dynamic and pervasive experiences, the Web is quickly advancing toward its third major upgrade.

By Kirk L. Kroeker

19 Tracking Garbage

Researchers are focusing on the so-called “removal chain” in an attempt to save landfill space, improve recycling rates, and trim the flow of toxic materials into the environment.

By Samuel Greengard

21 Katayanagi Prizes and Other CS Awards

Viewpoints

22 Economic and Business Dimensions Gaming Will Save Us All

How gaming, as the first media market to successfully transition toward media-as-a-service, is an exemplar for a similar evolutionary transition of content and entertainment.

By Tim Chang

25 Legally Speaking

Only Technological Processes Are Patentable

The U.S. Supreme Court will narrow the universe of process innovations that can be patented to those that are “technological,” but what will that mean for software?

By Pamela Samuelson

Viewpoints

28 Computing Ethics

The Ethics Beat

Surveying the increasing variety and nature of ethical challenges encountered by computing researchers and practitioners. By Rachelle Hollander

30 The Profession of IT

Orchestrating Coordination in Pluralistic Networks

Learning to build virtual teams of people of diverse backgrounds is an urgent challenge.

By Peter J. Denning, Fernando Flores, and Peter Luzmore

33 Broadening Participation Hiring and Developing Minority Faculty at Research Universities Emphasizing the importance of creating more programs and investing more funding toward the goal of developing minority faculty at research universities. By Richard Tapia

36 IT Policy

Making the Case for Computing Seeking funding for current and future computing initiatives requires both a strong argument and a broad community of supporters.