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 BLOG@CACM
DBMSs For Science Applications: A Possible Solution
Quite a few scientists who deal with the processing and storage of large amounts of data are unhappy with relational DBMSs. Here are several reasons why—and a possible solution.
From CSDiary
A Transition
The Computing Research Association (CRA) is one of the most important advocacy organizations for computing research. It promotes the cause of computing research to policymakers and other organizations interested in science policy…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Don Norman on Happy Design
Don Norman's March TED talk : "Three ways that good design makes you happy".
From insideHPC
NASDAQ to delist SGI
SGI has received news from the NASDAQ that trading of their stock is set to be suspended tomorrow. The company has requested hearing on the issue The Nasdaq Stock Market on March 3, 2009, [indicated] that trading of the Company’s…
From Putting People First
SustainIT - a supplement worth reading
The Independent today introduced SustainIT, the first in a series of three monthly supplements on ICT and globalisation. Some of the articles in the supplement (especially those not written by sponsor BT staff) are a treat: Corporate…
From insideHPC
H+L Architecture Named NCAR Design
H+L Architecture has been named the design firm for the new National Center for Atmospheric Research [NCAR] facility in Wyoming.
From CSDiary
Veloso Wins ACM SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award
The ACM SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award has been given to CMU Computer Science Professor Manuela Veloso. The award is given at the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and is intended to “recognize researchers…
From The Eponymous Pickle
3D Patient Record Interface
A clever 3D patient record interface by IBM Research Zurich. Obvious in the sense that it uses a 3D manipulable image for something that is complex and 3D: the human body. Acts as a front end for multiple dimension patientVideo…
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
ACM Turing Award Goes to Creator of Influential Innovations in Computer Software Design
MIT's Liskov, First U.S. Woman Ph.D. in Computer Science, Pioneered the Standard for Modern Programming Language and Software Reliability
ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, has named Barbara Liskov of the Massachusetts…From Putting People First
Tactical tech
Tactical Tech is an international NGO helping human rights advocates use information, communications and digital technologies to maximise the impact of their advocacy work. They believe that new technologies have significant…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Skittles Marketing Experiment
A recent experiment by Mars using a number of Web 2.0 services on their site is nicely summarized by Paul Gillin: Skittles' Bold Social Media Experiment. The idea started by using Twitter to increase buzz about the candy and…
From Putting People First
An anthropologist gone techno
Jukka Jouhki (blog), an anthropologist and post-doc researcher at the Department of History and Ethnology at the University of Jyv
From Putting People First
Social media is here to stay
danah boyd, a Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, just joined Microsoft Research New England On 29 February, she gave her first talk at Microsoft since joining the company. This talk, entitled…
From Apophenia
it's time for SXSW!!
After taking a break to finish my dissertation, I'm heading back to SXSW and I. Cannot. Wait. SXSW is one of my favorite-ist conferences evah. It's filled with fun folks who are truly engaged with the web, social media, and other…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Paper Water Bottles
In a conversation with the design company Brand-Image I was introduced to their design concept: the paper water bottle. An example at the right. Some true alternative thinking to make paper containers for water. With a close…
From insideHPC
Ballad of the Massively Parallel Supercomputing
And this is my first music post. Always something to celebrate here at insideHPC. Mike Bernhardt
From CSDiary
Claytronics on Slashdot
The Claytronics Project has hit Slashdot (again) today. See the post by clicking here. Jason Campbell (Intel Research Pittsburgh) is quoted in the article, and some of the comments that have been posted have been interesting.…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Guidelines for Behavior Ads
From the BBC, a new trend?New guidelines on behavioural ads UK ISPs stand to make a lot of money from targeted advertising. The online advertising industry has launched a set of guidelines for a genre of adverts that have been…
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
ACM Washington Update, Vol. 13.2 (March 8, 2009)
CONTENTS
[1] Newsletter Highlights [2] USACM Outlines Technical Principles for Open Government [3] USACM Hails Boosts in Research Funding [4] NIST Presents New Research on Voting Systems [5] New Legislation Proposes Increase…From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
Hill Tech Happenings, Week of March 9
March 10
Hearing The Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on patent reform, with a focus on recent court decisions and possible legislation. 10 a.m., 226 Dirksen Building
The Subcommittee on Emerging Threats, Cybersecurity…From insideHPC
AT&T wants to run your
Well, maybe not your HPC datacenter, but they are definitely lining up to run big enterprise datacenters, and $19B business in 2008. From an article at The Register Thanks to a bunch of acquisitions, AT&T has offered application…
From insideHPC
BNP Paribas deploys Tesla-based
BNP Paribas Corporate and Investment Banking announced last week that they have deployed a new CPU-based computer A significant portion of the calculations, about one TeraFlop (one thousand billion calculations by second), performed…
From Apophenia
"Social Media is Here to Stay... Now What?"
Last week, I gave my first talk at Microsoft since joining MSR. This talk was part of the annual Tech Fest where researchers from labs around the world come and share their work to the broader Microsoft community. For the most…
From CSDiary
Is CS Enrollment on the Upswing?
We’ll have to wait for the new Taulbee Survey results to come out (any day now), but there are a few signs here and there that CS enrollments are on the upswing. We just had our annual department Open House event, where we invite…
From CSDiary
Keeping Up
I’m way overdue for a new entry on this blog. The past two weeks have been pretty crazy. I attended the Computing Leadership Summit and the CRA Board meeting in DC; made a trip to Florida with Luis von Ahn to visit with donors…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Cruising, Searching and Selecting
Herb Sorensen of TNS takes a scientific look at shopper behavior in their habitat: Deconstructing the Shopping Trip (so far!). Another excellent read.He also reminded me of work at Wharton about how people efficiently (or not)…
From Putting People First
Empathy is growth
Dev Patnaik, founder and chief executive of Jump Associates, argues in Business Week that knowing the wants of your customers is more important than out-innovating your competitors. It’s become fashionable in the last decade…
From Putting People First
The LIFT conference experience
One of those things hard to achieve with conferences is a good atmosphere. The recent LIFT conference in Geneva, Switzerland clearly has it down to a science: logistics were so well taken care of that you hardly noticed them…
From Putting People First
New frontiers at LIFT09
The final session of the 2009 LIFT conference was about new frontiers, devoted to people who are pushing the envelope, and reinventing their fields in the process. Melanie Rieback discussed the evolution of security with regards…
From Putting People First
Nokia
Two new interviews on Nokia’s IdeasProject: This device we make in our own image changes everything Renowned computational biologist and educational innovator James Bower believes the Internet, rather than representing some new…