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 The Eponymous Pickle
Civil Nanotechnology
In a post in the Foresight blog: Civil nanotechnology: Open source sensing in Seed magazine. The promotion of nanotech enabled open source sensors in the environment. And some of the privacy concerns that these will create…
From Computer Science Teachers Association
A Computer Science Honor Society?
Does your high school have chapters of any subject-specific honor societies, such as Mu Alpha Theta (math), Science National Honor Society, Tri-M (music), or one or more honor societies for specific foreign languages?
From time…From insideHPC
Tabor Research stands by positive HPC outlook in down
Addison Snell at Tabor Research published an interesting read last week at the HPCwire blog. With the economy beginning to crash down around us, Tabor Research issued a press release in October stating that the majority of users…
From insideHPC
TotalView Adds Support For HP Cluster
TotalView Tech has announced that its flagship TotalView debugger now supports the HP Cluster Platform Workgroup System.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Scrapwalls
Now several times I have had the task of creating a collage of images quickly and easily. Typically I would have perhaps a hundred design images or so in a file and need to arrange and rearrange these in a two dimensional plane…
From Putting People First
Is the
“Are experiences relevant in a recession?” asks Jonathan Picoult. The stock of Starbucks Coffee, long revered as a prime example of a consumer-focused, experience-oriented business, was down over 50 percent in 2008 (underperforming…
From Putting People First
Nokia and Securitas to cooperate in bringing security services into mobile devices
Press release Nokia and Securitas today announced a new cooperation regarding mobile services for personal security and every day safety. Mobile devices already today give increased feeling of security with friends and family…
From Putting People First
Creating social solutions for MS patients
The people from Live|Work, a UK service design company, have inspired me from the time I met them at the meanwhile defunct Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, now nearly eight years ago. Alice Rawsthorn, the design critic of…
From The Eponymous Pickle
McCloud Presentation at TED
Presentation Zen has a good overview of and links to Scott McCloud's presentation at TED: Presenting comics in a new (media) world. I read McCloud's book: Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art some years ago which inspired…
From CSDiary
Bandwidth at the Inauguration?
I’m in Falls Church, Virginia, for a short visit with my father and stepmother. This is a historic time to be in the Washington DC area, of course. Some very, very good people managed to provide me with tickets for the inauguration…
From insideHPC
Tesla GPU seminar coming
Last week while I was traveling Cluster Monkey posted an announcement about a Tesla seminar this week, hosted by NVIDIA and Microway. The key presenter is Sumit Gupta, Ph.D., Senior Product Manager of Tesla GPU Computing at Nvidia…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Visualizing Earthquakes
I just rediscovered the Wolfram blog. Had not used Mathematica now for several years. I know that their visualization capabilities are excellent, especially combined with their math modeling. Quite Pricey for the individual…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Turn your weaknesses into strengths
General Motors, Ford and Chrysler
From insideHPC
University of Canterbury First to Teach Supercomputing in
The University of Canterbury will become the first institution in Australasia to teach high performance computing.
From Putting People First
India: The Impact of Mobile Phones
Vodafone publishes a very good, but highly under-communicated, Public Policy series. The aim of the series is “to provide a platform for leading experts to write on issues that are important to Vodafone and that may help policy…
From Putting People First
When everyone zigs, Cory Doctorow zags
Just when everyone is writing on how mobile phones are bringing about huge changes in emerging markets, Cory Doctorow publishes a very nice and thought provoking article in the Guardian entitled “Laptops, not mobile phones, are…
From Putting People First
Taken Out of Context: American teen sociality in networked publics
danah boyd is a a PhD candidate at the School of Information (iSchool) at the University of California (Berkeley) and a Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. She just published her dissertation…
From Putting People First
New phone features
The complexity of modern mobile phones is leaving users frustrated and angry, research by Mformation (and reported by BBC) suggests. Some 61% of those interviewed in the UK and US said setting up a new handset is as challenging…
From Springenwerk Blog
Links for 2009-01-18 [del.icio.us]
From The Eponymous Pickle
Buyology Thinking
Fairly extensive look in ResearchTalk at the claims behind Buyology: Buyology: Sound Science or Wishful Thinking?. the final claim comes down to the well exercised correlation vs causation argument. Also the context of each…
From The Eponymous Pickle
What Would Google Do?
Steve Baker, author of The Numerati, which I reviewed takes a look at an upcoming book by Jeff Jarvis called What Would Google Do?
From insideHPC
BOXX Tech Releases Core i7
BOXX Technologies of Austin, TX has announced the release of its latest workstation series, the 3DBOXX 4850 Extreme.
From The Eponymous Pickle
A View of Twitter vs Linkedin
Always astute Jerry Michalski sends along a link to a very nice description of why Twitter is useful. Although I am still learning about this tool, I am becoming a convert to its ability to help me connect. It still has rough…
From The Eponymous Pickle
In Car Spamming
Via correspondent Richard James. We have long been promised the idea of networked automobiles, now this seems to be imminent. Though along with the concept may come the rest of the baggage that this implies. In Slashdot and…
From ACM-W supporting, celebrating and advocating for Women in Computing
Still a men
I would like to start the January Blog by wishing you all a happy, healthy, and successful New Year!
My name is Maria Knobelsdorf and I
From Putting People First
Itsme concept evaluation
Some months ago I wrote on Core77 about Itsme, a new “design-driven” way of organizing the contents of a PC, covering both the hardware and the software of the workstation. The project is developed by a group of Italian researchers…
From Putting People First
Experience design for interactive products
Experience design for interactive products: designing technology augmented urban playgrounds for girls (pdf) is the long title of an interesting paper by Aadjan van der Helm, Walter Aprile and David Keyson of Delft University…
From CSDiary
Major Science Funding Called for in House Stimulus Plan
I’ve just finished a meeting of the NRC CSTB, held at Google in Mountain View. I shouldn’t say too much about what went on, but it’s worth noting that I detected a sense of hope in the air. The new Administration seems to be…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Selling vs Order Taking
Correspondent Herb Sorensen of TNS-Sorensen has a great piece in his Views series about Selling vs Order Taking which links to the history of retail itself and its architecture. I wrote about this previously, pointing to the…
From CSDiary
Smiley Award: Call for Nominations
Nominations are due on January 31, 2009, for the second annual Smiley Award for innovation in technology-assisted person-to-person communication. Details can be found at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/smiley/sa.html. I think this is such…