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 Wild WebMink
links for 2009-10-22
Another unexpected position that is wellworth reading and which I'm sure the orchestrated campaign against Oracle will dismiss with…
From Putting People First
The mad dash toward touch technology
True innovators need to know as much about when, why, and how not to use trendy technology as when to use it, says Microsoft Research principal scientist Bill Buxton. “Rather than marveling at what someone else is delivering…
From Putting People First
Human behavior: the key to future tech developments
As trained observers of how people in a society live, ethnographers can help companies figure out what people need and then work with designers to meet those needs with new (or more often tweaked) products and services. CNN reports…
From Putting People First
On security, programming, privacy, and
Three articles in the latest issue of Communications of the ACM are quite relevant for the readers of this blog: Usable security: how to get it Why does your computer bother you so much about security, but still isn’t secure?…
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
A Week For Computer Science Education
Computer science education reform is going to come in fits and starts working on issues from the top down (national media, federal policy, etc.) and the bottom up (in schools, districts, states, etc.). This week the "top down"…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wowd: Peer to Peer Popularity search
In the spirit of Web Squared, Wowd is a search engine that seeks to get 'fresh real-time results'. See also their blog. Heard it described at the Web 2.0 Summit. They position it as an instantaneous popularity measure. I am rarely…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Web 2.0 Summit
The Web TV Summit is underway and its live video stream can be accessed here. Interesting speakers on the topic, including Berners-Lee. I believe it will be archived in full.
From The Eponymous Pickle
GPS Shoes
I remember the idea being pushed back in 2007. A set of GPS enabled shoes.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Innovation in Consumer Goods
Good short piece in ConsumerGoods:Clorox, GSK and More Share Innovation TacticsIn the current economic climate, innovation is power. Top consumer goods executives recently gathered to gain insight into driving innovation and…
From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
ISMAR09: Experiential Learning 2 of 3 - Current Applications 2
This is the second of three posts on the experiential learning workshop held Monday at ISMAR09. The first post introduced the topic and summarized the first three presentations given in the morning on current AR applications…
From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
ISMAR09: Experiential Learning 3 of 3 - Group Discussion
This is the last of three posts on the ISMAR09 experiential learning workshop. Post one and post two covered the morning presentations on current applications, while this one will attempt to capture the excellent group discussion…
From Schneier on Security
Ballmer Blames the Failure of Windows Vista on Security
According to the Telegraph:
Mr Ballmer said: "We got some uneven reception when [Vista] first launched in large part because we made some design decisions to improve security at the expense of compatibility. I don't think from…From BLOG@CACM
A Week For Computer Science Education
Computer Science Education Week, which is the week of December 7 , is a wonderful platform to highlight the importance of computing to society and why we need to strengthen CS education--particularly at the K-12 level
From Computational Complexity
The Humbling Power of P v NP
From The Noisy Channel
Off To DC
I encourage you to check out some of the blogs I read.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Dashboard Design
Reading Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data. by Stephen Few. Very good. See also his blog: Visual Intelligence.
From Schneier on Security
Australia Man Receives Reduced Sentence Due to Encryption
From the Courier-Mail:
A man who established a sophisticated network of peepholes and cameras to spy on his flatmates has escaped a jail sentence after police were unable to crack an encryption code on his home computer. [.…From The Eponymous Pickle
Second Life For the Enterprise?
I abandoned SL about a year ago after over a year of exploration. Is it now crowded and profitable? People spending 100 minutes of time there per visit on average? I saw my enterprise build a space, I watched some very large…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Managing Shopper Lists - Store Contexts
One of my particular interests, starting at enterprise innovation locations, was to experiment with how a shopper could engage with retail locations in a seamless and useful way. I experimented with several applications thatoften…
From Wild WebMink
? A Remarkable Reversal
It was a surprise to see Richard Stallman's signature on a letter to the European Commission calling on them to block the acquisition of MySQL by Oracle with its proposed acquisition of Sun. The surprise wasn't primarily because…
From The Eponymous Pickle
WolframAlpha has an App
WolframAlpha, the computational knowledge engine, has an application for the IPhone. What has received much of the early publicity is that it is expensive in the odd expectation world of the App, where many excellent and some…
From Putting People First
Clay Shirky and Stephen Fry on the digital revolution
The people behind Digital Revolution (working title), 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, have posted some more…
From Putting People First
Trust in digital life
Denise Deveau, technology writer at The Globe and Mail speaks with Kim Cameron, Microsoft’s identity guru, about what it will take for consumers and businesses to feel secure sharing information online. How much do you trust…
From The Noisy Channel
Books! Books! Books!
When my daughter was born almost two years ago, I wondered if she’d grow up reading books. After all, I do most of my reading online, and increasingly find myself reading short articles rather than whole books. Needless to say…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Learning with Serious Games
I have long been interested in using games for serious learning. Doesn't it make great sense to use the fun, competition and often addictive nature of the game to help people learn and master complex tasks? Yet despite the obvious…
From Computational Complexity
An Unintentional Sociology of Blogs Experiment
Yesterday I posted a list of books that I want reviews of as SIGACT NEWS Book Review Column Editor. This resulted in an unintentional study of Sociology and Blogs which would make an awful paper but a reasonable posting. Some…
From Schneier on Security
TSA Successfully Defends Itself
Story here. Basically, a woman posts a horrible story of how she was mistreated by the TSA, and the TSA responds by releasing the video showing that she was lying.
There was a similar story in 2007. Then, I wrote:
Why is it…From Wild WebMink
links for 2009-10-20
Fascinating to see Stallman admit that the GPL does not guarantee software freedom. Nothing new to see in this letter, which (unlike the…
From Schneier on Security
Computer Card Counter Detects Human Card Counters
All it takes is a computer that can track every card:
The anti-card-counter system uses cameras to watch players and keep track of the actual "count" of the cards, the same way a player would. It also measures how much eachThe…From My Biased Coin
Old References
One interesting aspect of our WSDM paper is that we have multiple references from the 1930's and 40's. It turns out our problem is related to some of the problems from the early (earliest?) days of experiment design.This was…