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 The Eponymous Pickle
Big Japan Offers Smartphone Bar Code Scanner
I am informed that Big Japan is offering a free software developer kit (SDK) for their smartphone bar code scanner. Much more here. A number of Apps including ShopSavvy use their SDK today. See my recent review of barcode scanning…
From My Biased Coin
Bursts -- a new Barabasi book
At the end of the month, Barabasi's new book, entitled Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do, will be released. Here's the pre-order Amazon link, and he's apparently put a web page up with information about thehere…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Medical Lab on a Chip for the Home
The idea of having a medical testing chip in every home reminds me of a number of ideas floated for a biometric toilet, floated by a number of Japanese firms in the 1990s.
From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
CRA-W Grad Cohort 2010 Next Week
I'm very fortunate to be attending my second CRA-W Grad Cohort next week. I also went last year when it was held near San Francisco. This year it will be near Seattle, and am very excited that I have a couple of school friends…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Ning Fails at Free
We looked at the free social networking service Ning, created by Marc Andreesen. Now is has gone to a pay service, though users can migrate to alternative networks. An instructive example where the free economic model did not…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Tentacle Tie
Very nice.
From Putting People First
Innovating for all
The book “Innovating with people
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Does Your Computer Lab Scare Away the Girls?
The Internet is as the same time one of the great distractions and great spontaneously learning environments in history. As I looked at my twitter stream I saw a link to the live stream from TEDxSeattle and decided to take aSapna…
From Putting People First
Tales of Things
Tales of Things is a new tool that allows people to attach memories to their objects in the form of video, text or audio, thus “exploring the implications of The Internet of Things (network of objects that are traceable at anytime)…
From Schneier on Security
Fake CCTV Cameras
CCTV cameras in Moscow have been accused of streaming prerecorded video instead of live images.
What I can't figure out is why? To me, it seems easier for the cameras to stream live video than prerecorded images.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Business Intelligence in the Home
From the Spotfire blogging team. The number of devices in the home that now have an IP address. You are not alone. The implications? The new forms of data? Good blog to follow.
From BLOG@CACM
Robots After Roomba: The Ethics of Electronic Companions
As robots become woven into the fabric of daily life, what ethical issues will the world face?
From The Eponymous Pickle
Blogs Making a Small Business Grow
Walter Riker in Ease of Blogging points to a recent article on using blogs to make a small business grow. He continues to write well on bogging topics. Add it to your feed. Keep it up Walter.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Open Source
E-Commerce Times on the benefits of Open Source. Good introduction. -
From Computational Complexity
The Pad
So I broke down and bought the iPad. Many people have asked whether the iPad is worth buying. The short answer: It will be.There are many many iPad reviews out there on the web so what can I add? It wins as an entertainment…
From Wild WebMink
? Understanding Patent Absurdity
New FSF-promoted video on software patents, and more.
From Schneier on Security
Guns Painted to Look Like Toys
Last weekend I was in New York, and saw posters on the subways warning people about real guns painted to look like toys. And today I find these pictures from the Baltimore police department. Seaching, I find this article from…
From BLOG@CACM
World of Warcraft-Playing Professors
Are academics taking serious games too seriously?
From BLOG@CACM
What Makes a Good HCI Systems Paper?
Proposing a standard for reviewing HCI systems papers.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google Buzz Update
Good Adage Media article which updates Google Buzz. Includes excellent stats on Buzz usage versus Twitter, Facebook, Wave and Myspace. The stats show that it barely alive and there is evidence that Google is doing little to…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Parallel Mathematica
Writing parallel programs to take advantage of new multicore processors is seen as a very esoteric thing. Jeff Todd of Wolfram Research just sent me a more information about how it can be done with Mathematica 7. In particular…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Mobile Location in Retail
Treosystems is a company that we worked with in our innovation centers. A leader in the accurate gathering and delivery of product location and wayfinding in retail. They have been using kiosk based solutions for years in thousands…
From Schneier on Security
Security for Implantable Medical Devices
Interesting study: "Patients, Pacemakers, and Implantable Defibrillators: Human Values and Security for Wireless Implantable Medical Devices," Tamara Denning, Alan Borning, Batya Friedman, Brian T. Gill, Tadayoshi Kohno, and…
From The Eponymous Pickle
TweetDive Launched
Of interest, a good practical example of associative memories: " ... Saffron's launch of Tweetdive, an open-source demo app showing how associative memory technology works. Interestingly, TweetDive uses the world of live Twitter…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Traffic Data
Nice visuals in Flowingdata on traffic. Not so much about analysis, but about what the flow of traffic looks like. Augmenting data with color can make insight jump out at you. Inspirational for doing better visuals and allowing…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Teachers Don
I was invited to be on a panel at Northeastern University (I was a last minute fill-in but happy to attend) talking about Teaching With Technology. Now the difference between teaching technology and teaching with technology is…
From Wild WebMink
? Inside Politics
Shame Peter Mandelson didn’t download some common sense Concise and sensible article is pretty damning of Mandelson over DeBill, and rightly so: “Legislators have a responsibility to strike a balance between the competing needs…
From BLOG@CACM
Social Media and the Twitter Backchannel at CHI2010
A marked difference at CHI 2010 compared to last year is the amount of research around social media and the use of social media during the conference. These practices are enabling the conference to be less about one-to-many …
From Schneier on Security
Storing Cryptographic Keys with Invisible Tattoos
This idea, by Stuart Schechter at Microsoft Research, is -- I think -- clever:
Abstract: Implantable medical devices, such as implantable cardiac defibrillators and pacemakers, now use wireless communication protocols vulnerable…From Computational Complexity
New Constructive Aspects of the Lov
Guest Post by Bernhard Haeupler
The Lovász Local Lemma (LLL), slightly simplified, states that: Given a set of “bad” events, if for every event A there exists a subset of events with total probability mass at most 1/e such that…