I have been trying to decide which professional membership to drop, ACM or IEEE-CS. CACM and Computer are, IMHO, of roughly equivalent high quality. It looks as though there are two deciding factors. One is the terrible job IEEE has done placing Spectrum online; they are using qmags.com, who are not content with PDFs, but feel the need to litter the PDFs with navigation controls and other garbage. Why put navigational controls in a document that is viewed in a viewer with fine navigational controls? QMags' garbage is impossible to transfer to a Kindle, making it useless to me as an electronic format. The other is that ACM Computing Surveys remains excellent, and IEEE has nothing comparable.
Further, today I read "Living in a Digital World" by Samuel Greengard, 10/2011 CACM (http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2011/10/131393-living-in-a-digital-world/fulltext). It reminded me of the excellent idea of the digital sabbath and of the nice work done by Nicholas Carr in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (Norton, 2010). The technology surrounding us is dehumanizing and reducing our ability to function, and we need the scientific and engineering communities to continue to remind themselves of this.
ACM 2, IEEE-CS, -1
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