Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
February 2011
From Computational Complexity
Can we Innovate without Producing?
On Friday I heard a speaker lament about how losing the manufacturing base in the US: "You can move a foundry easier than you can move an Internet company." An article in the New York Times has as its headline New York Times
From Schneier on Security
Credit Card Fraud Ring
It amazes me that credit card fraud is so easy that you can run it from prison.
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Interesting Links 14 February 2011
Happy Valentines Day! Surely there is some appropriate computer project or connection for the day but I can’t think of one off hand. Can you? So for me, here are this weeks interesting links. Oh, before I forget. I have a new…
From Wild WebMink
? ForgeRock Starts Year Two With A Bang
ForgeRock was started in February 2010 and is now one year old. In its first year: ForgeRock did business with 35 customers in 10 countries Global turnover exceeded $2M US and continues to grow The company has grown to 35 employees…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Significance of Watson and Jeopardy
In KurzweilAI: a good piece on the artificial intelligence of the upcoming Jeopardy challenge using the IBM Watson computer. Ray Kurzweil on the meaning of computer machine challenges in games and Jeopardy to AI. I have followed…
From The Eponymous Pickle
SEO Gaming by JC Penney
Engadget comments on a NYT article on JC Penney gaming the search process of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on Google Search. I fail to see how anything wrong was done by the retailer, except that the search system as it exists…
From Computer Science Teachers Association
What Do You Need to Know About Computational Thinking?
The theme of the May CSTA Voice is "Computational Thinking." As I thought about what to include in this upcoming issue and reviewed some of the past CT work by people such as Jeannette Wing and Joan Peckham, as well Valerie Barr…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Considering Wal-Mart Bias
The bizarre bias against Wal-Mart in the NYC area. I understand the arguments, but they are essentially against efficiency.
From Wild WebMink
links for 2011-02-13
Document Freedom Day 2011 Don't for a second underestimate the importance of document formats – the way your files are stored by the program you use – in locking you in to a vendor ecosystem. It sounds dull – the esoterica of…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
White House White Board: Austan Goolsbee on the National Wireless Initiative
You gotta love having geeks in the White House!
From The Eponymous Pickle
Country Favorability Ratings
Gallup has published a favorability rating of countries to people in the US. Both the methods used and the graphics are interesting. Trends of the rating over time is visualized. How much these ratings influence the use of…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Word Cloud for this Blog
I created a wordcloud using Wordle, using the RSS feed for this blog. Scanning this, it is clear that it is using only a small subset of recent words in the blog itself, based on the feed.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Word Clouds
A favorite topic of mine, pictures that represent compact, useful and easily scannable visualizations of real data. Here Doug Lautzenheiser discusses the Wordle web application to construct the well known form called 'word…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Modernist Cuisine
Not sure how long this link will work, but a foodie friend sends me the article from the WSJ: The Game-Changing Cookbook: Nathan Myhrvold's 2,400-page 'Modernist Cuisine' upends everything you thought you knew about cooking. …
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Postdocs in Computing
The CRA website has an interesting white paper on the role of postdocs in computer science.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Retail is Ready for Mobile
Good piece with statistics in E-Commerce Times. Useful statistics. If you give the shopper the right kind of choices and offers , at the right time and place, with respectful treatment of the individual, mobile can be a powerful…
From Wild WebMink
links for 2011-02-12
Double Bug: Oracle Kept OpenJDK In The Dark Great explanation from Mark Wielaard of how the effectiveness of the OpenJDK community in dealing with the Double security problem was degraded by poor communication. (tags: Java OpenJDK…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
TCEA 2011 In Review
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From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Pheromone
A newly discovered female squid pheromone sparks aggression in male squids. Article.
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
DC ACM Chapter Co-Hosts Discussion on Digital Government
On February 17th, the D.C. Chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery an the New America Foundation will co-host a panel discussion, "The Open Government Directive: A Year Later." The Open Government Directive was established…
From Schneier on Security
Julian Sanchez on Balancing Privacy and Security
From a blog post:
In my own area of study, the familiar trope of "balancing privacy and security" is a source of constant frustration to privacy advocates, because while there are clearly sometimes tradeoffs between the two,…From The Eponymous Pickle
Rhymes for Our Times
I see that former P&G colleague and renowned advertising exec Norm Levy has set up a blog: Rhymes4ourtimes in conjunction with his book: Rhymes for Or Times: Skews on the News. An amusing set of verses that link to gathered…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Market Research Scanning App
An interesting and natural development. An App by Kinesis Survey Technologies that does both barcode scanning and supports market research functions. Includes the recording of location, time stamps and other on shelf data. …
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
NSF, OECD Partner to Explore Smart Health
The NSF
From Wild WebMink
? Is LibreOffice Open-By-Rule?
Charles-H Schulz from The Document Foundation submitted the data for a benchmark evaluation of LibreOffice. I have read his evaluations and added scores, giving a current evaluation of +5 for LibreOffice (on a scale of -10 to…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Taking Scientific Publishing to the Next Level
Scientific publishing is wasteful. We spend much time perfecting irrelevant papers to get them through peer review. Meanwhile, important papers—that thousands of researchers will have to study—remain filled with errors or suffer…
From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
Processing in Eclipse
After having to set up a Processing project in Eclipse after a long break from anything related to it, I decided to capture my notes to refer to later. I added it as a blog post to our lab's new website in hope it could helpA…
From Computational Complexity
PROS and CONS of being on a Program Committee
What are the PROS and CONS of being on a program committee?
From The Eponymous Pickle
Search Engine Trust
How much can you trust the output of a search engine? I can tell you that many people in the enterprise do, but not always to their advantage. Computerworld explores.
From The Eponymous Pickle
RoboEarth
A Web for Robots. Have also investigated the same kind of idea for retail spaces, and not for roboticsThe Internet has revolutionized how people produce, consume, and share information. Now imagine the same thing happening for…