Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
November 2009
From Schneier on Security
Public Reactions to Terrorist Threats
Interesting research:
For the last five years we have researched the connection between times of terrorist threats and public opinion. In a series of tightly designed experiments, we expose subsets of research participants to…From The Eponymous Pickle
Augmenting Your Reality: Junaio
More augmented reality methods for online and mobile.Took a look at the Junaio augmented reality browser on the IPhone today. The basic idea is to let you augment what you are seeing in a specific location. It can be your own…
From The Eponymous Pickle
What it Takes to Lead Now
By John Baldoni in the Harvard Business Publishing Blog, A majority of managers just don't understand what it means to be a leader ... '
From Schneier on Security
Bruce Schneier Action Figure
A month ago, ThatsMyFace.com approached me about making a Bruce Schneier action figure. It's $100. I'd like to be able to say something like "half the proceeds are going to EPIC and EFF," but they're not. That's the price …
From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
Quick Thoughts on Pregnancy and Grad School
For some reason or another, a few recent online conversations have got me thinking about pregnancy and grad school. (I suppose visiting a friend with a month-old baby probably had something to do with it, too.)One of the recent…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Text Mining Handbook
Long on my stack, just making my way through: The Text Mining Handbook: Advanced Approaches in Analyzing Unstructured Data by Ronen Feldman and James Sanger. A very good overview of methods in unstructured data analysis. Largely…
From The Noisy Channel
An Ad-Supported Model With Teeth?
Apple recently filed for technology to deliver a rather compelling ad-supported business model. Or perhaps the better word is compulsory. You can read an analysis by Randall Stross in the New York Times.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Bias of Convenient Study Choices
Always thought there was something wrong with using US college students for determining universal psychological facts about populations, except when determining the truth about US college students. Sure it is cheap and convenient…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Computational Complexity and Games
From MIT, an interesting piece about representing the real world, always a good thing to think about. I never thought that game theory could accurately represent the real world, more evidence in that direction. ' ... Constantinos…
From Computer Science Teachers Association
Just What is Computer Science?
Just what is computer science? Is it a science course? Is it a math course? Is it a business course?
These questions pop up more frequently now that states are requiring four years of science and math. In Texas, the AP…From Wild WebMink
? Inconvenient Truth
Answer: Yes. So why do the labels want to kill it off? Because they don't. Translation: All this toxic law to cut people off the internet is …
From The Noisy Channel
Call for Speakers: Enterprise Search Summit 2010
From Wild WebMink
A Software Freedom Scorecard
I spoke this morning at the South Tyrol Free Software Conference in Bolzano, Italy. My subject was the idea of a "software freedom scorecard", a list of indicators for the strength of software freedom in an open source project…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Sperm Whale Eating Giant Squid
Rare photo.
From Putting People First
Meet Microsoft
Microsoft Corp. is counting on Ms. Larson-Green, its head of Windows Experience, to deliver an operating system that delights the world’s PC users as much as its last effort, Vista, disappointed them. “She’s in charge of a wide…
From Schneier on Security
Blowfish in Fiction
The algorithm is mentioned in Von Neumann's War, by John Ringo and Travis Taylor.
P. 495:
The guy was using a fairly simple buffer overflow attack but with a very nice little fillip of an encryption packet designed to overcome…From Schneier on Security
Video Interview with Me
Here's an interview with me, conducted at the Information Security Decisions conference in Chicago in October.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Got a Stain? There's an IPhone App for That
I see that the Tide Stain Brain is now available as an IPhone App. This work has a long history at P&G and I had several involvements in the knowledge being delivered. The driving idea is to figure out how to take knowledge that…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Phone as Chemical Sensor
And an application proposed by NASA that converts an IPhone into a chemical sensor. Looks like a very rough mashup, but I much like the direction. Could something like this detect anomalies like stains?
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
More database compression means more speed? Right?
Current practical database compression techniques stress speed over compression:
Vectorwise is using Super-scalar RAM-CPU cache compression which includes a carefully implemented dictionary coder. C-store—and presumably Vertica—is…From The Eponymous Pickle
What Google Knows About You
This is worthwhile for just general caution if you are into Google applications. ' ... Google may know more about you than your mother does. Got a problem with that? ... '
From Computational Complexity
Jobs
As many university's still feel the effect of the financial crises, many have limited or no positions to hire new tenure-track faculty so I expect the academic job market to be difficult again this year. But a few people have…
From Wild WebMink
? Starting November With Some Free Music
I just posted this week's free music downloads list over on my personal blog.
From My Biased Coin
Surveys
This post is about surveys. It's motivated by one of my tasks last night, as I has to spend some time going over the final proofs for the survey Hash-Based Techniques for High-Speed Packet Processing, written with Adam Kirsch…
From Schneier on Security
Beyond Security Theater
[I was asked to write this essay for the New Internationalist (n. 427, November 2009, pp. 10–13). It's nothing I haven't said before, but I'm pleased with how this essay came together.]
Terrorism is rare, far rarer than many…From The Noisy Channel
Week 1 at Google: Information Overload!
As you might imagine, it’s quite a switch to go from criticizing Google from the outside to being on the inside. Jeff Jarvis, who was gracious enough not to make fun of me in public, nonetheless admitted to me privately that…
From Putting People First
Nokia has designs on India
Nokia’s senior design specialists are touring India to discover how Indians use cellphones. Leslie D’Monte reports for New Delhi’s Business Standard. Jhanvi Madan (not her real name), who lives in Mumbai , has been talking on…
From Putting People First
The social dimension of environmental sustainability
Experientia collaborator Irene Cassarino went yesterday to the international “The social dimension of environmental sustainability
From BLOG@CACM
Internet Connectivity and Multimedia Content in Latin America
How Internet connectivity has affected multimedia content in Latin America.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Deep Data Dives
In the CACM, Discovering natural laws using massive amounts of data. Also called knowledge discovery, here with some new directions: ' ... Mining scientific data for patterns and relationships has been a common practice for…