Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
March 2010
From The Eponymous Pickle
Perils of Market Research
In Bloomberg Businessweek: What can and cannot be measured with some market research tools. Very good introduction to the inadequacies of the survey. ' ... It can be a powerful weapon in any company's strategic planning arsenal…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Getting Yelped
In BusinessWeek, A new dynamic, but not any different than newspapers have experienced in the past. Also spaks to the motivation of review/criticisms in general. Yelp: Advertise or Else?The site faces a lawsuit
From Computational Complexity
Repost on Turing and Wasserman- lets talk about...
One of the commenters on the post on the recent Turing Award and the Waterman award pointed out that the context I gave lead to a discussion that was NOT about the work of Chuck Thacker or Subhash Khot. The commenter said: Can…
From Schneier on Security
Secret Questions
Interesting research:
Analysing our data for security, though, shows that essentially all human-generated names provide poor resistance to guessing. For an attacker looking to make three guesses per personal knowledge question…From Putting People First
MicroPublicPlaces
Situated Technologies Pamphlet 6: MicroPublicPlaces Spring 2010 Marc B
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Windows Phone 7 Series Programming
Programming phones seems to be the hot new thing these days. Yesterday Microsoft announced the availability of free programming tools for the new Windows Phone 7 Series of devices. Start with Visual Studio 2010 Express for Phone…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Procter Visualizing Plant Designs
From Consumer Goods Technology: P&G using visualization to optimize plants via fast prototyping. Includes images and vendors involved. Plant design and improvement via visual simulation-based methods is not new, has been done…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Geotagging the Future
Daniel Inniss makes some useful comments on Geotagging and business:'Geotagging the Future with Foursquare, Gowalla and TwitterWritten Location based services are not new, some, such as Loopt have been around since 2005 but 2010…
From Schneier on Security
USB Combination Lock
Here's a promotional security product designed by someone who knows nothing about security. The USB drive is "protected" by a combination lock. There are only two dials, so there are only 100 possible combinations. And when…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
External-memory shuffling in linear time?
You can sort large files while using little memory. The Unix sort tool is a widely available implementation of this idea. Files are written to disk sequentially, without random access. Thus, you can also sort variable-length…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Eric Brewer wins ACM
Eric Brewer has won the ACM – Infosys Foundation Award “for his contributions to the design and development of highly scalable Internet services.”
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Chuck Thacker wins Turing Award
Chuck Thacker has won the ACM A.M. Turing Award (quoting ACM) “for his pioneering design and realization of the Alto, the first modern personal computer, and the prototype for networked personal computers.
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Thoughts On AP CS Principles
The Advanced Placement Computer Science exam is one of the smallest and least diverse members of the Advanced Placement suite of College Board exams. Very few minorities and very few female students take this exam. In some schools…
From Computational Complexity
Central Website for FOCS as a whole (guest post)
(Guest Post by Paul Beame)
There is now a central website for the FOCS conference as a whole here!!
In addition to links to the most recent and upcoming conferences one useful item that is included are locations and …
From The Eponymous Pickle
In-Store Marketing Measurements
In AdAge: A favorite topic of mine: Shopping Aisles at Cutting Edge of Consumer Research and Tech: They Learned It From You: Marketers Working to Better Understand Supermarket Psychology. ... We experimented with this kind of…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Interesting Links 15 March 2010
I know I
From My Biased Coin
Kindle Textbooks
I've had a couple of people point out to me that Probability and Computing: Randomized Algorithms and Probabilistic Analysis (my book) is now available on Kindle. I looked around and saw that several other standard texts are…
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
National Research Council Announces Prizes in Cyberdetterence Research
The Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) of the National Research Council (NRC) has announced prizes for research in cyberdeterrence. The CSTB announced prizes for papers submitted that address at least one of…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Relentless Growth of Online Shopping
In FastCompany: The continuing growth of online shopping. Physical stores continuing to link up. -
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
Hill Tech Happenings, Week of March 15
March 16
Hearing:
The Research and Science Education Subcommittee of the House Science and Technology Committee will hold a hearing on broadening participation in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics education. 10…From Schneier on Security
Typosquatting
"Measuring the Perpetrators and Funders of Typosquatting," by Tyler Moore and Benjamin Edelman:
Abstract. We describe a method for identifying "typosquatting", the intentional registration of misspellings of popular website …From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
Designing a Hybrid Card Game
I'm working on a design for a card game that incorporates a mobile device into the game play. It's for my game design class final project, which is intended to have us solve a design problem of our choosing. I believe creating…
From Wild WebMink
Blog Moved - Reminder Again
Just a reminder that this blog has now moved to Wild Webmink where you will be most welcome to join me from now on.
From The Eponymous Pickle
SXSW Conference Stream
I notice that there has been more than usual buzz about the SXSW conference (South by Southwest) this year. Its a set of interactive, film, and music festivals and conferences that take place every spring in Austin that occurs…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Valuing Spontaneity
I was surprised a while back by getting a number of birthday wishes in a social networking package from people whose names I did not immediately recognize. I quickly realized that the package allows you to automate the greetings…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Foursquare for Business
An interesting item on on the Foursquare space about business applications for the social networking game. Includes a number of examples of businesses doing promotions with FS:FOURSQUARE FOR BUSINESSES foursquare aims to encourage…
From The Noisy Channel
Is Spontaneity Overrated?
It used to be a surprise when people remembered our birthdays, but in the twenty-first century Facebook ensures that we will
From Apophenia
Speaking about Privacy and Publicity
Yesterday I gave the opening keynote at SXSW to over 5000 people (OMG, that room was huuuuuuuge). My talk was about privacy and publicity and I spent a lot of time pushing back against the notion that “privacy is dead.” In…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Cognition and Culture
Mind Hacks posts about the Cognition and Culture blog: ' ... covers the territory where culture and psychology meet ... ' . Also points to their reader section which has lots of useful background sources.
From Putting People First
Four visions of the world tomorrow
Sir George Cox was the closing speaker at The Big Rethink, a ‘Redesigning Business Summit’ organised by The Economist, in association with the Design Council, that aims to develop some fresh ideas on how design thinking can be…