Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
April 2012
From Putting People First
Nest Thermostat: User-centered design is the best marketing
I enjoyed the final paragraph of the Fast.CoDesign article on the second generation Nest Thermostat: “Here
From Putting People First
The future of money in a mobile age
Within the next decade, smart-device swiping will have gained mainstream acceptance as a method of payment and could largely replace cash and credit cards for most online and in-store purchases by smartphone and tablet owners…
From Putting People First
The Smart City starts with you
Wired UK has published a guest post by Usman Haque, founder of Pachube.com and director at Haque Design + Research and CEO of Connected Environments, where he argues that current Smart Cities initiatives are looking for a one…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Robotics Challenge for Disaster Response
A very detailed DARPA challenge for robotics in the area of disaster response. In IEEE spectrum. I have been surprised that more has not been done in this context. It is an obvious application. At the same time, disasters…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Computers and Society
See correspondent Lisa Kaczmarczyk's book:Computers and Society: Computing for Good contains in-depth case studies with extensive, thought provoking end of chapter questions and is appropriate for a wide-variety of undergraduate…
From Putting People First
Wearable devices: the next battleground for the platform wars
Wearable devices, or
From The Eponymous Pickle
Delivering Analytics
In E-Commerce Times: Some useful thoughts about the process and the needs for expertise. Its never all about the tools:" ... Considering the large number of tools and wide range of skills necessary to be an effective digital…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Electronic Laboratory Notebook Management
Rescentris just brought to my attention. We worked on Electronic Laboratory Notebook (ELN) systems that could be signed and witnessed some time ago. Most recently I was reintroduced to the broader issue of how knowledge management…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Aimia Loyalty Analytics
I have been following the Aimia group for a while now. More news. " ... Self Serve, a proprietary program through Sobeys' partnership with analytics firm Aimia, will help the company work more broadly and collaboratively with…
From Schneier on Security
Forever-Day Bugs
That's a nice turn of phrase:
Forever day is a play on "zero day," a phrase used to classify vulnerabilities that come under attack before the responsible manufacturer has issued a patch. Also called iDays, or "infinite days"…From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Plagiarism v. Learning
The SIGCSE mailing list has been having a very active discussion of plagiarism in computer science classes of late. These discussions seem to recur with disappointing regularity. If not in the SIGCSE list they show up on theComputer…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition Finals Later This Month
Later this month, the best and brightest cyber defense students from 10 universities throughout the country will descend on San Antonio, TX, for the 8th annual National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (CCDC)
From Schneier on Security
Outliers in Intelligence Analysis
From the CIA journal Studies in Intelligence: "Capturing the Potential of Outlier Ideas in the Intelligence Community."
In war you will generally find that the enemy has at any time three courses of action open to him. Of those…From Computer Science Teachers Association
Recipes for Making Improvements in K-12 CS
Yesterday I had the pleasure of meeting with Bill Mitchell, Director of the BCS Academy of Computing in the United Kingdom (UK). It was interesting to chat with Bill about the role that BCS has played in the formation of the …
From Wild WebMink
Virtual Choir 3
Eric Whitacre launched Virtual Choir 3, the composite performance of his choral work “Water Night”, to promote his new album of the same name (of which more later). Once again, it’s
From Putting People First
UX is the heart of any company. How do you make it top priority?
Wolff Olins
From Putting People First
People-powered health
People Powered Health is a programme from NESTA, the UK innovation charity, to support the design and delivery of innovative services for people that are living with long term health conditions. The programme focuses on co-production…
From Wild WebMink
The Lesson of the Pantheon Roof
Reblogged from The Global Mink: Pantheon Roof, a photo by webmink on Flickr. Probably the most amazing artefact of the ancient world I have seen, the Pantheon in Rome, started life as a Roman temple to all the gods around 27…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Shopper Marketing
New book: Shopper Marketing: How to Increase Purchase Decisions at the Point of Sale, by Markus Stahlberg. On my list to read. Contains a chapter by Herb Sorensen regarding his Atlas store category simulation system that…
From CERIAS Blog
Keynote: Howard Schmidt (Keynote Summary)
Howard Schmidt, Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Cyber Security, Office of the U.S. President
Morning Keynote Address, April 4, 2012.
Summary by Keith Watson
In the introduction, Professor Spafford…From CERIAS Blog
Security Fireside Chat (Summary)
Summary by Christine Task.
The fireside chat was an open discussion among several important persons with very interesting positions in the security world. The conversation covered a broad range of topics, as each participant…From Schneier on Security
Hawley Channels His Inner Schneier
Kip Hawley wrote an essay for the Wall Street Journal on airport security. In it, he says so many sensible things that people have been forwarding it to me with comments like "did you ghostwrite this?" and "it looks like you…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Visualizing Risk
A study in visualizing risk, from Forbes. Very complex dashboards of data are shown. This gets back to using the human visual system as a trend and outlier recognition engine. While the eye cannot directly determine the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
P&G Razor Innovation
In the HBR Blog. How consumer innovation for Gillette is moving to the far east. Matches some other speculation I have heard about how other innovation work is moving to the centers of populations and thus new markets.
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
Hill Tech Happenings, Week of April 16
April 18 Markup: The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee will review a bill to update the Federal Information Security Management Act. 10 a.m., 2154 Rayburn Building Hearing: The Immigration Subcommittee of the House…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Multi-Agency Earth System Models (EaSM) Proposals Due
The National Science Foundation (NSF), through its cross-cutting Science, Engineering, and Education for Sustainability (SEES) initiative
From The Eponymous Pickle
Struggling to Collaborate
Baseline Slideshow: On the issues of inter-enterprise collaboration. Somewhat useful, again, for a project I am working, but could use more depth than they claim. There is an unfortunate tendency today to replace detailed…
From Computational Complexity
ACM/IEEE Curriculum 2013
[STOC 2012 Early Registration Deadline Thursday] On a roughly ten-year cycle, the ACM and IEEE Computer Society get together to create a list of core topics that every getting an undergraduate CS degree should know. The joint…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Managing a Portfolio of Innovations
From Forrester: We also worked on a closely related project. how do you get the right information, especially about the technical risk involved, to the decision makers? It is a collaboration issue where decision makers need…
From Schneier on Security
How Information Warfare Changes Warfare
Really interesting paper on the moral and ethical implications of cyberwar, and the use of information technology in war (drones, for example):
"Information Warfare: A Philosophical Perspective," by Mariarosaria Taddeo, Philosophy…