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 Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
DevCamps
Microsoft is happy to announce that Windows 8 DevCamps have been added to the DevCamps program to enable developers to build beautiful…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Simplicity in IT
Twitter event today:@IBMSmtrCmptng Expert Integrated Systems Twitter chat TODAY at 4PM EST #expertsyschat http://goo.gl/vC95hI will comment later.
From The Eponymous Pickle
New SAS Visual Analytics for Big Data
In Information Management: The in-memory play continues: " SAS has unveiled a new in-memory analytics platform designed for scalability and very fast performance on standard blade architecture ... SAS Visual Analytics represents…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Windows Reimagined
Windows 8 is going to be a big change for a lot of people. Microsoft is of course doing a lot to help people prepare for this. As part of this effort Microsoft is running a set of anchor events to help developers get started…
From Wild WebMink
Promoting Document Freedom
Today is Document Freedom Day. It’s not the easiest subject to explain. It’s easy to explain why being free to video a police encounter in the USA is important, or why it’s wrong for your eBook to be remotely controlled by a…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
DARPA
Today, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), together with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA),
From Schneier on Security
SHARCS Conference
Last weekend was the 2012 SHARCS (Special-Purpose Hardware for Attacking Cryptographic Systems) conference. The presentations are online.
From BLOG@CACM
Curriculum Standards Efforts Are Important: Help Reduce Committee Battles
Curriculum standards efforts are important. They help bootstrap new departments, and they help reduce pervasive curriculum committee battles.
From Putting People First
An introduction to Lean
Laurence McCahill, design lead and co-founder of Spook Studio, explores for .net magazine the Lean Startup and Lean UX movements, which bring a groundbreaking approach to product development, and what it means for designers,…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Top 50 Brands in Content Marketing
Some interesting statistics about mostly very well known companies that develop online content. Includes measures like Twitter followers, Facebook fans, Unique site visitors, inbound links and content marketing index. Further…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Judea Pearl Wins Turing Award
For contributions to artificial intelligence in the area of uncertainty and causal reasoning. More details about his work here. His excellent book: ... Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference, won the 2001 Lakatos Award…
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
Federal Trade Commission Pushes Forward With Online Privacy Initiative
Yesterday the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released the final version of its report on consumer privacy online. It issued a draft report in December 2010 and received over 450 comments in response, including those filed by…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
White House to Announce Big Data R&D Initiative Thursday;Live Webcast Planned
The
From The Eponymous Pickle
Giving Credit
In the HBR Blogs: We were always taught to give credit where it was due in the big enterprise. It does not meant that it always happened. A certain amount of diffusion of credit always occurred. Of course if you do not…
From Computer Science Teachers Association
Why Aren't You GoIng to CS&IT
Once agwin this year, CSTA will be holding its annual Computer Science and Information Technology conference. It will be a fabulous event and the people who attend will give it rave reviews and will tell us it is the best professional…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Statistical Insights
Steve Miller in Information Management: On our inability to link common sense and statically rigorous reasoning. Very true, and it is even more difficult to explain this kind of reasoning to the decision makers that may ultimately…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Tablets Enhance Buying
In a survey by Aislebuyer. " ... 57% of shoppers said retailers that use mobile devices instead of cash registers are more appealing, even though only 22% have shopped at such stores. "We're seeing increased interest from retailers…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Publicly available large data sets for database research
Most database research papers use synthetic data sets. That is, they use random-number generators to create their data on the fly. A popular generator is dbgen from the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC). Why is…
From Computational Complexity
"Math was a mistake- I made it too hard"
(REMINDER- IF you are a STUDENT who wants to GOTO STOC 2012 but needs money to go then you should GOTO the STOC 2012 homepage and click on Travel Support. Deadline to apply: April 4.)
In the movie Oh God Book II God, played…
From Schneier on Security
The Effects of Data Breach Litigation
"Empirical Analysis of Data Breach Litigation," Sasha Romanosky, David Hoffman, and Alessandro Acquisti:
Abstract: In recent years, a large number of data breaches have resulted in lawsuits in which individuals seek redress…From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Why Universities Should Host High School Programming Contests
I finished up last week with a trip to Western New England University where they were running a high school programming contest. I love these events because I think they have real value for the students and the teachers who bring…
From Wild WebMink
Magic Editable PDFs
Please stop sending .DOC or .DOCX files as attachments to your e-mails. There is a better way. Send editable PDFs. I explain how in ComputerWorldUK today.
From Putting People First
Who, Where, How We Work: The Intersection of Culture, Workplace, and Social Media
What happens when designers & manufacturers discuss the workplace & social media? Dexigner reports that IIDA has published a whitepaper summary of the IIDA Industry Roundtable 15, focused on the changes in the industry, and in…
From Putting People First
Technology can push our crazy buttons, rewire brains
Our tech saturation has reached such a critical point that some experts say it’s rewiring our brains. Research psychologist and computer educator Larry Rosen of California State University, Dominguez Hills, suggests that being…
From Putting People First
I
Who are these companies and what do they want from me? Alexis Madrigal’s voyage into the invisible business that funds the web. “This morning, if you opened your browser and went to NYTimes.com, an amazing thing happened in the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wikipedia Page 1 Rank
For some time now it has been common to see Wikipedia results to come up on page 1 of a Google search. Search Engine Watch looks at a number of studies that have looked at this behavior, based upon the kind of searches used…
From Wild WebMink
? Artistic Excellence
[This post is only useful to people who can buy MP3s from Amazon US - sorry] I have previously recommended samplers from Mishara Music. They specialise in singer-songwriters and their previous two samplers in Summer 2011 and…
From Schneier on Security
Congressional Testimony on the TSA
I was supposed to testify today about the TSA in front of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. I was informally invited a couple of weeks ago, and formally invited last Tuesday:
The hearing will examine the…From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
Hill Tech Happenings, Week of March 26
March 27 Hearing: The Technology and Innovation Subcommittee of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee will hold a hearing on the effect of federal policies on innovation. 10 a.m., 2318 Rayburn Building March 28 Hearing…
From The Eponymous Pickle
George Dyson on Advertising
In the Edge: George Dyson on self-replicating codes, the universe .... and strangely, on advertising. Or more generally as I see it 'selling' ..." ... What's the driver today? You want one word? It's advertising. And, you…