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 Wild WebMink
links for 2010-01-11
Lovely interview that captures Pollan's humanity. The idea of having a booklet of common sense eating rules to counter all the crazy diet junk that's …
From The Eponymous Pickle
Best Buy and Visa Contactless
In StoreFronBackTalk: Best Buy removes Visa Contactless system. Apparently over a dispute of the cost of valiation systems. A trend? We had a meeting with contactless payment vendors now over two years ago when these tests…
From Computer Science Teachers Association
Object Lessons from a Summer Workshop on a Cold Winter
As teachers begin a new calendar year and its promise of teaching and grading in cold, rainy, and even snowy weather, it can be a good idea to rethink how to approach students who may not be achieving their potential. We recently…
From Putting People First
World Wide Mush
In his new book, “You Are Not A Gadget,” online pioneer Jaron Lanier explains how the Internet has gone off course. In this Wall Street Journal, he summarises the key ideas and it turns out to be a full-blown rant against “digital…
From The Eponymous Pickle
3D TV Ready for Prime Time
Is this the year for the emergence of 3D-TV? Some thoughts from exhibitors at the Consumer Electronics Show.
From Putting People First
Design for sustainable behaviour (part 2)
A range of other researchers have also published papers on the topic of design for sustainable behaviour. Twenty papers were presented at the CHI 2009 Workshop, “Defining the Role of HCI in the Challenges of Sustainability,”…
From Putting People First
Design for sustainable behaviour (part 1)
Dan Lockton, a Ph.D. researcher at Brunel University (UK), has together with professors David Harrison and Neville Stanton, recently published a range of papers on the topic of design for sustainable behaviour (the list also…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Nanoarticle Use
On the safety of nanoparticle use in products. ' ... The science and technology committee of Britain's upper house of parliament said in a report that use of nanoparticles in food and food packaging is likely to grow dramatically…
From Putting People First
The false question of attention economics
A few posts have emerged recently that recapitulate the well-worn arguments of attention scarcity and information overload in the real-time social web, so Stowe Boyd wrote a “short and sweet counter argument from a cognitive…
From My Biased Coin
Visiting Dartmouth for a Research Symposium
I spent the day at Dartmouth, as I was asked to be "keynote speaker" for their Computer Science Annual Research Symposium. Essentially, it's their own mini-conference for a day, with a mix of faculty and graduate student talks…
From The Eponymous Pickle
GIS In Retail
Great article from ESRI: The Future of Retail: Understanding the Geography of the Marketplace Helps Businesses Thrive, by Simon Thompson, ESRI
From The Eponymous Pickle
Augmenting Packaging Using AR
Had a highly informative chat with Lisa Murphy of Metaio this past week about retail examples of augmented reality, and she pointed me to this interesting example of using a smart phone interaction with a Kellogg's cereal box…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Vision for Augmented Reality
One of our early looked at AR used specialized eyeglasses. Here is more on this approach, though I think that smartphones will make this easier to deliver, at least in the short run. AR Eyewear to come? Opinion below: ' ..…
From Putting People First
The Internet is Africa
Publishing Perspectives reports on a recent panel discussion on the African publishing industry at this year
From Putting People First
Greenpeace guide to greener electronics
Greenpeace’s Guide to Greener Electronics provides an evaluation of “the 18 top manufacturers of personal computers, mobile phones, TVs and games consoles according to their policies on toxic chemicals, recycling and climate…
From The Noisy Channel
Can You
Weren’t we just talking about what’s different about mobile search use cases and about how to make web search more exploratory? I may be biased, but I think that Google’s recently launched “near me now” button is a step in the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Future of Laundry
Have seen this low-water laundry idea covered for years, but yet to see it commonly implemented. So does a normal washer take water and destroy it? Or is the water usually treated, evaporate, come down in rain and become perfectly…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Quilt
Light-up squid quilt.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Power from Solar Updraft Towers
An interesting combination of solar power and heat draft. Reminds me of methods that use ocean water temperature differences.-
From Putting People First
Irish initiative to help SME
A new pilot programme from InterTradeIreland is aimed at assisting small and medium-sized firms, initially in the civil security sector, to innovate and meet identified but as yet unmet market needs, using ethnographic research…
From Schneier on Security
Cybersecurity Theater at FOSE
FOSE, the big government IT conference, has a Cybersecurity Theater" this year. I wonder if they'll check the photo ID of everyone who tries to get in.
On a similar note, I am pleased that my term "security theater" has finally…From Computational Complexity
COLT and CCC
The COLT (Computational Learning Theory) call for papers is out. (Actually its been out since October but I was only recently emailed it.) For other information about COLT see here.
How do COLT and CCC relate to each other…From Michael Nielsen
Biweekly links for 01/08/2010
Remnants of the Biosphere
Extraordinary images from Biosphere 2.
…My heart’s in Accra » Yemen and the problems of ADD journalism
“In a print age, media pack behavior made slightly more sense. Most readers read only a daily…From The Eponymous Pickle
Webcast on Social Interaction in VR
Transformed Social Interaction in Virtual Reality Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab and an associate professor in the Department of Communication at StanfordMonday, January…
From Putting People First
Experientia article on emerging markets research in Interfaces Magazine
The latest issue of Interfaces Magazine, a quarterly magazine published by Interaction, the specialist HCI group of the British Computer Society (BCS), contains a lengthy article on an emerging market research project Experientia…
From Putting People First
A Creative Commons inspired barter market in Turin, Italy
Two articles from today’s La Stampa newspaper (translation by Mark Vanderbeeken, Experientia): Bargains without money Luca Indemni – Fabrizio Vespa “Leave your wallet at home” – that could be the slogan of the Gifts Without Money…
From Schneier on Security
FIPS 140-2 Level 2 Certified USB Memory Stick Cracked
Kind of a dumb mistake:
The USB drives in question encrypt the stored data via the practically uncrackable AES 256-bit hardware encryption system. Therefore, the main point of attack for accessing the plain text data storedCracking…From Wild WebMink
links for 2010-01-08
Show this to every politician: "What we need is security that's effective even if we can't guess the next plot: intelligence, investigation and emergency…
From Schneier on Security
Connecting the Dots
I wrote about intelligence failures back in 2002.
From Putting People First
Mobile experts on 2020 trends
Rudy De Waele, co-founder of dotopen, invited a number of mobile experts — including Howard Rheingold, Douglas Rushkoff, Katrin Verclas, Willem Boijens, Fabien Girardin, Timo Arnal and Nicolas Nova — to write down their five…