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 Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Getting Ready for ISTE
ISTE is only about a month away now. hard to believe it is so close. SIGCT is out with their annual recommendations for computer science teachers of workshops, sessions and meeting to attend. If you haven
From Putting People First
Mobile banking: mediated use
Jan Chipchase (frog design and until recently an acclaimed user researcher/anthropologist at Nokia) reflects on the topic of technical and textual illiteracy in the context of mobile banking, and the role of privacy within the…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Report from NCWIT
(Contributed by Dr. Christine Alvarado, Harvey Mudd College) The National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) annual summit took place last Tuesday through Thursday in Portland, OR. Hundreds of people dedicated…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Blog Changes taking place
You may have noticed a different look to the blog today. Microsoft has migrated us all (those of us who use http://blogs.msdn.com/ to blog to the latest and greatest version of Community Server. So there are a number of changes…
From My Biased Coin
Links to Look At
Matt Welsh has what he tells me is his most-read post ever about The Secret Lives of Professors. I'll help promote it here, but save my commentary for the comments there.FemaleScienceProfessor has had two great posts this week…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Rapid Insight
Via AnalyticBridge, an introduction to Rapid Insight's Veera tool. Was unaware of it, but looks to be of interest for data flow approaches to business intelligence. Will take a further look " ... Rapid Insight
From Schneier on Security
Infosec Television Commercial
LIGATT Security certainly hopes to scare people.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Walled Apps and the Freedom of the Net
In the NYT Magazine, an article on how they see the increasing uses of paid Apps on devices as a means of walling away quality on the Web. Certainly there are still lots of free quality offerings, and most paid offerings are…
From The Eponymous Pickle
How Did We Get Mobile?
A short slideshow on the history of mobile communications. A number of interesting milestones I had not heard of.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Bio Detector
A device developed at Lawrence Livermore Labs that can scan for many viruses and bacteria.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Foursquare and Newspapers
In Gigaom: Will the Foursquare location and reward idea help newspapers? ' ... The Journal announced today that readers can get news and reviews about local spots in the Big Apple through a partnership with Foursquare, and can…
From Wild WebMink
? WebM Data Points
An analysis of WebM and its patent risk Carlo demonstrates that On2 must clearly have analysed the patent context for VP8 since so many of the “sub-optimal choices” called out by H.264 partisans reflect avoidance of patented…
From Computational Complexity
Parallel Thinking
Guy Blelloch from CMU gave a distinguished talk last week at Northwestern on Parallel Thinking, a take on the Computational Thinking pagadigm from his past and future chair, Jeannette Wing. Blelloch's thesis: Because of multi…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Microsoft Institutes for Education Leaders
IF you have missed the previous Microsoft Institutes for Education Leaders in the past there are a new set of events now scheduled. I expect that more will be added in different locations over time so check the Microsoft Institutes…
From Putting People First
Growing up online
In Growing Up Online, the American public affairs series FRONTLINE takes viewers inside the very public private worlds that kids are creating online, raising important questions about how the Internet is transforming childhood…
From Putting People First
How social mood moves the world
Why do share prices, skirt lengths, even the state of the European Union, fluctuate so wildly? It’s down to social mood, says John Casti, and we must heed its messages. “No collective human activities or actions, such as globalisation…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Martin Gardner Dies
Its rare that I do an obituary here, but a particularly inspirational figure to me, Martin Gardner, Puzzler and Polymath, has died at the age of 95. His NYT obituary linked to here is well done. I used to anticipate his monthly…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Interesting Links 24 May 2010
I pretty much took last week off from blogging. I sort of needed a break and since they were migrating this and many other blogs to a new updated blogging engine it seemed like a good time to step back from it for a while. I…
From Schneier on Security
Scene from an Airport
I've gotten to the front of the security line and handed the TSA officer my ID and ticket.
TSA Officer: (Looks at my ticket. Looks at my ID. Looks at me. Smiles.)
Me: (Smiles back.)
TSA Officer: (Looks at my ID. Looks at me…From The Eponymous Pickle
Location Based Services Revenue
Good piece in E-Commerce Times on charting a revenue stream for location based services. A place I have been examining.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Print Ad Database
A new research database that looks at the relationship of what was done in print and what it achieved based on specific variables. Though this is old tech, print ads will not go away soon. Would also like to see how these results…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Supermarket Space Allocation
In Progressive Grocer: An old problem that we started to look at in terms of optimization starting in the 70s. In recent years increased computing power and better models have started to construct revenue management models to…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Social Media for Product Launch
The use of social media for new initiatives. Brand Week has a list of a number of recent examples. To this I say, why not do this in addition to other methods? It remains a relatively inexpensive method, and as long as many people…
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
Hill Tech Happenings, Week of May 24
May 25
Meeting:
The Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee of the Department of Homeland Security will meet. 12:30 p.m., Harding Hall, 710 North Capitol Street
From The Eponymous Pickle
Collective Intelligence by Retailers
Retailers sharing their collective intelligence. ' ... Gartner analysts Mick MacComascaigh and Whit Andrews recently released a study, "Leading Websites Will Use Search, Advanced Analytics to Target Content," that provides great…
From Schneier on Security
Alerting Users that Applications are Using Cameras, Microphones, Etc.
Interesting research: "What You See is What They Get: Protecting users from unwanted use of microphones, cameras, and other sensors," by Jon Howell and Stuart Schechter.
Abstract: Sensors such as cameras and microphones collect…From Wild WebMink
links for 2010-05-24
To Microsoft, Open Source means "Windows Encumbered" Just because Microsoft is busily embracing open source, that doesn't mean they have any interest in software freedom, as Andy Oliver points out. (tags: Microsoft OpenSource…
From Computational Complexity
The Life of Martin Gardner 1914-2010
The math and science writer Martin Gardner passed away on Saturday. Gardner wrote the column Mathematical games for Scientific American from 1956 to 1981 and Scientific American reposted a 1995 profile, some Gardner puzzles and…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Interesting Links 24 May 2010
I pretty much took last week off from blogging. I sort of needed a break and since they were migrating this and many other blogs to a new updated blogging engine it seemed like a good time to step back from it for a while. I…
From The Noisy Channel
Estimating the Query Difficulty for Information Retrieval
The other day, I received a surprise package in the mail: a copy of IBM researchers David Carmel and Elad Yom-Tov’s newly published lecture on “Estimating the Query Difficulty for Information Retrieval“. I wasn’t even aware that…