Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
February 2009
From Putting People First
Open source and mobile banking
After coming home from the Mobile World Congress, Mark Pickens, a microfinance analyst with CGAP
From Putting People First
The three layers of handhelds user experience
Christian Lindholm, a partner and director at Fjord, argues that there are three layers in handhelds user experience: “The highest level I call Bling (this is because, it caters to the visual senses) it contains the visuals,…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
If you could only write one more research paper
Many years ago, I read the following piece of wisdom:
If you had only one year left to live, what would you do differently? What are you waiting for to make these changes, now?
Let me propose a variant for researchers:
If…From CSDiary
Art and Code
I was planning to wait another week before blogging about this, but it looks like things are starting to fill up, so… On March 7-9, Carnegie Mellon will be hosting the ART AND CODE symposium, which is described as “a symposium…
From Computer Science Teachers Association
Where Are All the High School Computer Science Students?
I recently had a discussion with a professor from Virginia Tech on why can't we recruit more students for Computer Science majors at the university level, why can't we get women or minority students, and what can be done to turn…
From insideHPC
The Inquirer Interviews Khronos
The Inquirer has posted a quick interview with the Khronos Group president, Neil Trevett.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Engineering Education
Gary Wnek points out that David E Goldberg has posted an excellent detailed slide show: What Engineers Don't Learn and Why They Don't Learn it. Part of the Ifoundry project, a project for innovation in engineering education.…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Augmenting Reality : Cellphones and Models
The NYTimes has an article: The Cellphone, Navigating Our Lives talks about the concept of augmenting reality. Specifically about new cellphone interfaces that can paint data on top of images around them ... Linking together…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Private Label Winning
In AdAge: Private Label Winning Battle of BrandsMarketers Face Moment of Truth As Retailers' Lines Soar to Historic Sales High ... Package-goods brands face their greatest crisis and strongest threat from private label since…
From Wild WebMink
"Because our copyrights are worth more than your human rights"
Monday is the last day of the internet blackout campaign organised and in support of it I have blacked out my avatars on Twitter and Facebook as well as on this page. Why? It's to appeal a very badly thought-out law that's been…
From insideHPC
CTR
Computer Technology Review published its list of the top 5 trends it expects in HPC throughout 2009. Here is the (abbreviated) list
HPC is becoming more mainstream. Green IT initiatives are getting real. Cloud computing/software…From CSDiary
Thinking About Computational Thinking
What is “computational thinking”? I think I first heard Jeannette Wing use the term back around the time that the Internet bubble burst, and of course we’ve become accustomed to using it ever since. A couple of years ago, the…
From insideHPC
Feldman revisits the memory wall, takes family
Last week HPCwire’s editor Michael Feldman commented on the memory wall, and what may lie on the horizon for HPC The Nehalem processors, though, should provide some relief — if temporarily. The soon-to-be-released quad-core EP…
From insideHPC
AMD demos working Istanbul 6-socket
Report at The Tech Report from Friday detailing a preview of working silicon for AMD’s new six-core Opteron, the chip that AMD hopes will stave off Intel’s forthcoming Nehalem Xeons. The chip is codenamed “Istanbul” Istanbul…
From insideHPC
HyperTransport group
Last week HPCwire ran this press release from the Hypertransport Group, released during their annual pow wow. Pretty standard stuff, except for the way this one reads Believing that the economic downturn makes computing technology…
From insideHPC
Intel aims tweaked servers at cloud
From a story at the UK’s TechWorld we learned last week that Intel is tweaking its Nehalem implementation to be more attractive to “cloud” installations Intel is developing a new motherboard, designed for servers used in cloud…
From Putting People First
Nokia Siemens Network going for
The Nokia Siemens Network website and its forum site “Unite” contain a wealth of valuable articles and background papers:
A huge amount of articles and whitepapers on basic internet access for the ‘next billion’ customers (see…From The Eponymous Pickle
Sketchory
For bloggers and others that might need sketched images: Sketchory. Here described in more detail. 250,000 images available under creative commons license. You can copy or embed, even for commercial purposes. Even includes…
From Wild WebMink
Spot On
Best summary of the New Zealand Blackout that I've seen:
From The Eponymous Pickle
Future of Advertising
Good post covering advertising and marketing futures. In particular this covers aspects of how social networks will change the marketing future. Slides and sound are one page down on the post. By John V. Willshire. From the…
From Putting People First
The Internet of Things in 2020
In February 2008, the European Commission and an European industry working group (EPoSS) held a workshop on the Internet of Things, involving more than 80 experts from universities, research centres and private companies such…
From Wild WebMink
Sunday's Link Roundup
Bill proposes ISPs, Wi-Fi keep logs for police US Republicans declare war on DHCP (not sure they realise that, mind you). What's with all these attempts to outlaw normal use of the internet? Where are they coming from? I never…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Text to Speech Illegal?
Reading James Boyle's The Public Domain(review) has alerted me to copyright issues. The new Kindle has a text-to-speech capability that reads book text to you. Now the Authors Guild is saying that the reading of a text byillegal…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Planning Long-Term Growth
Change and GrowthSure, consumer spending is down and costs are up. But this is a company that is plotting where to build its production plants through 2015, not fretting over oil prices in 2009.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Updating the Library
I visit our local library about twice a week. To get books I have transferred from branches and to browse. Today I watched as a librarian carefully helped a patron figure out how to use a terminal to access their system, do…
From CSDiary
A Comment on the NY Times
Last week, the New York Times published an article by John Markoff, entitled, “Do We Need a New Internet?” I’ve written a brief commentary about this for the CCC blog.
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Does Better Security Depend on a Better Internet?
Last week the New York Times printed an article by John Markoff entitled, Do We Need a New Internet? In the article, Markoff states, “…there is a growing belief among engineers and security experts that Internet security and…
From The Eponymous Pickle
New Economy Engineering and Design
Am considering the New Economy Engineer. Interesting new site. Also in the same domain: The Entrepreneurial Engineer. Worlds can be engineered as well as designed, a careful balance of both works well. I fear we are swinging…
From Computer Science Teachers Association
Looking for Research Participants
As the chair of CSTA's Professional Development Committee, I recently received a request from Mara Saeli, a PhD student at the University of Eindhoven (in the Netherlands), who is seeking some experienced CS teachers to participate…
From CERIAS Blog
Bad JavaScript, no CVE for you!
I'm flabbergasted to see Adobe release an advisory for a critical issue, using everything (BID & a "Vulnerability identifier") but a CVE identifier. I'm not surprised either that JavaScript support in Acrobat was involved in…