Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
December 2012
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
The Year That Was
That was, that almost wasn’t? src Thomas Lehrer is a mathematician and co-author of the paper, “The Distribution of the Number of Locally Maximal Elements in a Random Sample.” It was published in 1957 in the journal Annals of…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Writing for Computers
I found this Ars Technica series about writing computer programs interesting. In part of my early enterprise career I did this for executives. Explaining to them why computing was useful, and enough training to let them know…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Active Customers as Key to Growth
Very good HBR piece on the use of social customer connections to build your business. How do you get customer advocacy to work for you? Marketing, Product Development and strategy development in a company simply do not have…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Think Different in 2013
In Innovation Excellence: A fundamental credo of innovation. A short post that will remind you of its importance.
From Schneier on Security
Terms of Service as a Security Threat
After the Instagram debacle, where it changed its terms of service to give itself greater rights over user photos and reversed itself after a user backlash, it's worth thinking about the security threat stemming from terms of…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Interesting Links 31 December 2012
Well a new year starts tomorrow. Hope it is a great one for all of you. This is the last interesting links list for the year. It’s a pretty short list though. Last week was pretty quiet on the Internet.
Still time to submit…From The Eponymous Pickle
Automatic Monitoring of Surveillance Cameras
Out of work at MIT. A classic problem. Think of this also as an event analysis situation where we are seeking changes and outliers and need to search possibilities quickly. " ... Now a system being developed by Christopher…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Connecting Exercise
In GigaOM: MiGym is designed to better connect the health club exerciser and the customer. Quantifying the health club workout. I like the general idea, though there could be elements of gamification included. Could the same…
From Computer Science Teachers Association
2013 CSTA Annual Conference
Are you ready for some great Computer Science and/or IT professional development? Or, do you have some great professional development that you would like to share with other CS professionals? Or are you simply anxious to visit…
From The Eponymous Pickle
On the Fallacy of Zero Sum Thinking
Via Mark Perry. Real situations are not zero-sum scenarios, they have unknown contexts and unintended consequences. Always. Be prepared for that.
From The Noisy Channel
Onward, Upward, and [In]ward
![Onward, Upward, and [In]ward](/system/assets/0002/3440/042516_LinkedIn_Tunkelang.small_square.jpg?1476779511&1461593405)
It’s that time — the end of another great year. It’s been a phenomenal year for LinkedIn, for my amazing team of data scientists, and for me personally. The end of year is also an exciting time of transition. I enter 2013 thinking…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Looking Back, Looking Forward
This seems to be the time that people look back on the previous year and forward to the new year. It’s almost January which was named after Janus who is often pictured as looking both backwards and forwards after all. I’ve been…
From updated sporadically at best
Resolutions and Goals for 2013
It has come time for me to publicly announce my goals for 2013 in order to shame myself into following through.I have the following resolutions.Only acquire things I will use. Right now my "minimalism" is sustained by high object…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Scientific Gifts
And a new place to look for them? src George Dyson is the author of Turing’s Cathedral. This book was newly released when we saw copies at Princeton’s celebration of the Alan Turing Centennial last May. It covers John von Neumann…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Emergent Distribution Models
Viewing distribution models. " ... With direct sales forces under heavy pressure and channel partners becoming scarcer as the reseller market undergoes shifts, a new type of distribution that encompasses both and more is emerging…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Corporate Culture and Innovation
In Innovation Excellence: Culture is essential for innovation to work. The real culture. I have been in organizations where the apparent culture promoted innovation, but the actual culture hampered it. Figure yours out,…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Building Networks
How do you build a better personal business network? From Knowledge at Wharton. Good piece: " ... successful networking goes far beyond handshakes and business card exchanges, noted speakers at the recent 14th Annual Wharton…
From updated sporadically at best
Zen Living by the Rules of Soyen Shaku
In thinking about what I want out of 2013, I have become inspired by the rules of Soyen Shaku, the first Zen teacher to come to America. Here they are, from Zen Flesh Zen Bones:In the morning before dressing, light incense and…
From updated sporadically at best
Why I Go Out
My friend Neha sent me this piece Why Go Out, in which Sheila Heti compares going out (to bars, clubs, parties, and the like*) to a cigarette habit, discusses the merits of being alone, and concludes that social interaction may…
From updated sporadically at best
Treat Yo Self: Clean Up Your Code
A couple years ago, I discovered what I thought was the shortcut to building research systems. Forget good software engineering practice! Forget functional abstraction! Copy-and-paste code all over the place; modify it toblog…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Why do students pay for the research professors do?
Universities require their professors to publish research papers. Yet publishing your research has little to do with most of the teaching that goes on in universities. And with online teaching, we can almost completely separate…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: William Gilly, Squid Researcher
Good article.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered.
From Wild WebMink
PBX Project
I’ve written a bit about my holiday project to try the Raspberry Pi as a PBX over on InfoWorld today.
From Schneier on Security
I Seem to Be a Verb
From "The Insider's TSA Dictionary":
Bruce Schneiered: (V, ints) When a passenger uses logic in order to confound and perplex an officer into submission. Ex: "A TSA officer took my Swiss army knife, but let my scissors go. I…From Schneier on Security
Becoming a Police Informant in Exchange for a Lighter Sentence
Fascinating article.
Snitching has become so commonplace that in the past five years at least 48,895 federal convicts -- one of every eight -- had their prison sentences reduced in exchange for helping government investigators…From The Eponymous Pickle
Who Uses Neuromarketing?
During the early days of our cognitive science work we often asked this question. Who among Fortune 500 companies have used techniques to measure and understand the non conscious interaction between consumers and products. What…
From The Eponymous Pickle
End of the Public Phone Network
In IEEE Spectrum: Will this system end by 2018? The 134 year old public phone network is dying. What are the implications of changes to the network and how data travels among people and machines? Or is it entirely about…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Predicting A Supply Chain Network of Fast Data
I don't normally like yearly predictions. But I found these to be thought provoking. They all deal with the long proposed suggestion that increasingly transparent information, among multiple players, about the operation of…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Decepticons
Research at Ga Tech is using 'deception' methods used in nature to enhance behavioral models. Have always been interested in biological models. They have often been used in simulation of competitive systems.
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
The Future Belongs To The Creators
A lot of people are thinking about the future this time of year. I’ve got a few ideas myself. This is the year I’ve done a lot with apps on phones and tablets. I’ve been playing with both an iPad mini and a Windows 8 tablet and…