Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
October 2013
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
CS Ed Week and an Hour of Code are coming
An announcement for Hadi Partovi, founder of code.org, about Computer Science Education Week (Dec. 9-15) and the Hour of Code initiative.
To celebrate Computer Science Education Week (Dec. 9-15), Code.org and dozens…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Waze and Google, Together
Was an early user of Waze, which did some very interesting things with social car travel. Intriqued about how Google bought them for $1 Billion. Now the US FTC has decided not to interfere. Looking forward to an integration…
From Geeking with Greg
Quick links
What I found interesting lately:
From The Eponymous Pickle
Curious Voyager
My longtime colleague Walter Riker, has a long running blog Curious Voyager. Follow him. He does excellent training in the MS Office Space. He also keeps up with many enterprise computing needs. Contact him for more information…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Random Forests for Classification
A technical discussion of using Random Forest Algorithms for large database classification problems. Have not used this myself yet, but I am dealing with classification systems. " ... Both R and Python have robust packages…
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
Hill Tech Happenings Week of September 30
Well, it would appear that some things are still happening during the shutdown. I would recommend, however, that you double check before visiting any of these meetings in person. October 2 Markup: The House Homeland Security…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Predictive Analytics World
Some early takeaways from Predictive Analytics World. Instructive comments that I could agree with in general.
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Miriah Meyer, former Computing Innovation Fellow, named a 2013 PopTech Science Fellow
Miriah Meyer was a Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Computing Innovation Fellow (CIFellow) from 2009 – 2011 at Harvard University. Upon completion of her Fellowship, Miriah became a USTAR assistant professor in the School…
From The Eponymous Pickle
4D Printing Adapts
So what is 4D Printing? Printing objects that can adapt to their environment. In GigaOM. " ... 3D printing promises to give us objects on demand. But 4D printing promises to give us objects that change over time, adapting…
From Schneier on Security
NSA Storing Internet Data, Social Networking Data, on Pretty Much Everybody
Two new stories based on the Snowden documents.
This is getting silly. General Alexander just lied about this to Congress last week. The old NSA tactic of hiding behind a shell game of different code names is failing. It used…From The Eponymous Pickle
Microsoft's Power BI for Office
It has been some time since I looked at any of Microsoft's Business Intelligence offerings. As MS partners in the enterprise we did see some of their BI acquisitions that work with Access. New writeup in Nextweb which overviews…
From BLOG@CACM
Heidelberg Laureate Forum: Research At the Interface Between Disciplines
The importance of interdisciplinary work, particularly in applying mathematics and computer science to biology, was a topic emphasized throughout the Heidelberg Laureate Forum.
From Schneier on Security
Will Keccak = SHA-3?
Last year, NIST selected Keccak as the winner of the SHA-3 hash function competition. Yes, I would have rather my own Skein had won, but it was a good choice.
But last August, John Kelsey announced some changes to Keccak in…From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Flipping The Computer Science Classroom
I’m a bit of a “flipped classroom” skeptic. Let’s just get that our of the way up front. But I want to get my thinking out there in hopes that people will educate me on the whole idea.
To me it seems a lot like “read this chapter…From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The written word took over the world
Whereas human beings are geared genetically toward spoken languages, written languages are an acquired ability. In this sense, it is a high-level ability. For centuries, only a small elite knew how to write and read. I suspect…
From Schneier on Security
WhoIs Privacy and Proxy Service Abuse
ICANN has a draft study that looks at abuse of the Whois database.
This study, conducted by the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in the United Kingdom, analyzes gTLD domain names to measure whether the percentage of privacy…From My Biased Coin
Entrepreneurship and the Curriculum
At the Andreessen Horowitz academic round table (see last post), the issue of how to promote student entrepreneurship through the curriculum arose. The VCs at AH (which I'll use for short hereon) want there to be more tech-based…