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Communications of the ACM

Opinion Archive


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The opinion archive provides access to past opinion stories from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.

March 2013


From ACM Opinion

Rethinking Objects and Form Are Key to 3D Printing Revolution

Rethinking Objects and Form Are Key to 3D Printing Revolution

3D printing has already changed the game for manufacturing specialized products such as medical devices but the real revolution will come when designers start to rethink the shapes of objects.


From ACM Opinion

Steve Mann: My 'augmediated' Life

Steve Mann: My 'augmediated' Life

Back in 2004, I was awakened early one morning by a loud clatter. I ran outside, only to discover that a car had smashed into the corner of my house.


From ACM Opinion

Why the Pencil Is Still the Most Important Tool For Digital Designers

Why the Pencil Is Still the Most Important Tool For Digital Designers

Looking for digital inspiration, or staring at an empty computer screen?


From ACM Opinion

Can Your Boss Read Your Email?

Can Your Boss Read Your Email?

Harvard faculty members responded with shock after the Boston Globe revealed that theuniversity’s administration had searched 16 faculty deans’ email accounts to try to determine the source of a media leak during a cheating scandal…


From ACM Opinion

Kim Dotcom Is the Anti-Zuckerberg: Share Nothing, Encrypt Everything, Be Happy

Kim Dotcom Is the Anti-Zuckerberg: Share Nothing, Encrypt Everything, Be Happy

Appearing like a retro-futuristic apparition, digitally transmitted through pneumatic tubes from a future that was but will never be, the disembodied head of Kim Dotcom, the Osama bin Laden of file sharing, bobbed and hovered…


From ACM Opinion

How Samsung Broke Away from the Android Pack

How Samsung Broke Away from the Android Pack

As successful as Samsung's Galaxy S franchise is now, it's easy to forget the Korean consumer electronics giant's first attempt at the American smartphone market was met with an apathetic shrug.


From ACM Opinion

Homunculism

Homunculism

According to Wikipedia, Ray Kurzweil is an "American author, inventor, futurist, and director of engineering at Google. Aside from futurology, he is involved in such fields as optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech…


From ACM Opinion

Sxsw: Google's Amit Singhal Talks Natural-Language Search, Mobile

Sxsw: Google's Amit Singhal Talks Natural-Language Search, Mobile

How do you build a search engine that's more attuned to natural language, capable of divining what you mean, and giving back what you want?


From ACM Opinion

Tim Berners-Lee on the Making of New Worlds

Tim Berners-Lee on the Making of New Worlds

The Internet should be open.


From ACM Opinion

Miyamoto: I Couldn't Have Imagined Where We've Ended ­p

Miyamoto: I Couldn't Have Imagined Where We've Ended ­p

Where do you go when you're arguably history’s most famous video game designer in a medium that's witnessed explosive growth since its halcyon days?


From ACM News

Everything We Know About What Data Brokers Know About You

Everything We Know About What Data Brokers Know About You

Data companies are scooping up enormous amounts of information about almost every American. They sell information about whether you're pregnant or divorced or trying to lose weight, about how rich you are and what kinds of cars…


From ACM Opinion

Why Private Companies Won't Make ­p For Cuts in Government Science Funding

Why Private Companies Won't Make ­p For Cuts in Government Science Funding

The budget cuts that took effect last week could wipe out as much as $54 billion in federal funding of science, research, and innovation over the next five years, calculates the American Association for the Advancement of Science…


From ACM Opinion

Lars Rasmussen: The Brains Behind Facebook's Future

Lars Rasmussen: The Brains Behind Facebook's Future

For a man that made his career out of helping millions of people find their way around, Lars Rasmussen is frank about his own navigational shortcomings.


From ACM Opinion

The Big-Data Interview: Making Sense of the New World Order

The Big-Data Interview: Making Sense of the New World Order

In April 2003, British and U.S. researchers declared the Human Genome Project complete.


From ACM Opinion

Google Glass: Is It a Threat to Our Privacy?

Google Glass: Is It a Threat to Our Privacy?

If you haven't heard about the excitement around Google Glass—the head-mounted glasses that can shoot video, take pictures, and broadcast what you're seeing to the world—then here's an idea of the interest in them.


From ACM Opinion

6 Things I Want to Do with Nfc

6 Things I Want to Do with Nfc

Tapping your phone on a console to pay for fries and a Coke is cool. Yet until the stars align, it's not how you'll be using NFC, the Near Field Communications standard that gets devices talking to one another quickly and in…


From ACM Opinion

Shedding More Light on National Security Letters

Our users trust Google with a lot of very important data, whether it’s emails, photos, documents, posts or videos.


From ACM Opinion

Are We Really Facing Cyberwar?

Are We Really Facing Cyberwar?

A few weeks ago I was standing by a railway track in the small town of Gaithersburg in Maryland as a CSX freight train blasted through the level crossing; its horn blaring and bells sounding out a warning.


From ACM Opinion

Eye-Tracking Smartphones Have Arrived. What About the Privacy Implications?

Eye-Tracking Smartphones Have Arrived. What About the Privacy Implications?

Last March, I wrote in Slate about eye-tracking, which could allow computers and smartphones of the future to collect information not only about what we read, but how we read it.


From ACM Opinion

Computer Interfaces: Tech's Next Great Frontier

Computer Interfaces: Tech's Next Great Frontier

Consider the tongue. It's sensitive yet muscular, packed with taste buds and nerves, and without its acrobatic ability humans wouldn’t be able to eat or talk. It's also our most versatile sense organ, and some computer engineers…


From ACM Opinion

Google Services Should Not Require Real Names: Vint Cerf

Google Services Should Not Require Real Names: Vint Cerf

In the face of increasing government-led crackdowns on social media, Google Inc. should not force Internet users to reveal their real names for some services, including its Google+ social network, said Vint Cerf, a senior Google…


From ACM Opinion

What to Do After You've Been Hacked

What to Do After You've Been Hacked

Evernote became the latest member of the "we’ve been hacked" club. And the thing is, what was once a pretty exclusive club now lets just about everyone in these days. I’m a member too.


From ACM Opinion

The Best Books About Biotechnology

The Best Books About Biotechnology

I've spent the last few weeks creating a syllabus for myself on the world—people, techniques, theory, history—of biotechnology. I've talked with some scholars, accepted some Amazon recommendations, and done some rummaging around…


From ACM Opinion

The Dangerous Logic of the Bradley Manning Case

The Dangerous Logic of the Bradley Manning Case

After 1,000 days in pretrial detention, Private Bradley Manning offered a modified guilty plea for passing classified materials to WikiLeaks. But his case is far from over—not for Manning, and not for the rest of the country.


From ACM Opinion

Why Teens Are Tiring of Facebook

Why Teens Are Tiring of Facebook

To understand where teens like to spend their virtual time nowadways, just watch them on their smartphones.


From ACM Opinion

Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow on 'homeland,' Printed Guns, and Heart Hacking

Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow on 'homeland,' Printed Guns, and Heart Hacking

I had the pleasure of spending some time with Cory Doctorow on Feb. 25 at the Jefferson Hotel here in the nation's capital.


From ACM Opinion

A Museum's Games Are Not on Pedestals

A Museum's Games Are Not on Pedestals

Video games, as their name suggests, combine the ancient human practice of formal play with moving pictures, a younger form.


From ACM Opinion

Mobile Computing Is Just Getting Started

Mobile Computing Is Just Getting Started

Mobile computers are spreading faster than any other consumer technology in history.


From ACM Opinion

Wing Surveys Her New Opportunity

Wing Surveys Her New Opportunity

A month into her new job as Microsoft vice president and head of Microsoft Research International, Jeannette Wing found time for a wide-ranging discussion about her new role and what she sees ahead.


From ACM Opinion

Nate Silver Presents Forecasting Work as Antidote to 'terrible' Political Pundits

Nate Silver Presents Forecasting Work as Antidote to 'terrible' Political Pundits

Celebrated political forecaster Nate Silver has shot to fame by letting the data speak loudly about elections.

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