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 Michael Nielsen
Interesting sentences
From Pierre Levy’s book Collective Intelligence: mankind’s emerging world in cyberspace: Groups learn even more slowly than individuals. The flipside to this is that sometimes groups learn things that individuals can’t or won’t…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Practicing the Google Rule
Michael Schrage asks why many people do not use the information easily available to them. Obvious, but also worth repeating. We were always taught that before any first meeting, client or interviewer, we should do a search…
From Schneier on Security
Outsourcing to an Indian Jail
This doesn't seem like the best idea:
Authorities in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh are planning to set up an outsourcing unit in a jail. The unit will employ 200 educated convicts who will handle back office operations…From Computational Complexity
Boycotting Arizona
I heard a suggestion that computer science conferences not be held in Arizona because of their new anti-immigration law. Both Bill and I have discussed academic boycotts before in regards to China, Israel and South Dakota. IThe…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
2010 U.S. Innovative Education Forum!
Do You Innovate? Apply now for the 2010 U.S. Innovative Education Forum!
You could be selected to attend events in Washington, DC this summer and Cape Town, South Africa in the Fall. Visit the 2010 U.S. Innovative EducationPartners…From My Biased Coin
Harvard News Items
Some highlights: 1) From the Crimson: "An undergraduate has been dismissed from Harvard College after allegedly hacking into online accounts of the teaching staff in his courses." Makes me wish I was still on Faculty Council…
From Putting People First
Embedded anthropology
Anthropologist Simon Roberts, who manages the social science research and design research team for Digital Health Group at Intel in Ireland, spoke last week at an RSA event on Embedding Design in London, UK, on the role of anthropology…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google and the Newspaper Industry
In the Atlantic: Quite interesting detailed article: How to Save the News, by James Fallows: " ... Everyone knows that Google is killing the news business. Few people know how hard Google is trying to bring it back to life, or…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Engaging to Compete
New from the Seriosity blog: Engaging to Compete. Also a link there to a full chapter of the book. I talk about the book at greater length here. Its about using the strong engagement aspects of games to drive real work.
From Schneier on Security
Insect-Based Terrorism
Sounds like fearmongering to me.
How real is the threat? Many of the world's most dangerous pathogens already are transmitted by arthropods, the animal phylum that includes mosquitoes. But so far the United States has not been…From Computational Complexity
When to go Low Tech
Recently someone asked me to subreferee a paper for a conference. She emailed me a pdf file but when I printed it out it was unreadable- the spacing was all off. What should I do? Print it out in different ways with different…
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
Hill Tech Happenings, Week of May 17
May 20
Hearing: The Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee will hold a hearing on the nomination of Carl Wieman to be the Associate Director for Science at the Office of Science and Technology Policy. 2:30 p.m…From The Eponymous Pickle
How Iconoclasts Think
A good podcast: Featured Guest: Gregory Berns, the Distinguished Chair of Neuroeconomics at Emory University and author of Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently ... '
From The Eponymous Pickle
Neural Data and fMRI Scans Confirmed
In Roger Dooley's Neuromarketing Blog: ' ... Now, new research published in Nature has shown that there is indeed a correlation between neuronal activity and what the fMRI can measure ... It remains to be seen whether fMRI will…
From Putting People First
User experiences for children, for seniors and for play
UX Matters is another one of these great resources for the user experience community. Here three recent articles: Designing user experiences for children By Heather Nam (Mediabarn) Creating a great experience for Web site users…
From Putting People First
Bringing behavioural change from lab to studio
Nick Marsh recently published an article with Dan Lockton in the fourth edition of Touchpoint, the Service Design Network journal. The issue is completely focused on the relationship between service design and behaviour change…
From Wild WebMink
links for 2010-05-17
From Schneier on Security
Software Liabilities in the UK
The British High Court ruled that a software vendor's EULA -- which denied all liability for poor software -- was not reasonable.
I wrote about software liabilities back in 2003.
From BLOG@CACM
On FIFA World Cup 2010: Football and Internet in Latin America
Quick view on how the FIFA Football World Cup will affect Internet in Latin America.
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Interesting Links 17 May 2010
I have quite an eclectic mix of links this week. Some career information, some Windows Phone programming links, Internet safety, school IT information and more. I hope you
From The Eponymous Pickle
Stengthening Brand America
Edward Burghard, Retired Harley Procter Marketer, Procter & Gamble, has made me aware of the Strengthening Brand America Project. It is focused on catalyzing the transfer of product and corporate branding knowledge from the…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Quiet Period for This Blog
It
From Putting People First
UX reflections in UX Magazine
UX Magazine keeps to its high standards with these three well written contributions: Curators of the Real-Time Web: Distilling the chatter to relevant, actionable information By Jonathan Gosier (Appfrica) “Information wants to…
From Putting People First
Why it
Is there an alternative to the seemingly inevitable cuts to public services? Hilary Cottam of Participle poses the question. “The scale of the challenge to our public services is clear. The mainstream debate is all about cuts…
From Putting People First
Danah Boyd and the Facebook privacy discussion
Microsoft researcher Danah Boyd doesn’t need much introduction as her outspoken and well-developed analysis is frequently quoted on this blog. Two long articles — each with many comments — react to the current Facebook privacy…
From Putting People First
The trust economy: A world of P2P money-lending
Wired UK has published a long article on P2P money-lending in its June issue: The article devotes particular attention to Kiva.org, a San Francisco-based peer-to-peer (P2P) non-profit, which uses the principles of social networking…
From Putting People First
Can business analysts become UX designers?
Mike Gualtieri and Mary Gerush of Forrester Research have just published a paper entitled Business Analysts: Seize the opportunity to deliver compelling user experiences – Make a big difference to your organization by focusing…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Soft Reliability
The concept of soft reliability came up again in a recent conversation. Had not brought it up here for more that a year. Good overview site here. If anyone has insider information about new developments in this realm, comment…
From Putting People First
Researchers study behavior in social networks
Research scientists Cameron Marlow (Facebook Inc.) and D.J. Patil (LinkedIn Corp.) have access to the interactions of groups of people that outnumber populations of whole countries and therefore unprecedented windows into the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Faceted Search in Linkedin
I have always thought that Linkedin had a messy user interface. It especially confuses new users, who I heard from in the enterprise. Just read of some changes they made in the key 'people you may know' interface, including faceted…