commuNicaTioNs;of;The;acm

Departments

5 ICPS Editor’s Letter

ICPS Offers Major Research Venue By Tom Rodden

6 Letters To The Editor Shine the Light of Computational Complexity

9 In the Virtual Extension

10 BLOG@CACM

Matters of Design

Jason Hong considers how software companies could effectively incorporate first-rate design into their products.

12 CACM Online

End of Days for Communications in Print? By David Roman

43 Calendar

108 Careers

Last Byte

112 Puzzled

Parsing Partitions By Peter Winkler

About the cover: Hand gestures are the most primary and expressive form of human communication. While such gestures may seem a natural means for interacting with computers, progress has often been lost in translation.

This month’s cover
story details the
requirements of
hand-gesture interfaces
and the challenges of meeting the needs of various apps.

News

13 Chipping Away at Greenhouse Gases Power-saving processor algorithms have the potential to create significant energy and cost savings. By Gregory Goth

16 Information Theory After Shannon Purdue University’s Science of Information Center seeks new principles to answer the question ‘ What is information?’

By Neil Savage

19 Maurice Wilkes: The Last Pioneer Computer science has lost not only a great scientist, but an important link to the electronic computing revolution that took place in the 1940s. By Leah Hoffmann

20 Following the Crowd Crowdsourcing is based on a simple but powerful concept: Virtually anyone has the potential to plug in valuable information.

By Samuel Greengard

23 ACM Launches New Digital Library More than 50 years of computing literature is augmented, streamlined, and joined to powerful new tools for retrieval and analysis.

By Gary Anthes

25 ACM Fellows Honored Forty-one men and women are inducted as 2010 ACM Fellows.

Viewpoints

26 Privacy and Security

Against Cyberterrorism

Why cyber-based terrorist attacks are unlikely to occur.

By Maura Conway

29 Economic and Business Dimensions Household Demand for Broadband Internet Service

How much are consumers willing to pay for broadband service?

By Gregory Rosston, Scott Savage, and Donald Waldman

32 Inside Risks

The Growing Harm of Not Teaching Malware Revisiting the need to educate professionals to defend against malware in its various guises. By George Ledin, Jr.

35 Kode Vicious

Forest for the Trees

Keeping your source trees in order. By George V. Neville-Neil

37 Education

From Science to Engineering Exploring the dual nature of computing education research. By Mark Guzdial

41 Viewpoint

Technology, Conferences, and Community Considering the impact and implications of changes in scholarly communication. By Jonathan Grudin

The Need for a New Graduation Rite of Passage A proposal for a new organization recognizing students graduating in the computer sciences as professionals with ethical responsibilities in service to society. By John K. Estell and Ken Christensen