Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
March 2012
From The Noisy Channel
Video of Strata 2012 Talk on Humans, Machines, and the Dimensions of Microwork
The video of the presentation that Claire Hunsaker and I delivered on “Humans, Machines, and the Dimensions of Microwork” at Strata 2012 is now available as part of the complete video compilation. I’ve taken the liberty to…
From Computer Science Teachers Association
Motivating Student Interest with Job Information
Need a little extra motivation to encourage young women (or anyone for that matter) into your CS courses? Take a look at the 25 Best-paying Jobs for Women reported by CareerBuilder:
http://msn.careerbuilder.com/Article/MSN-2965…From The Eponymous Pickle
What If Modeling in Tableau
What-if modeling, essentially a simple form of simulation, is a powerful concept in business analytics. I was reminded today that you can do this kind of parameter based analysis is Tableau Software. See this article in their…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Video from Thursday
As we’ve covered extensively, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), together with six Federal agencies, rolled out the Big Data R&D Initiative
From The Eponymous Pickle
Special Skills Needed for Predictive Analytics
In Information Management: I agree that specific skills are needed. But even beyond what is said, the ability to understand and map the business processes involved. It is not just the statistics and the math, it is the practical…
From The Eponymous Pickle
About Learning
Learning is a favorite topic of mine. I supported a language laboratory study of sleep learning a long time ago and still follow this area. Here in Wired " ... an interview with Robert Bjork, the director of the UCLA Learning…
From Wild WebMink
Digital Rights Are Just Human Rights, Online
(with thanks to SMBC, who are so generous with their images they even generate the HTML to embed them on your blog)
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: How Squid Hear
Interesting research:
The squid use two closely spaced organs called statocysts to sense sound."I think of a statocyst as an inside-out tennis ball," explains Dr Mooney.
"It's got hairs on the inside and this little dense…From The Eponymous Pickle
On the Dark Side of Teams
In Knowledge@Wharton: Research Roundup: The 'Dark Side' of Teams; the Risks of Social Comparisons; and the Transfer of Entrepreneurial SkillsDoes working in teams make people less receptive to outside input? How can social comparisons…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Melding the Real and Virtual Worlds
Bringing together real and virtual worlds.? No, I still can tell the difference. " ... Social science studies increasingly suggest that the divide between the virtual and real worlds is narrowing. Our experiences of reality…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Procurement Freshly Examined
Bain looks at procurement in some detail. A crucial issue in organizations:" ... Rising commodity costs and volatility in input prices have become facts of life. Basic commodities are under pressure not only from their own…
From Wild WebMink
? Profitable Freedom
My column on InfoWorld today connects the dots of the pragmatic value of software freedom to the CIO and the success of Red Hat. Open source delivers cost saving via freedom, not just by being cheap on licenses.
From The Noisy Channel
Data 2.0 Summit
I’ll be participating in the Data 2.0 Summit on Tuesday, April 3rd, and I hope to see some of you there. Last year, my colleague (and fellow LinkedIn data scientist) Scott Nicholson attended and wrote this guest post about it…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Sanjeev Arora Named Winner of 2011 ACM-Infosys Award
Congratulations to Sanjeev Arora, the Charles C. Fitzmorris Professor of Computer Science at Princeton, who yesterday was named the recipient of the 2011 ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in the Computing Sciences
From Computational Complexity
The Value of an Academic Publication
Russell O'Connor's paper was accepted into last years ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Generic Programming. Russell put the final version of his paper on the ArXiv under a public domain dedication. Russell couldn't transfer author's rights…
From Wild WebMink
? OSI Affiliate Scheme Grows
It’s been an open secret all month, but two new members have joined the Affiliate scheme at OSI – Spain’s CENATIC (the national open source competency centre that’s been so important to the government adoption of open source…
From The Eponymous Pickle
3D Imaging Patents at Apple
An interesting patent description from Apple on 3D imaging patents. And some additional information on 3D imaging developments. Useful for retail context applications and simulation modeling.
From My Biased Coin
The Groupon effect on Yelp ratings (Guest Post)
Giorgos Zervas discusses our recent paper (just accepted to EC).A few months ago, in a paper that eventually appeared at WSDM 2012, John, Michael and I (Giorgos) presented a finding that attracted a fair bit of attention: using…
From Wild WebMink
Available For US Engagements
I expect to be in the USA in early-to-mid May (and possibly again in July). If you would like me to speak at a private or public event, or to provide consulting services, I would be pleased to hear from you.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Cross Posting in Pinterest and GPlus
Starting immediately, select posts from this blog will be cross posted in Pinterest and G+ under my name as an experiment. Follow them there as this idea and design changes evolve. Select posts have been placed in Twitter…
From Schneier on Security
Summer Schools in Cryptography and Software Security at Penn State
Normally I just delete these as spam, but this summer program for graduate students 1) looks interesting, and 2) has some scholarship money available.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Supply Chains Benefit From Information Sharing
This is obvious. Collaboration is important at strategic and tactical levels. But the details are worth repeating. " ... In a report by SCM World, 49.1% of buyers and 40.8% of sellers believe information-sharing benefits supply…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Process: Making Analytics Work for Every Company
When I worked with analytical methods in the big enterprise, it was often the case that work had already been done to map out the business processes involved. In the mid 1980s we were already using methods like expert systems…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Check Outs of the Past
LA Times Article: On the state of the supermarket checkout and coming expected migration to smartphones. With a pointer to technologies of times past that we experimented with in much detail: " ... Ten years ago, shoppers…
From Computational Complexity
Sanjeev Arora wins ACM-Infosys Award
Sanjeev Arora will receive the 2011 ACM-Infosys Foundation Award, the highest honor ACM gives to a mid-career scientist. Sanjeev Arora is one of the architects of the Probabilistically Checkable Proofs (PCP) theorem, which revolutionized…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Obama Administration Unveils $200M Big Data R&D Initiative
The Obama Administration has unveiled details
From Schneier on Security
Harms of Post-9/11 Airline Security
As I posted previously, I have been debating former TSA Administrator Kip Hawley on the Economist website. I didn't bother reposting my opening statement and rebuttal, because -- even thought I thought I did a really good job…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
NY Times on Today
As we noted on Tuesday, the Obama Administration is scheduled to announce a new, multi-agency Big Data R&D Initiative today. An event — to be streamed live via the web
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wikipedia and the University
Abstract of a case study: it is still evolving, but the younger cadres of teachers and students see it as a viable tool. Similar to the way any encyclopedia was used in the past, as an introductory, definitional tool for a…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Jive Intranet Gamification
Team collaboration and Gamification. An area we looked at a number of times without much success. Corporate culture was never one to experiment with anything non traditional. Always worth amother look for the sake of efficiency…