Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
March 2009
From CERIAS Blog
Symposium Summary: Transitive Security & Standards Adoption Panel
A panel summary by Jason Ortiz.
Panel Members:
From insideHPC
Monsters vs. Aliens: 100 Terabytes, 1,000 years of rendering, and
The boys and I saw Monsters vs. Aliens this weekend. They loved it, I enjoyed it, and I was astonished at the visual quality of what used to be the hard stuff in computer animation: realistic water and human skin. Unbelievable…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Colgate's Mini Disposable Toothbrush
Colgate continues to do very well. " ... Colgate thinks it could score with the Wisp, set to debut on Apr. 6. Several years in development, it's a disposable mini-toothbrush with a "breath-freshening bead" in the bristles. The…
From insideHPC
Work with NCSA in the Google Summer of
The optics on this are great: marry an HPTC research organization with the cool hip chic-ness of Google. From the release NCSA has been selected as a mentor organization for Google Summer of Code 2009 and is looking for students…
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
Hill Tech Happenings, Week of March 30
March 31
Markup: The Research and Science Education Subcommittee of the House Science and Technology Committee will markup pending legislation, including the STEM Education Coordination Act of 2009. 2 p.m., 2318 Rayburn Building…From The Eponymous Pickle
Google on Emotion and Computing
All intelligence has an emotional component. Thus it is not unexpected that artificial intelligence has an emotional element. We all experience it. The frustration of setting up or learning a new system. How that system changes…
From Wild WebMink
Manchester, Olso, San Francisco - Upcoming Gigs
I've got some speaking engagements coming up, two of them free of charge.
From insideHPC
Macedonia
There was sketchy news on the computerwebs on Friday that Macedonia has just installed its very first supercomputer (no, I didn’t where Macedonia was either: it’s in Europe bordered by Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria, and others). The…
From insideHPC
Intel Details Future Graphics
On Friday of last week, Intel decided to unveil more details on its upcoming graphics chip, Larrabee.
From insideHPC
Cray option buy back
Remember back at the end of February when insideHPC broke the news that Cray was offering to buy back drowning options from employees as a gesture of goodwill? I thought you wouldn’t…so here is the link. Basically the company…
From insideHPC
Today
I wrote a feature last week for HPCwire on solid state drives. I had two goals: first, to provide a little background for those wondering exactly what an SSD is and just why everyone is talking about them now. My second goal…
From insideHPC
The week in
My regular weekly feature at HPCwire was up late last week; from that article’s introduction
Sun sells supers down under for weather prediction; new Rackable solution achieves 99% power efficiency. John West recaps those stories…From insideHPC
Oxford installs supercomputer from Streamline
In mid-March I had an email show up in the insideHPC news hopper with a pointer to news that the University of Oxford had just installed a new cluster from Streamline Computing (a division of Concurrent Thinking, an HPC vendor…
From insideHPC
Academic HPC
A couple weeks ago I invited vendors with academic discounts to send me info and I’d do a round up here in response to what looked like a growing trend. I only got a few responses, but they are good ones. So if you are in an…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Fun not Fear
Barb Didrichsen points me to a new site by Phil Terry: Fun not Fear. " ... The science and math behind 'bad news' With the "fun not fear" Facebook campaign, we are combatting the culture of fear with good news, good acts and…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
More on
Susan Graham provided a great overview in a post a few days ago of the Computing Community Consortium’s March 25th day-long Library of Congress symposium, “Computing Research that Changed the World:
From Wild WebMink
Sunday Link Selection on March 29
I've finally reached home again after two weeks of travel in the US and Europe; here are a few links to celebrate.
- Waiting for the Barbarians by C. P. Cavafy
"Now what
From CERIAS BlogCyber security challenges and windmills
[Note: the following is primarily about U.S. Government policies, but I believe several points can be generalized to other countries.]
I was editing a section of my website, when I ran across a link to a paper I had forgotten…
From The Eponymous PickleBusinessWeek on Business Intelligence
Fairly good piece on Business Intelligence, saying its time is now because it will be the method to get the kind of efficiency that will be required to survive in tougher times. Thus will be a top priority for CIOs. Not bad…
From BLOG@CACMThe Great Electronic Brain and the Rhetoric of Recruitment
We rarely talk about computers as "Electronic Brains" or "Thinking Machines." That seems presumptuous or audacious today. Maybe that's exactly what we need to recruit more people to computing -- bold, noble, presumptuous, audacious…
From Wild WebMinkTwilight Zone Over
That's it - Europe is now messing with the clock too, so the usual northern hemisphere time-zone spacings are back in place and the Twilight Zone is ended. Now we all need a new excuse for missing those telephone conferences.
From Daniel Lemire's BlogA taxonomy of Computer Science researchers
As a kid, you are told that scientists follow the scientific method. They come up with a hypothesis, and they try to falsify it. You also learn about engineers who solve practical problems using science. Later, you learn about…
From The Eponymous PickleImproving your Linkedin Profile
Short CIO article on improving your Linkedin profile. Largely obvious, but a useful checklist, especially to those new to Linkedin.
From BLOG@CACMResults of IT in Education
Short review of the results of the implementation of information technologies in latin american education
From The Eponymous PickleMicrosoft Augmented Reality
Interesting piece I just got to on augmented reality work at Microsoft. Augmented reality has always been of interest to me as a way to overlay data in retail environments for the context of the observer. So a shopper would…
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACMInternet Privacy Bill Possible in this Congress
The Bits blog at The New York Times recently ran an interview with Representative Rick Boucher (D-VA) the new Chair of the Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet of the House Energy and Commerce Committee…
From The Eponymous PickleFree Software and Copyright Law
Legal thoughts from a presentation by Richard Stallman. Once again the very odd implications of copyright law.
From Putting People FirstDimensions of compelling mobile experiences
Dave Zuvernik, senior user research specialist on Adobe XD
From The Eponymous PickleHaptic Jackets
Haptics are the study of using touch as input or output. Touch is a hard sense to deliver or detect precisely. Now the promise of a 'haptic jacket' which will add touch feelings to media. You could wear a haptic jacket atdubbed…
From Wild WebMinkForcing Dutch procurement to be transparent
You may remember last September I published an interview with crusading Dutch IT journalist Brenno de Winter. During our meeting, we discussed the sorry state of ICT procurement in Europe and the findings from a research group…