Communications of the ACM articles from May 2000

Communications of the ACM archives from May 2000

FLYING THE RAILS.(Technology Information)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2000... Engineers in Japan are developing trains that can "fly," reports New Scientist. Using the "wing-in-ground" (WIG) effect, in which a high-pressure cushion of air forms beneath flying objects as they approach the ground, they believe they can...

LOGGING ONLINE HOURS AT WORK.(Industry Trend or Event)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2000... People spend more than twice as much time online at the office as they do at home, a new survey finds. Highlights from the Nielson/Net Ratings survey of Internet usage for the month of January, based on a sample of 6,500 workers at small,...

TOP PRIZE: EMBEDDED ENCRYTION.(Brief Article)
May 1, 2000... A student who encrypted a secret message on a DNA strand won first prize and a $100,000 college scholarship in the Intel Science Talent Search, an annual competition held at the Science Talent Institute in Washington, D.C. and considered the...

DIGITAL NOSE KNOWS.(Technology Information)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2000... Several prototypes of an electronic nose that could help doctors sniff out tuberculosis by its odor are being developed by researchers at the Illinois Institute of Technology. One prototype is a vibrating crystal--it looks like a transparent...

WALKING AGAIN VIA CHIP IMPLANT.(Technology Information)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2000... Using electrodes and a computer chip, surgeons in France performed a procedure that allowed a paralyzed man to walk again. More than 15 electrodes were implanted on nerves and muscles in the legs and pelvis of 39-year-old patient, Mark Merger....

CELL-PHONE-FREE CLASS.(Humor)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2000... An elementary school principal in Genoa, Italy, declared his school a cell-phone-free zone after pupils began ducking under their desks to call family and friends. Upon issuing the ban, the principal cited a case in which a girl who had been...

ANOTHER NODE IN THE CROWD.(Industry Trend or Event)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2000... Overcrowding has crept up on cable companies as they upgrade networks and sign up customers for broadband service, including Internet access, cable television, and phone service delivered at high speed over a single line, reports the Wall...

Much Ado About Licensing.(Industry Trend or Event)
May 1, 2000... The front portion of "Forum" features responses to the "Viewpoint," "Not Now Not Like This" (Feb. 2000, p. 29), regarding the ACM Council's decision to not endorse the licensing of software engineers. I THINK IT IS UNFORTUNATE that the...

From P-books to E-books.(Hardware Review)(Evaluation)
May 1, 2000... As better technology becomes available, books in the electronic age are taking on a whole new look and feel. The dream of electronic books has been with us at least since Vannevar Bush published his famous article, "As We May Think," in...

Predatory Disintermediation.(Industry Trend or Event)
May 1, 2000... When cutting out the middleman means stifling the competition. This definition comes from the electronic version of the Third Edition (1994) American Heritage Dictionary, and it gives an idea of just how fast things change in cyberspace....

To DVD or Not to DVD.(Industry Trend or Event)
May 1, 2000... The current legal DVD battle between the movie industry and the free/open software communities over DVD is a microcosm of an ongoing intellectual property war. This war pits intellectual property owners against such diverse groups as...

Existential Education in the Era of Personal Cybernetics.(Humor)(Column)
May 1, 2000... I remember very clearly the morning of Tuesday, January 19, 2038 at 3:14:07 a.m., which, very strangely, one second later, was also the afternoon of Friday, December 13, 1901, at 20:45:52. I say "very strangely," because Unix (and its variants...

EMBEDDING THE INTERNET.(Technology Information)
May 1, 2000... Add reliable wireless communications and sensing functions to the billions of physically embedded computing devices around the world for a new universe of ubiquitous networked computing. To most people, today's Internet is an astonishing...

PROACTIVE COMPUTING.(Technology Information)
May 1, 2000... Human-in-the-loop computing has its limits. What must we do differently to prepare for the networking of thousands of embedded processors per person ? And how do we move from human-centered to human-supervised computing? For the past 40...

WIRELESS INTEGRATED NETWORK SENSORS.(Technology Information)
May 1, 2000... For pervasive computing performance, exploit the physical limits of these densely distributed networks of embedded sensors, controls, and processors. Wireless integrated network sensors (WINS) provide distributed network and Internet...

EMBEDDED COMPUTATI0N MEETS THE WORLD WIDE WEB.(Technology Information)
May 1, 2000... An infinitely accessible Web-linked physical environment united by a multitude of tiny servers could mean a life of information ease. Two important trends are converging to help drive the radical transformation of how information flows in...

EMBEDDING ROBOTS INTO THE INTERNET.(Technology Information)
May 1, 2000... How to control and coordinate teams of cooperating robots embedded in wireless networks connected to the Internet? Use communication to reduce uncertainty in robotics, and robotics for network communication through physical mobility. With...

AMORPHOUS COMPUTING.(Technology Information)
May 1, 2000... For coherent behavior from vast numbers of unreliable microsensors, actuators, and communication devices interconnected in unknown ways, apply the lessons of cellular cooperation in biological organisms. Over the next few decades, two...

UNIVERSAL USABILITY.(Technology Information)
May 1, 2000... Pushing human-computer interaction research to empower every citizen. In a fair society, all individuals would have equal opportunity to participate in, or benefit from, the use of computer resources regardless of race, sex, religion, age,...

Web-based E-catalog Systems in B2B Procurement.(Technology Information)
May 1, 2000... Web-based catalogs provide the main entry point for B2B e-commerce and will fundamentally transform supply-chain relationships. Electronic commerce (EC) has many possible definitions [1, 4, 6]; we define it as the use of electronic systems...

ENDURING BUSINESS THEMES.(Technology Information)
May 1, 2000... System adaptability is critical in today's rapidly changing business culture. Now, new approaches offer ways to specify, design, and implement adaptable apps. IT APPEARS OBVIOUS THE SPECIFICATION OF AN EASILY ADAPTABLE SOFTWARE APPLICATION...

ALL I REALLY NEED TO KNOW ABOUT PAIR PROGRAMMING I LEARNED IN KINDERGARTEN.(Technology Information)
May 1, 2000... When it comes to programming practices, studies show two heads are almost always better than one. Pair programming is a practice in which two programmers work side-by-side at one computer, continuously collaborating on the same design,...

Designing Cryptography for the New Century.(Technology Information)
May 1, 2000... Cryptography was once the domain of generals and curious children, but the advent of the Information Age changed that. In the early 1970s the National Security Agency (NSA) and the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) realized that non-combatant...

Internet Risks.(Internet/Web/Online Service Information)
May 1, 2000... The Internet is expanding at an unprecedented rate. However, along with the enormous potential benefits, almost all of the risks discussed here in past columns are relevant, in many cases made worse by the Internet, due to widespread...