acm - an acm publication

2008 - May

  • Technology based outsourcing K-12 mathematics and science teaching

    The author suggests that the teaching of mathematics and science in K-12 schools be outsourced to teachers in other countries whose students achieve better in mathematics and science. He outlines the advantages of using telecommunications technologies to outsource the teaching of mathematics and science.

  • Scarce resources in computing
    How we organize computing - and innovate with it - is shaped by what at any time is the most scarce resource. In the early days of computing, processing (and, to a certain extent, storage, which up to a point is a substitute for processing) was the main scarce resource. Computers were expensive and weak, so you had to organize what you did with them to make as much out of the processing capacity as possible. Hence, with the early computers, much time was spent making sure the process was fully used, by meticulously allocating time for users on the machine - first with scheduled batch processing, then with time-sharing operating systems that rationed processing resources to users based on need and budget.
  • SC08 broader engagement offers mentoring and travel assistance grants
    Austin, TX Interested in understanding what supercomputing means? Want to learn how next-generation computing, networking and storage technologies help to solve our worlds challenges and problems? Do you want to be in a place that brings together scientists, engineers, researchers, educators, programmers, system administrators and managers to discuss, discover and innovate the path forward for computing? If so, the SC08 Broader Engagement initiative might just be for you.
  • Elliptic curve cryptography

    This paper describes the Elliptic Curve Cryptography algorithm and its suitability for smart cards.

  • Preface by Arun Tripathi to Jeff Malpas' 'The Non-Autonomy of the Virtual'
    Australian philosopher Jeff Malpas, author of Place and Experience, argues in his Ubiquity paper The non-autonomy of the virtual: philosophical reflections on contemporary virtuality that the virtual is not autonomous with respect to the everyday, but is rather embedded within it, and an extension of it. Within philosophy, Professor Malpas is perhaps best known as one of a small number of philosophers who work across the analytic-continental divide, publishing one of the first books that drew attention to convergences in the thinking of the key twentieth century American philosopher Donald Davidson and the phenomenological and hermeneutic traditions, as exemplified in the work of Heidegger and Gadamer.
  • The non-autonomy of the virtual: philosophical reflections on contemporary virtuality

    Much contemporary talk of virtual 'worlds' proceeds as if the virtual could somehow be considered as in competition with or as an alternative to the world of the 'nonvirtual' or the 'everyday'. This paper argues that such a contrast is fundamentally mistaken, and that the virtual is not autonomous with respect to the everyday, but is rather embedded within it, and an extension of it.

  • A prototype design for DRM based credit card transaction in E-commerce

    In E-Commerce credit cards gained popularity as a sophisticated payment mechanism. With the increase in credit card use on web, credit card fraud has gone up dramatically. Which cause customer's inconvenience and for merchant, loss of customers. To combat credit card fraud and to regain the customer's trust an attempt is made here to design a trust based payment system, in which the customer does not need to disclose his/her credit card number during the transaction, and hence they can feel safe. In this newly proposed system on behalf of the customer the bank or the issuer of the credit card is involved to perform the transaction. This is basically done by generating a single use 'token' by the bank which includes information about the customer, merchant, product, payment amount, date of issue and date of expiry etc. and thereafter wrapped as a DRM package. Among various advantages, one is that only the intended user and the specified application software can open the DRM package using special key. The application, thereafter, will take care of the rights imposed on the 'token' and expires itself after the single use. We have tried an attempt to use UML to design the model of such system, which is the recent trend of software engineering practice.

  • New technique for fixing an Ethernet IPv6 address using the fedoracore operating system

    During the course to deploy Ipv6, we found several critical implementation and operational issues which distract user and possibly prevent wide deployment of Ipv6. Among the problems we noticed stateless IP autoconfiguration, which provides for each nodes connected to the network an IP address. However, two nodes may have the same address, and a network conflict appears. In this case a manual IP address, which depends on restarting Network Interface Card, is required. In this paper, we present a technique that, independently of rebooting NIC, maintain the IP address fix. Validation is done by using Fedoracore Operating System.