Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
May 2009
From The Eponymous Pickle
BPM in Retail
Microsoft's presentation on the use of Business Process Management in retail. Well done. BPM should be used much more than it is. It is the simplest form of 'expert system' for typical processes. It it can be difficult to…
From The Noisy Channel
Playing With Wolfram Alpha
Woo hoo, I have preview access to Wolfram Alpha! I’ve only had a short time to play with it, but I can already report that my experience confirms my previously expressed expectations: the NLP is very brittle, but there’s great…
From The Noisy Channel
Playing With Wolfram Alpha
Woo hoo, I have preview access to Wolfram Alpha! I’ve only had a short time to play with it, but I can already report that my experience confirms my previously expressed expectations: the NLP is very brittle, but there’s great…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Research interests should be short-lived?
How did I come to Computer Science? Through geophysics! I was once given data sets spanning several CD-ROMs. Back then, this was a lot of data!
From Putting People First
Daniel Kaplan
Daniel Kaplan, CEO of the French Next-Generation Internet Foundation (FING) and one of the driving forces behind the upcoming LIFT conference in Marseilles, France, has published three long essays with an excellent critique of…
From insideHPC
UK Met Office Shooting for DC Direct
The UK Met Office is planning to upgrade its supercomputing systems in the next 18 months.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Neuroscience of Illusion
Teller on the Neuroscience of illusion in Wired. There is something to learn here for the merchandising arts. " .. exploiting gaps in human perception ... " . Via Richard James.
From insideHPC
Super Micro rack mounts
From an article at The Register, news that Super Micro has a new breed of rack mounted server This doesn’t mean that low-powered Atom and similar processors - like VIA Technologies’ Nano and C7 chips - are suddenly going to take…
From insideHPC
German Met installs NEC vector
From news at HPCwire One such national weather service is the German Meteorological Service, called Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD), based in Offenbach, Germany. Here, on the southern banks of the river Main, researchers work around…
From insideHPC
Flywheel UPS business grows, best practices
Enterprise IT Planet has posted their green news roundup. Here are a few items of interest to our community: Active Power, makers of flywheel-based UPS for green power in data centers, announces a 48 percent increase in revenue…
From Putting People First
The wisdom of community
In an article on A List Apart, Derek Powazek explores what it means to connect the ideas of James Surowiecki, expressed in his book The Wisdom of Crowds, to the social web where, he says, they can reach their full potential. “The…
From insideHPC
First winner announced today, still time to jump in the drawing for this week
I’ll be spinning the big wheel here at insideHPC HQ (I’ve always wanted to use that thing) to find out who the first week’s winner is in our Bribery is Fair Play survey. The wheel will spin around noon central today, so you still…
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
ACM Washington Update, Vol. 13.4 (May 6, 2009)
CONTENTS
[1] Newsletter Highlights [2] Proposed Legislation Would Expand Federal Reach Into Cybersecurity [3] White House Cybersecurity Review Complete [4] U.S. Government's Chief Technology Officer Announced [5] Federal Trade…From Putting People First
In cellphone, India reveals an essence
Anand Giridharadas, South Asia correspondent at International Herald Tribune, describes what makes the cellphone special in India, and what it means for democracy. “The cellphone appeals deeply to the Indian psychology, to the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Multitasking a Myth?
A NYT piece on the science of concentration says that concentration, once broken, can take twenty minutes to re-establish. Overviews some of the findings in the book Rapt, by Winifred Gallagher.Covers neuroscience work on the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Exxon Station Locator
It has been reported that ExxonMobil has released a new station locator using the Google API. It has also been pointed out that the service does not have a form designed for mobile use. Makes sense, but a quick search of applications…
From Springenwerk Blog
Links for 2009-05-06 [del.icio.us]
From The Eponymous Pickle
Netezza and Pi Solutions
Certainly an interesting objective here: "... Pi Solutions and Netezza jointly sponsored a free web seminar focused on how true item-level profitability analytics could enable Retail and CPG companies to optimize revenues for…
From BLOG@CACM
High-Performance Computing: Where
By definition, the raison d’être for high-performance computing is high performance, but floating point operations per second (FLOPS) need not be the only measure. Human productivity, total cost and time to solution are equally…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Netezza and Green Business Intelligence
Piece from Insurance Networking News, includes 8 tips to green your business intelligence strategy ... a mention of Netezza, BI appliance innovator: " ... the BI appliance Netezza Performance Server. Their design and strategy…
From Putting People First
Inspiring articles by Elizabeth Churchill of Yahoo! Research
If you like the writings by the highly original Elizabeth Churchill, a principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research in charge of the Internet Experiences Group — and I definitely do! — then this Spring has been a particularly…
From insideHPC
Wolfram previews a kind of computational
c|net has an article on Wolfram Research’s new product, Wolfram Alpha, being launched later this month Wolfram Alpha is like a cross between a research library, a graphing calculator, and a search engine. But does Wolfram Research’s…
From insideHPC
Rackable announces Q1, posts
Rackable, er Sgrackable, Racka-GI, the company that just bought SGI, announced its first quarter results yesterday. The company lost $.46 per share, GAAP net loss per share from continuing operations was ($0.46) for the first…
From insideHPC
IBM partners in fight against
Yesterday IBM and the U of Texas announced that they were working together to use the World Community Grid in the fight against
From insideHPC
SC09 podcast with Cherri Pancake, getting the most out of
SC is a huge conference, and gets bigger every year. But the conference has kept up, listening to attendee feedback and introducing new tools, features, and support for groups with special needs. SC09 just released its latest…
From Wild WebMink
links for 2009-05-06
From Putting People First
Most Interaction09 conference videos now online
Most of the videos of the Interaction09 conference, that took place this February in Vancouver, Canada, are now available online (see also here). Here is a personal selection: Kars Alfrink: Play in social and tangible interactions…
From Putting People First
The poverty of user-centered design
Andrew Dillon, dean of the School of Information (”iSchool”) at the University of Texas, writes on his blog InfoMatters that he finds “the term
From Putting People First
User-centred approach drives the design of Intel
In December last year, Intel design researcher Daria Loi made a very strong presentation at the UPA Europe conference showing how people in different cultures “keep, protect and find what they value”. She and others in her team…
From Putting People First
Cisco CTO: The future of collaboration will be all about user experience
In a series of predictions on the future of collaboration, Padmasree Warrior, the chief technology officer of Cisco Systems, points out that it’s the user experience that matters. “We need to provide an experience that