Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
March 2013
From The Eponymous Pickle
Ahold Boosts Online
In Food Business News, another major retailer pushes online. " ... Ahold USA, which reports that sales increased 3% in fiscal 2012, to $25.8 billion, says it will build business by offering more private-label products and by…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Innovation in Consumer Goods Companies
In CGT: What consumer goods companies are doing for innovation: " ... What do Nestlé, Campbell Soup Company and General Mills all have in common? They all beat the odds by delivering highly successful new consumer products…
From The Eponymous Pickle
IBM In-Store Image Recognition App
In PopAI: IBM Research steering shoppers in the store and combatting showrooming. In the early days of our retail innovation center we worked with IBM image recognition systems. Here augmented reality interacts wity packaging…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Cisco Pushes Internet of Everything
Cisco putting value on the Internet of everything. Imagine everything is tagged and communicating on the net. And smart too.
From Schneier on Security
Marketing at the RSA Conference
Marcus Ranum has an interesting screed on "booth babes" in the RSA Conference exhibition hall:
I'm not making a moral argument about sexism in our industry or the objectification of women. I could (and probably should) but it's…From The Eponymous Pickle
Causes of Innovation Failure
In Innovation Excellence: Some fairly obvious, but worth reviewing to understand the process.
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
DARPA Grant to Carnegie Proves Seriousness of Cyber-Security Efforts
President Barack Obama, during his State of the Union address, discussed education and the revolution of industry, bringing it back to America. President Obama also discussed high school curriculum reform to better prepare students…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Do NULL markers in SQL cause any harm?
The relational model, and by extension, the language SQL supports the notion of NULL marker. It is commonly used to indicate that some attribute is unknown or non applicable. NULL markers are a bit strange because they are not…
From Schneier on Security
Technologies of Surveillance
It's a new day for the New York Police Department, with technology increasingly informing the way cops do their jobs. With innovation comes new possibilities but also new concerns.
For one, the NYPD is testing a new type ofDaily…From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
When Do We Teach Debugging?
I spent some time debugging student code today. Actually I spend a lot of time debugging student code these days. It is not something I mind at all. I see it as taking advantage of teachable moments. I believe that DebuggingHow…
From BLOG@CACM
Exascale Software: Just a Few Orders of Magnitude
Extraordinary parallelism, unprecedented data locality and adaptive resilience: these are daunting architecture, system software and application challenges for exascale computing.
From Putting People First
The disappearing interface
Where static computer screens and smartphones suck in our gaze and extract us from the world around us, many of the most interesting new tech gadgets and ideas move us back out into the open. Instead of all-purpose, full-focus…
From Putting People First
Designing the political future
After technology received so much attention as a key differentiator for Barack Obama’s reelection campaign, Cooper Managing Director Doug LeMoine asked Scout Addis, the Director of User Experience at Practice Fusion, to discuss…
From Putting People First
Are our household appliances getting too complicated?
Who needs a kettle with four heat settings? A washing machine with a ‘freshen up’ function? A toaster with six browning modes? What happened to the good old days of the on/off switch, asks Tom Meltzer in The Guardian. “Function…
From Putting People First
Language issues. An Interview with Brigitte Jordan
Last September, social anthropologist Nora Schenkel had the opportunity to interview Brigitte Jordan, described by Cat Macaulay as one of the “godmothers” of design ethnography. Schenkel interviewed her on how she transitioned…
From Computer Science Teachers Association
President Obama Answers Question About Computer Science
If you haven't seen it yet, check out the two and a half minute video of President Obama on Google+ Hangout.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlOySsg7oxY
When asked directly about whether requiring CS programming in high …From The Eponymous Pickle
Real Air Travel Costs
M J Perry writes that flight travel cost per mile has decreased 50% since 1980. Interesting statistics and very surprising. Some of the commenters suggest that the analysis does not include reduced comfort, waiting and smaller…
From The Eponymous Pickle
New Sim City
A new version of SimCity is coming out tomorrow to considerable enthusiasm. SimCity opened the eyes of a number of executives to the use of simulation when it first came out in 1989. I had several contact me asking if we simulate…
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
Congress to Consider Patent Litigation Reforms This Week
Two events on Capitol Hill this week will focus on potential patent litigation reforms. Both will be available by live webcast. Congressional Briefing on “Patent Trolls and Their Impact on the Economy” Tuesday, March 5, 2013,…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Gamification and Innovation
In Innovation Excellence: How gamification influences open innovation. Two favorite topics with spending numbers and forecasts. We used gamification to innovate around supply chain problems.
From Wild WebMink
Saying “Copy” Was A Screw-Up
Why using the word "copy" was probably the screw-up that took away our rights and allowed publishing middle-men everywhere to eternally tax culture.
From Schneier on Security
New Internet Porn Scam
I hadn't heard of this one before. In New Zealand, people viewing adult websites -- it's unclear whether these are honeypot sites, or malware that notices the site being viewed -- get a pop-up message claiming it's from the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
The Stall at Disney's Tomorrowland
I have grown up around both personal and job related visits to Disney. So this review of Tomorrow Land hit home. Seen it since the late 60s. Exactly what I had thought, Disney is not much about predicting the future any more…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Where are the “big problem” jobs?
Several authors, scientists and entrepreneurs have lamented our poor ability to innovate. It seems that industry is recruiting few people to work on hard problems, except maybe when they are supported by the government: Private…
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
Do Not Track Legislation Reintroduced in Senate
On Thursday Senator Rockefeller of West Virginia introduced legislation to establish an option for people to opt out of tracking their online activity. It is S.418 and can be reviewed online. The Senator introduced a similar…
From Computational Complexity
Do we ever NEED the adv pumping lemma for Reg langs?
Recall the Pumping Lemma and the Advanced Pumping Lemma for Regular languages: Pump. Lemma: If L is regular and infinite then there exists n such that for all w∈ L , |w|≥ n, there exists x,y,z y≠ e, w=xyz, such that for all…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Disfluency
In The Edge: Why do simple cues so influence what we perceive? Reminds me of Semiotics, which is also a way to look at how cues change our view of the world, recently applied to advertisements by a colleague. How are the changes…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Ultrasound on Smartphones and Tablets
More sensor developments we need to watch. Directly how practical and accurate remains to be seen. " ... Qualcomm, in the fourth quarter of 2012, acquired the assets of EPOS, a developer of digital ultrasound technology. Qualcomm…
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
Hill Tech Happenings, Week of March 4
March 6 Hearing: The House Homeland Security Committee will hold a hearing on the Department of Homeland Security’s role in cybersecurity for critical infrastructure. 10:30 a.m., 311 Cannon Building March 7 Hearing: The Senate…
From My Biased Coin
Rankings Don't Matter (But)
Back when I started at Harvard, people would literally say things to me like, "I didn't know Harvard had computer science." Now I could just point such people here.