Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
October 2009
From Putting People First
Charles Leadbeater and Tim Berners-Lee on the digital revolution
Digital Revolution (working title) is an open source documentary, due for transmission on BBC Two in 2010, that will take stock of 20 years of change brought about by the World Wide Web. The BBC intends to tell the story of the…
From The Noisy Channel
In the ASIS&T Bulletin: Reconsidering Relevance and Embracing Interaction
From The Noisy Channel
HCIR 2009 Proceedings Now Available
The HCIR 2009 proceedings are now available on the workshop web site. We’re planning to
From The Noisy Channel
Jeff Jarvis and Matt Cutts on the New FTC Blog Regulations
As has been anticipated for a while–and discussed during the Ethics of Blogging panel–the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has published explicit guidelines regarding how bloggers (at least within its jurisdiction)…
From Computer Science Teachers Association
Leadership Cohort Ohio Update
I decided to read Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell as it was recommended to me by several people. That in turn let me to read his first book Tipping Point. This may seem a little unrelated to CS but bear with me.
Tipping Point…From Schneier on Security
UK Defense Security Manual Leaked
Wow. It's over 2,000 pages, so it'll take time to make any sense of. According to Ross Anderson, who's given it a quick look over, "it seems to be the bureaucratic equivalent of spaghetti code: a hodgepodge of things written…
From Schneier on Security
Moving Hippos in the Post-9/11 World
It's a security risk:
The crate was hoisted onto the flatbed with a 120-ton construction crane. For security reasons, there were no signs on the truck indicating that the cargo was a hippopotamus, the zoo said. The last thing…From Putting People First
Microsoft demos multi-touch enabled mice concepts
Microsoft is exploring the concept of multi-touch mice, a new research paper reveals. The paper is being presented today as part of the User Interface Software and Technology conference, and identifies five different prototypes…
From Putting People First
How to visualise energy savings
Kevin Anderson reports in The Guardian on how a new generation of monitors can generate data about your energy use and help you cut your costs and carbon. “These energy monitors not only show you real-time information about your…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Focus Groups Failing for the Movies
Roger Dooley suggests that the recent mention of using brain scans to provide accurate and specific predictions for scary movie content really shows a further failure of focus groups. Will the emergence of the understanding of…
From Computational Complexity
Two Recent Complexity Books omit Mahaney's theorem- ovesight or wisdom?
In a prior post (a while back) I pondered if Mahaney's theorem (SAT \le_m S, S Spare, implies P=NP) should be taught in a basic grad course in complexity. I thought YES.
As a sequel to that I note the following: The theorem…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Cellphones as our Remote Controls
Steve King writes an excellent blog: Small Business Labs on small business and entrepreneurial topics that is useful. Notable is a recent article on the increasing use of cellphones as 'remotes' for our daily life, including…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
What is more fundamental: Physics or Computer Science?
Computer Science can be taken a natural science: the study of how the universe processes information. If it is a natural science, then does it build on Physics? Or does Physics build on Computer Science? The answer is obvious…
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
Hill Tech Happenings, Week of October 5
October 7
Meeting: The Information Security and Privacy Advisory Board will meet. The focus of the meeting will be on the NIST Information Technology Laboratory. 9 a.m., NTSB Conference Center, 429 L'Enfant Plaza SW, Washington…From My Biased Coin
Job Competitions
Stefan Savage made an insightful comment related to the issue of jobs:
I've long felt that its a fallacy that there exists a fine-grained Platonic ideal of "goodness" for researchers (so too for papers), but its an even bigger…From Wild WebMink
Links for 2009-10-05
From Schneier on Security
Actual DHS Travel Record
If you were curious what the DHS knows about you.
From Return 42;
The Other Side of the Table: Lawrence Paulson
This post in the The other side of the table series is one week late. Sorry for that. As I have mentioned earlier, it is a quite busy time for me at the moment. Anyways, this week we will hear what Lawrence C. Paulson's questions…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Paid Traffic Down
Paid online traffic appears to be down about 26%, A very cursory look at the data looks like it is a significant change beyond normal and seasonal variability. Implications? See the comments of the post linked to for some…
From BLOG@CACM
Collective Intelligence: a Fad or Real Research?
A recent trend in HCI research is the extension of the long time goal of augmenting human intelligence to "augmenting social intelligence." That is, enabling not just a single person to find and make sense of information, but…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Soap Opera Moving Online
Dave Knox posts on new experiments by Procter with online soap. Links to another local article on the change. Outlines some of P&G's goals. One of the world's largest advertiser and marketers took it from paper to radio to TV…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Pirating Books Expands
With the emergence of popular book readers will will we start to see increasing book piracy? In the NYT ' .... The Association of American Publishers estimated that these hardcover sales in the United States declined 13 percent…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Singularity
Artificial intelligence and consciousness at the singularity summit. This is still a long ways off-
From The Eponymous Pickle
Counting on Dividends for 119 Years
I worked on a project that helped Procter executives relate and visualize compensation to dividends. It was the first PC based program that execs used directly. I was reminded by a Motley Fool article that I saw today: ... Impressive…
From CERIAS Blog
What About the Other 11 Months?
October is "officially" National Cyber Security Awareness Month. Whoopee! As I write this, only about 27 more days before everyone slips back into their cyber stupor and ignores the issues for the other 11 months.
Yes, that is…From Putting People First
The shift from human-centered to resource-centered design
Eric Wilmot writes on Greener Design on how to design for a post-consumption society. And an excellent article it is. “The current interpretation of human-centered has expanded to indulge human desires at the expense of other…
From Putting People First
It
When companies develop innovative products that don
From My Biased Coin
"Core" TCS
Enough time has perhaps passed from Mihai's controversial post to consider, constructively I hope, some of the comments that arose here on this blog from it.One issue that arose is what a PhD in theoretical computer science should…
From BLOG@CACM
Grace Hopper Highlights
Tessa reports on highlights from the recent Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Quick Latitudes and Longitudes
Download Squad mentions a little mashup utility that lets you quickly get latitudes and longitudes for a place name. Used it some time ago and was glad to be reminded of it for an upcoming effort.