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 BLOG@CACM
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Academia . . .
Aria Haghighi, an award-winning natural language processing researcher, describes his trek from a tenure-track faculty job at UMass-Amherst to his decision to leave academia and found a startup.
From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
Things I Like About Python
Back in May I wrote a popular post about which was a better beginners language: Processing or Python. Although I concluded that Processing was better for the audiences I tend to have in mind (that is, nontechnical members of…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Midsize Insiders
Some of my blog posts will start to appear in Midsize Insiders. Quite an interesting group of other bloggers as I have read them so far: " ... Insiders are independent subject matter experts, empowered to blog for IBM because…
From The Eponymous Pickle
The Need for Thank You
In the HBR: In a long career, before search became common, and I had become a rumored expert, I was often asked to do a simple online search. Later their admins would be trained. I responded quickly in one case, though it…
From Schneier on Security
Decrypting a Secret Society's Documents from the 1740s
Great story, both the cryptanalysis process and the Oculists.
From My Biased Coin
Posts from FOCS (part 5)
[Again, edited by Justin Thaler, who organized all this. The following was written by Michael Forbes of MIT.]Title: Higher Cell Probe Lower Bounds for Evaluating Polynomials Author: Kasper Green Larsen Larsen gave a very understandable…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Augmented Reality Tricks for Dieting
What if we used augmented reality to scale what we eat to its caloric content? A simple idea, that might work in an era of Google Glasses type Augmented Reality. But how practical? More in Slashdot.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Facebook and Jobs
Wharton looks at Facebook's social jobs App. A competitor to Linkedin's focus? " ... the company’s “Social Jobs” app will allow users to search approximately 1.7 million jobs by keyword and location, and then apply for positions…
From Computational Complexity
Recursion Theorem follows from Church-Turing
During a homework assignment in a graduate complexity course I took at Cornell back in 1985 I used the following reasoning: Since a computer code sits in RAM that a program can read, by the Church-Turing thesis we can assumerecursion…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Retail Space Usage
In Progressive Grocer. A recent exploration of a Fresh Market made me take a closer look at allocation of space and the implications of the approaches being used. Times are changing.
From The Noisy Channel
Follow Me on LinkedIn!
I’ve recently started posting on LinkedIn as part of LinkedIn’s thought leadership program. My first two posts as an “influencer” are a bit meta: Influence and the Attention Economy Measuring Influence I’m curious to hear what…
From Schneier on Security
Anonymous Claims it Sabotaged Rove Election Hacking
Can anyone make heads or tails of this story? (More links.)
For my part, I'd like a little -- you know -- evidence. Remember that Ohio was not the deciding state in the election. Neither was Florida or Virginia. It was Colorado…From The Eponymous Pickle
Navigating the Big Data Challenge
From Brain: Good overview of the challenge involved. Starting with a concise statement of the problem: " ... Today's decision makers have no trouble finding enough data to make good business decisions. Their challenge is knowing…
From BLOG@CACM
What Does 'Big Data' Mean? (Part 3)
The "big velocity" use case is examined in this third post in a series on big data.
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
What Programmers Say When Their Programs Don’t Work
Someone posted this to Facebook the other day. I have to admit that I have said several of these and heard most of them. I suspect a lot of these are also said by students when asked about why their projects don’t work.
I’ve…From The Eponymous Pickle
The Pain of the Interface
In Technology Review: All UIs are a pain to use. Especially the new ones. I read this as I am about to select a new one.
From My Biased Coin
Computer Science Rhodes Scholar
A question we tend to get at Harvard is why students should come here to study computer science. There are lots of reasons, of course, but one thing we like to emphasize it that it's possible to study computer science here but…
From The Eponymous Pickle
IBM Provides Ecosystem Financing
An interesting piece just received about how IBM is provide financing for its clients. Quite a broad opportunity to drive opportunities for growth.' ... IBM recently announced that it is providing its ecosystem of business partners…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Starwood Tweets Aloft
The Starwood Aloft hotel chain has started their agency review process using Twitter. Recall when they had a virtual presence in Second Life? My its been a long time since I visited there. My enterprise also had a private…
From The Eponymous Pickle
VSN Strategies
Colleague Jim Tenser has a blog called VSN Strategies. " .... James (“Jamie”) Tenser is an author and consultant to the retail and consumer products industry. His firm VSN Strategies focuses on merchandising, marketing, consumer…
From Schneier on Security
E-Mail Security in the Wake of Petraeus
I've been reading lots of articles articles discussing how little e-mail and Internet privacy we actually have in the U.S. This is a good one to start with:
The FBI obliged apparently obtaining subpoenas for Internet Protocol…From Computer Science Teachers Association
Code Literacy: A 21st-Century Requirement
This blog piece is reprinted with permission of its author, Douglas Rushkoff. It was originally published at http://www.edutopia.org/blog/code-literacy-21st-century-requirement-douglas-rushkoff. Douglas is the author of Program…
From Wild WebMink
Open, Free and Commercial
"Open" is never used honestly to mean "non-commercial". "Open" means no permission required; only salesmen pretend otherwise.— Simon Phipps (@webmink) November 19, 2012 Whatever anyone may say, something can't be "open" (or indeed…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
A Wonderful Riff On Rank
The approximate rank of matrices—a great idea Santosh Vempala is one of the world experts on high-dimensional geometry, and has made many beautiful contributions to this and other parts of theory. We have presented some of his…
From Schneier on Security
Security Theater in American Diplomatic Missions
I noticed this in an article about how increased security and a general risk aversion is harming US diplomatic missions:
"Barbara Bodine, who was the U.S. ambassador to Yemen during the Qaeda bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in 2000…From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Interesting Links 19 November 2012
I made some more changes to the blog this last week. I hope they are not too disruptive but I want to make the site more useable and interesting. The big changes are the addition of an easy option to subscribe via email and the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Designing Great Visualizations
Tableau provides a paper on data visualization. Requires Registration. " ... This paper traces the history of visual representation, from early cave drawings through the computer revolution. It also examines the different styles…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Open Colleges and the Teachers Apple
A link just sent to me. An interesting blog that addresses changes in the education industry. " ... A decade ago, electronics and cell phones in the classroom were considered little more than a distraction. Today, new devices…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Ask Your Director of Analytics
In Forbes: What should the questions you ask your director of analytics? If you have such a person. Not the usual things, more about the business aspects. That is good, but certainly not entirely inclusive. Worth a scan…
From Putting People First
UK study: tech in schools requires a rethink of how learning is organised
In the last five years UK schools have spent more than £1 billion on digital technology. From interactive whiteboards to tablets, there is more digital technology in schools than ever before. But so far there has been little…