Communications of the ACM articles from June 1999

Communications of the ACM archives from June 1999

News Track.(News Briefs)
June 1, 1999... WE SEE EVERYTHING At major U.S. corporations last year, there was a 43% chance--up sharply from 35% in 1997--employers monitored workers' email files, voice mail, computer files, phone calls or other work-related activities, according to...

Y2K COUNTDOWN.(Technology Information)(Brief Article)
June 1, 1999... EU Y2K Holiday The vast majority of European Union countries will close their financial markets Dec. 31 over concerns about the risks posed to computers due to the date change, say EU sources. The decision follows an announcement that the...

Is Criticism of Computing Academe Inevitably Divisive?(Technology Information)
June 1, 1999... I was talking to a computer science professor the other day, expressing some of the same opinions that I tend to share in this column--a belief in software practice and practitioners, a concern for some of the directions being taken in...

Software Strategies in Developing Countries.(Industry Trend or Event)
June 1, 1999... Globalization touches everything these days, and software is no exception. It's big business in developing countries (DCs),(1) from the headline-grabbing software factories of Bangalore to the back-street database designers of Nairobi. And no...

Don't Forget the Intangibles in Improving Software Inspections.(Letter to the Editor)
June 1, 1999... ROBERT GLASS'S "PRACTICAL Programmer" column (Apr. 1999, p. 17), passed over some intangibles in his discussion of software inspections--specifically; some of the pros and cons of scheduling group review meetings vs. individual reviews. ...

Information in the Information Age.(Technology Information)
June 1, 1999... The information age is characterized by the free flow of information made possible by computer networks. Information products and services account for a large part of the information in these networks. As a rule of thumb, information products...

Melissa's Message.(Article 2B(1) of the Uniform Commercial Code)(Government Activity)
June 1, 1999... If you've spent the last several months in the Galapagos Islands, you may not have heard of the Melissa virus. As the rest of us now know, Melissa is designed to let itself replicate exponentially by exploiting the ability of Microsoft Word to...

EMERGING INTERNET INFRASTRUCTURES WORLDWIDE.(introduction to special section)(Industry Trend or Event)(Editorial)
June 1, 1999... The rise of Internet communications also means confrontation with the established politico-economic-telecom order. This special section focuses on the emergence of Internet infrastructures in the developing world. The imposing word...

THE INTERNET IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES.(Industry Trend or Event)
June 1, 1999... Access means much higher user fees and costs to ISPs for connecting to the global Net, and geographic dispersion limited to a few big cities. Development of the global Internet has been phenomenal. It has grown from a small, closed,...

MOVING TOWARD A NON-U.S.-CENTRIC INTERNATIONAL INTERNET.(Industry Trend or Event)
June 1, 1999... New high-capacity links in Europe and Asia could represent the beginning of the end of the rest of the world's having to send its Internet traffic through U.S.-based networks. The international structure of the Internet has been very...

ICANN AND INTERNET REGULATION.(The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers)(Internet/Web/Online Service Information)
June 1, 1999... Enough credibility to regulate the root server databases of the most important communications medium of the 21st century? Organizations and rules aren't normally considered an "infrastructure." But global internetworking simply would not...

CHINA'S STATE-COORDINATED INTERNET INFRASTRUCTURE.(Internet/Web/Online Service Information)
June 1, 1999... How can the government use the Internet to promote economic development while maintaining its political and economic control? In 1995, as the use of the Internet began to spread through many sectors of Chinese society, the country's leaders...

Building India's National Internet Backbone.(Internet/Web/Online Service Information)
June 1, 1999... The government wants it to link the country's huge rural population, as well as its own district offices and new private ISPs, to the Web and the world. India is a geographically vast country, located across the Arabian Sea from Saudi...

The Wireless Local Loop in Developing Regions.(Opinion of the authors)(Industry Trend or Event)
June 1, 1999... Why data communications should be part of the basic service when building new wireless voice networks in Africa and Southeast Asia. Wireless networks are often cited as the most economically feasible solution to the severe dearth of...

Lessons from Haiti's Internet Development.(Internet/Web/Online Service Information)
June 1, 1999... The country's expanding Internet sector has largely bypassed the government's telephone monopoly, and outpaced regulatory reform, due largely to the innovative use of wireless technologies. Haiti would not seem to be the most fertile ground...

ALL OPTICAL NETWORKS.(Technology Information)
June 1, 1999... Enlightening the effects and implications of nearly infinite bandwidth. It is widely speculated that the future communications world will be two-layered, in that all communication between fixed points will take place by fiber optics, while...

USING Autonomous Robotics TO TEACH SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING.(Technology Information)
June 1, 1999... Learning critical thinking and interdisciplinary teamwork by building your own animal. If you walked into our Autonomous Robotics class at Case Western Reserve University on a typical day, you might be surprised to find 30 college students...

Reengineering the University.(Industry Trend or Event)
June 1, 1999... TODAY'S UNIVERSITY IS AT A TURNING POINT, AND TURN IT MUST. THE TIME HAS COME TO RECOGNIZE THAT EDUCATION IS A BUSINESS AND STUDENTS ARE THE CUSTOMERS. UNIVERSITIES ARE DUE FOR A RADICAL RESTRUCTURING. AFTER CENTURIES OF EVOLUTIONARY...

Considerations for an EFFECTIVE Telecommunications-Use Policy.(Industry Trend or Event)
June 1, 1999... Creating effective use through effective policy. Recent changes in federal telecommunications legislation have underscored the importance of an up-to-date and effective telecommunications-use policy in business organizations. With the...

INTUITIVE DECISION-MAKING.(Industry Trend or Event)
June 1, 1999... Combining advanced analytical tools with human intuition increases insight into problems. Today's worldwide marketplace provides not only more customers, suppliers and competitors, but also increased complexity for the decision-making...

CHANGES IN ACM's REVISED COPYRIGHT POLICY.
June 1, 1999... A helpful introduction to the new additions and alterations to this pioneering policy, particularly since the advent of digital libraries. This introduction to the third revision of ACM's copyright policy updates the policy created in 1994...

Risks of Y2K.(uncertainty about overall compliance)(Government Activity)
June 1, 1999... As we approach January 1, 2000, it's time to review what progress is being made and what risks remain. Our conclusion: Considerable uncertainty continues; optimists predict only minor problems; pessimists claim that the effects will be...

ACM Turing Award Presented to Jim Gray of Microsoft Research.(Senior Researcher James N. Gray)(Technology Information)
June 1, 1999... In May, James N. Gray was awarded the 1998 ACM A. M. Turing Award at the ACM Awards Ceremony in New York City. Gray was honored for his "seminal contributions to database and transactional processing and his technical leadership in system...

Waterloo Wins ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest.
June 1, 1999... On April 11th team members from the University of Waterloo in Canada took first place in the world finals competition of the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest, sponsored by IBM. For the first time in its 23-year history, the...

ACM Mumbai Chapter Serves Computing Professionals in India.
June 1, 1999... The ACM Mumbai chapter (ACM-Mumbai, formerly ACM-Bombay) was chartered in June, 1996. The primary aim of the chapter is to contribute to the ongoing professional growth and fulfillment of its members and of the computing community in general....

Willis H. Ware Receives IFIP Award.
June 1, 1999... IFIP Technical Committee 11 on Security and Protection in Information Processing Systems has given the 1999 Kristian Beckman Award to Willis H. Ware. The objective of the award, which was created in honor of Kristian Beckman, the first Chairman...

ACM Briefs House on Computer Policy.(Congressional Briefing to the House of Representatives)(Industry Trend or Event)
June 1, 1999... ACM sponsored a Congressional Briefing to the House of Representatives in Washington, DC on March 5th, 1999. The Association invited six of its members to speak on a Science Policy Panel that was moderated by Chuck Brownstein, Chair of USACM....

1999 ACM Awards Ceremony Held in New York City.
June 1, 1999... Recipients of ACM's 1998 awards and the new 1999 ACM Fellows were honored on May 15th at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City. Robert Metcalfe, inventor of the Ethernet, was the master of ceremonies and Vinton Cerf, "father" of the...

ACM Magazine Group Launches First Issue of intelligence.
June 1, 1999... The ACM Magazine Group recently published the first issue of intelligence: New Visions of AI in Practice. The new publication was formerly the ACM SIGART Bulletin. The first issue, the Spring, 1999 edition, debuted on March 22 and has been...

New from ACM Press Books.(Mobility: Processes, Computers, and Agents; Software for Use: A Practical Guide to the Models and Methods of Usage-Centered Design; Modern Information Retrieval)(Review)
June 1, 1999... Three new ACM Press books were recently published covering topics in mobility, software for use, and modern information retrieval. ACM Press Books is a collaboration between ACM and Addison Wesley Longman. Mobility: Processes, Computers,...

Addison Wesley Books Available to ACM Members.
June 1, 1999... In addition to the preceding ACM Press books, Addison Wesley Longman, has also made the following books available to ACM members at a discount. These books cover some of the most current topics in the field of computing, including Linux,...

ACM Criticizes Proposed Adjudication Rules for Domain Name Disputes.(World Intellectual Property Organization)(Industry Trend or Event)(Brief Article)
June 1, 1999... ACM President Barbara Simons has written to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) regarding the rules for the adjudication of disputes of global top-level domains (gTLDs) proposed in the WIPO's Interim Report on the Internet...

USACM Joins Amicus Brief in First Amendment Appeal.(encryption codes on private Web sites)(Government Activity)(Brief Article)
June 1, 1999... On March 1, USACM joined a number of organizations and scientists in an amicus brief with the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals arguing that a Cleveland law professor should be allowed to publish encryption code on his Web site without government...

ACM Press Expands Its UML Coverage.(The Unified Modeling Language User Guide; Objects, Components, and Frameworks with UML: The Catalysis Approach; The Object Constraint Language: Precise Modeling with UML; Real-Time UML: Developing Efficient Objects for Embedded Systems; Visual Modeling with Rational Rose and UML)(Technology Information)(Review)
June 1, 1999... In addition to the UML books by the three Amigos, ACM Press with the cooperation of Addison Wesley, its publishing partner, has made five more UML titles available. The Unified Modeling Language User Guide by: Grady Booch, James...

First Student ACM SIGCHI Chartered at the University of Waterloo in Canada.(founding members: students Henry Chen and Farouk Meghji)(Industry Trend or Event)
June 1, 1999... The University of Waterloo Student ACM SIGCHI Chapter was officially chartered last February and is the first student chapter affiliated with SIGCHI. Its founding members are students Henry Chen and Farouk Meghji. In an interview with...

Student Chapter Excellence Program Winners.(Mississippi State University, University of Maine, University of California at Irvine, George Washington University)(Industry Trend or Event)
June 1, 1999... ACM has named winners of its Student Chapter Excellence Program. The award for Outstanding Chapter Activities was given to the Student Chapter at Mississippi State University, the School Service Award to the University of Maine, the Outstanding...

ACM SIGMOBILE Continues to Promote Research and Discussion.(ACM's Special Interest Group on the Mobility of Systems, Users, Data and Computing)(Industry Trend or Event)
June 1, 1999... SIGMOBILE, ACM's Special Interest Group on the Mobility of Systems, Users, Data and Computing, has experienced a period of growth and acceptance among both the academic and industrial communities. It continues to achieve its primary goals of...