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 Computational Complexity
March Madness
Once again, America's favorite binary tree, the NCAA Men's National Championship Bracket. The tree seems to get more unbalanced every year. There are four regions, the East has the traditional 16 teams, the West and South have…
From Wild WebMink
Free Money!
Kiva are giving away $25 to anyone who asks today. It’s true. The catch? You have to loan the money to someone who has far, far less money than you do and who will use it to bootstrap their business. Like everything, Kiva has…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Visualization on the iPad
iPad visualization Apps. Some interesting examples of ways to visualize things on a tablet. Tablets are ways to simplify interaction, as are visualization technologies. This example is by no means complete, but a good start…
From Schneier on Security
Jamming Speech with Recorded Speech
This is cool:
The idea is simple. Psychologists have known for some years that it is almost impossible to speak when your words are replayed to you with a delay of a fraction of a second. Kurihara and Tsukada have simply built…From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
The Tag Challenge: 5 Thieves, 5 Cities, 12 Hours on March 31
The U.S. Department of State has unveiled the Tag Challenge, a “social gaming
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Interesting Links 12 March 2012
In between the usual meetings, email exchanges, phone calls and meeting basketball stars (Why College?) I managed to collect a good number of links this week. Please read though the whole list and I am sure you
From The Eponymous Pickle
Legacy of the Japanese Earthquake and Tsunami
Mark Montgomery of Kyield writes about the legacy of the Tohuki earthquake. Its broad managerial implications and governance. This reminds me of the preparation of our supply chain to much less catastrophic 'random' events like…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Kahn Academy Has an App
In FastCompany: Look forward to taking a closer look. Will this prove to be a fundamental change in the educational process?" ... Khan Academy, the wildly popular YouTube lecture series, is slated to launch its iPad app any…
From My Biased Coin
A Brief Comment on Conference Software
I'm currently juggling serving on two PCs. One uses HotCRP. One uses EDAS. In my humble opinion, HotCRP hugely dominates EDAS. Perhaps EDAS isn't actually so bad, but by comparison, it's just painful.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Daylight Savings Time and Costs
MJ Perry on Daylight Savings Time. Including an analysis of its cost. I find the Wikipedia article on the topic also quite interesting.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Allostatic Load and Post Traumatic Stress
Some time ago I got the chance to interact with Allostatix, the best known practitioner of the measurement of Allostatic Load, a multiple component human health stress measurement. Their analytics involved are particularlyuse…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Quantifying the Patient of the Future
More on quantifying the patient. Back to who owns the data and can ultimately leverage it. Can you afford the sensors needed? The quantified self movement's practitioners are also called self-quanters.
From Wild WebMink
? Sunday Cabbage
Close-Up Cabbage, originally uploaded by webmink. I was cooking for 10 today, so decided to saut
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
For March Madness, the Mathematics Behind Bracketology
Just in time for the kickoff of
From My Biased Coin
Housing Day Midterm
As a sign I just must be getting old, I don't get an issue some students have with me.Since I've been professing, I hold the midterm for my class the Thursday before spring break. It's where the exam fits best, and I'm wellA…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Linkedin Acquires Rapportive
Have used Rapportive for years. If you have many contacts it usefully provides information about them on a right hand column in GMail. It makes sense that they have now been acquired by Linkedin to get even more information…
From Wild WebMink
? A Day At The Races
As a child, my parents used to regularly take me point-to-point racing. I wasn’t very interested in the horses, but there were often trees to climb and always a picnic and friends in droves. My parents used to “have a flutter”…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Big Data and the Stalker Economy
Correspondent Jerry Michalski comments in Forbes on Big Data and the Stalker Economy. Based in part on our conference call about Big Data from this Monday. Some excellent points.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Demographics of Digital Platforms
Colleague Dean DeBiase on this topic. Good points, Dean. " ... One of the most interesting aspects of the analysis issued recently by Nielsen company NM Incite on the U.S. Digital Consumer (although the fact that 274 million…
From Computer Science Teachers Association
Thinking Big About Computer Science Education
Thinking big about computer science education means thinking about how we can guarantee that every American student has some formal computing education. There are many ideas for how we can go about doing this, but there are …
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
UPenn Professor Talks Robotics at TED 2012
Vijay Kumar, Professor of Mechanical Engineering & Applied Mechanics as well as Computer & Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania, delivered a fascinating talk at last month’s
From Geeking with Greg
Ad targeting at Yahoo
A remarkably detailed paper, "Web-Scale User Modeling for Targeting" (PDF), will be presented at WWW 2012 that gives many insights into how Yahoo does personalized advertising.In summary, the researchers describe a system used…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Dr Z
If you have downloaded and installed the new Windows 8 Consumer Preview you have noticed that is is different. In many ways very different from previous versions of Windows. Zhiming Xue aka Dr. Z has created a series of posts…
From Putting People First
In praise of lost time
Facebook Timeline is an exemplary bit of interaction design that does little to advance the timeline formally. Yet it might alter the nature of human memory itself. A Domus Magazine design report from Palo Alto by Dan Hill. “It’s…
From Putting People First
Striving and Surviving: exploring the lives of women at the Base of the Pyramid
On International Women’s Day, the GSMA mWomen Programme released a study called “Striving and Surviving
From Putting People First
Health and ethnography: don
When it comes to health, consumers
From The Eponymous Pickle
Priceonomics
Priceonomics. 130 million prices to buy or sell just about everything. I wonder why this kind of data has not been provided before.
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Humboldt Squid Can Dive to 1.5 km
Yet another impressive Humboldt squid feat:
"We've seen them make really impressive dives up to a kilometre and a half deep, swimming straight through a zone where there's really low oxygen," the Hopkins Marine Station researcher…From Schneier on Security
<i>Liars and Outliers</i>: Book Excerpt
Gizmodo published the beginning of Chapter 17: the last chapter.
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Why College?
Yesterday Edwin Guarin and I represented Microsoft at the formal opening of a computer lab at the Clark Elementary and Middle school in Hartford CT. The lab was donated by Ray Allen (UConn and Boston Celtics basketball star)Ray…