Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
January 2011
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
To IDE or Not To IDE
One of the controversial issues that keeps coming up in computer science education is the role of the IDE
From The Noisy Channel
Enabling Exploratory Search with Dhiti
Last August, I wrote “Exploring Nuggetize“, in which I described an interface that
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
President Signs COMPETES Reauthorization
On Tuesday President Obama signed into law the reauthorization of the America COMPETES Act. The bill continues (among other things) the increasing funding trend for the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the National…
From The Eponymous Pickle
RFID Security Cube
In RFID Journal: Had thought these kinds of security applications makes sense, here is a recent example:Self-contained RFID Cube Helps Keep Out Foreign MaterialAccess Solutions has devised a turnkey unit that employs EPC Gen…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Crowdsourcing Site
I was contacted to take a look at a fascinating site that helps you construct crowd sourced solutions.It is called Squad Help. It looks like it uses contests to help companies solve a soft problem, like naming a product or site…
From Schneier on Security
SMS of Death
This will be hard to fix:
Using only Short Message Service (SMS) communications
From Daniel Lemire's BlogSo, you want to be a mad scientist?
Exceptional scientists are often a bit crazy: Kurt G
From Computational ComplexityThe Enduring Legacy of the Turing Machine
Last Februrary Peter Wegner asked if I would be interested in writing an article for a series in ACM Ubiquity on "What is Computation?" Our expanding collaboration with other fields is broadening our understanding of computation…
From BLOG@CACMTeaching Kids to Feel the Math With Computers
Why are students still calculating when they could be understanding? Now that computers are everywhere, how should math education change?
From Wild WebMinklinks for 2011-01-06
WikiLeaks prompts internal federal crackdown As I recall this is exactly the auto-immune response Assange was seeking to cause… (tags: wikileaks assange, cia,) Open Source community building: a guide to getting it right | VisionMobile…
From The Eponymous PickleDigital Lightroom
Need to manage your photos? A look at Digital Lightroom, among other applications for advanced image management.
From Schneier on SecuritySony PS3 Security Broken
Sony used an ECDSA signature scheme to protect the PS3. Trouble is, they didn't pay sufficient attention to their random number generator.
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred ThompsonMeasure 21st Century Teaching and Learning at Your School Today!
I just saw an announcement of an interesting new program from Microsoft
From The Noisy ChannelTwo Changes
I just wanted to let regular readers know that I’ve made two changes to this blog. The first is that I’ve eliminated the use of categories on posts. I found that I was categorizing almost all posts as “general”, and that there…
From The Eponymous PickleKraft Foods and Business Intelligence
An article in Consumer Goods Technology on Kraft Food's use of Business Intelligence. " ... Kraft Foods discusses its voyage toward information access and analysis, and reveals how areas like product freshness and S&OP can benefit…
From Computer Science Teachers AssociationReflections
At the end of the year, it is customary to reflect upon what has been accomplished during the year. Since it is near that time I thought it might be a good time to reflect upon some of the things that CSTA as an organization…
From BLOG@CACMWorks in Progress: MIA
It is time we extracted a sample of cultural DNA from computing's history and engineered a new generation of contemplative, informal workshops. After gestation, ideas conceived at those workshops might even find their way into…
From Wild WebMinklinks for 2011-01-05
LibreOffice Is the Default Office Suite for Ubuntu 11.04 – Softpedia Good to see the folks at Canonical supporting LibreOffice. (tags: Ubuntu DocumentFoundation ODF LibreOffice OpenOffice.org)
From Schneier on SecurityEavesdropping on GSM Calls
It's easy and cheap:
Speaking at the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) Congress in Berlin on Tuesday, a pair of researchers demonstrated a start-to-finish means of eavesdropping on encrypted GSM cellphone calls and text messages, using…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred ThompsonSeven Reasons to Teach Windows 7 Programming
I had an email from Pat Yongpradit over New Year’s week end. Pat is an award winning high school computer science teacher whose students do impressive work under his guidance. Pat has been using XNA game studio in his school …
From Wild WebMinkCopyrights vs Human Rights
My article on how human rights trump copyrights is now available in the Essays section.
From The Eponymous PickleSloppy Arithmetic is Useful
In ACM: Some surprising results regarding the value of imprecise arithmetic and chips that can calculate imprecisely. Good article about potential applications.
From The Eponymous PickleMotorola Splits
The split of the 83 year old company in two pieces is seen in a number of different ways. We worked with them in the early days of RFID and they provided some excellent technology. Net I think better focus will result in better…
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACMACM Washington Update Vol. 14.5 (January 2011)
CONTENTS
[1] Newsletter Highlights [2] FCC Draws Line in the Net Neutrality Sand [3] Computer Science Education Week Extends its Reach [4] USACM Vice Chair Felten Appointed as First FTC Chief Technologist [5] Web Accessibility…
From The Eponymous PickleLinkless Press Releases
Why do many press releases not include links to useful information, in particular to the release itself and the companies involved? Has always mystified me. Please make it as easy as possible to provide you with free marketing…
From Daniel Lemire's BlogIf human population grew at the pace of computer storage
Between 1990 and 2010, the cost of one megabyte of disk storage went from $9 to $0.00015. Had the human population followed a similar growth, there would be 300 trillion people on Earth. (For simplicity, I am not taking inflation…
From Schneier on SecurityGuard Towers at WalMart
This feels very creepy and police-state-like. What on earth could WalMart be worried about?
From The Eponymous PickleKnowledge Management in Fast Moving Industries
In HBR, a good article that scopes out various approaches for knowledge management. How formal do these approaches have to be? Or can they just observe in the background and construct knowledge via usage? An obvious AI - Learning…
From The Eponymous PickleGetting Linked Data to Market
Article about this course is dated, but worth a look as to the direction of this work. I had always seen this as the most immediately useful aspect of the semantic web:" ... Linked Data describes a method of publishing structured…
From The Computing Community Consortium BlogIBM
While many of us were enjoying time off last week, our colleagues at IBM were busy unveiling their fifth annual “Five in Five” — a list of five technology innovations that have the potential to change the way we live, work, and…