Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
November 2012
From The Eponymous Pickle
Get Your Washing Machine to Text
The Internet of things, where all things have an address and can communicate. Here, word of a way you can text the concept with real things.
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
CIFellow Sharoda Paul Featured in the New York Times
Sharoda Paul, a former CIFellow, was recently featured in the New York Times article,“Looking to Industry for the Next Digital Disruption.” After her postdoctoral fellowship at a Palo Alto research center as a 2010-11 CIFellow…
From Schneier on Security
Classified Information Confetti
Some of the confetti at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York consisted of confidential documents from the Nassau County Police Department, shredded sideways.
From Schneier on Security
Hackback
Stewart Baker, Orin Kerr, and Eugene Volokh on the legality of hackback.
From Wild WebMink
Locked-In With Open Source?
You can be if it’s not really open source. While open source forms a part of many proprietary solutions, the term “open source” should only be used to describe software whose full source code is made available under an OSI-approved…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Words Matter
Not long ago someone tweeted “Stop using "guru," "ninja," and other terms for job descriptions. You are a Sparkly Code Princess. Own it!” It’s been running though my head ever since. Then last week Laura Blankenship wrote a post…
From The Eponymous Pickle
IBM DemandTec for Marketers
From IBM DemandTec, a good view of the need to construct valid shopper segmentation. Why? So we can use targeting to make sure the right consumer gets the most influential message. The link goes to an infographic and further…
From Wild WebMink
MyGOSSCon Slides
I gave a presentation yesterday in Malaysia on the forces driving change in open source; here are the slides.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Data Analytics Foundation
New and growing. Contact us for more information.Data Analytics Foundation works with market-leading companies across multiple verticals, solving high impact business problems in the areas of Marketing, Supply Chain and Risk…
From Putting People First
Research on Android tablet use in 5th grade classrooms
The series of research projects on tablet use in schools (see here, here and here) now also has an Android study. A small research project by Marie Bjerede and Tzaddi Bondi, equipped a 5th grade class of 27 students in Portland…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Why I like the new C++
I was reading Vivek Haldar’s post on the new C++ (C++11) and I was reminded that I need to write such a post myself. C++ is a standardized language. And they came up with a new version of the standard called C++11. Usually, for…
From Wild WebMink
Open Rights Group Maturing
In the space of a few weeks, the Open Rights Group (where I’m a volunteer director) has gone through a growth spurt, winning an award for campaigning work, launching an appeal for members to fund a legal advisor so it can engage…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Commenting on Communications
I am getting increasing number of Spam Comments with an author of 'Anonymous'. It is getting difficult to even scan all messages. If you would like to improve your chances of being approved for publication include an author…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Leveraging Big Data Around Customers
Good piece, because it is ultimately how you leverage the data, and leveraging it means that you use analytics to make it work with specific decision processes. Figuring out precisely what those processes are is the first step…
From Putting People First
MedLove, Berlin, 23rd of November
Post by Experientia UX researcher Anna Wojnarowska: The first MedLove conference, a UX and healthcare summit sponsored by Razorfish, took place this Friday in Berlin. MedLove gathered professionals from around the world discussing…
From Putting People First
Book: The Human Face of Big Data
Big Data is the subject of a forthcoming glossy photo book, a smartphone application for personal data analysis and comparison, and an interactive version of the book for the iPad, reports Steve Lohr on the New York Times Bits…
From Putting People First
Learning and the emerging science of behavior change, aka ‘nudging’
The language of learning today is full of references to “softness” and “openness.” Software, soft skills, soft performance, and the softening up of school knowledge go hand-in-hand with open source, open access and open educational…
From Putting People First
Nearly all videos of UX Week 2012 now online
Our friends of Adaptive Path have uploaded (nearly) all videos of UX Week 2012, the premier user experience design conference that took place in August in San Francisco. KEYNOTES Ducks, dolls, and divine robots: designing our…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
NSF Holding First Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace PI Meeting This Week; Tuesday Afternoon Webcast to Discuss Federal Cybersecurity R&D Strategy
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is holding this week a first-ever Principal Investigators’ meeting for its Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC) program. From Tuesday through Thursday, nearly 400 academic researchers…
From Putting People First
Another batch of NEXT Service Design videos
The NEXT Service Design videos keep on coming, but very slowly. Here are another three: A Facebook for Things – Turning Physical Products into Digital Information Services Andy Hobsbawm, Evrythng There’s a revolution going on…
From Putting People First
Why do the user interfaces of Smart TVs suck?
Driven by marketing tick lists and a seeming disregard for how ordinary people will use their products, manufacturers have simply chucked more and more features into their sets until existing user interfaces have creaked at the…
From Putting People First
New York Times interviews Jim Wicks, Design Chief at Motorola Mobility
Motorola Mobility, which Google acquired in May, recently released new smartphones and reintroduced itself as the “New Motorola.” But what does that even mean? One thing is for sure: Motorola is not the same company that it was…
From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
Resources for Testing Game Story Ideas
I will soon be trying out simple nonlinear narrative ideas for my thesis research, and wanted to find (freely available) tools that will make doing so much easier. Here are a few, some of which are great for beginners and non…
From Putting People First
Unpacking cars: doing anthropology at Intel (paper by Genevieve Bell)
The fall 2011 issue of AnthroNotes (pdf) starts off with an article by Genevieve Bell, senior cultural anthropologist at Intel. She describes her latest research project, designed to understand how cars around the world can serve…
From Putting People First
Technology is useless if it doesn’t address a human need
Facebook is great for checking out photos of your exes and all, but for social innovators working in the developing world, there’s no point to new technologies unless they make life better for the people they’re trying to help…
From Putting People First
Expereal, free iPhone app, based on Daniel Kahneman’s book ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’
Expereal is a free iPhone app developed to help people better understand themselves, to feel even more connected to the world, and to, hopefully, make more informed decisions about their lives. The marketplace has social media…
From BLOG@CACM
The Problem Is That We're Just Too Darn Useful: CS Ed and State Public Policy
Is Computer Science a vocational skill or an academic subject? While many of us might say "yes" and "yes," public policy in the states is increasingly requiring a choice between those two answers.
From Schneier on Security
<i>Liars and Outliers</i> Ebook 50% Off and DRM-Free
Today only, O'Reilly is offering 50% off all its ebooks, including Liars and Outliers. This is probably the cheapest you'll find a DRM-free copy of the book.
From Schneier on Security
Homeland Security Essay Contest
The Naval Postgraduate School's Center for Homeland Defense and Security is running its sixth annual essay competition. There are cash prizes. (Info on previous years here.)
From Computational Complexity
Inverse Closure Problem
In the undergraduate complexity course we spend some time on closure properties such as (1) REG closed under UNION, INTER, COMP and (2) R.E. closed under UNION and INTER but NOT COMP. I propose the following inverse problem:…