Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
January 2009
From Wild WebMink
Link roundup for January 6
Debian, Philosophy, and PeopleWhere angels fear to tread. "So if even the sixth and eighth commandments admit to exceptions, why is it that some Debian developers approach the first clause of the Debian Social Contract with a…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How many deleted sections do you write?
Research ideas come through writing. Thinking deep thoughts while you stare at the wall is not productive. So, researchers write a lot. Some of it is incorrect or uninteresting. Just like movie studios are filled with deleted…
From Putting People First
Smart homes haven
New York Times technology reporter Steve Lohr reports on the “dream” of the smart home. “Yet the smart home has remained a dream for years, just over the horizon. And the horizon keeps receding. Along the way, there have been…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Open Engineering Design Course
Friend and colleague Professor Farrokh Mistree at Ga Tech is teaching a course ... ME6102 Designing Open Engineering Systems.... At Ga Tech and Washington State. He is seeking examples, case studies, ideas and support. Leave…
From insideHPC
Wyoming Includes Supercomputer in Stimulus
Gov. Dave Freundenthal of Wyoming has announced details on his economic stimulus list destined for President-elect Barack Obama.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Procter Approach to Global Product Management
A CG article on the topic with good detail. Includes a link to the Web seminar recording. " ... P&G recently established a Corporate Standards System (CSS) to streamline its PLM operations into one global work process ... Specs…
From Putting People First
The 5 D
Niti Bhan wrote a long article on Core77 on marketing to the Bottom of the Pyramid. “The premise of the fortune at the base of the pyramid (BoP) is based on the notion of how to profitably do business with the poor. But few such…
From CSDiary
Holiday Tech Gifts
I’m writing this from Osaka, Japan, where I am waiting for the continuation of my flight to Taipei, Taiwan, for a meeting of the Taiwan-CMU-Berkeley iCAST research collaboration. Ed Clarke, Christos Faloutsos, Adrian Perrig,…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Washing Machine Twits When Done
Home washing machines were major parts of our future homes. So when I saw this achievement I had to chuckle. Includes video. The communications idea is not new, but it is new regarding the use of Twitter. So not much new here…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Scan IT! at Stop & Shop
In aisle scanning continues, competing with automated checkouts. The claim is that 40% of people now use some form of automated checkouts. Here is another update from Stop & Shop where they continue to test hand scanners.Modiv…
From Wild WebMink
The first weekend's links of 2009
From The Eponymous Pickle
Business Intelligence Blog
Newly discovered: Business Intelligence Blog, by Doug Lautzenheiser
From insideHPC
Sun sponsors HPC Symposium in the Great White
From Sun’s HPC Watercooler comes news of a reason to travel to Canada this summer June 14-17 Sun is pleased to sponsor the High Performance Computing Symposium, a multidisciplinary conference that focuses on research involving…
From insideHPC
The dangers of a monoculture for the future of
Joe Landman pointed to this presentation (PDF) by Paul Lu at U of Alberta on the emerging monocultures in HPC (x86, InfiniBand, Linux) and the risks posed by the elimination of diversity. It’s an interesting, easy read that will…
From insideHPC
A look at Tesla
Doug Eadline over at ClusterMonkey got an early Christmas present from NVIDIA: a look at the year in Tesla technology: It is not often someone does our job for us and when it happens we like to take advantage of it. Earlier this…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Buyology Presentation in Cincinnati
If you are in the Cincinnati area join us. I will be there. We are delighted to invite you to attend an exclusive presentation by Martin Lindstrom on his bestselling book, Buyology
From Computer Science Teachers Association
Leadership Cohort Update
During the time since the first Leadership Cohort Workshop in July, members have been busy with advocacy efforts in their various states. Previous blog posts by individual members have reported on some of those activities. …
From The Eponymous Pickle
Mind Reading and Marketing on 60 Minutes
From the Neuromarketing blog, I see that there was a piece on brain scanning and its applications on 60 Minutes. Includes a link to the program itself. More about the lie detection angle than neuromarketing. The level of bias…
From insideHPC
Jaguar Supercomputer Accepted, Cray Buys More
Cray has announced that the one petaflop Jaguar supercomputer installed at Oak Ridge National Lab officially passed its acceptance tests at the end of 2008.
From Putting People First
Nokia
Nearly by accident I discovered Nokia’s recently launched IdeasProject, an effort “to surface Big Ideas about the future of communications — and to show the many ways that these ideas are connected”. It is definitely a site rich…
From Putting People First
On futures and design
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, researcher director at the Institute for the Future, has posted a thoughtful essay on his blog about how trends in computing and design might affect the way that futurists work: how they could be used to…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Book Scanning Continues
Good article in the NYTimes on Google book search. The value of building a complete digital library. A settlement in October with authors and publishers has cleared the way for continuation of the project. Press release. Microsoft…
From insideHPC
Your last HPC book? The best HPC-related book
What’s the last HPC-related book you bought, and when did you buy it? What’s the best HPC-related book you’ve ever bought (you define “best” however you’d like: most useful, most inspiring, whatever)? For more related articles…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Neuroscience of the Self
In Edge, an interesting essay:Self Awareness: The Last Frontier By neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran. This is about how any thinking system ultimately considers its self and environment. Discussion of are the so-called mirror…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Logic Programming
I was just connected to a UK company called Logic Programming Associates Ltd. Which has a number of products including WIN-Prolog and VisiRule. The latter has a visual interface which allows you to construct interfaces forDecision…
From CSDiary
CMU Mind Readers
Research on machine learning — that is, machines that improve with experience — has made astounding progress over the past decade or so. Such research is very mathematical and often theoretical in nature, which makes it hard…
From Putting People First
People-centred design in times of frugality
The current economic recession is turning out to be very severe (The Guardian evokes the spectre of a 1930s-style depression), with rich countries being the biggest losers, and this slowly unfolding reality will drastically transform…
From Putting People First
Where to post?
From The Eponymous Pickle
TouchGraph Revisited
I looked at TouchGraph some time ago. A means of visualizing searches and determining the connections between search results. Many new features in this new version. When you search on a URL or some text you will get a connected…
From Putting People First
M-banking and economic development
Jonathan Donner of Microsoft Research India and Camilo Andres Tellez of the London School of Economics and Political Science have together written a paper on mobile banking and economic development that just got published in…