Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
April 2010
From Putting People First
Transition for display industry
Interesting, this point of view from the Samsung Economic Research Institute: “As demand for CRT display devices winds down and the penetration rates of TVs and PCs in advanced markets rises, the rise in demand for display devices…
From Putting People First
How do older people use e-mail?
Researchers at the Universidad Pompeu Fabra (UPF) in Spain have studied how older people interact and use email in their daily life. The study, conducted by Sergio Sayago, was carried out in social centres in Barcelona and will…
From Putting People First
Emerging-market consumers are hard to reach
The Economist explores the topic of consumer research in emerging markets: “Emerging markets are far more varied and volatile than mature ones. There is little money around: the average income per person in China is around $3…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Librarians in the Information Age
A few days back I posted about the US Library of Congress saving all Tweets. I just came upon a book: This Book is Overdue ... by Marilyn Johnson. Which covers lots of related issues. She reminded me of the loss of the content…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Lego and Adidas with Augmented Reality Packaging
An interesting example of Lego using extended packaging to excite potential buyers, partnering with Metaio, see also, related work with Adidas. 'LEGO Group Brings its Augmented Reality Boxes to All Its Stores Worldwide After…
From My Biased Coin
Should Harvard's Intro CS Class Do Away with Grades
There's been discussions of late on the possibility of offering our intro CS class in two flavors -- a "graded" and "SAT/UNSAT" version. (Same class, just two different grading options formalized into two course numbers.)I was…
From The Eponymous Pickle
God as a Mathematician
Herman Wouk on God as a mathematician. Is it, as Wouk suggests: The Language God Talks ... "? . More on writer Herman Wouk.-
From The Eponymous Pickle
Low Cost Winners
In Harvard Business: The Secret Sauce of Low Cost Winners. " ... it is a culture that is "proud to be cheap" in good times and bad. Their people cut erasers in half, turn off the lights when they leave the building, bring…
From The Noisy Channel
Qui, Quae, Quora
A friend of mine at Quora invited me into their private beta a couple of weeks ago, and by now I suspect that many of you are using it–especially since I’ve somehow managed to be the top hit for [quora invite]. Speaking of which…
From Schneier on Security
Lt. Gen. Alexander and the U.S. Cyber Command
Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, the current Director of NSA, has been nominated to head the US Cyber Command. Last week Alexander appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee to answer questions.
The Chairman of the Armed …From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
Hill Tech Happenings, Week of April 19
April 21
Hearing:
The Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on cybercrime and identity theft. This was previously scheduled for April 8. 10 a.m., 226 Dirksen Building
The Communications, Technology and the Internet…From Computer Science Teachers Association
Tennessee Moving Forward on CSTA Chapter
Tennessee is talking! Well, at least in a very small corner of Tennessee, Chattanooga to be precise, the community of Computer Science Educators is beginning to grow.
After the summer leadership cohort workshop in Chicago…From My Biased Coin
Guest Post : Justin Thaler/New Paper
I'm happy to introduce Justin Thaler, a first-year graduate student at Harvard that I'm advising. You can find out more about Justin at his home page. Justin volunteered to write a post about a paper we (Cormode, Mitzenmacher…
From Putting People First
Ubiquitous service design
Peter Morville (pictured) and Jeffery Callender, who recently released the book
From Computational Complexity
Is Guessing a good idea?
The following is from an Ask Marilyn Column. I paraphrase this since its from memory.
READER'S LETTER: I have heard of exams where you are penalized for guessing. How do they know you are guessing?
ANSWER: These are multiple…From Wild WebMink
links for 2010-04-19
Interlocking Rings – Set of 2 I can think of a Lego fan who would love these. I wonder how long the trademark and patent threats that take these off the market will take to come? (tags: Lego Jewelery Rings art design)
Planes…From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Interesting Links 19 April 2010
Friday morning this week I head to Washington DC for the 2010 US Imagine Cup Finals. You can come by the US Imagine Cup Community Showcase on April 26, 2010 from (AM until 2Pm at the Newseum, Washington, DC. Register HERE: www…
From Schneier on Security
Life Recorder
In 2006, writing about future threats on privacy, I described a life recorder:
A "life recorder" you can wear on your lapel that constantly records is still a few generations off: 200 gigabytes/year for audio and 700 gigabytes…From The Eponymous Pickle
Data Singularity
On the Data Singularityby Michael E. Driscoll "... In a nutshell, the Data Singularity is this: humans are being spliced out of the data-driven processes around us, and frequently we aren
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Credentials or Knowledge
The ever interesting Will Richardson got me thinking again today. He talks about how to credentialize learning in a post titled An Open Mind (In Higher Ed at Least) from open course ware such as the MIT OpenCourseWare project…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Flowing Data
Newly discovered company. Note the emphasis on letting experts discover hidden patterns. That's useful, but I think it better to let experts and less-than-expert people with new ideas also work with the data. Not crowd sourcing…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Data Everywhere
Economist article on the superabundance of data. The value and the complexity it produces. New techniques, hardware and pushing the manipulation of this data down from the high end analysts to the end users is crucial.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Power Aware Computing
From the CACM:Recipe for Efficiency: Principles of Power-Aware ComputingPrior work on power management reflects recurring themes that can be leveraged to make future systems more energy efficient ... "
From The Eponymous Pickle
4 Block World on Computing
In the whimsical four block world: Computers getting cheaper an better.-
From Wild WebMink
? Going Open
ACTA opens up at last; password changes pointless; crowdsourcing is not open source; and more.
From Apophenia
Big Data: Opportunities for Computational and Social Sciences
Scott Golder recently wrote blog post at Cloudera entitled “Scaling Social Science with Hadoop” where he accounts for “how social scientists are using large scale computation.” He begins with a delightful quote from George Homans…
From Michael Nielsen
Open Architecture Democracy
This is the text for some brief remarks I made about open architecture democracy at the beginning of a panel on the subject, moderated by Tad Homer-Dixon, and with co-panelists Hassan Masum and Mark Tovey. One day…
From Wild WebMink
? Accommodating Innovators
An excellent paper by Lawrence Lessig leads to the question why we are criminalizing the next generation in protection of the past.
From Computer Science Teachers Association
Elective Status Creates Chaos for Courses and Students
A recent experience brought to us by a school within our local CSTA chapter drives home some of the unusual difficulties we have in developing Computer Science programs in our high schools.
It seems that seventeen students chose…From Computer Science Teachers Association
Elective Status Creates Chaos for Courses and Students
A recent experience brought to us by a school within our local CSTA chapter drives home some of the unusual difficulties we have in developing Computer Science programs in our high schools.
It seems that seventeen students chose…