Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
May 2010
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
Draft Internet Privacy Bill Released
Representative Rick Boucher, Chairman of the Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet released a discussion draft of an internet privacy bill. The bill, which was released with the Ranking Member of the subcommittee…
From The Noisy Channel
I wish I could take even a gram of credit for this! I’m really proud of my colleagues for rolling out this new design that encourages and facilitates exploratory search. Go HCIR!
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
What do you need to know?
The Microsoft Job Blog recently has a two part interview study guide set of posts. In the second (Microsoft interview study guide: Part II of II) there was a long list of Knowledge Questions. It starts with a list of basic computer…
From Computational Complexity
Ralph Kramden: Your wait is over! 3D-TV is here!
(This was written before I saw Lance's post on gadgets. This post could be called an unintentional co-post. Is that a word? Now it is!)
In The Honeymooners episode that aired on Oct 1, 1955 Ralph Kramden does not wantI'm…
From Schneier on Security
Why Aren't There More Terrorist Attacks?
As the details of the Times Square car bomb attempt emerge in the wake of Faisal Shahzad's arrest Monday night, one thing has already been made clear: Terrorism is fairly easy. All you need is a gun or a bomb, and a crowded target…
From Putting People First
Service Design Thinks
Nick Marsh has been organising several service design ‘Thinks’ events in London: ‘Service Design at Scale’ (November 2009) and ‘Service Design from Scratch’ (March 2010). Service Design at Scale featured presentations by Steven…
From Putting People First
Peter Merholz: The Want Interview
The founder & president of Adaptive Path explains why they
From Putting People First
Bill Moggridge blogs
Bill Moggridge, the legendary industrial and interaction designer, IDEO co-founder and now director of the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, started his own blog, Bill’s blog. It reads like his working notes, though very…
From Putting People First
The many differences between mobile and desktop interaction
Interacting with a mobile device is very different from our interaction with desktop devices. But what does that mean precisely? In a long article for the Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces, Luca Chittaro of the HCI Lab at…
From Putting People First
Reading in a digital age
Sven Birkerts wites in the American Scholar on why the novel and the Internet are opposites, and why the latter both undermines the former and makes it more necessary. “My real worry has less to do with the overthrow of human…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Art of the Twitter Pitch
Some good if sometimes obvious comments about the idea of the Twitter Pitch. Common sense ideas about how to use 140 characters to convince someone of something. That's part of what I have been doing since my experiment with…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Using Social Media to Complain
An instructive example of consumers using social media to complain:Parents Use Social Media to Sound Off on J&J RecallMany Take to Blogs, Facebook, Twitter to Complain About Drug Giant's Handling of Concerns ... "
From My Biased Coin
SIGCOMM PC, Not Liveblogging
I am absolutely, positively, not liveblogging from the SIGCOMM PC, as that is, I am rightly told, a bad idea. But these are my impressions after the fact. (I'm told notifications have gone out.)This was a big PC -- 50 people…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Saffron is Cool Vendor
I have mentioned Saffron Technology a number of times in this blog. Visited them first about four years ago and have had recent conversations. An announcement today: ' ... a privately held data analytics software firm providing…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Future Consumer
Future Consumer, by Carte Blanche. Includes Arnaud Frade of TNS Group, who I have heard on this subject before. Nothing very new, but some good points to repeat about the future of the consumer in their environments.
From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
First Course Outline
Is everyone this excited about their first course outline? I'm not sure why, but I'm feeling sort of giddy about it. I mean, sure, I've TA'ed before, and taught younger students for outreach and my mini-course, but this is the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Tesla Predicted Blackberry
Physicist Nikola Tesla is said to have predicted the Blackberry type device over a century ago. Best known for his invention of alternating current, high energy devices, motors, generators and pioneering early radio transmissions…
From Schneier on Security
Preventing Terrorist Attacks in Crowded Areas
On the New York Times Room for Debate Blog, I -- along with several other people -- was asked about how to prevent terrorist attacks in crowded areas. This is my response.
In the wake of Saturday's failed Times Square car bombing…From Putting People First
Findability and Exploration: the future of search
Stijn Debrouwere, a Belgian information architect, has published a long Peter Morville-inspired post on findability related issues. “The majority of people visiting a news website don
From Putting People First
Smart Things
After posting the first chapter of his new book Smart Things: Ubiquitous Computing User Experience Design (see also this earlier post), Mike Kuniavsky is now doing the same with the third chapter. The final book, he says, will…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Fratricide and the Ecology of Proposal Reviews
A friend of mine from Field X once served as a program officer at a major research funding agency. (Names changed to protect the innocent.) As part of a quality assurance scheme, he was asked to review the proposal process…
From Putting People First
What
The concept of social objects is pretty widely used in social interaction design, but we
From Computational Complexity
Gadget Love
Many of my fellow CS theorists are surprisingly technophobes. Don't own a cell phone. Begrudgingly got a credit card but still refuse to buy anything online. Still read email by typing "mail" at the unix prompt. Maybe they don't…
From Schneier on Security
Malcom Gladwell on Spies
Translation: the proper function of spies is to remind those who rely on spies that the kinds of thing found out by spies can't be trusted.
Nice article on the British Operation Mincemeat in World War II.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Global Time Sink
Carr in Roughtype discusses the Web as a global time sink, and outlines efforts to go 'cold turkey' on using the Internet. One participant suggests that getting away from the net leads to a burst of productivity and creativity…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Internet of Things Mashup
The Internet of Things conference starts today in London. Much more about it here. More information at the link, a blog, videos, etc. I will report on aspects of it as required.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google Voice and Skype
In Computerworld: You can now make calls using Skype from Google Voice. There is also a unified caller ID between the two. Very nice connection that can make both more useful. Voice is most useful if you need to have multiple…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Dis-Loyalty Program
Clever thought: Is The Anti-Loyalty Program A Fun Way To Get Competitor Intelligence? by Evan SchumanA UK coffee retailer had an unusual idea, something he called a Dis-Loyalty Card. It was designed to take customers coming into…
From Computer Science Teachers Association
What's Different About Boys' and Girls' Interest in Computing?
Today's college-bound students have grown up immersed in the technology of computing, and what interests them is no longer the same as what attracted previous generations to computing. For them, computers have become an appliance…
From The Eponymous Pickle
May/June Analytics
In the May June Analytics Magazine. A number of good articles including analytics in health care, text analytics, supply chain analytics overview. As usual, good largely non-technical expositions.