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 The Eponymous Pickle
Google TV
Coming this fall, Google TV. Where will it end?
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Sorting is fast and useful
I like to sort things. If you should learn one thing about Computer Science is that sorting is fast and useful. Here’s a little example. You want to check quickly whether an integer belongs to a set. Maybe you want to determine…
From The Eponymous Pickle
New Open Innovation Strategy at Kraft
In Consumergoods Technology: New open innovation strategy at Kraft.
From Computer Science Teachers Association
CS CAREER PROJECTIONS
We all hear the stories about how the CS job market has turned around (if it ever really was on a downward slope). But, when talking to students or their parents about what a great career option computer science is, it's best…
From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
Feedback Before Assessment
Continuing my reflections on Ken Bain's What the Best College Teachers Do (started here), I wanted to touch on a couple of things in the chapter on preparing to teach. The chapter largely contains 13 questions that the best…
From BLOG@CACM
How Many Computers Will You Own?
How many computing devices will you have in ten years? Two? Six? Just one?
From Schneier on Security
Detecting Browser History
Interesting research.
Main results:[...]
We analyzed the results from over a quarter of a million people who ran our tests in the last few months, and found that we can detect browsing histories for over 76% of them. All[…From The Eponymous Pickle
Procter Online Store Open to Public
After months of testing P&G's online store is now open to the public. ' ... Procter & Gamble Co. said Wednesday the "eStore" is up and running for the general public after months of testing. The Cincinnati-based maker of such…
From BLOG@CACM
Albion College Eliminates Computer Science
Albion College decides to eliminate the computer science major due to budget cuts and low enrollment, because it's not really part of 21st century work.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Data Diving with Mathematica
Short article from the Wolfram blog about doing data analysis and visualization using Mathematica. The wealth of capabilities in Mathematica are considerable, but you need to know the package well to adeptly mash up solutions…
From Computational Complexity
Teaching for the first time: SUBRUK's story
(Guest Post by Subrahmanyam Kalyanasundaram)
My First-time Teaching Experience.
Background: This spring semester, here at Georgia Tech, I got the opportunity to be the full instructor for Automata and Complexity, CS 4510…
From Wild WebMink
links for 2010-05-20
jclouds I heard about this project at the Open Cloud Meetup in San Francisco last week. It is an abstraction layer for cloud computing, allowing you to write apps that can run on any cloud rather than being locked in to just…
From Schneier on Security
Militarized Marine Mammals
A Navy seal - actually a sea lion - took less than a minute to find a fake mine under a pier near San Francisco's AT&T Park.
A dolphin quickly located a terrorist lurking in the black water before another…
From The Noisy Channel
Elastic Lists for Faceted Search
If you like faceted search and are interested in design patterns for it, I encourage you to check out Moritz Stefaner’s work on elastic lists. Here is his description: Elastic lists allow to navigate large, multi-dimensional…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wal-Mart Virtual Mirror
In StoreFrontBackTalk: Evan Schuman on Wal-Mart's virtual makeover effort. We experimented with this concept in-store and in-home for a dozen years, in a number of countries. Including work with the vendor EZFace mentioned…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google Prediction APIs
Google has announced the availability of Machine Prediction APIs. Google is well known for AI based applications. This link to their machine learning capabilities is particularly interesting. Check the link to see a broad…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Next Generation Cave
I have seen a number of uses of the CAVE environment, at universities, retail and manufacturing laboratories. And although each has been a very impressive attempt to change the context of a person, they have also had a number…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Upcoming Talk on Mashed-up Visualization
On mash-ups for visualization, plan to attendL The Last Mile: Data Visualization in a Mashed-Up World (May 20, at 3PM ET, then archived) Requires minimal registration. Dashboards and data visualization technologies provide…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Comment from Google on Wifi Privacy
Comments from Google on the recent Wifi privacy problems in Europe. Troubling that they seem to be less than completely serious on this topic. Just because no one individual can be named that has been harmed by this does not…
From Computational Complexity
What should be in an automata course: Two views based on recent experience
(Joint Post with Subrahmanyam Kalyanasundaram)
In this post, I speculated on what I might put into my automata theory course. That prompted Subrahmanyam Kalyanasundaram, a PhD student at Georgia Tech, who was teaching Automata…
From BLOG@CACM
The Complicated Issues of Computing Education in Qatar
The ACM Education Board visited Qatar at the beginning of May. At Qatar University, 70% of the students in CS are women, and those we met are hungry to produce innovative technology. But are there jobs for them?
From Wild WebMink
links for 2010-05-19
Web Browsers Leave 'Fingerprints' Behind as You Surf the Net You may do your best to remain anonymous on the web, you may have cookies blocked, but this research by EFF shows you can easily have your browser uniquely identified…
From Wild WebMink
? Not Just For Radicals
Software freedom may sound like a line from a revolutionary manifesto, but it’s the key genetic market for value in the enterprise. read more on my ComputerWorldUK blog…
From The Eponymous Pickle
The Security of Cars as App Platforms
There has been software in cars for a long time, but now that Ford has opened an App store they start looking like a platform for software, networked into the grid. How long will it be before we start to see Spam and Malware…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Location Apps and Capabilities Competing
AdAge review of location Apps and new competitive capabilities in Facebook. I am not sure I want to have another capability rolled into FB. At least in systems like FourSquare I can concentrate on ideas like loyalty without all…
From Wild WebMink
? Home, Pele
By way of explanation for my preoccupation and paucity of publication of late, I finally made it back home today after my trip to the US with ForgeRock. We had a varied and busy trip that included several visits to potential…
From The Eponymous Pickle
KYield Diabetes Use Case Scenario
Mark Montgomery of KYield writes: " .. I am pleased to share with you our health care use case, which is an important cornerstone of our series 'Semantic Scenarios for the Intelligent Enterprise':We selected the diabetes mellitus…
From The Eponymous Pickle
TV Apps
In AdAge: The growth of mobile applications that mirror TV productions. Cross platform delivery and advertising. .
From The Eponymous Pickle
Laser is 50 Years Old
The functional laser is 50 years old in 2010. It was predicted as early as 1917 in a paper by Einstein. A very remarkable achievement with many applications. Much more.
From Schneier on Security
History of NSA Computers
A recently declassified history through 1964.