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The article analyzes existing and proposed American and foreign standards for one inch perforated paper tape for information interchange. This standard covers the physical dimensions of the paper tape and its perforations. The unpunched tape shall have an overall nominal width of 1,000 inch and shall have a nominal thickness of .004 inch. The tape shall be used for recording up to eight levels of information across the tape. The longitudinal center line of the feed holes shall be parallel with the reference edge of the tape and located .392 inch plus or minus .004 inch from the reference edge. The feed holes in the tape shall be fully punched and round with a diameter of .046 inch plus .002 minus .001 inch. The code holes in the tape shall be fully punched and round with a diameter of .072 inch plus or minus .002 inch. All holes punched in the tape shall nominally center on the true intersection of longitudinal and perpendicular transverse center lines spaced .100 inch apart.

According to a nationwide study of U.S. voting systems, long-used methods of casting votes are more dependable than electronic means. Conducted by the California Institute of Technology/Massachusetts Institute of Technology Voting Project, the study focused on undervotes and overvotes, which together make a category of votes called "residual votes."

This article focuses on conferences related to computer systems. The 1981 Winter Simulation Conference to be held on December 9-11 in Atlanta, Georgia, is to feature papers, panel discussions, and tutorials on discrete and combined (Discrete/Continuous) simulation modeling; The 15th Annual Simulation Symposium is planned for March 17-19, 1982 in Tampa, Florida; The Fifteenth Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Honolulu, January 6-8. 1982, is to cover developments in theory or practice in the areas of computer software and hardware and advanced systems applications; The National Educational Computing Conference 81 is set for June 17-19 at North Texas State University in Denton, Texas; An International Conference on Systems Methodology, organized by the Society for General Systems Research and sponsored by the International Federation for Systems Research, is planned for January 5-9, 1982, in Washington D.C.

This article focuses on a list of conferences related to computer systems. The ACM SIGACT-SIGMOD Conference on Principles of Database Systems is planned for March 29-31, 1982 in Los Angeles, California; The Symposium on Reliability in Distributed Software and Database Systems, to be held July 21-22, 1981, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, will have sessions on robust concurrency control in distributed database management systems; language issues for reliability in distributed systems; The Annual Conference of the Association for the Development of Computer- Based Instructional Systems is designed to provide a setting for both formal and informal sharing of CBI experience, research findings. This meeting is to be held May 10-14, 1982, in Vancouver, British Columbia. An international conference. The Impact of Computerization on Social Science Research, is scheduled for September 14-18. 1981, in Grenoble, France.

The decomposition of a complex data transmission system into segments and the identification of the terminal configurations employed on each segment appear to offer promise as a powerful tool for permitting and clarifying measurements and comparisons of the performance of like system segments, and for describing the features of systems which are significant to performance measurements. Many problem areas remain, however, for further study. For example, the question of combining the individual performance measures of a multisegment, multi-mode-of-operation system into a meaningful measure of total systems performance appears quite formidable. It is the intent of the Task Group to approach these problems of performance measurement gradually and to resolve them first for the simpler systems before proceeding to complex system configurations. Although the techniques which this Task Group has evolved for system description may appear to be voluminous or even redundant when applied to very simple configurations, they are orderly, and every effort has been made to seek and exploit the "common denominators" of data transmission systems having arbitrary degrees of complexity. We doubt that much further compaction can be realized without, severely curtailing or destroying the generality and (hopefully) universal applicability of these methods. The format which has been described is admittedly incomplete. It is suggestive rather than exhaustive. It is believed that its chief virtue lies in the identification of an orderly succession of levels of abstraction which permits the regular decomposition of highly complex systems into functional subgroupings having a size structure within the span of human attention. The details of description outlined within these subgroupings require further study and elucidation and it will probably always be necessary for the system describer Io employ good judgment and imagination in extending the scope of description in those areas where new advances, unique applications and/or common sense so dictate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the Association of Computer machinery (ACM). It discusses the results of the recent voting of ACM members in relation to proposed Constitutional Amendments. The results revealed that the "Yes" vote run 712 short of the Constitutional requirement of two-thirds of the number of valid votes that were received. New audio cassettes have been released by ACM. It contained selected presentations from recent ACM conferences, including the 1974 conference which was held in San Diego in November 1974. Cassettes from the 1975 ACM Annual Conference are likely to be available in March 1976. The topics included in the ACM cassette library are database systems, structured programming, virtual memory, large scale software, and dp management, and includes the A.M. Turing Award Lectures from 1972 to 1974. A position paper containing recommendations for support of high quality mathematical software development has recently been forwarded to the National Science Foundation by authors Wayne R. Cowell and Lloyd D. Fosdick.

Consistency control has to be enforced in database management systems (DBMS) where several transactions may concurrently access the database. This control is usually achieved by dividing the database into locking units or granules, and by specifying a locking policy which ensures integrity of the information. However, a drawback of integrity enforcement through locking policies is the degradation of the global system performance. This is mainly due to the restriction imposed by the locking policies to the access of transactions to the database, and to the overheads involved with the management of locks. A framework for the quantitative analysis of the impact of these factors on the performance of DBMS is presented in this paper. In a first step, the main factors which determine the behavior of these systems are pointed out and analyzed independently. The results hereby obtained are aggregated in a second step to yield a global performance evaluation. Throughout this hierarchical modeling approach various analytical techniques are used and the results are illustrated by numerical examples. The paper concludes by pointing out the final results' sensitivity to some basic assumptions concerning transaction behavior and the need for more experimental studies in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On almost all software development projects the assumption is made that the program development function will be done on the same machine on which the eventual system will run. It is only when this production machine is unavailable or when its programming environment is totally inadequate that alter. natives are considered. In this paper it is suggested that there are many other situations where it would be advantageous to separate the program development and maintenance function onto a specialized computer which is dedicated to that purpose. Such a computer is here called a Programmer's Workbench. The four basic sections of the paper introduce the subject, outline the general concept, discuss areas where such an approach may prove beneficial, and describe an operational system utilizing this concept. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a computationally tractable methodology for including accurately the effects of finite memory size and workload memory requirements in queueing network models of computer systems. Empirical analyses and analytic studies based on applying this methodology to an actual multiaccess interactive system are reported. Relations between workload variables such as memory requirement distribution and job swap time, and performance measures such as response time and memory utilization are graphically displayed. A multiphase, analytically soluble model is proposed as being broadly applicable to the analysis of interactive computer systems which use nonpaged memories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on new design possibilities that visual and task focused systems offer. In the 1970s when the infrastructure, methodologies, specifications, architecture and goals for large scale corporate systems were set, the focus of applications software was data processing. The hardware was, of course primitive by today's standards. But hardware aside, the first 10 to 15 years of application development were focused on structuring environments to capture, transform, and report on data-largely transaction data. The first systems author remember were insurance, banking people used to keypunch from when batch systems were the rage. Of course, since the paper forms couldn't be represented well and since display screen real estate was such a priority, these "data entry"screens contained huge numbers of fields with minimalist cryptic labels. Since people weren't doing anything but entering data that existed on source paper forms, the focus was on rapid data entry. And since data transmission was costly, the goal was to have as much on a display as possible before pressing transmit or enter.

The article presents several research papers relating to algorithms. The paper "Greatest Common Divisor of n Integers and Multipliers" presents an algorithm which calculates the greatest common divisor, IGCD, of n integers. Details of the method and comparisons to other algorithms are also given. The algorithm is a new version of the Euclidean algorithm for n integers. The n-1 calculations of the greatest common divisor of two integers is accomplished by means of a modified version of the Blankinship algorithm. The paper "Exponential Integral Ei (x)" presents the results of one phase of research carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under Contract NAS7-100, sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. It presents an algorithm which was compiled and executed without any modification on a UNIVAC 1108 computer. An unfortunate precedent has been set in several recent algorithms of using an illegal FORTRAN construction.

The article discusses the role of the man as an Information-Processing System. The International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) will conduct a session regarding technological innovations in data processing. Computer system design which has been patterned on man as recently been moving away from totally central control system design concepts headed for decentralized control concepts. Chairman of the session will be Isaac L. Auerbach which is also the president of IFIP. The plans of this computer organization will make a big progress in information technology.

The article focuses on innovative, inexpensive, efficient and increasingly compact storage technologies promise practically unlimited capacity and instant access to data anytime, anywhere. It focuses on the extraordinary ultra-high-density storage technologies emerging today and their often-invisible contribution to the future of distributed information networks and appliances. Digital data storage is the lifeline of the information revolution. Digital displays, fast communication systems, large storage repositories and powerful processors are poised to further diminish the dependence on traditional physical media, most notably paper and point the way towards vast amounts of onboard and readily available data and access from practically any electronic device and appliance by practically any computer user or consumer worldwide. Computers, automobiles, electronic consumer devices, aircraft, boats, all kinds of engines and practically any electronic device or appliance require local data storage to enable them to carry out crucial processor functions.

The editorial board of the new journal "Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems" (TODAES) of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is inviting submissions of technical papers. C. L. Liu of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is the editor-in-chief of TODAES. Papers should address recent results of research and/or development in the specification, design, analysis, simulation, testing, and evaluation of very large-scale integrated electronic systems, emphasizing a computer science/engineering orientation. TODAES will also publish tutorial and survey papers and short technical notes. Publication begins in January 1996. TODAES will use state-of-the-art electronic publishing and communications technology to distribute in three formats: print copy, electronic distribution via an Internet server, and on CD-ROM.

The article presents a calendar of events related to computer science. It includes, International Conference on Machine Translation; Computer Science and Statistics: 16th Symposium on the Interface; Fourth Latin American Conference in Computer Science; Seventh International Conference on Pattern Recognition; Ohio Instructional Computing Conference; Computer Networking Symposium; Third Conference on Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science; Total Systems Reliability Symposium; The Fourth International Conference on Information Systems; Second International Conference on Advanced Automation; Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences; Workshop on Sublanguage Description and Processing; International Symposium on Logic Programming; International Symposium on the Performance of Computer-Communication Systems; Seventh International Conference on Software Engineering; Seventh International Conference on Software Engineering; and International Workshop on Models and Languages for Software Specification and Design.

The nature of programming is changing. These changes will accelerate as improved software development practices and more sophisticated development tools and environments are produced. This paper surveys the most likely changes in the programming task and in the nature of software over the short term, the medium term, and the long term. In the short term, the focus is on gains in programmer productivity through improved tools and integrated development environments. In the medium term, programmers will be able to take advantage of libraries of software components and to make use of packages that generate programs automatically for certain kinds of common systems. Over the longer term, the nature of programming will change even more significantly as programmers become able to describe desired functions in a nonprocedural way, perhaps through a set of rules or formal specification languages. As these changes occur, the job of the application programmer will become increasingly analysis-oriented and software developers will be able to attack a large number of application areas which could not previously be addressed effectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An important part of a simulation study is the analysis of simulation output for the purpose of making inferences about properties of the process being simulated. Fundamental to much of this analysis is the building of a confidence interval on the mean value of a key output variable of interest. This procedure is complicated by the possible presence of serial correlation in the output, which makes it difficult to estimate the variability in the estimator of the process mean. Although some research has been devoted to estimating this variability, additional research must be directed toward developing reliable confidence interval procedures and making the practitioner's selection of an appropriate procedure relatively straightforward. This paper provides a conceptual framework for research in the analysis of simulation output, focusing in particular on confidence interval methodology. The characteristics of confidence interval procedures, theoretical output processes, and processes of practical interest to simulation practitioners are discussed, and their relationships with one another spelled out. Standard measures of effectiveness applicable to proposed confidence interval procedures are introduced, and the application of these measures to two previously suggested confidence interval procedures is illustrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consider a multipriority batch computer system which users from several different classes may join, with toll, service, and waiting charges. Such a system is formulated here as a semi- Markov decision process, In which the aim of arriving users Is to minimize their expected loss. The optimal joining policy of arriving users who may join the system at some of its queues is a control limit policy, with a single control number for any possible queue and the user's class; a newly arriving user will join a queue that is not filled up to the control number corresponding to this queue and the user's class. In this paper control numbers, as well as lower and upper bounds for the control numbers and the capacities of the system's queues, are derived. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the advent of on-line (time-sharing) computer systems and graphic terminals, we have available a new dimension in numerical problem solving capabilities. Rather than simply use the new power to achieve fast turnaround, we can develop interactive routines which are easy to use and also take advantage of the insight and visual capabilities of the human problem solver. Several on-line systems for general purpose mathematical problem solving have already been implemented as well as some special purpose systems for solving problems in a particular area such as ordinary differential equations. The advantage of restricting the problem area is that the interface with a user can be greatly simplified, in this paper we discuss some of the advantages accrued by such systems and design considerations for interactive routines. Furthermore, an implementation of an on-line least squares data-fitting program, PEG, is presented with results obtained from empirical data. In conclusion, areas for future work in this field are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today's computation centers are based on rapidly changing technologies of hardware and software systems. It is difficult, therefore, to base decisions on experience; in most instances, the benefits of comparable experience for a given problem situation are not available. In this paper, a mathematical model of the Lockheed Central Computer Center is formulated that describes the operation of a computation center in terms of information nets, decision processes, and control functions. Experiments performed with this model, the results of the experiments, and the application of the results are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the first symposium on Small Systems organized by the Association for Computing Machinery that was held on August 2-3, 1978 in New York City under the sponsorship of Small Computing Systems and Applications. The keynote speaker was Maurice V. Wilkes of the University of Cambridge. Following the keynote address, a distinguished panel session was presented. A Best Paper Award based upon the quality of the written material and oral presentation was given to Jacob Slonim, Michael Farrell, and Paul Fisher of Kansas State University for the paper "A Survey of Mini-Database Management Systems in 1977."

The article reports on certain developments in the field of computing machinery. Late last year U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson set up a National Commission on Technology, Automation and Economic Progress to study the impact of technological changes on American life. Howard R. Bowen, an economist and president of the University of Iowa, was nominated as chairman of the 14-member panel. David N. Freeman, a member of Association for Computing Machinery, was awarded the prize for the most significant paper presented at the 1904 Fall Joint Computer Conference. Installation of a large analog computer system has recently been completed by GPS Instrument Company at General Electric Co.'s Radio Guidance Operation in Syracuse, New York. ITT Research Institute is in process of organizing a computer cooperative for Chicago area structural engineers in Illinois. Computer technology is being utilized by the structural engineer because of the increasing complexity of the structural systems resulting from his search for optimum design.

The article discusses necessary measures that the United States government must take to fix electronic voting standards. Unless a threat model and a system model is put into place, electronic voting will not be guaranteed to be accurate. The main reasons that electronic voting systems have failed when put into practice are poorly designed systems which do not meet expectations for correctness, availability, accessibility, or security, and a flawed certification process that doesn't express a coherent set of requirements for the systems. Methods to eliminate these problems are presented.

The fees from the sale of standards and the stringent policies on sharing copies of standards may decrease the number of people who access these documents and may thus reduce the impact of the standards. Consider two scenarios. In one scenario, information technology standards are available only via purchase. In the other scenario, information is freely available, such as through the Internet. The International Telecpmmunications Union (ITU) provides an electronic site on the Internet from which anyone can copy ITU standards. The European Computer Manufacturers Association also distributes its standards at no cost. On the other hand, organizations such as the International Organization of Standards (ISO) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (WEE) sell their standards. The availability of specifications on the Internet facilitates their acceptance as defacto standards and rewards the development efforts of those that made the specifications. The acceptance of the specification is the major objective and is more rewarding to those responsible for developing the content than the monetary sale of individual copies of the standard. Might there not be a natural selection process such that increased knowledge about the standards process and the marketing of standards helps bring success to those organizations which best serve the interests of the market.

A root cause of the behavioral problems often experienced when computer systems are implements in organizations may be the inadequate conceptualizations of users that system designers hold. Designers may perceive users of systems to be individuals who need other and guidance in their lives and who are motivated by financial rewards rather than opportunities for personal growth. Thus, the designers may design tightly structured systems that lower the quality of working life and produce, as a consequence, the behavioral problems observed. Previous studies of designers in the United Kingdom, Sweden. and the United States found evidence that appears to support this hypothesis. The current replication study with Australian system designers produces similar evidence, but the conclusions drawn from the evidence are not clearcut for two reasons. First, it is now apparent that then are methodological problems with the research approach used. Second, an extension of the prior research suggests a contingency theory perspective of designers user models may be needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The STRUM system was created to apply software engineering techniques to microprogramming. It provides the tools that allow the microprogrammer to use high level language, structured programming, and formal program verification to create emulations for a horizontally microprogrammed computer. This system is evaluated in two parts: (1) High level microprogramming language design and its use in structured microprogramming; and (2) Verification of a large microprogram. Both parts of this evaluation include experimental results. Part I includes a comparison of an emulation created using traditional techniques to the same emulation created using the STRUM system. Part II describes the formal verification of a 1700 line program that was immediately subjected to extensive testing. This work provides new results on the efficiency of high level microprogramming languages, the effectiveness of peephole optimization for microcode and the practicality of formal microprogram verification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An open batch processing system, KEKOPEN, developed at KEK, makes possible the handling of magnetic tapes directly by users, without the intervention of professional operators. The authors show that the user need not perform any additional work during job execution. The user program is unconscious of the "staging" of input/output data. Finally, the authors discuss the possibility of adapting the concept of this working system to other computer systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An optimization procedure for the allocation of program and data flies in a computer network is presented. This algorithm takes into account the dependencies between files and programs such as occur in real heterogeneous computer networks. Insights into whether or not to convert programs from one computer 10 another can also be gained from the model. A search procedure for the file location problem is described, along with an example and a possible application of the model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some of the problems of simulating discrete event systems, particularly computer systems, on a conventional digital computer are dealt with. The systems are assumed to be described as a network of interconnected sequential processes. Briefly reviewed are the common techniques used to handle such simulations when simultaneous events do not occur, can be ignored, or can be handled by simple priority rules. Following this, the problem of dealing with simultaneous events in separate processes is introduced. An abstraction of this problem is developed which admits solution for a majority of commonly encountered problems. The technique will either find a method of simulating the parallel events or report that none can be found. In some of the latter cases it is shown to be possible to find a solution by extending the information available to the solution technique, but in many cases the technique becomes computationally unfeasible when the additional information is provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a report on the remote, online, real-time digital computer system for clinical electrocardiograms. Experience with new digital computation techniques has made it increasingly apparent that electrocardiographic diagnosis may be successfully performed automatically. Operationally, the diagnostic system consists of a sequence of five programs that are called from tape into memory via the executive monitoring program. Diagnostic runs are made daily from the hospital in the morning and the afternoon. The operation time for each case is approximately four minutes with about one-half of the time consumed by teletyping and tape handling and the remainder by real-time computation. The result of the patient's identification data analysis were presented in the sequential form to provide a clear picture of the sectional contributions of the various parts of the program to the final diagnosis and to allow for online, real-time cardiologist-computer interaction at various levels in the diagnostic process during those periods when an attempt is being made to increase the diagnostic accuracy of the system.

The article presents abstracts from ACM's publications. Titles include "Dealing with World-Model Based Programs," "Detecting Global Variables in Denotational Specifications," "Evaluation of Step Directions in Optimization Algorithms," "Integration of a Primal Simplex Network Algorithm with a Large-Scale Mathematical Programming System," and File Servers for Network-Based Distribution Systems.

The article discusses progress that has been made in developing methodology, algorithms and tools for the verification of hardware and software systems. It describes the design of change-pump phase-locked loops to demonstrate both the challenges involved in the verification of hybrid systems and of potential benefits of formal analysis. It cites a study which shows that the technique of symbolic simulation is competitive with the industry-standard simulation tools in terms of computational requirements.

The article presents information about a report issued from the U.S. Office of Technological Assessment (OTA) detailing the impact of emerging technologies on the dissemination of government information. The OTA stresses that Congressional action is urgently needed to resolve current information issues as well as set the direction of federal activities for years to come. The electronic age demands that the entire policy area be reviewed and revised in the next few years. Technical advances are creating opportunities for productivity improvement in Federal information dissemination that is estimated conservatively at hundreds of millions of dollars. Such progress has opened up many new and potentially cost effective ways to disseminate federal information. The OTA expects important underlying technical advances in microcomputers, printers, scanners, electronic publishing systems, optical disks and a host of on-line networks to continue unabated for at least the next 3-5 years and 10 years or more in many cases.

Several letters to the editor are presented in response to articles in previous issues including a commendation to the journal's commitment to computing practices, a reader's comment on the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Committee Report in the June 1978 issue and "Highlights From the ACM 1977 Publications Survey," in the July 1978 issue.

Operating under the name J-N-J Mail Order and using a computer program it created, a high-tech bookie operation took $180,000 a day in illegal bets, reports the "New York Daily News," newspaper. A crew of 19 people were arrested in a crew for handling illegal action from more than 200 players and other bookies in and around New York. Betting slips traditionally on paper were created electronically and could be called up and filled out on the screen. Authorities said the gambling locations were run by the Columbo crime family.

The ACM Lectureship series, a program sponsored by the Local Activities Board to send computer professionals into communities around the world has been administered electronically. The ACM Technology Outreach Program has put to the series by eliminating paper documentation, except for reimbursement requests, which still require original receipts. TOP can now offer much more highly integrated graphics and hypertext for many of ACM's programs and projects, including the Lecated technical forums, and focus groups. These activities are presently at varying stages of development, with a number already active.

This article reports that the U.S. administration received an estimated 100,000 resumes between election and inauguration days for 4,000 federal jobs. Helping them sort through almost 2,000 entries per day was an AI-based image processing employment system called Resumix. The software system scanned and filed resumes in seconds, then retrieved them according to job skills. The team figures the system also saved about a million pieces of paper.

The article discusses difficulties that can exist with computer software. Problems discussed in the article include a lack of metrics to measure software dependability, the dependability of a computer system's software, and software verification problems. Research is being completed on steps that can be taken to make certified software code more dependable. Changes that have been made to programming languages, formal semantics, and program verifications have helped power the advances that have occurred in certified software.

The article discusses ways to improve how electronic documents are managed and exchanged in computer systems. Large document collections must be organized to be useful, and this organization can be structured in many different ways. Some repositories organize documents into categorical hierarchies, while others organize them using hyperlinks. No matter how documents are organized within the database, the author stresses that a great amount of effort is needed to keep large collections organized and usable.

This article discusses strategies for making software development more effective. One of the ways people try to make software development more effective is in the definition of roles: if one can just put the right people in the appropriate positions, with well-understood responsibilities and clearly defined interfaces passing clean information from which effective decisions are made, then one's project will be successful. One can think of software development activities as making executable both what is known and what is not known. There are four categories of these knowns and unknowns: the transfer and implementation of previously known knowledge; the definition of specific unknown quantities; the discovery of unknown quantities; and the discovery and proof of previously unknown processes or approaches. When one looks at explicit and rigorous role definition, it is obvious that its effectiveness is an inverse function of variability. The effectiveness of role definition is a function of the quantity and types of unknowns present at the time when the roles are being defined.

The invention of the movable type printing press launched the information age by making the mass distribution of information both feasible and economical. Newspaper, magazines, shopping catalogs, restaurant guides and classified advertisements can trace their origins to the printing process. Five and a half centuries of technological progress in communications networks, protocols, computers and user interface design led to the Web, online publishing and e-commerce. Consumers and business have access to vast stores of information. all this information, however, used to be accessible only while users were tethered to a computer at home or in an office. Wireless data and voice access to this vast store allows unprecedented access to information from any location at any time. The presentation of this information must be tailored to the constraints of mobile devices. Although browsing and searching are the acceptable methods of locating information on the wired Web, those operations soon become cumbersome and inefficient in the wireless setting and nearly impossible in voices interfaces. Small screens, slower connections, high latency, limited input capabilities and the serial nature of voices interfaces present new challenges.

This article focuses on three-dimensional (3D) visualization of software architectures. Software architectures refers to the art and science of structuring very large programs and concerns the organization of a system in terms of its components, global control structures, physical distribution, evolution and more. The discipline of software architecture recently received a boost from new technological options for visualizing and analyzing software systems. These options are the result of the virtual reality modeling language (VRML), which is a de facto worldwide standard. There are several reasons why it is worthwhile to investigate and apply the emerging VRML technology to visualizing software designs. The main one is that VRML technology is available today and can help upgrade two-dimensional (2D) approaches to show design information. Moreover, 3D makes it possible to make a layout of the design objects more consistent with the object's intended role than can be done in a single plane. 3D visualization helps identify new design metaphors, fostering new ideas with respect to design principles.

The article presents information on members of the Advisory Committee of the journal "Communications of the ACM." Participants will include representatives of the ACM Chapters in the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Russia, and Ukraine, in addition to members of the ACM Special Advisory Committee on Eastern and Central Europe. How to facilitate the participation of the many highly trained computer professionals in Eastern and Central Europe will be a central concern of the meeting including strategizing for better dissemination of technical materials and instruction, especially given ongoing economic and political crisis in the region.

As vast metropolises adopt computer ballot counting methods including punch-card, mark-sense and directentry systems, the question arises whether a national or local election can be "thrown" via internal or external manipulation of hardware, software and/or data. Proponents of electronic voting systems say sufficient controls are being exercised, so that attempts to subvert an election would be detectable. But speakers at a recent session on security and auditability of electronic vote tabulation systems pointed out that the U.S. Federal Election Commission has provided only voluntary voting system standards that may not be adequate to ensure election integrity. Numerous incidents of electronic voting difficulties have come to the attention of the press, although to date there hnve been no convictions for vote fraud by computer. Equipment-related problems are a source of concern to election boards, especially when time-critical operations must be performed. The Columbus Dispatch reported that 40 of the 758 electronic machines used in Franklin County's June primary required service on election day.

The article presents information on various developments taking place in the field of computer industry. Portia Isaacson, of the Department of Mathematical Sciences, University of Texas at Dallas, has been named Conference Chairman for the 1977 National Computer Conference. The conference will be held June 13-16, 1977, in Dallas, Texas. Isaacson will be the first woman to chair a National Computer Conference. Her career has touched on virtually all phases of computer system development, both in industry and in the academic community. The 24th in a series of annual international symposia organized by the Microwave Research Institute of the Polytechnic Institute of New York is being held in New York City on April 20-22, 1976. Data Processing Management Association is proceeding with plans for the observance of its 25th anniversary in 1976. The annual Canadian Computer Conference Session 76 will be held in Montreal, Canada, on May 18-20, 1976. The conference is jointly sponsored by the Canadian Information Processing Society and the Canadian Science Association.

Software reviews are not a new idea. They have been around almost as long as software has. One of the most natural ways to check if something is correct is to look at it. In the 1950s and 1960s, large software projects often included some sort of software review. By the 1970s, various review methods had emerged with different names, software reviews, technical reviews, formal reviews, walkthroughs, structured walkthroughs, and code inspections. Each review method had different forms to fill out, different review team sizes and makeup, and so on, but none suggested any approach for reviewing the software or other work product other than just looking at it and discussing it. One might wonder why reviews are used at all, since most software is tested anyway. There are several reasons for doing something other than testing. Among these reasons are the expense and insufficiency of testing. It is well known that a software system cannot be made reliable by testing. Since independent inspections are routine in many other disciplines, such a financial accounting and building construction, it is surprising that inspection is not a significant element of software development.

This article focuses on the evaluation of safety-critical software. It is increasingly common to use programmable computers in applications where their failure could be life-threatening and could result in extensive damage. For example, computers now have safety-critical functions in both military and civilian aircraft, in nuclear plants. and in medical devices. Within the engineering community software systems have a reputation for being undependable, especially in the first years of their use. The public is aware of a few spectacular stories such as the Space Shuttle flight that was delayed by a software timing problem, or the Venus probe that was lost because of a punctuation error. In the software community, the problem is known to be much more widespread. Generally, many uses and many failures are required before a product is considered reliable. Software products, including those that have become relatively reliable, behave like other products of evolution-like processes; they often fail, even years after they were built, when the operating conditions change.

This article presents information related to the various functional and behavioral aspects of computer-aided software engineering (CASE). Recent CASE advertisements suggest that users are reporting productivity improvements ranging from 30 to 300 percent. Two additional factors which were considered very important during system development were also included along with the CASE product functions. They were communication among project team members and adherence to the enterprise's system development standards. Although the implementation of technological functions may vary in other CASE products, most of the competing CASE products support an equivalent function. Testing of all 17 functions required that 136 paired comparisons be made by the subjects. For the software engineer's preferences, the preferred representation of the 136 similarity rankings was in three dimensions with 88 percent of the total original pairwise ranks accounted for. A study implies that CASE product offerings need not be as robust in functionality as the one used in the study in order to positively affect productivity.

This article focuses on the partial metrics system design. The Partial Metrics System is designed to support the metrics-driven implementation of individual modules in a large-scale programming project. It is assumed that the system's modular structure has been specified prior to this stage, and that a high-level functional description exists for each module. The goal of the Partial Metrics System is to provide a uniform framework in which each module can be developed and its progress assessed. The structure of the subsystem supports a metrics based approach to the stepwise refinement process. The principle on which the Partial Metrics System is based is that aspects of the design process for a software module are reflected by changes in the pseudocode structure for that module during the design process. This perspective of monitoring the process is analogous to that of a physician monitoring the progress of a hospitalized patient.

The article discusses the introduction of Automated Enterprise Management Systems (ASUPs), a management information system, in the industrial enterprises of the U.S.S.R. The Communist party and the government of the Soviet Union have orchestrated an unprecedented program to introduce computer-based information systems from the top down on the scale of an entire country. But the integration of these systems into the general economy of the U.S.S.R. has been fraught with numerous difficulties. The majority of ASUPs were geared toward manufacturing industries. Between 1965 and 1985, about 7500 ASUs were built throughout the Soviet economy. About 3300 are at the enterprise level, a few hundred are ministry-level systems and most of the rest are for process control. The Soviets have built a large computer infrastructure that has succeeded in delivering usable hardware and software to a large number of organizations throughout the economy. The infrastructure had the most success in building hardware, systems and applications software were next, and training a knowledgeable user base was last.