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 CSDiary
“Isn’t it great to have a President who cares about science?” This was a statement made by Google CEO Eric Schmidt to a group of academics and industry leaders a few weeks ago. Indeed, there has been a huge amount of activity…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Pre-Businesses
Considering non-monetizable pre-businesses whose 'cool clock' may be ticking. Can you guess what social network that ZDNet is talking about? A good piece on the dilemma.
From Computer Science Teachers Association
Differentiated Instruction
As I was grading a movie summary from my Fundamentals of Programming class, yesterday, I noticed the varying insights that the students had to the Charles Babbage movie I had shown in class. This assignment suggested to me that…
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
Hill Tech Happenings, Week of March 15
March 17 Meeting: The Election Assistance Commission will hold a meeting. One of the agenda items concerns voter registration databases., 11 a.m., 1225 New York Avenue, Suite 150
March 19
Hearing: The Senate Commerce, Science…From The Eponymous Pickle
Net-Map
From Visualcomplexity, something called Net-Map which allows users to manipulate the relationship of players and decisions. What is interesting here is that the approach is not technological, but more of a touch, paper and pen…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Lower Inventories
Lower inventories in retail are likely to cause more out-of-stocks. Yet it will also cause retailers to be more creative in understanding the problem in general. Also it will drive retailers to understand their profitability…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Intuit on Small Business Innovation
Steve King outlines the Intuit Future of Small Business report and points to a just released research brief on innovation in small business. If you run one or work with small businesses this is interesting. A sample finding…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Culinary Innovation Center
Interesting work by Wegmans. Has some connections to other innovation center work. There is lots of interest in North America about innovative food preparation and the explosion of TV food networks and the idea of a 'foodie'…
From insideHPC
More on scientific clouds from Dan
As I mentioned last week, I recently did an article for HPCwire with a Q&A with Dan Reed from Microsoft about his CCF team and the intersection of clouds and HPC. He expanded on a part of the conversation we had by email with…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Gardening and research
I love gardening. I love research. These activities are analogous:
Gardening Research
Biodiversity minimizes the impact of diseases and pests. A multidisciplinary or broad research program is more resilient against systemic…From insideHPC
An actual HPC blog conversation, more on the OpenMP debate with
Now, this is the sort of thing that happens in other communities all the time (the Mac community for example, where I used to spend some free time reading — now I just don’t have free time), but it doesn’t happen in HPC very…
From insideHPC
Penguin launches new workgroup-sized
Last week Penguin Computing announced they had launched two new workgroup-size clusters. First up, a 16 TFLOPS Tesla-based system Penguin is now offering an Altus 1702 fully-integrated cluster with four twin 1U compute nodes,…
From insideHPC
Sun gears up to try utility cloud again using somebody else
Timothy Prickett Morgan reported at Channel Register on Friday that Sun is evidently gearing up to make a third run at selling cloud computing cycles to customers. This based on comments that Sun CTO Greg Papadopoulos made a…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Smart Phone GPS
Have been experimenting with a number of walk tracking methods on my IPhone. There are many pedometer style applications, which work fine but need calibration. Now that I have a GPS phone have looked at several GPS applications…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Borders Backing from E-Commerce
In StorefrontBacktalk: Borders was originally trying to cleverly integrate online and bricks. Though that did not draw me there. Now they are pulling back, likely a victim of Amazon. The local brick Borders, a longtime favorite…
From insideHPC
SDSC Hosts Two Workshops on Bridging HPC and
The San Diego Supercomputer Center [SDSC] has announced that it will host two, 2-Day workshops designed to help begin to bridge the gap between high performance computing and humanities.
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
A Symposium on
Ed Lazowska and Peter Lee on November 4 proposed a brainstorming exercise to identify about a dozen game-changing advances in computing research over the past 20 years. Several people responded, as summarized in a November 30…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Sweet Success of Smell
On scents in environments: ...
From insideHPC
Are you an HPC vendor with an academic
The response to the couple of recent posts I’ve done about academic freebies and specials has been great. So I thought I would gather them up and list them in an Academic HPC Stimulus post here at the site. So if you (or your…
From Wild WebMink
Saturday Link Roundup on March 14th
From The Eponymous Pickle
Working Habitats : Office Evolution
Herman Miller, the creator of the widely praised, iconic Aeron chair, was one of the collaborators with our early innovation center projects. We tested office novel office space designs with them. Now they are talking about…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Web is 20
Hurrah Berners-Lee! Web celebrates 20th anniversaryAnalyst: A single paper written 20 years ago today became a great 20th-century idea.
From Putting People First
NESTA launches innovation lab to improve UK public services
NESTA, the UK’s National Endowment for Science, Technology, and the Arts, has set up The Lab, a new UK innovation structure that will bring together all the players across public service delivery to “come up with fresh ideas…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Beyond Minority Report Interfaces: Sixth Sense
Very interesting TED talk presentation on gesture driven wearable devices by Pattie Maes. What I found particularly interesting is the inclusion of a projector that can use any available surface. (at the right the hand is used…
From insideHPC
HPC and cloud computing,
I don’t usually link to my own stuff, but you may find this interesting. I just finished an article/Q&A with Dan Reed, longtime HPC’er, science and computation advocate, and head of the Cloud Computing Futures research team at…
From insideHPC
Sun
Sun’s CEO is doing a series on his blog about his company’s strategic imperatives: 1. Technology Adoption 2. Commercial Innovation 3. Efficiently Connecting 1. and 2. He’s on post three of four, with video. Check them out: one…
From Putting People First
Alan Cooper on the similarities between interaction designers and agile programmers
During the Agile 2008 conference, Amr Elssamadisy interviewed Alan Cooper, the father of Visual Basic and supporter of interaction design. He talked about his contact with the Agile movement and the similarities discovered between…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google Voice is Coming
I have used Google-acquired Grandcentral for about a year now. It has been very useful, especially if you need to consolidate multiple numbers such as landline and mobile. Good for the very mobile small business. Only problem…
From Wild WebMink
Friday link roundup on March 13
USDOJ: OPA: Publicly Distributed Documents The documents themselves are fascinating, but the fact they are being made available (at least initially) as PDFs of scanned paper documents speaks volumes about the urgent need forIBM…
From BLOG@CACM
Canaima, Venezuela's Linux Distro Venezuela Ii
Second part of Venezuela open source experience, this time a short talk about Canaima, the linux debian distro for public entities .