Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
January 2013
From The Eponymous Pickle
Making Virtual Reality Real
In Fast Company: Did lots of work dealing with how a virtual presence could be be as real as possible. So these findings are useful.
From Schneier on Security
Shaming as Punishment for Repeated Drunk Driving
Janesville, Wisconsin, has published information about repeated drunk driving offenders since 2010. The idea is that the public shame will reduce future incidents.
From Wild WebMink
Open Source and App Stores
Package management in Perl and Linux may have seeded their existence, but app stores have been hostile to open source and failed to pass on software freedom to users. But that could be changing, and today’s exemplar could be…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Finding Patterns in Business Data
Was introduced to and further investigating Verix: " ... Beyond Traditional BI ... By fully automating the search and analysis of business data, you skip the tedious task of scavenging a multitude of reports, Verix takes you…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Making Data Meaningful
From today's Data Visualization Day at UC. A talk by Jeffrey A Shaffer, VP of Information Technology and Analytics at Unifund. He is also an adjunct professor at the University of Cincinnati. Gave an excellent talk about…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
New AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing
In recent years, interest has been growing in the emerging interdisciplinary area of Human Computation, a field that explores principles and applications around giving computing systems programmatic access to human intellect…
From Schneier on Security
Identifying People from their Writing Style
It's called stylometry, and it's based on the analysis of things like word choice, sentence structure, syntax and punctuation. In one experiment, researchers were able to identify 80% of users with a 5,000-word writing sample…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
CSTA K-12 Computer Science Standards correlated with the Common Core
This is a big deal. With so much attention being focused on the Common Core for education these days understanding where Computer Science fits takes on some increased importance. I did mention this work by the CSTA earlier in…
From My Biased Coin
On My Drive in This Morning...
It would, of course, be completely inappropriate for me to write that if you're interested in illegal prescription drugs, you should go talk to Stefan Savage of UCSD. But it's more appropriate for me to give a shout-out to him…
From Computational Complexity
The End of a Useless Test
First a word from our sponsor: Mihalis Yannakakis is celebrating his 60th birthday this year and you are invited to the party. From the Educational Testing Service: The last administration of the GRE Computer Science Test …
From Schneier on Security
Identifying People from their DNA
The genetic data posted online seemed perfectly anonymous - strings of billions of DNA letters from more than 1,000 people. But all it took was some clever sleuthing on the Web for a genetics researcher to identify…
From Wild WebMink
FOSDEM Picks 2013
On ComputerWorldUK, I’ve posted my picks for FOSDEM. I didn’t mention that I’ll also be speaking (about OSI) at the end of Saturday afternoon in the Free Java DevRoom. I’ve still a few openings for 1:1 meetings too – let me…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Zipcar as an Acquired Innovation Idea
Innovation Excellence writes about the acquisition of Zipcar by Avis. Zipcar is the urban car sharing service, which we looked at as an example of the innovation process. Saul Kaplan writes to Avis: " ... If you want to…
From Computer Science Teachers Association
Training Critical Thinkers and Problem Solvers
As a teacher I am always trying to find ways to encourage and interest my students in my class. I try to come up with innovative lesson plans that go according to what they like. I believe I must engage the students' interests…
From Schneier on Security
The Security of the Mega File-Sharing Service
Ever since the launch of Kim Dotcom's file-sharing service, I have been asked about the unorthodox encryption and security system.
I have not reviewed it, and don't have an opinion. All I know is what I read: this, this, this…From The Eponymous Pickle
Coke is Gamifying the Game
In Adage: Coke creates a social media game based on a Superbowl ad. How well will it work for ongoing engagement beyond the event? Would it have been better to create something that is football related? Will it depend …
From The Eponymous Pickle
Complexity Course from SFI
A free eleven week MOOC course on a introduction to the concepts of complexity by the Santa Fe Institute. To start February 4. An example of Massive open online courses.
From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
Early Lessons for Carleton Quest
We've been asking new students to try out our new Carleton Quest app in the last few weeks. Although I don't have a huge amount of feedback yet, there are a few clear lessons we learned already.I made some posters with Carleton…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Massive Open Online Courses
I have been connected to Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) for some time now. The link gives an overview of what they do and cover today. The topic reminds me of 'Big Data', in that it is not all about the courses just being…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Kinect Sensors in Everyday Life
Still looking at the opportunities to connect sensors to gather to improve analytical decision making. Here some more learnings out of CES on the topic of using well established systems, like the Microsoft Kinect sensor, for…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Emailed Dashboards
David Hecht via Teradata's Gib Bassett. On a school of management based on emailed dashboards. Lately there has been This article suggests a simple method of getting data important that is to you. And while dashboards have…
From Schneier on Security
Commenting on Aaron Swartz's Death
There has been an enormous amount written about the suicide of Aaron Swartz. This is primarily a collection of links, starting with those that use his death to talk about the broader issues at play: Orin Kerr, Larry Lessig, …
From BLOG@CACM
Athena Award Nominations Closing Soon!
Don't miss out on the chance to nominate someone for an Athena Award from ACM-W.
From Computational Complexity
A New application of Ramsey Theory to a Geometry problem
All of the material summazized here is in a new paper by Gasarch and Zbarsky. You can find that paper here) Consider the following problem: Let {p1,...,pn} be a subset of distinct points in Rd. We think of d ≤ n. How big…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Teacher as Opportunity Activator
Yesterday I tried out a little web site called Name Tag Analyzer that looks at your LinkedIn information (this assumes you have a Linked In Account of course) and comes up with what should be on your name tag. For me it came…
From Schneier on Security
Google's Authentication Research
Google is working on non-password authentication techniques.
But for Google's password-liberation plan to really take off, they’re going to need other websites to play ball. "Others have tried similar approaches but achieved…From The Eponymous Pickle
Augmented Reality Potty Training
Metaio reports on Kimberly Clark's Pull-ups potty training via an Augmented reality App. To Celebrate the First Flush. Clever idea here. Descriptive Video." ... The Kimberly-Clark Corporation has released an interactive Augmented…
From My Biased Coin
Auernheimer Speaks
Auernheimer -- who as I've discussed on this blog was convicted of a felony by accessing AT&T servers -- put out a statement yesterday.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Data Quality Dimensions
From Malcolm Chisholm: Rethinking the Dimensions of Data Quality. An important issue. Consider that data supports analytics, and analytics drives decision making, the loss of quality components can create bad decisions. How…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Internet of Things
In Information Week: A video about a visit to the Internet of Things Consortium at CES. The trend that continues to develop. With many concerns and increasing analytical opportunities.