Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
March 2011
From Putting People First
Why Nokia failed:
Controversial British columnist Andrew Orlowski published a long investigating article on Nokia’s failure to build its own smartphone platform. “When Nokia CEO Stephen Elop announced that Nokia was abandoning its development…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Building It and Getting the Shopper to Buy it
From Computational Complexity
STOC 1989
A student at Northwestern gave a presentation about a STOC 1989 paper. I've been to well over a hundred conferences and the memories of many just merge into each other. But some conferences stand out in one's life and STOC 1989…
From Putting People First
Addressing poverty through human-centered design
A few days ago the global innovation firm IDEO announced its commitment to apply design-thinking to address poverty with the launch of IDEO.org this fall. Of course, I immediately remembered the vivid debate last year that kicked…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
What Is Computer Science All About
One of the big questions that comes up time and again is “what is computer science all about?” Get a bunch of computer science people in a room and you’ll get almost as many answers as there are computer science people.I don’t…
From Schneier on Security
Full Body Scanners
Wired.com has a good three-part story on full-body scanners.
From Putting People First
Designing Pleasurable Products and Interfaces
DPPI 11, the 5th conference on Designing Pleasurable Products and Interfaces, will take place in Milan, Italy this year and Experientia partner Mark Vanderbeeken is part of the scientific committee. The DPPI conference originally…
From Wild WebMink
? Parallel Filing
In the future, where will most of the patents that patent trolls use come from? Find out in my article today on ComputerWorldUK.
From BLOG@CACM
TeachScheme! Using Mathematics to Teach Programming
Matthias Felleisen and a team of computer scientists have developed the TeachScheme! Project, which provides high school teachers with courseware and other tools to use mathematics to teach programming.
From Putting People First
Experientia partner jury lead at Core77 Design Awards
Experientia partner Mark Vanderbeeken will be one of 15 international Jury Captains for the inaugural year of the Core77 Design Awards. The Core77 Design Awards which have just been launched is positioned as “a global design…
From The Eponymous Pickle
What Your EMail Domain Says About You
Fascinating blog post in Hunchblog about what your choice of domain says about your demographics. This is surprisingly important, it has been used by the enterprise to sort and estimate the importance of incoming messages.
From Geeking with Greg
Personal navigation and re-finding
Jaime Teevan, Dan Liebling, and Gayathri Geetha from Microsoft Research had a fun paper at WSDM 2011, "Understanding and Predicting Personal Navigation", that focuses on a simple, highly accurate, easy, and low risk approachThis…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Bing Adds 2D Barcodes and Grabbing Text
For a recent study I compared Redlaser and ShopSavvy smartphone barcode readers for on shelf use. I notice today that Microsoft has added a 2D barcode reader to its Bing mobile App. I tested it on an IPhone 4.3. ... Their…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
The New York Times picks up on a point made in the recent report of the President
From The Eponymous Pickle
Brands as Media Properties
In Brandweek: Unilever says that brands must be turned into media properties via content.
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
A Wednesday News Roundup
Lots of interesting stories touching on computing research in The New York Times and Time magazine in the past couple weeks: - Feb. 28 –
From The Eponymous Pickle
Febreze Reaches Billion Dollar Mark
Commentary regarding the Febreze benchmark on the Brand Channel. A Billion dollars in sales for a quite simple concept.
From Computer Science Teachers Association
Top 10 Reasons Why You Should Attend (or Should Have Attended) SIGCSE
Top 10 Reasons Why You Should Attend (or Should Have Attended) SIGCSE
10. It has a long tradition (42 years to be exact!) of bringing together people from all around the world to discuss computer science education! 9. Where…From BLOG@CACM
Who Needs a Tablet?
Tablets do not solve a mainstream problem, they only serve a niche.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Problems with Mobile Location Data
A thoughtful interview post on issues that occur with mobile location data. " ... Between identifying relevant and accurate data sources, harmonizing data from multiple sources, and finding new ways to store and manipulate that…
From Computational Complexity
Les Valiant wins the Turing Award
From Putting People First
Sitra
Last week Experientia participated in Ecobuild 2011 (London, UK) to showcase its work in user-centred sustainable design for the built environment, and in particular its experience of Low2No, a major low-to-no carbon impact development…
From Wild WebMink
links for 2011-03-09
'No sysadmin' is the key to Freedom Box "The Freedom Box project will succeed or fail on whether it works "without sysadmin". If only trained sysadmins can figure out how to be free, the society won't be free. It's like the early…
From Schneier on Security
Malware as Job Security
A programmer installed malware into the Whack-a-Mole arcade game as a form of job security.
It didn't work.
From My Biased Coin
Leslie Valiant Wins Turing Award
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
CS Principles AP Course Pilots Wanted
As many of you know there is a new AP CS course, APCS Principles, under development. A second round of pilot courses is planned for next school year and the program is actively seeking schools/faculty to sign up to take part. …
From The Eponymous Pickle
Computing Beyond Mathematics
An interesting viewpoint article in ACM. In one way this is quite obvious, computer science has gone far beyond mathematics ... far beyond just 'computing':Computer and Information Science and Engineering: One Discipline, Many…
From The Eponymous Pickle
SAS Pushes Business Intelligence to Mobile
A very good direction we are seeing as key Business Intelligence vendors are supporting mobile. You should be able to take your intelligence to wherever your data comes from.SAS pushes BI to Apple iPad, iPhoneSAS Institute is…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Breaking news: HTML+CSS is Turing complete
A programming language is Turing complete if it equivalent to a Turing machine. In practice, it means that any algorithm can be implemented. Most programming languages are Turing complete, including SQL, ECMAScript, Java, C,…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Location Based Marketing
In Adage: a good overview of what marketers should think about when considering the use of location based services.