Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
January 2010
From Putting People First
Interesting Google Blog article on how user research dramatically improved driving directions on Google Maps India. The research was based on the fact that street names are not commonly known in India and the typical wayfinding…
From Schneier on Security
Eavesdropping in the Former Soviet Union
Interesting story:
The phone's ringer is a pretty simple thing: there's a coil, a magnet and a hammer controlled by the magnet that hits the gongs when there is AC current in the coil. The ringer system is connected directly…From Putting People First
Book: Pervasive Information Architecture
Pervasive Information Architecture – Designing information space in ubiquitous ecologies is a book being written by Andrea Resmini and Luca Rosati for Morgan Kaufmann-Elsevier which promotes a holistic approach to information…
From Apophenia
Whose Voice do you Hear? Gender Issues and Success
Growing up, I loved to debate. With anyone. My debating tone used to drive my mother batty because she thought I was yelling at her. Exasperated, I would often bark back that I was simply debating. Over the years, I realized…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
From Kobe to Haiti
Today, January 17th, is the anniversary of the 1995 Kobe, Japan, earthquake which killed over 6,000 people. I am in Japan, ironically, accepting the Motohiro Kisoi Award for academic contributions to rescue engineering.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Brand Loyalty and Brand
Walter Riker, colleague at Procter, writes in Curious Voyager about brand loyalty being killed by the brand.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Making Food While You Watch
Laurence Hayward, of the Venture Lab sends along a report from their newsletter about a number of new ideas that manufacture fresh food concepts in stores while the consumer watches. Our own experience is that consumers are much…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Overzealous Spam Filter Found
I just noticed that the blog spam filter has been classifying too many messages as spam and that several useful comments had been blocked. I approved the comments I found. Do re-send a comment if it has not been included.…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Procter Underutilizes Scale
AdAge interview with ' ... Bob McDonald, CEO of Procter & Gamble, said the size of the company is not a disadvantage, as many analysts believe. "Size doesn't matter," he said. "What matters is turning size into scale and turning…
From The Noisy Channel
Real Time Search Is Personal
The other day, I promised in a comment thread that I’d write about what I see as real use cases for real-time search. As it happens, I’m experiencing one right now. As my wife, daughter, and I were walking home from a playground…
From Schneier on Security
Security vs. Sustainability in Building Construction
Any facility executive involved in the design of a new building would agree that security is one important goal for the new facility. These days, facility executives are likely to say that green design is another…
From Schneier on Security
Google vs. China
I'm not sure what I can add to this: politically motivated attacks against Gmail from China. I've previously written about hacking from China. Shishir Nagaraja and Ross Anderson wrote a report specifically describing how the…
From My Biased Coin
New TCS postdocs/jobs website at CCI
There's a new page http://intractibility.princeton.edu/jobs/ that was set up as a centralized location for advertising postdocs and jobs for theoretical computer science. There's been quite a bit of talk for some time that TCS…
From Putting People First
Information and communication technologies vital for social inclusion
The World Economic Forum today released its study on Scaling Opportunity: Information and Communications Technology for Social Inclusion, an analysis of how ICT is evolving to address the social and economic needs of the poor…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Writing tools to improve your research productivity
Researchers
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Interesting Links 18 January 2010
When it rains it pours! I spent last week at FETC in Florida but kept a weather eye out for interesting things to pass on via Twitter (follow me on Twitter @AlfredTwo) and this blog. There sure was a lot going on. This is a larger…
From Schneier on Security
Prison Escape Artist
When he went to court for hearings, he could see the system was flawed. He would arrive on the twelfth floor in handcuffs and attached at the waist to a dozen other inmates. A correction officer would lead themThe…
From Computational Complexity
Sam Roweis (1972-2010)
Sam Roweis, an NYU CS professor specializing in machine learning, took his own life last Tuesday night. Jennifer Linden and Maneesh Sahani set up a weblog to share memories of Sam and John Langford's blog also has a collection…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Checking in to Retail SmartPhone Potential
Since my early days in retail innovation centers I have been thinking about how the inevitable success of location-aware smart phones can directly introduce the retailer and the retailer to the shopper. Have written here about…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Reading and Blogging the NYT
Its inevitable. Rumors abound on the NYT going behind a pay wall. Althouse has some good comments, as a blogger, on the use of linking central news sources. You can't blame newspapers, being in an increasingly desperate situation…
From Putting People First
danah boyd on why Zuckerberg is wrong to say
Ethnographer danah boyd, a Microsoft researcher, argues that Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg is wrong saying that ‘the age of privacy is over’. “Privacy isn’t a technological binary that you turn off and on. Privacy is about having…
From The Eponymous Pickle
More Internet of Things
New SmartPhone developments could fundamentally change the nature of shopping. In ReadWriteWeb ' ... a series called Mobile Web Meets Internet of Things this week, starting with a look at barcode scanning. We wrote that smartphones…
From Apophenia
From Putting People First
Are mobile phones Africa
Whether it’s checking market prices of crops, transferring money or simply making a call, mobile phones are transforming Africa. But, asks The Guardian, could this new technology end up bypassing the poorest? The problem apparently…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Comparing the GDP of EU and US States
A most interesting comparison of the per capita GDP of US States versus EU Countries. Via economist Mark J. Perry.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Sarcasm Punctuation Mark
It seems like a futile effort, but a firm has patented and now sells a sarcasm punctuation mark, hoping to profit from all of that misunderstanding in text and email messaging. Still waiting for Esperanto to succeed.
From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
Games and the Three Levels of Design
Continuing to read Donald Norman's Emotional Design, I am finding the three levels of design most of the book is based on to be very useful, especially when thinking about game design (as I have been doing lately).These are the…
From Schneier on Security
Fixing Intelligence Failures
President Obama, in his speech last week, rightly focused on fixing the intelligence failures that resulted in Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab being ignored, rather than on technologies targeted at the details of his underwear-bomb…
From Putting People First
Good: the Slow Issue
Good, the collaborative magazine, has published its “Slow Issue” with perspectives on a smarter, better and slower future: “At its simplest, slow stands for a focus on quality, authenticity, and longevity rather than a mindless…
From BLOG@CACM
What Will 2010 Bring?
What changes will we see in 2010 in computing?