Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
October 2010
From The Eponymous Pickle
Playstation Smartphone
Soon to be released, the Playstation, Android-based smartphone. In Engadget.
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Who is going to need a database engine in 2020?
Given the Big Data phenomenon, you might think that everyone is becoming a database engineer. Unfortunately, writing a database engine is hard: Concurrency is difficult. Whenever a data structure is modified by different processes…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Trimble Acquires Thingmagic
Thingmagic, out of MIT, was one of the first EPC RFID companies we worked with. Here a continued set of mergers in the RFID space. The RFID tracking world has simply not performed as was expected back in 2000:Trimble Acquires…
From BLOG@CACM
Computers Are a Tool, Even in Education
Computers in schools should be making teachers' jobs easier, making it easier for students to learn, and increasing student achievement in measurable ways. Little else matters.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Keeping Retired Knowledge in the Game
I met with the management team at YourEncore today and was further impressed by their approaches, projects and future directions, so I thought I would repeat a message that I posted earlier: Keeping knowledge in the company is…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Tesco Adds Barcode Scanner
Tesco has added a barcode scanner to its IPhone App. A short mention here, which mentions that this can be used at home to add items to a grocery list. This kind of behavior is something we studied because of the thought…
From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
SIGCSE 2011 Paper on My Computing Course for Non-Majors
I submitted a paper to this year's SIGCSE (ACM's Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education) conference that didn't get in. The reviews were actually fairly positive overall; I got the impression that even though it…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Unilever and Ampere Life Sciences
A brief WSJ piece about Unilever working with Ampere Life Sciences. Forrest Sawyer: He is also a co-founder of Ampere Life Sciences, a newly launched company developing medical and functional foods targeting antioxidant deficiencies…
From Computational Complexity
FOCS Part II
I'm heading back to Chicago this morning. Dan Spielman had a special talk in honor of his recent Nevanlinna prize. He gave an amazing talk (as always) about solving Laplacian matrix that comes from graphs, basically putting springs…
From Wild WebMink
links for 2010-10-26
LibreOffice Contributions stats It's early days, but it seems liberating the OpenOffice.org community from the contributor agreement and excessive vetting has helped more than sixty (yes, 60) people decide to try their hand at…
From Schneier on Security
Seymour Hersh on Cyberwar
Excellent article from The New Yorker.
From Putting People First
Seeing the world from the East
Last week I was in Seoul, South Korea. My third visit. And it struck me again how fast Asia, and South Korea in particular, is moving economically, and hence also in the design field. Being in Seoul, you don’t notice any crisis…
From The Noisy Channel
A Question of User Expectations
Ideally, a search engine would read the user’s mind. Shy of that, a search engine should provide the user with an efficient process for expressing an information need and then provide the user with results relevant to the that…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Welcoming Andrew Parsons to the US Academic Team
The latest person to join the US Academic Developer Evangelist team is Andrew Parsons. Andrew is moving from the other side of the world (Australia) to work with colleges and universities around the New York City area. He
From The Eponymous Pickle
Crowdsourcing Microtasks
I have been involved in a number of projects that involved using crowdsourcing tasks. I had missed the conference mentioned , but I this article in Oreilly Radar tht provides some useful thoughts and pointers to new services…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Computer Vision
Fascinating CACM piece on changes in the direction of computer vision: A Neuromorphic Approach to Computer VisionNeuroscience is beginning to inspire a new generation of seeing machines ...
From The Eponymous Pickle
Birth Season my Effect Food Allergies
This is a surprise finding, could be used to do preventative medicine / forecasting of need for medicines that address this.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Approaches to Your Company Blog
A good piece on the establishment of a corporate blog in ReadWriteWeb Have now been involved in a number of efforts to establish a company blog. A useful look at different styles of blogs for startups. " ... Gartner was right…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Intelligent Individuals Don't Make Groups Smarter
An intriguing insight that is applicable to crowds research:" ... an early effort at defining general intelligence in groups suggests that individual brainpower contributes little to collective smarts. Instead, it's social awareness…
From The Eponymous Pickle
The Edge on Benoit Mandelbrot
The Edge online source has a number of articles by and about IBM researcher and complexity theorist, and economist Benoit Mandelbrot, who recently passed away.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Tableau 6.0 to Combine Data Sources
New in Tableau 6.0, drag and drop data to combine sources.
From Computational Complexity
FOCS Part I
Some thoughts from the FOCS conference in Las Vegas. One result I hadn't seen before I heard people excited by, Determinant Sums for Undirected Hamiltonicity by Andreas Bj
From Schneier on Security
Declassified NSA Documents
It's a long list. These items are not online; they're at the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, MD. You can either ask for copies by mail under FOIA (at a 75 cents per page) or come in in person. …
From Wild WebMink
? Reputation and Regulation
Building an Online Reputation, One Angry Customer at a Time Really excellent advice here on how to handle customer engagement. As one of the comments says this is a typical profile – both of attitude and skill – for a community…
From Putting People First
Intel research projects explore context-aware computing
If you could look into Intel
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Interesting Links 25 October 2010
Busy week last week but than most weeks are. Also a long week since I was working a booth at the New Hampshire Tech Fest on Saturday. That was a good day though. (Read about Microsoft at NH Tech Fest here). I had a great time…
From Putting People First
Rotman Magazine: It
Five articles in the current issue of Rotman Magazine, the high-level and thoughtful publication of the Roger Martin-led Rotman School of Management in Toronto, Canada, are definitely worth exploring: Donald Sull on stubborn…
From Computer Science Teachers Association
For Most students, the Computer is for Solving Problems
I had a memorable time last weekend. My new Apple iMac came on a FedEx truck at about 9:30am. The publishing agreement for my textbook (second semester computer science) came about fifteen minutes later on a different FedEx…
From BLOG@CACM
HPC and the Excluded Middle
Betwixt and between ubiquitous consumer software and the ethereal realm of ultra-high-performance computing, lies the excluded middle, the world of day-to-day computational science problems.
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Interesting Links 25 October 2010
Busy week last week but than most weeks are. Also a long week since I was working a booth at the New Hampshire Tech Fest on Saturday. That was a good day though. (Read about Microsoft at NH Tech Fest here). I had a great time…