COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM
Departments
5 Editor’s Letter
The Financial Meltdown
and Computing
By Moshe Y. Vardi
8 Letters to the Editor
Computer Science Does Matter
10 In the Virtual Extension
12 blog@CACM
Saying Good-bye to DBMSs,
Designing Effective Interfaces
Michael Stonebraker discusses
the problems with relational
database management systems
and possible solutions, and
Jason Hong writes about interfaces
and usable privacy and security.
14 CACM Online
What You Read on
Your Summer Vacation
By David Roman
37 Calendar
108 Careers
Last Byte
110 Puzzled
Solutions and Sources
By Peter Winkler
112 Future Tense
Confusions of the Hive Mind
By Jaron Lanier
Association for Computing Machinery
Advancing Computing as a Science & Profession
News
15 Entering a Parallel Universe
The multicore processors that
help extend Moore’s Law may run
afoul of Amdahl’s Law.
By Gregory Goth
18 Medical Nanobots
Researchers working in medical
nanorobotics are creating
technologies that could lead to novel
health-care applications, such
as new ways of accessing areas
of the human body that would
otherwise be unreachable without
invasive surgery.
By Kirk L. Kroeker
20 Facing an Age-Old Problem
Researchers are addressing
the computing challenges
of older individuals, whose
needs are different—and too
often disregarded.
By Samuel Greengard
23 Computer Science Meets
Environmental Science
Scientists share knowledge and
seek collaborators at computational
sustainability conference.
By Karen A. Frenkel
about the cover:
C.E.B. Reas lives and
works in Los Angeles.
He is a professor in the
Department of Design
Media Arts at the
University of California,
Los Angeles. His work
has been exhibited
internationally. In 2001
with Ben Fry, Reas
initiated Processing,
an open source
programming language
and environment for
creating images, animation, and interaction.
Viewpoints
24 Law and Technology
Keeping Track of
Telecommunications Surveillance
The creation of a statistical index
of U. S. telecommunications
surveillance activities and their
results will benefit both civil liberties
and law enforcement.
By Paul M. Schwartz
27 The Profession of IT
Computing: The Fourth
Great Domain of Science
Computing is as fundamental as
the physical, life, and social sciences.
By Peter J. Denning
and Paul S. Rosenbloom
30 Emerging Markets
How ICT Advances Might
Help Developing Nations
Some predictions for technology
developments, deployments, and
the associated societal implications.
By Mark Cleverley
33 IT Policy
The Long Road to Computer
Science Education Reform
Viewing the factors impeding
improvements to CS education from
kindergarten through grade 12
from a policy perspective.
By Cameron Wilson and Peter Harsha
36 Viewpoint
Face the Inevitable,
Embrace Parallelism
Hardware, software, and applications
must all evolve in anticipation of
the proliferation of parallelism.
By Anwar Ghuloum
39 Interview
An Interview with Maurice Wilkes
Maurice Wilkes, the designer and
builder of the EDSAC—the first
computer with an internally stored
program—reflects on his career.
By David P. Anderson
