Communications of the ACM articles from January 1999

Communications of the ACM archives from January 1999

News Track. (news briefs).(Industry Trend or Event)
January 1, 1999... CONTINUING GENDER GAP Even though the gap continues to narrow between U.S. high school boys and girls in math and science, girls make up a smaller percent age of students in computer science classes, reports the American Association of...

Y2K COUNTDOWN.(government efforts in China)(Government Activity)(Brief Article)
January 1, 1999... CHINA DEADLINES The Chinese cabinet decreed that all Chinese government-owned enterprises and agencies must have their computer systems revised by March and millennium bug tests completed by September, reports the China Economic times. The...

Correlating Patents and Living Standards.(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 1999... I WAS DISAPPOINTED BY THE lack of quality in Richard Hsu's "Viewpoint" ("Maintaining High Living Standards Through Innovation, Strong Patents," Oct. 1998, p. 27). Hsu fails to mention what he believes are the strengths and weaknesses of...

The Communications Decency Act Is not as Dead as You Think.(Industry Trend or Event)(Editorial)
January 1, 1999... When the Communications Decency Act was originally signed into law in 1996, there was a abundance of media coverage, particularly among media within the IS community. The focus of this coverage was on language in the CDA that sought to limit...

Value-Added Publishing.(Technology Information)(Column)
January 1, 1999... Without question, electronic publishing is one of the hottest topics in computing. Groups worldwide want to know how to do it well, how to advertise it effectively, how to enhance the capabilities of electronic publishing to include emerging...

The COPA Battle and the Future of Free Speech.(Child Online Protection Act)(Software Review)(Evaluation)
January 1, 1999... Last October, a new battlefront opened in the U.S. war between those who see a risk to childhood's innocence and those who see a risk to free speech. The omnibus budget package includes the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), a successor to the...

Starr Wars.(government should post everything on Internet )(Government Activity)(Column)
January 1, 1999... You've got to hand it to the U.S. Congress. It sure got the Starr Report posted promptly on the Internet. But the report, which answered some questions many of us never asked, prompted other very interesting questions. Like why is it that...

SYMBOLIC MODELING in PRACTICE.(Technology Information)(Technical)
January 1, 1999... Modeling is a complex activity of abstracting information and knowledge from a particular domain in order to achieve a model containing the essentials from the perspective of the modelers and their given goals. While this definition includes...

FROM OBJECT-ORIENTED TO GOAL-ORIENTED REQUIREMENTS ANALYSIS.(Technology Information)(Technical)
January 1, 1999... Goal-oriented and object-oriented analysis should be seen as complementary, the former focusing on the early stages of requirements analysis... the latter on late stages. The growing influence of object-oriented programming on programming...

CONNECTING the DESIGN of SOFTWARE to the DESIGN of WORK.(Technology Information)(Technical)
January 1, 1999... When the software's preference contradicts good user work practice the power of computing quickly becomes an electronic bureaucrat--frustrating productivity while imposing overhead. When we design interactive software we are also defining...

SCENARIOS for MODELLING.(Industry Trend or Event)
January 1, 1999... Scenarios have become key artifacts in systems engineering but their management is poorly understood. Management science, software engineering, and human-computer interaction research have traditionally followed a model-based approach,...

INTEGRATING DEVELOPMENT of TASK and OBJECT MODELS.(Technology Information)
January 1, 1999... Interleaved analysis of user and object interaction scenarios promotes the understanding of reciprocal opportunities and constraints. User tasks and the software designed to support them are interdependent. Tasks set requirements for new...

EMBEDDING FORMAL KNOWLEDGE MODELS IN ACTIVE DOCUMENTS.(Technology Information)
January 1, 1999... Creating problem-solving documents. Computational symbolic models are powerful tools for making ideas explicit because they support the formal definition of all the terms in an argument, and these formal definitions may be used to compute...

USER INTERFACE DIRECTIONS FOR THE WEB.(Technology Information)
January 1, 1999... The web is about to face its own Y2K crisis--one that has a great deal on common with the problems facing the mainframe industry. We know it's coming, the solution is easy in principle, but difficult in practice due to sheer mass. And, we can...

ENHANCING DATA QUALITY IN DATA WAREHOUSE ENVIRONMENTS.(Technology Information)
January 1, 1999... Nothing is more likely to undermine the performance and business value of a data warehouse than inappropriate, misunderstood, or ignored data quality. Decisions by senior management lay the groundwork for lower corporate levels to develop...

How the Internet Helps Build Collaborative Multimedia Applications.(Technology Information)
January 1, 1999... Start with the Internet itself for freely available software technologies, then add some custom software. For programmers, designing and implementing distributed multimedia applications used to be a formidable challenge. As recently as five...

THE ROLE OF KNOWLEDGE IN SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT.(Technology Information)
January 1, 1999... Before the program can be written, humans have to describe and organize the knowledge it represents according to specific knowledge structures. Software development is knowledge-intensive. Many concepts have been developed to ease or guide...

Action Research.(Technology Information)
January 1, 1999... To make academic research relevant, researchers should try out their theories with practitioners in real situations and real organizations. At the International Federation for Information Processing Conference last year in Philadelphia,...

Roadblocks to Web Technology Adoption?(Internet/Web/Online Service Information)
January 1, 1999... Despite the hype associated with Web Technology, it is becoming clear that adoption of this technology is not as smooth sailing as many business organizations assumed it would be. Granted, there are thousands of corporate Web sites and many...

Evolving Telephone Networks.(Industry Trend or Event)
January 1, 1999... The U.S. public telephone network (PTN) is changing--partly in response to changes in technology and partly due to deregulation. Some changes are for the better: lower prices with more choices and services for consumers. But there are other...