Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
December 2010
From Wild WebMink
links for 2010-12-17
Marwell Wildlife: Adopt a Penguin If you're stuck for a gift idea for a Linux fan in the UK (or elsewhere actually), consider giving a Marwell animal sponsorship… (tags: Penguin Linux Christmas) Towards interoperability for European…
From Schneier on Security
Fake Amazon Receipt Generators
They can be used to scam Amazon Marketplace merchants:
What happens once our scammer is armed with his fake receipt? Well, many sellers on Amazon will ask you to send them a copy of your receipt should you run into trouble, …From The Eponymous Pickle
Mechanical Turk Challenged by Spam
We used Amazon's Mechanical Turk to successfuly solve several human intelligence tasks in the enterprise. Unfortunately it is now reported that a large percentage of tasks and responses there are Spam. This erodes its credibiity…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Retailers and In Store Smart Phones
A very good article in the WSJ about the increasing use of smartphones in stores to compare prices and other information about products via search and barcode scanning. The reactions of retailers to this behavior. We studied…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Computer Science Teacher Education
Mark Guzdial makes a strong case that the Best hope for CS Teacher Education is in-service, not pre-service. Basically there is not enough demand for strong pre-service CS teacher education because there are not enough people…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Blogging has Peaked Says Pew Report
In ReadwriteWeb: It importantly varies by demographic, but the Pew Internet Report appears to indicate that the frequency of Blogging appears to have peaked on the Web. Many more useful statistics in the article.
From The Eponymous Pickle
NGram Visualization Tool
New from Google Labs, the ability to plot the usage of words or phrases in Google's huge and growing scanned corpora of text. Easy to use and simple to apply to understand the changes in the uses of words over time. In ten…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
PCAST: The Role of NIT R&D in National Priorities
The
From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
The Story of My Comps
I did my oral defence for my comprehensive exam this morning and wanted to share what I learned, since it might help others. The details aren't important, but suffice it to say I got a conditional pass - I just need to do an…
From Computer Science Teachers Association
CS Ed Week a Success!
The 2nd annual Computer Science Education Week (CSEdWeek) wrapped up last week, and thanks to some incredible partner support and engagement from the computing community it was a smashing success. With a new website providing…
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
Computer Science Education Week Extends Its Reach
This is a repost from Blog@CACM, the blog connected to Communications of the ACM It was written by Debra Richardson, Chair of the 2010 Computer Science Education Week, and ACM Director of Public Policy Cameron Wilson.
The 2nd…From The Eponymous Pickle
Does Analytics Need a Soul?
Article in SASCOM. " ...
From Computational Complexity
Low, Superlow, supersuperlow sets, and Paywalls
Recall the following:
-
If A is a set then A' (pronounced 'A jump') is
the halting set relative to A. Formally it is:
{ e | MeA(e) converges }
- A set A is low if A' &leT HALT.
- A set A is superlow if A' &lett HALT.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Geo-Fenced Advertising in Test
Intriguing direction that could provide better shopper behavior and location understanding. For example this could be used to understand when a shopper enters an aisle, or comes into a store. " ... Clinique, Ritz Camera, Groupon…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Humans vs Computers in Jeopardy
An interesting artificial intelligence challenge. This has been planned for a few years now, here is new information about an IBM computer challenging a human in the Jeopardy game. Contrary to the previous highy structured…
From BLOG@CACM
Computer Science Education Week Extends Its Reach
Covering the highlights from CSEdWeek 2010 and how the computing community can stay involved.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Procter Move to Social Media
ReadwriteWeb posts about P&G's move from Soap Operas to Social Media. This is a very thin article, but worth a scan. Wish they had looked for and provided more detail. P&G has been a pioneer in new marketing spaces, from print…
From Schneier on Security
Security in 2020
There’s really no such thing as security in the abstract. Security can only be defined in relation to something else. You’re secure from something or against something. In the next 10 years, the traditional definition of IT security—that…
From Wild WebMink
links for 2010-12-16
An FBI backdoor in OpenBSD? If this is true, it punches a massive hole in the integrity of software that the whole hacker community relies upon. (tags: Security Unix OpenBSD FBI USA Surveillance) Appeals Court Holds that Email…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Microsoft bliink
I’ve talked about Bliink in the past. (See bliink) Over the last couple of years Microsoft has run this web development competition in schools across the county. It’s been limited to individual states, state-wide organizations…
From Putting People First
Book: User Experience Management
User Experience Management: Essential Skills for Leading Effective UX Teams By Arnie Lund Morgan Kaufmann Publishers (Elsevier) May 2011 ISBN: 978-0-12-385496-4 The role of UX manager is of vital importance — it means leading…
From Putting People First
EU action plan to drive take up of online public services
The European Commission unveiled an ambitious agenda to bring public services online across Europe so that it could “serve an economy which relies on the networks of the future.” By 2015, the Commission wants to have 50% of European…
From Putting People First
Interview with Bill Verplank
Steve Baty has published a short interview with Bill Verplank on Johnny Holland. Bill Verplank is – together with Bill Moggridge – at the origin of the term “interaction design” and one of the speakers at Interaction 11. I got…
From Putting People First
Designing interactive products for children
Yeevon Ooi of Webcredible writes in a long article that designing interactive products for children shouldn’t be any different from any user-centred design process, but the methods for carrying out user research, the implementation…
From Putting People First
Exchanging experiential gifts for the holidays
Shareable reports on a new trend of people exchanging experiential gifts
From The Eponymous Pickle
Future of Neuromarketing
Some interesting points on the changes in market research and how neuroscience will effect the industry:Market Research Industry Continues Transformation as Business World Searches for Consumer-Centric Focus and Insight on the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Dole and Price Chopper Use QR
There has been much in the news lately about the use of QR codes in Grocery. In this latest example, covered briefly in Supermarket News, Dole and Price Chopper are using the code for a holiday promotion. " ... The code appears…
From Wild WebMink
? Web Karma?
@webminkSimon Phipps Is the FBI's OpenBSD vulnerability the Universe's way of fixing a karma imbalance caused by the EFF winning 4th amendment rights for e-mail? about 20 hours ago via webRetweetReply
From Computer Science Teachers Association
They're not dumb. They're different. How do we keep them?
One of my favorite little (really little) books, published in 1990, is Sheila Tobias' They're not dumb. They're different: Stalking the Second Tier. Yes. In 1990. In a related article, Tobias summary of her work states:
Unappealing…From Wild WebMink
? Open Source and Government
Australia Government Report Warns Against Including IP In Trade Agreements It ought to be obvious that concessions to create a copyright and patent regime that favours foreign corporations is a bad concession to make in a trade…