Communications - May 2012

COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM

Departments
News
Viewpoints

5 Editor’s Letter Fair Access

By Moshe Y. Vardi

6 BLOG@CACM

Likert-type Scales, Statistical Methods, and Effect Sizes Judy Robertson writes about researchers’ use of the wrong statistical techniques to analyze attitude questionnaires.

30 Law and Technology

Design for Symbiosis

Promoting more harmonious paths for technological innovators and expressive creators in the Internet age. By Peter S. Menell

33 Historical Reflections

The Future of the Past Reflections on the changing face of the history of computing.

By David Anderson

19 ACM Election

ACM’s 2012 General Election Meet the candidates who introduce their plans—and stands—for the Association.

45 Calendar

35 Economic and Business Dimensions Digitization and Copyright: Some Recent Evidence from Music Examining the effects of stealing on producers and consumers.

By Joel Waldfogel

12

98 Careers

9 Automating Scientific Discovery Computer scientists are teaching machines to run experiments, make inferences from the data, and use the results to conduct new experiments.

By Neil Savage

Last Byte

120 Puzzled

Designs on Square Grids By Peter Winkler

12 Robots Like Us

Thanks to new research initiatives, autonomous humanoid robots are inching closer to reality.

By Alex Wright

38 Education

Programming Goes Back to School Broadening participation by integrating game design into middle school curricula.

By Alexander Repenning

14 Digitally Possessed

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. By Samuel Greengard

41 Viewpoint

Programming the Global Brain Considering how we can improve our understanding and utilization of the emerging human-computer network constituting the global brain. By Abraham Bernstein, Mark Klein, and Thomas W. Malone