Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
February 2015
From Apophenia
An Old Fogey’s Analysis of a Teenager’s View on Social Media
In the days that followed Andrew Watts’ “A Teenager’s View on Social Media written by an actual teen” post, dozens of people sent me a link. I found myself getting uncomfortable and angry by the folks who are pointing me to this…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Big Data Apps from Teradata
Have just had cause to go back and look to see what Teradata has done in the Big Data space. Interesting capabilities. Taking a deeper dive. " ... To ease companies into realizing bankable big data benefits, Teradata has…
From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
Review / Ruby Wizardry: An Introduction to Programming for Kids
I think story is a powerful way to teach computer science. I also think that too many programming books are boring. Boring is fine for the experienced programmer looking to learn a new language, but maybe not so great for a…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Big Data in Retail
In SiliconAngle: Obvious and not very much detail. Lots of room for innovative approaches to using data in retail. The opening sentence is telling:" ... Although they haven’t necessarily figured out what to do with the data…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Business Impacts of Effective Data
Measuring the result is important, or how would you know you had any? The means and techniques of measurement are very important. And then what is the value of the data assets being used. In SyBase." ... In a study of over…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Data Science at the Command Line
This is how I did analytics some time ago, with tools like SAS. It can still be done that way. Not sure I want to do it that way, but This book shows how.
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Addressing Privacy Issues at Davos
Recently, the world’s top leaders and thinkers gathered for the World Economic Forum’s annual conference in Davos, Switzerland. In addition to the great variety of world issues discussed, there were a few discussions on how technology…
From Schneier on Security
Programming No-Fly Zones into Drones
DJI is programming no-fly zones into its drone software. Here's how it'll work. The update will add a list of GPS coordinates to the drone's computer that tells it not to fly around the Washington D.C. area. When users are within…
From insideHPC
ThinkParQ Launches BeeGFS on Demand Parallel Storage
This week ThinkParQ launched BeeGFS on Demand parallel storage offering. Dubbed BeeOND, the new offering allows users with HPC clusters to generate job-dedicated parallel filesystem instances on demand.
From insideHPC
How OpenCL Could Open the Gates for FPGAs
"The silver bullet in HLS is the ability to take a sequential description that has been written in C and then find this parallelism, the concurrencies, without the user having to think. That was a necessary technology before …
From insideHPC
Fujitsu Powers Statistical Genetics at Wellcome Trust Centre
Today Fujitsu announced that the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics [WTCHG] at the University of Oxford is using the company's HPC systems to support the genetics research of 25 groups and more than 100 researchers.
From insideHPC
Utilizing Cloud HPC Resources for CAE Simulations
"Industry research indicates that both the general HPC market and cloud HPC are continuing to grow to meet engineering and science demand. As cloud resources increase, users should be cognizant of the HPC platforms available …
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Creating Code Hunt Puzzles
As I mentioned the other day (see Learning From the Code Hunt Dashboard) I have been creating my own Code Hunt puzzles for use with my students. Earlier this week I spent some time at Microsoft Research in a workshop about Code…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Workforce Analytics
Sue Lam in the APQC Blog:" .... By now, I’m sure you’ve heard all of the buzz about analytics and the importance of it for your HR function. Though it is a newer idea for HR, social and behavioral scientists have been using predictive…
From Schneier on Security
Electronic Surveillance Failures Leading up to the 2008 Mumbai Terrorist Attacks
Long New York Times article based on "former American and Indian officials and classified documents disclosed by Edward J. Snowden" outlining the intelligence failures leading up to the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks: Although…
From insideHPC
Lustre Metadata Performance and Solutions from Seagate
"Alongside the increasingly high demands of streaming bandwidth in HPC storage solutions, there is a growing need for higher levels of metadata performance for various applications and workloads. The Lustre parallel file system…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Commerce Anywhere
Brought to my attention: Oracle's Commerce Anywhere Blog. " .... David Dorf, Sr Director Technology Strategy for Oracle Retail, shares news and ideas about the retail industry with a focus on innovation and emerging technologies…
From My Biased Coin
New Heapable Subsequence Paper
In the "only a dozen people could care about this category"...About 4 1/2 years ago, I posted about a paper we had put up on the arxiv about Heapable Sequences and Subsequences. The basic combinatorial structure we were looking…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Smartstones: Human and Natural Technology
A message from the Smartstones Startup, to which I have provided some help." ... Do you believe #tech should be more #human? Are you sick of all the menus, passwords, and barriers to doing simple things like... communicatingThe…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Free Field Guide to Data Science
This appears to be very nicely done. By its title assumes a practical orientation with practitioner uses mentioned. The Field Guide to Data Science, In several formats including PDF, and a supporting App will also eventually…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Turning on Twitter Analytics
This was pointed out to me, a means of turning on Twitter analytics. Have not yet seen any associated reports.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Regression using R and a Start-up Kit
Via Vincent Granville. Good place to get started, since even beginning data analysts know what regression is and how to use it with other packages, Like Excel. So this is a good place to start with R.
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
30 Under 30: Young Scientists Who Are Changing The World
The Forbes 30 Under 30, is a tally of the brightest stars in 20 different fields under the age of 30. What these young men and women have accomplished in their lifetime is astonishing. Now is the time to be young and ambitious…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Using GMail for Business
A lengthy look at GMail, which I used during early tests in the enterprise. It is a good system I have grown to be accustomed to, it does not solve the basic email problem. Too much, too chaotic, and hard to turn into a knowledge…
From Writing
Hello, Startup
Today, I'm excited to announce the early release of my book, Hello, Startup: A Programmer's Guide to Building Products, Technologies, and Teams.
| http://www.hello-startup.net/ |
From Writing
Hello, Startup
Today, I’m excited to announce the early release of my book, Hello, Startup: A Programmer’s Guide to Building Products, Technologies, and Teams.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Winning on the Digital Shelf
A look at winning on the digital shelf. On packaging e-content. Some interesting thoughts, but this is a promotion.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Virtual Reality Emerges
Peter Fader, Wharton Marketing Prof, and others weigh in on the wearable-enabled, virtual reality marketplace. Lengthy detailed piece. Will this finally make them real as a new kind of interface? One recommendation is: Emphasize…
From insideHPC
Skoda uses HPC to Accelerate Automotive Innovation
Škoda Auto, was in need of scalable, high performance computing systems to perform complex product performance and safety analysis. In this case study we learn how they used HPC to rapidly develop more innovative vehicles with…
From insideHPC
A Merit Based Priority Scheme to Optimize the Use of Computing Infrastructure
"Following up on the “Streamlining Research Computing Infrastructure: A Small School’s Perspective”, this talk will discuss how a researcher’s priority in a shared HPC cluster is computed based on her/his usage pattern as well…