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 Putting People First
Singapore on design possibilities for tomorrow
The Singapore Design Festival, running November 20-30, now themed “Design 2050: Possibilities for Tomorrow,” , is also continuing its quest to improve people’s surroundings through good design for a better quality of life. As…
From Schneier on Security
FBI/CIA/NSA Information Sharing Before 9/11
It's conventional wisdom that the legal "wall" between intelligence and law enforcement was one of the reasons we failed to prevent 9/11. The 9/11 Comission evaluated that claim, and published a classified report in 2004. The…
From Computer Science Teachers Association
What is Computational Thinking
In the March 2006 issue of the Communications of the ACM, Jeannette Wing generated a significant response with her article on Computational Thinking. One of the significant impacts of this article was placing the phrase "Computational…
From Return 42;
JSpec
Testing everything is a good thing - or call it TATFT if you have to. While most programming languages already feature great testing frameworks, the ones available for JavaScript have just recently achieved a level of functionality…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Retail Commission on Shopper Marketing
Am a bit late to this, but of interest:' ... As part of its ongoing Shopper Merchandising and Marketing leadership strategy, Coca-Cola North America (CCNA) is sponsoring the creation of the Retail Commission on Shopper Marketing…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wolfram Details Mathematica R&D
More from the 2009 International Mathematica User Conference: ' ... In this second video clip, Stephen gives a detailed description of what’s coming in the R&D pipeline for future versions of Mathematica, including features-…
From Computational Complexity
Breaking Walls
Many of you readers don't remember a time when there were two Germanys or when we didn't think IP = PSPACE. Two walls collapsed in November of 1989 that changed all that. One marked the end of the Cold War. The other marked the…
From Putting People First
Matt Webb presentation at UX Week 2009 (video)
Matt Webb of Berg was one of the speakers at UX Week 2009, a conference in San Francisco organised by Adapative Path. In his presentation “Design Is In Your Hands,” Matt talked about developing products and learning from mistakes…
From Putting People First
Designing for a sustainable world
To celebrate World Usability Day 2009, System Concepts has put together a video podcast exploring how different stakeholders can enhance the user experience of their designs by including sustainability as a key requirement. The…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Which should you pick: a bitmap index or a B-tree?
Morteza Zaker sent me pointer to their work comparing bitmap indexes and B-trees in the Oracle database. They examine the folklore surrounding bitmap indexes—which are often thought to be mostly useful over low cardinality columns…
From Putting People First
Towards human-centred knowledge management tools
Institute for the Future just released its latest research report, Knowledge Tools of the Future, written by Alex Pang and Mike Love. The report takes an in-depth look at signals, drivers, and trends shaping how organizations…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Bing and Wolfram Alpha
In what is a useful direction, Bing and Wolfram Alpha are collaborating. Google already does some of this by understanding some kinds of numerical dimensionality to answer searches like: 'How many quarts in a peck'. The Bing…
From Schneier on Security
Security in a Reputation Economy
In the past, our relationship with our computers was technical. We cared what CPU they had and what software they ran. We understood our networks and how they worked. We were experts, or we depended on someone else for expertise…
From The Eponymous Pickle
US Destroying Manufacturing Jobs
You probably have one, a sink garbage disposer, many are made by Emerson Electric along with other electrical equipment. Emerson's CEO says the US Government is doing everything possible to destroy US manufacturing jobs. Lead…
From Computational Complexity
New York Theory Day
IBM-NYU-COLUMBIA theory day on Dec 11 !
Here is pointer to more information:
My advice: If you are able to go (distance, time, money all okay) then you should go. If you are unable to go then you shouldn't go.
…
From Schneier on Security
Hacking the Brazil Power Grid
We've seen lots of rumors about attacks against the power grid, both in the U.S. and elsewhere, of people hacking the power grid. Seems like the source of these rumors has been Brazil:
Several prominent intelligence sources…From Putting People First
Nokia The Way We Live Next 3.0
The third edition of Nokia’s The Way We Live Next conference took place yesterday and today in Espoo, Finland. Nokia’s blog, Nokia Conversations, reports on a few of the keynote presentations: Nokia
From The Eponymous Pickle
Artistic Bar Codes
In FastCompany: Examples of using art embedded in standard barcodes. I have seen this before, but have yet to see it in the wild. Do shoppers pay attention to this? Still a good idea. At the right a sample code.
From Putting People First
Using ethnography to improve user experience
Bonny Colville-Hyde of CX Partners has written a good introductory article on the value of ethnographic research. How can you ensure your service stands out from its competitors in the marketplace as the one people want to use…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google's Open Source Go
Google has released its internally used open source language GO. Taking a look. And here. For rapid application development and scalability.
From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
How to Use Social Media to Benefit Your Career
Carleton's Women in Science and Engineering's November guest speaker event last night was about How to Use Social Media to Benefit Your Career. With a general theme of "just do it," our guest speaker Natasha D'Souza ofVirtualEyeSee…
From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
ISMAR09: A Few Demos
There were many cool demos at ISMAR this year, and you can check out the description of them in the conference schedule. In this post, I've included a few photos and a video of some of my favourites. Click through the images…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Backing Out of Google
It was not too long ago that sites were falling over themselves to get found on search engines, and particularly on Google. Now an alternative strategy is popping up proposed by increasingly profit hungry news providers. Block…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Procrastination can be your friend
Procrastination can be a serious problem leading to job loss, high anxiety and even significant psychological disability and dysfunction (according to wikipedia). To avoid excessive procrastination, most researchers grow a sense…
From BLOG@CACM
Extreme Agility at Facebook
Robert Johnson, director of engineering at Facebook was the last keynote at OOPSLA 2009. Robert’s talk: “Moving Fast at Scale - Lessons Learned at Facebook”, aimed to shed some lights on Facebook’s scaling issues and successes…
From Putting People First
Accenture says tech-driven approach to CE innovation outdated
Consumer electronics companies must rethink the old technology-driven approach to innovation because industry convergence has made this model obsolete, claims a study by Accenture. In the converging world, “high-performance businesses…
From Putting People First
How to create a long-tail user experience
Andrew Maier of UXBooth reflects on how to cultivate (or dissolve) a community, or in other words how to create a long-tail user experience. Websites are social creatures. Or rather, their users are. In turn, the websites you…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Emulating Neurons
Interesting Mindhacks summary of a piece on brain emulation on a chip in Discovery. We were closely involved in the whole topic of 'Artificial Neural Nets' back in the 90s and used them successfully for certain kinds of analytical…
From Wild WebMink
links for 2009-11-11
I do hope it's actually a hearing and not a kangaroo court. So far the EC spokespeople that have responded on the record seem to treat all counter-arguments with…
From Schneier on Security
Thieves Prefer Stealing Black Luggage
It's obvious why if you think about it:
Thieves prefer to steal black luggage because so much of it looks alike. If the thief is caught red-handed by the bag's owner, he only has to say sorry, it looks just like mine. And he's…