Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
April 2009
From insideHPC
Rensselaer Announces New VP of
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has announced they have named a new vice president of research.
From insideHPC
NVIDIA graduate fellowships in visual
Late last week NVIDIA announced that it is funding 10 new graduate fellowships to study the use of GPUs in computing under its 8-year old fellowship program
More than 200 applicants were considered for the award, which comes…From insideHPC
TACC deploys new data intensive computing
Found at HPCwire “Corral,” a system for data-intensive computing and storage, is the newest resource to be deployed by the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin. …Corral will support database…
From insideHPC
Intel charter member of new Consortium on Digital
Late last week energy research company New Energy Finance announced the charter members of a new organization started to develop a better understanding of what the energy infrastructure of the future will look like. From the…
From insideHPC
Cilk Performance
CilkArts has just announced a new tool bundled with its Cilk++ version 1.0.2 release.
From The Eponymous Pickle
More Alpha Hints
Stephen Wolfram talks to Rudy Rucker on his upcoming Alpha release. The work has gotten lots of interest from people like myself who have had long-time interest in anything promising to embed intelligence on the Web. I have…
From insideHPC
Week in review, Nehalem in the HPC
If you don’t regularly check in with HPCwire, my weekly features went up late last week. First up is the fast and furious weekly update, featuring the HPC profession’s favorite news feature, “10 words and a link.” Also up is…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Sticker Based Contactless
Now more than two years ago we saw presentations by vendors pushing contactless payment in smart cards and cellphones. At the time I brought up the fact that you could just affix a sticker on a card or phone to implement aIn…
From insideHPC
In time of turmoil, Sun ramping up HPC
Sun’s Marc Hamilton wrote on his blog last week about changes lined up for the HPC team there Later this month, we will be announcing the newest upgrades to the Sun Constellation System line, providing significant new performance…
From insideHPC
Tape still greenest storage
At least according to this article at Enterprise Systems. And as interest grows in green supercomputing (at the least for minimizing the disruption of extreme power upgrades, even if you don’t by nature tend to hug trees), HPC…
From insideHPC
Capturing a master node with MS HPC Cluster
Not sure if this post is too deep to be interesting to more than a few of you, but thought I’d at least point to it. If you’ve ever asked yourself “How do I capture an image of a compute node which has been customized so that…
From insideHPC
Sun board rejects IBM bid, just negotiation or is the whole thing
This is being reported in several places, but I like the Wired version which you can find here The merger of IBM and Sun Microsystems appears to be coming apart, according to several reports, after a chain of events over the…
From Putting People First
Nokia
Two new interviews on Nokia’s IdeasProject: Social media may have unforeseen limits John Jordan, a pathbreaking tech consultant and academic, measures social technologies in terms of the notion of ‘network externalities,’ which…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Modeling Financial Meltdowns
See Ken Karakotsios's work on modeling financial meltdowns. Great example of using simulation economic models while encouraging collective input:" ... This is the first of a series of posts providing an inside view in the development…
From Putting People First
The rise of the mobile divides
Rich Ling is a sociologist at the Telenor research institute and a visiting professor at the IT University of Copenhagen, who is particularly interested in understanding the social implications of mobile telephony. He just posted…
From Wild WebMink
Sunday Link Round-Up on April 5th
HADOPI Law Passed - by 12 Votes to 4 Exactly how this can be quorate and just for creating a national law that will offer private business the power to cut citizens off from government services as a way to blackmail them into…
From Putting People First
Designing service design principles
Nick Marsh of Engine Service Design outlines some of his experiences developing service principles: “For the purposes of this discussion, I’m assuming that principles are creative generalisations that form the basis of further…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Why We Share Knowledge
Good post by Nancy Dixon on why we share knowledge. Covers important implications for knowledge management and the roles of people within the enterprise. My own experience is that I have seen a largely self-selecting group within…
From Putting People First
Jack Carroll on the history of HCI and interaction design
Grand Old Man of HCI, Jack Carroll, explains the history of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and how the field gave birth to User Experience and Interaction Design. Few people know the history of fields like UX, IxD, Usability…
From Putting People First
IT and the world
Richard Heeks reflects in the latest edition of “Communications of the ACM” on how information technology can be best applied to address problems and provide opportunities for inhabitants of the world’s poorest countries. “In…
From Putting People First
Debunking myths about customer needs
Marketing Management is a bi-monthly strategic marketing magazine published by the American Marketing Association. The Jan-Feb issue contained a very strong piece by Lance A. Bettencourt on giving customers the proper role in…
From Putting People First
A post to look at and to act upon
Bruce Sterling and Jasmina Tesanovic need your help. Despite the fact that U.S. citizen Bruce Sterling and Serbian citizen Jasmina Tesanovic have been married for nearly five years, and for all I can tell still very much in love…
From Putting People First
Information technologies and international development
Information Technologies and International Development, a quarterly peer-reviewed journal that focuses on the intersection of information and communication technologies (ICT) with economic and social development, is a gem. And…
From The Eponymous Pickle
More Simple Telepresence.
I have been examining simple telepresence tools, this article points to some examples. Have not tried these yet, but will.
From CSDiary
SIGBOVIK Conference Approacheth
A quick special announcement of a conference being held on campus tomorrow: ACH SIGBOVIK 2009: April 5th, 1pm, Scaife 125 The Association for Computational Heresy Special Interest Group on Harry Q. Bovik is delighted to present…
From CSDiary
Travelogue: Reflections on the Future for Computing Researchers
OK, I admit it. During the past two weeks I got in a bit over my head, time-wise. But, I’ve gotten through it, and I’m feeling pretty satisfied with the results. As I reported here on March 18, I was in Korea visiting the Korea…
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
ACM Washington Update, Vol. 13.3 (April 3, 2009)
CONTENTS
[1] Newsletter Highlights [2] Computing Groups Call for More Focus on Computing Education [3] 2008 ACM Turing Award Recognizes Dr. Barbara Liskov [4] USACM Seeks Details On Recovery.Gov To Maximize Public Information…From Wild WebMink
Three Links Showing What We Need To Fix
Financial Derivatives Explained Wonderful, clear, vaguely funny explanation of what "derivatives" are and why anyone watching should have understood it would all fold like a house of cards one day. No wonder we have a huge crisis…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Goodbye SGI
A colleague of mine was a founder of SGI. I was asked if I wanted to join them when they started up. We used their graphics engines to do package design in the 80s when they nimbly replaced monster machines. Gave a talk toNow…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Shoppers Making Decisions In-Store
Miller Zell study on where and why shoppers are making buying decisions. Surprising to me is that they did not find in-store digital signage to be influential with unplanned purchases. What are the in-store triggers that capture…