Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
December 2009
From The Noisy Channel
Faceted Search Presentation at New York CTO Club
From Schneier on Security
TSA Publishes Standard Operating Procedures
BoingBoing is pretty snarky:
The TSA has published a "redacted" version of their s00per s33kr1t screening procedure guidelines (Want to know whether to frisk a CIA operative at the checkpoint? Now you can!). Unfortunately, the…From Wild WebMink
links for 2009-12-10
From Return 42;
The other side of the table: Ben Collins-Sussman
This is already the 13th installment of The other side of the table. To me, it is still amazing how many people took the time to reply to my inquiry about their open questions, considering the often tight schedules most participants…
From Putting People First
Latest Donald Norman essay started a big debate
Donald Norman ’s recent essay Technology First, Needs Last, in which he argues that “design research is great when it comes to improving existing product categories but essentially useless when it comes to new, innovative breakthroughs…
From My Biased Coin
TSA Oops
You may have heard on the news that the TSA (temporarily) put up their Screening Management Standard Operating Procedure on the web. As pointed out on this blog (and elsewhere), they made a small error: "So the decision to publish…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Managong Business Complexity
Re-Discovered: Managing Business Complexity: Discovering Strategic Solutions with Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation by Michael J. North and Charles M. Macal . Read parts of this back in 2007 when it was published as an introduction…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Neuromarketing in Forbes
Sally Satel, MD, is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. She comments on On neuromarketing in Forbes.
From Schneier on Security
My Reaction to Eric Schmidt
Schmidt said:
I think judgment matters. If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines…From Computational Complexity
Is posting about 17x17 problem BAD FOR ACADEMIA?
(The 17x17 problem has gotten far wider attention than I imagined--- Brian Hayes posted it on his website: here, and its also here and here. The last website is odd in that it mentions my co-authors as also putting up the money…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Interactive Area Chart
From Flowingdata: How to make an interactive area chart, like the name voyager from the Baby Name Wizard by Martin Wattenberg. See the example on the right that shows changes in personal spending. Step-by-step instructions.…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Run-length encoding (part 3)
In Run-length encoding (part 1), I presented the various run-length encoding formats. In part 2, I discussed the coding of the counters. In this third part, I want to discuss the ordering of the elements. Indeed, the compression…
From Putting People First
Does technology need personality?
Cennydd Bowles, a user experience designer at Clearleft in Brighton, England, writes about interaction design, behavioural change, and the design of emotions. “If interaction design really is the business of behaviour change…
From Schneier on Security
Emotional Epidemiology
This, from The New England Journal of Medicine, sounds familiar:
This is the story line for most headline-grabbing illnesses
From Wild WebMinklinks for 2009-12-09
Strong, sad story that's worth reading. Given the effects are so systemic and rely so much on the inability of individual wisdom to overcome systemic…
From Putting People FirstMumbai markings enhance service design
Meena Kadri reports on how lunch and laundry delivery in Mumbai – known as the Dabbawalla and Dhobi Ghat services
From The Eponymous PickleExtended Packaging Becomes Reality
From Global standards body GS1, the concept of extended packaging allows the consumer to gather unlimited information from packaging via devices. For example a barcode reader on a smartphone enables extended packaging. Mobile…
From The Eponymous PickleSwash to be Sold Online Only
In an interesting development, P&G has decided to sell its Tide-Swash cleansing products online only. We visited their OSU - Columbus innovation store two years ago. See the Swashitout site.
From The Eponymous PickleJohn Nash Interview
A video interview of John Nash, game theory theorist, nobelist, and subject of the fictionalized movie: A Beautiful Mind.
From CERIAS BlogTalking to the Police All the Time
I started writing this entry while thinking about the "if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear" fallacy. What do you say to someone who says that they have nothing to hide, or that some information about them…
From Computer Science Teachers AssociationCelebrating Computer Science Education Week
A little over a month ago, I wrote about the U.S. Congress passing a resolution designating the first week of December as Computer Science Education Week. As far as attention for the field goes, this was cool, but my main point…
From Daniel Lemire's BlogWhy You Should Be a Global Warming Skeptic
The debacle of the leaked emails, data and code from the University of East Anglia showed that reputed global warming scientists were petty and cheaters. As always, the pursuit of excellence is often at the expense of rigor.…
From Computational ComplexityDequantification
After a talk on derandomization at Midwest Theory Day, someone asked if those techniques could also be used in quantum computing.In classical randomness under reasonable assumptions we can create a polynomial in m sized set…
From The Female Perspective of Computer ScienceCreating Your Academic Portfolio
I recently attended a workshop put on by our school's career services department about making an academic portfolio. Now that I'm a PhD student, I really want to redo my current website to better suit this type of portfolio.…
From The Eponymous PickleFirst Time Scents
In Neuromarketing: On the memorability of first time scents, as opposed to the well-known Proustian remembrances. We did much innovation in the area of understanding of how scent interacted with shoppers in retail contexts. It…
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACMACM Washington Update, Vol. 13.9 (December 7, 2009)
CONTENTS
[1] Newsletter Highlights [2] Computer Science Education Week Launches [3] Cybersecurity Receives Congressional Attention [4] Data Security Bills Approved by Senate [5] Google Revises Google Books' Settlement Agreement…
From Wild WebMinklinks for 2009-12-08
Photographers and anti-terrorism: The holiday snaps that could… Speechless.
From Schneier on SecurityUsing Fake Documents to Get a Valid U.S. Passport
I missed this story:
Since 2007, the U.S. State Department has been issuing high-tech "e-passports," which contain computer chips carrying biometric data to prevent forgery. Unfortunately, according to a March report from the…
From BLOG@CACMBetter GPS Software Through User Feedback
I appreciate my GPS software can tell me where I am, but it should get better at predicting where I will go.
From The Female Perspective of Computer ScienceLine Game at Design Tomorrow's World
This post was written originally for the Carleton University Women in Science and Engineering blog.I just got back from Design Tomorrow's World. The event is very engineering focused, so being a computer scientist, I wanted to…