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 Putting People First
Nokia
As Nokia
From Putting People First
The reality of social media
Adrian Chan has written a thoughtful post about “teasing apart the objective and subjective dimensions of social media, to examine what
From The Eponymous Pickle
Self Healing Software
From CACM on the idea of self-healing software. Mention of some IBM research in this area. Several years ago I went to a meeting on complexity modeling at IBM Almaden and met several researchers in this area. A tough problem…
From My Biased Coin
Robobees Redux
While I intentionally try to avoid the political on this blog, I did make an exception previously when I heard that the Harvard Robobees project had made #1 on Sean Hannity's "List of Government's Most Reckless Spending," because…
From Wild WebMink
links for 2010-05-16
Met Office: Five Day Volcanic Ash Charts Volcano forecasts have arrived. From the looks of these charts it's touch-and-go whether I will be able to fly home on Monday. (tags: Travel Forecast Weather Volcano)
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
The Computing Community Consortium At Three
The Computing Community Consortium was launched three years ago
From The Noisy Channel
People You May Know
I was just looking at LinkedIn and found myself pleasantly surprised by a minor UI improvement in the “People You May Know” widget: as you delete people you don’t know, the widget now updates without your having to go to another…
From Apophenia
Facebook is a utility; utilities get regulated
From day one, Mark Zuckerberg wanted Facebook to become a utility. He succeeded. Facebook is now a utility. The problem with utilities is that they get regulated. Yesterday, I ranted about Facebook and “radical transparency…
From The Noisy Channel
The Google Job Experiment
This is just so brilliant that I had to post it here. I’ve blogged in the past about alerting spam, but this guy took the idea to a new level, with great return on investment. Perhaps the news about this story will make the tactic…
From The Eponymous Pickle
What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains
On the list, but not on the stack yet. Nicholas Carr's new book: The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains . Look forward to reading it.
From Computer Science Teachers Association
The 10 Worst Practices in ICT Education
Excuse me if you have already found this gem, but I was sent this link and immediately formed a strong view that I'd like to meet Michael Trucano:
http://blogs.worldbank.org/edutech/worst-practice.
Michael is a Senior ICT…From The Eponymous Pickle
Android Pushes Ahead
I just bought two Android phones for the family. I am still using an IPhone. I have become interested in a comparison of the two options. This post has some interesting statistics between the two options.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Smartphones Killing the PC?
Dangerous to say never, but Dell says that Smartphones will never kill the PC. I see it somewhat like calculators versus cash registers. There will always be a need for some large format rarely-moved computing and network devices…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Open EEG
For those interested in brain metrics, you can now utilize an open EEG project on Source Forge.
From BLOG@CACM
Choosing Successful Research
How to choose research projects that are more likely to be successful.
From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
Applying How We Learn to Computer Science Classes
While reading What the Best College Teachers Do by Ken Bain, I felt excited about how much the knowledge contained within could make computer science education better. Although it seems that change is very slow, I do see some…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid T-Shirts
Some nice ones (ignore the dinosaurs).
From Schneier on Security
I Won a CSO Compass Award
And CSO published a Q&A with me.
From Apophenia
Facebook and
At SXSW, I decided to talk about privacy because I thought that it would be the most important issue of the year. I was more accurate than my wildest dreams. For the last month, I’ve watched as conversations about privacy went…
From The Eponymous Pickle
GIMP: Photo Authoring
Since leaving the enterprise I no longer have easy access to Photoshop. I have taken up GIMP, more here. It is very well done open source system: ' ... It is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Social Media and Business Intelligence
Short, common sense, but useful piece on the topic. You can only get what you measure.
From Schneier on Security
New Windows Attack
It's still only in the lab, but nothing detects it right now:
The attack is a clever "bait-and-switch" style move. Harmless code is passed to the security software for scanning, but as soon as it's given the green light, it's…From The Eponymous Pickle
Shopper App Goes Frugal
I have been keenly interested in ways to augment the shopping experience of consumers using smartphones and other devices. This blog has covered many such approaches since we started testing them in our innovation centers in…
From Computational Complexity
Goodbye PostScript
I was uploading a new PDF file up to my publications page and noticed that the paper also had a PostScript link but I didn't have an updated postscript file. So I asked myself (and my Twitter readers) if anyone still uses PostScript…
From My Biased Coin
The Value of Experiments
Several days ago Lance wrote about "Is Complexity Math or Science?", and in that context wrote "We don't do experiments...", which has caused me to overreact.I'm not sure who he meant by "We" -- I guess complexity theorists -…
From Schneier on Security
Fifth Annual Movie-Plot Threat Contest Semi-Finalists
On April 1, I announced the Fifth Annual Movie Plot Threat Contest:
Your task, ye Weavers of Tales, is to create a fable of fairytale suitable for instilling the appropriate level of fear in children so they grow up appreciating…From The Eponymous Pickle
Visa to Add Contactless Payment to IPhone?
The whole article shows how companies can back away from a press release. But why? In Storefrontbacktalk: ' ...Which is stronger: the curse of contactless payment or the coolness of the iPhone? Last week, Visa said it planned…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Lost as Hypertext Storytelling
I was involved in the early use of hypertext as a means of storing and retrieving knowledge. A number of hypertext systems existed before the Web. We constructed systems that used blocks of text that integrated different kinds…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Failure to Upgrade
There was a funny movie out a few years ago called Failure To Launch. It tells the story of a man in his mid thirties who still lives at home. He doesn
From My Biased Coin
Another Book on Networks
Another book on networks, namely Networks: An Introduction, by Mark Newman, will be available in about a week or so. Mark is known to many in the networking community; though he comes from the physics side, he has worked with…