Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
January 2012
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Software Engineering High School
It sounds like a movie title doesn
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Use Random Hashing if you Care About Security?
Hashing is a programming technique that maps objects (such as strings) to integers. It is a necessary component of hash tables, one of the most frequently used data structure in Computer Science. Typically, Hash tables have the…
From Schneier on Security
Going Dark to Protest SOPA/PIPA
Tomorrow, from 8 am to 8 pm EDT, this site, Schneier on Security, is going on strike to protest SOPA and PIPA. In doing so, I'll be joining Wikipedia (in English), BoingBoing, WordPress, and many others.
A list of participants…From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Interesting Links 16 January 2012
Sorry this is late today. Not a good weekend or morning either. Should be close to 100% for the workshops I am presenting in Vermont on Wednesday and Thursday though. More of what I did last week (Teaching Teachers and Students…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Accurate Robot Essay Graders
an interesting effort. . As the article asks, the end of multiple choice questions? This does delve into the nature of semantic meaning. A friend suggests it could be used as a new kind of UI. though in that case would require…
From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
You Will Fail to Have a Great Career
Larry Smith told the TEDxUW (University of Waterloo) audience that they will fail to have a great career. After all, there are ever so many excuses that crop up to justify why you can't follow your passion. Alas, there is no…
From Schneier on Security
PCI Lawsuit
This is a first:
...the McCombs allege that the bank, and the payment card industry (PCI) in general, force merchants to sign one-sided contracts that are based on information that arbitrarily changes without notice, and that…From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
NIST Seeking Submissions to Text REtrieval Conference
The National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST) — which recently posted a solicitation containing opportunities for computing researchers — is now out with a call for submissions to its 21st annual Text REtrieval Conference…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Visualization of the History of Personal Computing
A visualization of personal computing via graphs of units shipped, from 75 to the present. From lumbering desktops to the very fast emergence of tablets.
From Computational Complexity
The Information Flood
Twitter, Facebook, Google+. Information now comes to us as a faucet. If you don't drink it all it disappears forever. Try to find status updates and tweets from even a few days ago. Many of you wouldn't have seen this blog post…
From BLOG@CACM
The Way Forward For Computer Science in the U.K.
The last week has seen some interesting developments in Computer Science Education in the U.K., with some sensible suggestions for improvements published in a report by the Royal Society.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Branding Chatter
See Ed Burghard's paper.li online paper Branding Chatter. He is a former Harley Procter Marketer at Procter & Gamble who has lots of insightful things to say on the subject.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Developing Successful Brands about Places
Ed Burghard sends along his blog post on developing brands about places. Thoughtful. " ... I started the article off with a definition of place branding. At the time I remember being intrigued with the idea that a sub-set of…
From The Eponymous Pickle
One Bit Can be Stored in 12 Atoms
A report on research at IBM that has decreased the number of material atoms required to store a single bit of information from about a million iron atoms to only 12. A very considerable increase in efficiency. It is not usable…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Web Search and AI
Matthew Hurst makes a good point about the ubiquity of Web search slowing the development of artificial intelligence. I saw this repeatedly in the enterprise. We were developing AI systems for specific intelligence applications…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Listening to Your Customers
In Innovation Excellence: This good article mentions the (possible) Henry Ford Quote:
From The Eponymous Pickle
Kroger Robotic Convenience Store
A Robotic Convenience Store.We saw an early prototype of this idea several years ago. A device that contains hundreds of items for ready vending. Was seen as particularly useful in college areas. Similar specialized vending…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Thinkvine gets Funding
Local Firm gets Funding. "... US
From The Eponymous Pickle
Future of BI in the Organization
Mark Montgomery of Kyield writes. He cites a Forrester report: " ... One of the main themes in the report concerns expanding the use of BI throughout the organization, which essentially follows a proven management philosophy…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Sculpting Your Own Profession
In the HBR. design your own profession. Depends upon the local culture as to how successful this will be.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Facebook Allows Data Analysis
In ReadwriteWeb: Fascinating description of how Facebook is allowing the aggregate and statistical use of its data. What is described here is unstructured textual data, used for such applications as political sentiment tracking…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Argentina Attempts a Squid Blockage against the Falkland Islands
Yet another story that combines squid and security.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Business Intelligence Requirements Gathering
Somewhat obvious but useful examples of who and what to get together to better insure the success of a BI effort.
From Schneier on Security
Recovering a Hacked Gmail Account
Long (but well-written and interesting) story of someone whose Gmail account was hacked and erased, and eventually restored. Many interesting lessons about the security of largely support-free cloud services.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Eames Documentary Online
Worth a look. We worked with Herman Miller on innovation projects: PBS Eames documentary now online:If you're at all inter
From Computer Science Teachers Association
Shut Down or Restart: New UK CS Report
The Royal Society in Great Britain has just released a ground-breaking new report called Shut Down or Restart: The Way Forward for Computing in UK Schools which clearly demonstrates that the current challenges we face in K-12…
From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
Real Computer Science in High Schools
As someone who is always looking for outreach opportunities with middle and high school students, I enjoyed The Guardian's recent article called Michael Gove to scrap 'boring' IT lessons: Schools to be given freedom to run cutting…
From Schneier on Security
"Going Dark" vs. a "Golden Age of Surveillance"
It's a policy debate that's been going on since the crypto wars of the early 1990s. The FBI, NSA, and other agencies continue to claim they're losing their ability to engage in surveillance: that it's "going dark." Whether …
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
NIH Institute Creates New Division for Bioinformatics, Comp Bio
The National Institute of General Medicine Sciences (NIGMS), an institute of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) supporting basic research and research training, announced earlier this month that it would establish two new…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Teaching Teachers and Students Together
The other day Chris Bowen (that