Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
October 2012
From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
Passing the CU-WISE Torch
I'm one of the original founders of our Carleton University Women in Science and Engineering group. I stayed on the exec for a few years, stepping down only when I was pregnant, since I knew I wasn't going to be there the whole…
From Putting People First
Lugano conference on digital experiences in smart cities
On Saturday 27 October, the Italian-speaking Swiss city of Lugano will host the 4th edition of the UXconference. The 2012 edition of the conference, which is organised by the Sketchin team, will focus on the relationship between…
From Schneier on Security
Stoking Cyber Fears
A lot of the debate around President Obama's cubsersecurity initiative center on how much of a burden it would be on industry, and how that should be financed. As important as that debate is, it obscures some of the larger issues…
From Wild WebMink
Patent Troll Research Round-Up
Academic research about the problem of patent trolls has finally started to flow, and the findings are just as grim as all our instincts suggested. In my article for InfoWorld Open Sources this week, I look at some of the evidence…
From Putting People First
Slow HCI
The latest issue of Interfaces, the quarterly magazine of the Interaction Specialist Group of the BCS, the British chartered institute for IT, is devoted to Slow HCI, or how to design to promote well-being for individuals, society…
From Computer Science Teachers Association
Using Exploratory learning for CS
This year I am making some changes in my introductory Computer Science class. Last year, I added Scratch and BYOB as lead-ins to my standard programming language, Racket (Scheme). This year, I am going straight to BYOB, but following…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
I Can Figure It Out Myself
I set out for my daily walk today hoping for inner peace and calm. What I found was a bit of inspiration. About a half mile into my walk I saw a little girl, could not have been much more than two if that, approach some stairs…
From Schneier on Security
Analysis of How Bitcoin Is Actually Used
"Quantitative Analysis of the Full Bitcoin Transaction Graph," by Dorit Ron and Adi Shamir:
Abstract. The Bitcoin scheme is a rare example of a large scale global payment system in which all the transactions are publicly accessible…From Putting People First
Spacebrew, an open source toolkit for creating interactive spaces
Spacebrew is a new software – currently in beta release – for prototyping and producing interactive spaces. It was developed by the Interaction Lab at the Rockwell Group, led by the (very bearded) Co-Chiefs James Tichenor (who…
From Putting People First
Daniel Bor: ‘It’s just a gut instinct, but Blink got it wrong’
Daniel Bor is a cognitive neuro-scientist at the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science, University of Sussex, and author of The Ravenous Brain: How the New Science of Consciousness Explains Our Insatiable Search for Meaning…
From Putting People First
The Club of Helsinki – co-creation of urban development projects
The Club of Helsinki is a non-profit organization that offer possibilities to co-create urban development projects that prototype new integrated and sustainable business and management models. The organization is founded by designer…
From Putting People First
Transforming Bodies & Lifestyles: Insights into Inspiring Behavior Change
Transforming Bodies & Lifestyles: Insights into Inspiring Behavior Change Institute For The Future 2012 Inspiring people to change their behaviors in order to become healthier remains one of the most intractable challenges. But…
From BLOG@CACM
A Fundamental Duality of Software Engineering
What is the value of that function for x = 6?
From Putting People First
Wearable tech pioneers aim to track and augment our lives
Wearable technology is still in its infancy but as it increasingly taps into a desire to have the functionality of technology without the intrusiveness. A BBC article covers some of the recent products on the market: the GoPro…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Finish the Features or Hit the Date
In professional development there is always a trade off between what features to have in a product and when you want to ship the product. Dare Obasanjo @Carnage4Life is a Principal Program Manager Lead at Microsoft and a really…
From Wild WebMink
Dynamic!
This visualisation of activity on the LibreOffice code repository rocks!
From Computational Complexity
Dagstuhl Typecast
| Nerd Shot from Dagstuhl Seminar 12421 |
From The Eponymous Pickle
Tweets are Big Data
Are Tweets data? In GigaOm. With the increasing use of tweets the need for real-time analytics is happening more, I recently did an evaluation that dealt with the twitter firehouse, and this can be a daunting task. An article…
From Schneier on Security
Genetic Privacy
New report from the Presidential Commission for the Study of Biothethical Issues.
It's called "Privacy and Progress in Whole Genome Sequencing." The Commission described the rapid advances underway in the field of genome sequencing…From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Killing Curiosity
I have real mixed feelings about the Advanced Placement exams in general and the AP Computer Science exam in particular. Very mixed. There are some criticisms in this opinion piece in the Atlantic (AP Classes Are a Scam) that…
From Putting People First
UX articles and dissertations from Denmark
Mind Design, the Design Research Webzine of the Danish Centre for Design Research, contains a wealth of information, all available in English. Here are some highlights: Article Companies: Design Research Works in Practice Design…
From Wild WebMink
Open Source and Cloud
After the Community Summit at Open World Forum, three of the speakers – including me – spent 10 minutes discussing how cloud computing impacts the open source community. Far from making open source irrelevant - an idea that only…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
CCC Blog Reaches Over 300,000 Views!
The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Blog, which was created in 2008, has served as a means for exchanging information between the research community and funding agencies. It has provided an immediate online mechanism for…
From The Eponymous Pickle
A Temporal Forecasting Story
Connecting methods to provide forecasts. Forecasts based on semantically rich text data, such as that based on blog entries, news posts, or tweets. Today I met Brand Niemann of the Semantic Community at the first Recorded Future…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Big Data Sites
A number of sites to watch that deal with the topic of big data. lots of hype of late, but the topic needs to be watched as techniques evolve.
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
One Man’s Floor Is Another Man’s Ceiling
Factoring again, always factoring… Peter Borwein is among those who carry forward the title mission of Alan Turing’s famous paper, “On Computable Numbers…” With David Bailey and Simon Plouffe, he found a new kind of fast formula…
From My Biased Coin
Harvard Center for Research on Computation and Society (CRCS) Postoc / Visiting Scholar Call
Harvard's CRCS is looking for postdocs! Please apply....We're very interested in theorists (and, of course, non-theorists as well!) in all of the areas listed below. Also, for those who know of my work with Giorgos Zervas -…
From Wild WebMink
Kicking Comic Sans
If you have been using the font Comic Sans to support dyslexics, there’s a new font in town – see ComputerWorldUK.
From Schneier on Security
Studying Zero-Day Attacks
Interesting paper: "Before We Knew It: An Empirical Study of Zero-Day Attacks In The Real World," by Leyla Bilge and Tudor Dumitras:
Abstract: Little is known about the duration and prevalence of zeroday attacks, which exploit…From Putting People First
Book: Innovating for People
Innovating for People Handbook of Human-Centered Design Methods by LUMA Institute 2012, 86 pages Abstract Innovation is an economic imperative that calls for more people to be innovating, more often. This handbook equips people…