communications of the acm
Departments

5 Editor’s Letter

Are You Talking to Me? By Moshe Y. Vardi

9 In the Virtual Extension

News Viewpoints

22 Law and Technology

Remix Nation

Assessing the threat the anticircumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act pose for fair use.

By Rebecca Tushnet 16

7 Letters to the Editor

Solved, for All Practical Purposes

10 BLOG@CACM

Jeannette M. Wing PCAST; Barbara Liskov Keynote

Jeannette M. Wing discusses her PCAST presentation about the importance of computer science and its impact. Valerie Barr shares highlights from Barbara Liskov’s keynote at Grace Hopper.

25 Historical Reflections

In Praise of ‘ Wilkes, Wheeler, and Gill’ Reflections on the first textbook on programming. By Martin Campbell-Kelly

27 Calendar

88 Careers

13 A Breakthrough in Algorithm Design Computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University have devised an algorithm that might be able to solve a certain class of linear systems much more quickly than today’s fastest solvers.

By Kirk L. Kroeker

28 Emerging Markets

Corporate Social Responsibility and Global I T Outsourcing How to improve IT outsourcing relationships while doing good for society.

By Ron Babin, Steve Briggs, and Brian Nicholson

Last Byte

110 Puzzled

Solutions and Sources By Peter Winkler

112 Q&A

Scaling Up

Eric Brewer talks about infrastructure, connectivity, and computing for developing nations.

By Leah Hoffmann

16 Invasion of the Mobile Apps

The market model pioneered by Apple and others is transforming the software world—and has profound implications for software companies and their customers. By Gary Anthes

19 Remaking American Medicine Developing an IT ecosystem for health could improve—and transform—the practice of medicine. By Neil Savage

31 The Profession of IT

Managing Time, Part 2

Masterful time management means not just tracking of messages in your personal environment, but managing your coordination network with others.

By Peter J. Denning and Ritu Raj

34 Viewpoint

Realizing the Value of Social Media Requires Innovative Computing Research

How social media are expanding traditional research and development topics for computer and information scientists.

By Ben Shneiderman, Jennifer Preece, and Peter Pirolli

Association for Computing Machinery Advancing Computing as a Science & Profession

PhototgraPh by Daniel go