Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
December 2011
From Computer Science Teachers Association
Winter "BREAK": A Time to Relax and Reenergize
Most of us look forward to our winter breaks. After all, a break in routine is almost always a good thing. Most of us are conditioned to getting up at a certain hour, traveling to work following the same route, doing our last…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
One Compile A Day
A recent blog post by Ian Bogost (The Virtues of Long Compiles) has me thinking once again about the trouble with fast compiles. How would you program differently if you could only compile your project once an hour or perhaps…
From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
Welcome Molly, Future Girl Geek!
Andrew and I are delighted to announce the birth of our first child, Molly! She was born on December 16 at 5:47pm and weighed 7 lbs 3 oz. We're all doing well and enjoying our time together as a new family.
View this post and…
From The Eponymous Pickle
What Makes a Brand Experience Great
Brian Collins on the delightful Hershey store. A great brand experience worth a visit. He provides some reasons why it works.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wizard Theatricals and Technology
Russell Brumfield, aka 'The Wiz', colleague who worked with us at the innovation center on aroma technologies has a new web site. He is an expert on putting on events and now has pulled together dozens of technology specialists…
From Putting People First
Julian Bleecker: creating wily subversions
Steven Portigal interviews Julian Bleecker about the near future, design fiction and storytelling. Julian Bleecker is a designer, technologist and researcher in the Advanced Projects studio at Nokia Design in Los Angeles and…
From Putting People First
Lego is for girls
In its new focus on products for girls, Lego is using quite a lot of ethnographic research: “To develop Lego Friends, Knudstorp relaunched the same extensive field research
From Putting People First
Study: Millennials prefer sharing over ownership
The idea of sharing things instead of owning them goes against everything we’ve been taught as a consumeristic society. Those who have spent their lives “keeping up with the Jones’” may find it hard to suddenly relinquish their…
From Computational Complexity
Game Changers
Two announcements on Monday connected to my two Alma Maters mark the changing face of universities.
It didn't hurt that Cornell…From Putting People First
Design for the marginalised millions
Reboot, a service design firm working in the fields of governance and international development, recently spent time with three marginalized groups in China
From Putting People First
What makes a brand experience great?
Brian Thomas Collins has made a career out of creating brand experiences, “a few of them great”. He writes: “A good brand experience is when a brand does what we expect of it. A great brand experience is something we tell someone…
From Putting People First
Why people adopt or wait for new technology
Jared Spool explores the key differences between
From Putting People First
Five lessons from the best interaction designs of 2011
Frog’s Robert Fabricant breaks down the themes from the 2011 Interaction Design Awards. “Technologies like cheap sensors and cloud computing are increasingly being used to augment our daily lives in both magical and mundane ways…
From Putting People First
Video chat reshapes domestic rituals
Far-flung families are increasingly using Skype, Apple
From Putting People First
The Internet gets physical
NY Times technology reporter Steve Lohr writes on how consumer-based Internet technologies are morphing into new uses in energy conservation, transportation, health care, traffic management and food distribution. Low-cost sensors…
From Putting People First
An evolution toward a programmable universe
With a harvest of data from a wired planet, computing has evolved from sensing local information to analyzing it to being able to control it. Larry Smarr, founding director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
IBM
IBM is out with its sixth annual “Five in Five” list, specifying five technology innovations that have the potential to change the way we live, work, and play over the next five years. It’s a list that has met with some success…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
SIGCSE 2012 For Computing Teachers
This is another of several recent “CSTA Blasts” that I am posting on my blog. If you are a member of the Computer Science Teachers Association you will have seen this and I apologize for the duplication. If you are a computer…
From The Eponymous Pickle
A Look at Local 3D Printing
Discussed here.The idea has been around for a while. When will it's consumer moment come? Remote 3D construction of parts, likely plastic, in out homes in a device that can 'print' in 3-D. Still inclined to think this will…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
DARPA Announces 2012 Young Faculty Award Program
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has announced its Young Faculty Award (YFA) program for 2012, seeking to “identify and engage rising stars in junior faculty positions [i.e., untenured Assistant or Associate…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Training Games
Training games and simulations from Kognito. I was just asked about such systems, which are a favorite topic of mine: " ... Kognito is an award-winning developer of online role-playing simulations and games where users build…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Training the Robotics Designers of the Future
Promoting entry level robotics for kids . Late to order for holiday gifts, but I like the idea. I particularly liked Lego Mindstorms and played with far more primitive approaches years ago. I think there is an advantage…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Determining Pecking Order
A human pecking order algorithm based on linguistic style. Helping with the ordering of online conversations? Or a means to determine marketing influence? Contains some interesting additional background on analyzing text style…
From The Eponymous Pickle
SAP Gearing up Google Apps
Quite interesting development. SAP moving towards easier to access and utilize capabilities in the Cloud." ... The current plan is for SAP to deliver an integration between its Business ByDesign on-demand ERP (enterprise resource…
From The Eponymous Pickle
FohBoh
Just brought to my attention. FohBoh, Front of the house (Foh), Back of the House (Boh). Food service social media. " ... Servicing the restaurant, chef and wine community. Join 40,000 + industry peers to connect communicate…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Textbooks
I was reading through a couple of blog posts by Garth Flint earlier today. I
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
An excellent example of how novel data-driven methods can advance science and society: In February 2012, the journal
From Wild WebMink
? Java and Ubuntu
Despite a panic caused by a misleading headline, not only is Java not being removed from Ubuntu, but the Java reference implementation is actually a package in the main repository. My article today on ComputerWorldUK has the…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Help Shape the CSTA Annual Conference: Be a Proposal Reviewer
This is one of several recent
From BLOG@CACM
Online Stanford Classes Explore New Models For CS Learning
What's cool about the online Stanford CS classes is not the numbers, but the models. They are explorations of new ways to teach computer science.