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 The Eponymous Pickle
Report on Brains on the Path to Purchase
In my last message I indicated my acquired skepticism on some current neuromarketing work. Just to provide some balance, let me point a report from a recent conference. One of my favorite correspondents spoke:Report from the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Detecting Mathematical Thinking
Can we detect reliably the specific nature of the thoughts in the brain? Some work reported on in Nature Communications that show we can deferentially detect the brain working on simple math problems. Still awaiting work on…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Connected TV and Internet of Things
We did lots of work in our 'future home' experiments in our innovation centers to understand how the home would ultimately be interconnected both inside and outside its boundaries. In particular, RFID connections to productsThis…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Teaching Helps Research
How teaching interacts with research Tim Budd is a computer scientist who works mostly in programming theory and practice. He once was a graduate student of mine, and did his thesis work on an APL compiler. Ken recalls that when…
From The Eponymous Pickle
In Line Help
Google has added inline help in several of its services. More here. Slightly more convenient in the actual context of the problem. Intelligence always exists in a context.
From Putting People First
Architects don’t listen to people
Christine Outram left the architecture profession because, she says, architects “don’t listen to people“. “The truth is, most of you don’t try. You rely on rules of thumb and pattern books, but you rarely do in-depth ethnographic…
From Putting People First
The design of Copenhagen as a bicycle friendly city
In a ten part video series, Copenhagenize Design Co explores the top 10 design elements that make Copenhagen a bicycle-friendly city. In the embedded video above they highlight The big picture. The overall design of the bicycle…
From Putting People First
Observations from an ethnography conference
Alexa Curtis recently attended EPIC, the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference, a truly international gathering of ethnographers, anthropologists, strategists, designers, and others who are committed to understanding audiences…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Graphics Chips for High Speed Visualization
In Technology Review: Work from MIT. Reviewing. See their public interface and demonstration which looks at Twitter data. Lets you look at a database of 11.6 million plus records, visualized instantly." ... Graphics Chips…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Educause Conference Reprise
Been a long time reader of Educause, even before the Web, as a newsletter. I see that the Cisco blog is writing about their conference. Some good posts recently. Second day. " ... Bringing Together Technology and Education…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Fiona Apple Wears a Squid as a Hat in New Video
Even I think this is weird.
From Computer Science Teachers Association
CSEA Legislation Timeline
There is so much momentum around the need for more computer science education in the country's schools, and many organizations in addition to CSTA are now working toward getting more computer science teachers in more elementary…
From Schneier on Security
D-Link Router Backdoor
Several versions of D-Link router firmware contain a backdoor. Just set the browser's user agent string to "xmlset_roodkcableoj28840ybtide," and you're in. (Hint, remove the number and read it backwards.)
It was probably put…From The Eponymous Pickle
Dilbert in the Enterprise
In the HBR: We were heavy users of the Dilbert strip in the enterprise. They found their way into many slide shows. We thought that Scott Adams must have been attending our meetings to get the corporate richness of his humor…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Amazon and Google in the Supply Chain
So true, worth looking at again:Why distributors should pay attention to Amazon, Google Amazon's B2B online channel Amazon Supply and Google's Google Shopping for Suppliers are worth paying attention to, especially now that both…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Call for Participation: 2014 Workshop on ACM History
The ACM History Committee (http://history.acm.org/) is sponsoring a two-day archiving workshop to help diffuse knowledge of professional archival practices into ACM’s membership and others with an active interest in preserving…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Deadline for Proposals for CSTA Conference Approaching
The deadline for session and workshop proposals for the 2014 CSTA conference on K-12 computer science education is November 15, 2013.
In addition to 3-hour workshops and 1-hour sessions, this year's conference will include a20…From BLOG@CACM
Results From the First-Year Course MOOCs: Not There Yet
The empirical results of first-year MOOCs are in. We're not there yet in terms of retention, learning, or access.
From Schneier on Security
Identifying Cell Phones Through Sensor Imperfections
There seems to be a bunch of research into uniquely identifying cell phones through unique analog characteristics of the various embedded sensors. These sorts of things could replace cookies as surveillance tools.
SlashdotMetaFilter…From Putting People First
What behavioral economics is not
Essay: The Nature of the BEast: What Behavioral Economics Is Not 10/16/13 Matthew Darling, Saugato Datta, and Sendhil Mullainathan People are complex; they defy easy summary. Like Walt Whitman, we all contain multitudes. As a…
From Putting People First
An obstacle to patient-centered care: poor supply systems
It is widely acknowledged that patients and their families should be deeply involved in the design of and decisions about the health care that the former receive — and that it is integral to achieving high quality and patient…
From The Eponymous Pickle
P&G Gym from IDEO
For a recent talk I had to research some of the work that IDEO did for P&G. I re-discovered this Bloomberg article about the design work that IDEO did to help create the GYM. Excellent overview. This became part of P&G's Innovation…
From Computer Science Teachers Association
Injecting Serious CS into a STEM Course
My school district has a STEM course in the high school that is meeting the district's computer science graduation requirement. That means that the STEM students need to be meeting the CSTA K-12 Computer Science Standards. Curriculum…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Topology Mapping for Analytics
Seems Vincent Granville has been thinking similarly lately. See his article and code in Data Science Central: A little known component that should be part of most data science algorithms. Beware, this has a general introduction…
From Schneier on Security
"A Court Order Is an Insider Attack"
Ed Felten makes a strong argument that a court order is exactly the same thing as an insider attack:
To see why, consider two companies, which we'll call Lavabit and Guavabit. At Lavabit, an employee, on receiving a court order…From My Biased Coin
Simons Research Fellowships Post
Alistair Sinclair asked me to post a note about the Simons Research Fellowships positions at Berkeley. But since that's where Justin Thaler (my now-ex student) ended up, I though he could put in a few words about his experience…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Toward Star Trek economics
Characters in the Star Trek universe often claim that their future Earth has abolished money. Everyone gets what he needs and nobody works for money. Unfortunately, they never explain how it may work. Clearly, not everyone can…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Simple Model of Persuasion
In Neuroscience Marketing: " ... The Persuasion Slide™. In short, it’s a simple model for persuasion that encompasses a variety of conscious and non-conscious factors. ... " . By Roger Dooley. Comment on it there. Simple idea…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Career Technical Schools and Computer Science
Over the years I have gotten involved with a number of career technical schools in New England. Several in New Hampshire where I live and several in Massachusetts which is near by. This is fall advisory meeting season so I have…
From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
Slides from 'Coherent Emergent Stories in Video Games' / GHC13
I gave a talk at this year's Grace Hopper on what I've been working on for my thesis project:Coherent Emergent Stories in Video GamesCrafting satisfying narratives while preserving player freedom is a longstanding challengeMy…