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 The Eponymous Pickle
A Smell Sensory Future
Roger Dooley gives a good overview of the Whiff!: The Revolution of Scent Communications in the Information Age book by Russell Brumfield and James Goldney. I have mentioned this lively book on scent sensory topics here a number…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
What is a 'Better Internet'?
Ellen Zegura is Professor and Chair of Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She writes to us today in her role as chair of the NetSE Council. What is a “better Internet”? The current Internet has been a remarkable…
From Putting People First
Forthcoming Rosenfeld Media books
Rosenfeld Media, which is run by Lou Rosenfeld, publishes short, practical, and useful books and webinars on user experience design. Here are their forthcoming titles: Design is the Problem: The Future of Design Must be Sustainable…
From CERIAS Blog
Do we need a new Internet?
Short answer: " Almost certainly, no."
Longer answer:
The blogosphere is abuzz with comments on John Markoff's Saturday NT Times piece, Do We Need a New Internet? John got some comments from me about the topic a few weeks back…From CSDiary
Gallery of Greats
This one is for our alumni and other friends who haven’t been on campus for a while. During one of the celebrations in honor of Ed Clarke’s winning of the ACM Turing Award, portraits of Ed and some of the previous CMU Turing …
From The Eponymous Pickle
Hackers Among the Amish
Good Kelly post, have only experienced the Amish from a distance and from the highways seeing all those rare clotheslines in a modern age. Best point from the post: their default response to emergent tech is set to 'no'. It…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Extending the Brand
Jonathan Baskin looks at the extension of the Mr. Clean Brand. Why not? A very stong brand with a great image that has slipped over the years. If only we could have made him talk!If does not destroy the brand and adds to that…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Virtual Worlds for Business Book
This looks to be good: " ... Nick from Clever Zebra here. After some pushing from friends and colleagues, I'm pleased to tell you that the Virtual Worlds for Business eBook is going free, and open source today! We'll be announcing…
From Wild WebMink
OpenSolaris - Changing The World Another Way
A rather unusual project just started in the OpenSolaris community. It's the OpenSolaris Lending Project. Instead of directly working on the code for OpenSolaris, the new project provides a venue for OpenSolaris community members…
From The Eponymous Pickle
New Focus Group: The Game
Great idea, but I continue to see few groups succeeding at it. A carefully tailored game can be expensive to produce:How World of Warcraft Promotes InnovationThis video game demonstrates in its structure and scoring some fundamental…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Agile Design Podcast
Podcast on optimizing agile design. By UXDesign, via IBM Design.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Automating Data Visualization
Nice little instructive, technical piece:Automating Data Visualization with Ruby and Graphviz I often have the need to visualize data from the enterprise resource planning system we use at work. For those not familiar, an ERP…
From Wild WebMink
Link roundup for the week ending February 14
OpenOffice.org Conference 2009 Registered OO.o members get to pick the location for the annual conference, and this year there are some absolutely fantastic choices. The Library of Alexandria? Iceland and its Gullfoss? Budapest…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Microsoft's Retail Stores
Prof Peter S. Fader of Wharton looks at Microsoft's plans to set up some retail stores, and makes some suggestions." ... One of the biggest differences between the two tech giants is that Microsoft has no computers of its own…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Intel Investing in Social Networking
They say why in this short article. Also I have heard 'Twitter' used several times in the non technical press in the past few days, don't recall hearing about it there before. My experiment continues, with ups and downs, my…
From Putting People First
Playful augmented objects
Touch is a research project, led by Timo Arnall, that investigates Near Field Communication (NFC), a technology that enables connections between mobile phones and physical things. The project aims to develop applications and…
From BLOG@CACM
Usable Privacy and Security
We are facing an increasing number of security failures, not because of problems with encryption algorithms, network protocols, or system implementations, but rather due to problems with the user interfaces of computer systems…
From The Eponymous Pickle
FTC Says Self-Regulate Behavioral Marketing
In Adage, see also the complete US Federal Trade Commission news release and report. " ... The Federal Trade Commission seemed to give a major victory to marketers today when it confirmed it will let them self-regulate behavioral…
From Putting People First
Kazys Varnelis
Kazys Varnelis [CV | blog], the author of Networked Publics and the Director of the Network Architecture Lab at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, is writing a new book and posting…
From Putting People First
Dubberly Design articles
Hugh Dubberly is a forum editor at Interactions Magazine, which means that he writes, co-writes or edits articles for the magazine. The website of his company, Dubberly Design Office, contains all of these excellently written…
From Putting People First
Interview with Jeff Howard of Design for Service
Jeff Howard writes the blog Design for Service and is also the curator of the most comprehensive and well organised service design reference library on the internet. Over the past few days he has been discussing service designing…
From Wild WebMink
Old Code and Old Licenses
I was in Brussels at the weekend to attend FOSDEM, one of the handful of "real" Free software developer conferences I attend each year (another is LCA which I went to in Hobart two weeks ago). I was once again honoured to be …
From BLOG@CACM
Open Source in Latin America
An introduction to open source and its applications in south america.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Eye Tracking - Tie Tying
Short piece on Google eye-tracking studies and universal search. Interesting to see how they approach it. I like the Tie tying example, it was one of the first 'aha' moments I had with remote teaching using the Web.
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
What I Have Learned About Life From War Games
Like most dads who have professional careers, I have little time for games. Nevertheless, I spend some time playing war games. These games have taught me some basic principles.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Provisional Words
Nick Carr posts about Automatically Updated Books. Where he points out that devices like the Kindle can provide updated text for for any work. Great for a book that needs up-to-date information. It is just updated in the background…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Locations too Honest
I see that GMail has added a new optional feature to its signatures. It will add a location designation that it derives from an IP address. In an article, Wired suggests that any such features should allow you to control the…
From insideHPC
ORNL & Morehouse to Offer Supercomputing
Morehouse College computer science seniors now have their own supercomputing class in the catalogue.
From insideHPC
Intel to Invest $7 Billion in US
Intel CEO Paul Otellini announced yesterday that the company has planned to spend roughly $7 billion over the next two years to build advanced manufacturing facilities in the US.
From Wild WebMink
Link roundup after travelling too much
- TripIt API Documentation - v1More web end-points for cloud applications. This is the path to the future of cloud.
- A Twitter Decision"Twitter spam. Really? Are you even paying attention? I