Communications of the ACM articles from October 1989

Communications of the ACM archives from October 1989

News Track.
October 1, 1989... SPACE CONCERNS EXPLORED. . .Testing and verification methods, diverse compatibility, and sufficient electrical power provisions are some of the major issues that NASA should address to ensure the successful design and operation of space...

Space for computing. (President's Letter)
October 1, 1989... Voyagers 1 and 2, the automated space probes, are leaving our solar system this year after a phenomenally successful tour of the large planets in the outer solar system. The Voyager crafts have been in space for 12 years gathering a wealth...

Technical correspondence.
October 1, 1989... Calendar P's and Queues The article, "Calendar Queues: A Fast 0(1) Priority Queue Implementation for the Simulation Event Set Problem," by Randy Brown (Communications, Oct. 1988, pp. 1220-27) presents a mechanism whose...

Abstracts from other ACM publications.
October 1, 1989... Petri-Net-Based Hypertext: Document Structure with Browsing Semantics P. David Stotts and Richard Furuta We present a formal definition of the Trellis model of hypertext and describe an authoring and browsing prototpye called...

ACM news.
October 1, 1989... ACM Donates $560,000 to PBS Computer Series When public television station WGBH in Boston asked ACM last fall to co-sponsor its $3.67 million computer history project, ACM just couldn't walk away. After all, part of ACM's mission is to...

Chapters news.
October 1, 1989... New jersey College Announces Olympics Winners At the fourth annual Computer Olympics Competition held at the New jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, eight winners were selected from the 50 high-school participants. The students...

General news.
October 1, 1989... Parallel Processing Research Deadline Announced December 31 is the entry deadline for the 3rd annual Gordon Bell Prize, which recognizes outstanding achievements in parallel-processing applications to scientific and engineering...

Calendar of events.
October 1, 1989... ACM's calendar policy is to list open computer science meetings that are held on a not-for-profit basis. Not included in the calendar are educational seminars, institutes, and courses. Submittals shouid be substantiated with the name of...

Calls for papers.
October 1, 1989... October 9 9th ACM SIGACT-SIGMOD-SIGART Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (PODS), Nashville, Tenn., April 2-4, 1990. Submit 11 c. of extended abstract (10 pages maximum) to Program Chair, Yehoshua Sagiv, PODS, Department...

The case against user interface consistency.
October 1, 1989... Designers striving for user interface consistency can resemble Supreme Court justices trying to define pornography. each of us feels we know it when we see it, but people often disagree and a precise definition remains elusive. A close...

A finite and real-time processor for natural language.
October 1, 1989... People process natural language in real time and with very limited short-term memories. This article describes a computational architecture for syntactic performance that also requires fixed finite resources. Natural languages are...

Impact of a restricted natural language interface on ease of learning and productivity. (performance of novices using Lotus 1-2-3, Lotus HAL compared)
October 1, 1989... The authors compare the performance of novices using Lotus HAL, a restricted natural language interface, with the performance of novices using Lotus 1-2-3, a more traditional interface The growing use of computers by people with...

Four paradigms of information systems development.
October 1, 1989... Developing computer-based information systems necessarily involves making a number of implicit and explicit assumptions. The authors examine four different approaches to information systems development. All systems developers approach the...

The 1987-1988 Taulbee Survey. (Computing Research Board survey on computer science and computer engineering PhD's and faculty)
October 1, 1989... The Computing Research Board's 1987-1988 Taulbee Survey includes the latest statistics on production and employment of Ph.D.'s and faculty in computer science and engineering. Included also are departments offering Ph. D. 's in computer...

Results of the nineteenth ACM North American Computer Chess Championship. (includes analyses of five outstanding games) (includes related article on five outstanding games)
October 1, 1989... In 1987, it was called CHIPTEST-M. In 1988, with tongue in cheek and after a major overhaul, it was renamed DEEP THOUGHT 0.02. Whatever it is called, it plays tough chess! DEEP THOUGHT 0.02 won three and drew one of its four games and...

An evaluation tool for measuring authoring system performance. (includes list of tasks in each of nine functional areas)
October 1, 1989... A model for producing objective and precise measurements of the power and performance of authoring systems is described. An animation task is given as an example of the model's potential as a tool for evaluating authoring systems along the...

SIG news.
October 1, 1989... Results of SIGDOC, SIGNUM Balloting The following individuals were elected to serve as SIG Documentation (SIGDOC) officers for the term July 1, 1989 to June 30, 1991. SIGDOC CHAIR R. John Brockman University of...