Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
February 2014
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
The Evil Genius
Do We Live In A Simulation? René Descartes is famous for countless things in mathematics—Cartesian products, Cartesian coordinates, Descartes’ rule of signs, the folium of Descartes. He is also famous for his work in philosophy…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Swarms of Intelligent Cooperative Drones
Swarms of drones as emergency responders. See some of my previous writings about swarms. How do we install cooperative intelligence? How is cooperative intelligence different from individual intelligence?
From The Eponymous Pickle
SNCR Millennial Report Abstracts
SNCR Supported Study .... (Society of New Consumer Research)Millennials are leading the social commerce movement. They are more likely than any other group to like/follow/pin companies and brands. They are enticed by coupons…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid vs. Owlfish
This video is pretty fantastic:
The narrator does a great job at explaining what's going on here, blow by gross blow, but here are the highlights: Black-eyed squid snares owlfish with its two tentacles, which are tipped with…From Schneier on Security
CROSSBEAM: NSA Exploit of the Day
Today's item from the NSA's Tailored Access Operations (TAO) group implant catalog:
CROSSBEAM(TS//SI//REL) CROSSBEAM is a GSM module that mates a modified commercial cellular product with a WAGONBED controller board.
(TS/…From Schneier on Security
Co3 Systems at the RSA Conference
Co3 Systems is going to be at the RSA Conference. We don't have our own booth on the show floor, but there are four ways you can find us. Monday, we're at the Innovation Sandbox: 1:00–5:00 in Moscone North. At the conference…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Hospitality Internet of Everything
I like this take on the hospitality industry. And its relationship to Big Data. The industry is an example where it makes much sense to utilize real time data, while learning from the patterns in historical knowledge.
From The Eponymous Pickle
History of Rational Economic Forecasting
In the Harvard Business Review Blogs: May require registration. Good thoughts. When I taught forecasting it was always about understanding how the forecast was wrong. It can never contain all the external influences except…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Stop Small Thinking about Big Data
A good, free 15 page pamphlet about Big Data. Co Sponsored by Teradata. Looks to be a set of objective observations about the opportunities and cautions. Integration of new technologies into existing systems of information…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The myth of the scientist as a disinterested individual
We like to have an idealized view of the scientist. He or she is someone who chose against a high-paying career to pursue the ideals of science and academia. Unlike the greedy engineer or entrepreneur, he works not for himself…
From BLOG@CACM
Reflections on Using AppInventor to Teach First-Year Programming
This post reflects on my experiences of using AppInventor to teach Android development to first-year university computer science students.
From Schneier on Security
Building an Online Lie Detector
There's an interesting project to detect false rumors on the Internet.
The EU-funded project aims to classify online rumours into four types: speculation -- such as whether interest rates might rise; controversy -- as over the…From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
DARPA Announces New Program in Big Data
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced the launch of the Big Mechanism program to develop automated technologies that will help explain the causes and effects that drive complicated systems. Paul Cohen…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
University of Arkansas Program For Minority Students & Majority Women
An interesting looking summer program. One has to get there on their own from what I can tell but no cost other than that. Open to 11th/12th graders.
TECHNOLOGY AWARENESS PROGRAM (TAP)
The Technology Awareness Program (TAP)…From The Eponymous Pickle
3D Sensor Enabled Smartphone
In Mashable: Project Tango from Google. Quite an interesting effort. Relates to a number of our indoor navigation experiments. Ready here to do a retail store test. " ... an experimental Android-powered smartphone with…
From The Eponymous Pickle
A Twisting Phone
My son pointed me to this iPhone App, that twists a phone on its long axis, to enable automated panorama images. It was featured recently on Shark Tank. An example where devices in a phone can be used via their unintended consequences…
From Schneier on Security
Brian Krebs
Nice profile of Brian Krebs, cybersecurity journalist:
Russian criminals routinely feed Mr. Krebs information about their rivals that they obtained through hacks. After one such episode, he began receiving daily calls from a…From Schneier on Security
CANDYGRAM: NSA Exploit of the Day
Today's item from the NSA's Tailored Access Operations (TAO) group implant catalog:
CANDYGRAM (S//SI//REL) Mimics GSM cell tower of a target network. Capable of operations at 900, 1800, or 1900 MHz. Whenever a target handset…From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Twitter Accounts for CSTA Members To Follow
Patrice Gans has a great post on the CSTA blog about Creating a Professional Learning Network that I wanted to share. Normally I would just include a link on my Monday morning interesting links page but I wanted to add a bithttps…
From Wild WebMink
Sun Friends On The Move
I see that two friends I worked with at Sun — most notably creating blogs.sun.com — are on the move. Danese Cooper has decided that she can take on one more corporation’s move towards open source and has been appointed Head of…
From Wild WebMink
Stand Up For ODF In The UK
Originally posted on Meshed Insights & Knowledge:Showing that no issue is actually sorted until the end of the process is reached, Microsoft is trying to get its partner network to speak up for OOXML as a document format for…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Augmented Reality and 3D Remote Manufacturing
Had explored the close connection between augmented reality and remote manufacturing / 3D Printing. Its interesting to see that the AR company Metaio is now offering developer kits that support this connection. They write:…
From Computer Science Teachers Association
Creating a Professional Learning Network
For the first time in my teaching career, I am teaching at a school with other computer science instructors. Not all computer teachers are as lucky; many are the only such teachers in their schools, and in some cases, even their…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Comcast and Time Warner
Locally we are part of Time Warner. Whose support I am less than enthusiastic about. What will the change mean? I would prefer some competition. In Knowledge@Wharton:Will Comcast’s Merger with Time Warner Give It Too Much…
From Schneier on Security
RCS Spyware and Citizen Lab
Remote-Controlled System (RCS) is a piece of spyware sold exclusively to governments by a Milan company called Hacking Team. Recently, Citizen Lab found this spyware being used by the Ethiopian government against journalists…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
The Joy of Teaching Computer Science
Recently The Atlantic published an article, “The Joy of Teaching Computer Science in the Age of Facebook.” The article has a Q&A with Mehran Sahami, a professor and Associate Chair for Education in Computer Science at Stanford…
From Apophenia
Can someone explain WhatsApp’s valuation to me?
Unless you were off the internet yesterday, it’s old news that WhatsApp was purchased by Facebook for a gobsmacking $16B + $3B in employee payouts. And the founder got a board seat. I’ve been mulling over this since the news…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Code.org Teacher and Student Awards
New program from Code.org to recognize students and teachers who are making a difference in computer science.
Do you know a teacher or student who's changing the face of computer science - in big ways and small? Code.org wants…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Gamification of the Office
Our own experiments showed that it was much easier to gamify external facing systems than to make game dynamics work internally. Internally you have the control, but corporate culture can easily interfere. This article does…
From Computational Complexity