Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
May 2011
From Schneier on Security
CDC on the Zombie Apocalypse
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention weigh in on preparations for the zombie apocalypse.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Building Animations in HTML5 With Hype
Nice potential alternative to using Flash for animations, given the problem with delivering Flash on some popular phones and Pads. Investigating further.
From Schneier on Security
The Normalization of Security
TSA-style security is now so normal that it's part of a Disney ride:
The second room of the queue is now a security check area, similar to a TSA checkpoint. The two G-series droids are still there, G2-9T scanning luggage and…From BLOG@CACM
Obama Administration Announces Landmark Global Internet Strategy
The White House this week announced a comprehensive global strategy document bringing multiple agencies together in an effort to emphasize their commitment to a broad vision of online engagement moving forward. The goal: cyberspace…
From The Eponymous Pickle
How Shopping is Changing
My colleague Walter Riker writes in his blog about how the nature of shopping is changing. Including a number of useful links. He follows trends and tech in retail, like I do.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google Abandons Newspaper Scans
Google has apparently abandoned their very ambitious plan to scan, and interpret the worlds past and present newspapers, and make them available via search. Having done some newspaper based research I could see that this would…
From Schneier on Security
Forged Subway Passes in Boston
For years, an employee of Cubic Corp -- the company who makes the automatic fair card systems for most of the subway systems around the world -- forged forged and then sold monthly passes for the Boston MBTA system.
The scheme…From Putting People First
Publicity and the culture of celebritization
Danah Boyd, researcher at Microsoft Research New England and Fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society, wrote a long post on the social factors involved in celebritization. “As information swirls all around…
From Putting People First
To solve our healthcare crisis, home treatment needs a makeover
Instead of resembling outmoded PCs, home healthcare technology should look and feel like the other devices that surround us, argues Smart Design’s Dave Cronin in Fast Company. “Nurses, doctors, and other professionals are hugely…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
How Many Letters In An Alphabet
My mind tends to wonder a bit when I drive long distances. Sometimes it goes in very weird directions. For some reason I started thinking about encoding characters in binary. Yeah, pretty weird. Anyway I was reminiscing on RADIX…
From The Noisy Channel
Going Public
What a day! I’ve been excited about LinkedIn from the moment I joined — and for several years before that — but today has been a unique experience. I hope our celebration extends beyond LinkedIn’s employees and investors — this…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Think Insights With Google on Consumer Behavior
New Google site that appears to be quite useful. " .... Welcome to Think Insights with Google At Google we believe data beats opinion. So we work hard to study the worlds of consumer behavior, digital…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Amazon Sells more Kindle Books than Print Books
Time marches on ... Print books are sagging, I never expected this quite so soon. and I did not expect that there would be enough penetration of reading devices yet to make this possible.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Evernote
At Walter Riker's recommendation I have just started to use Evernote to manage notetaking for multiple clients. Overall this is very nicely done and allows you to sync notes between multiple locations. I am now using it toSee…
From Apophenia
Publicity and the Culture of Celebritization
In this month’s “Rolling Stone,” the magazine published an article called “Kiki Kannibal: The Girl Who Played With Fire”. The article tells the story of a 14-year-old teen in Florida who used MySpace to create a digital persona…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Apple Causes Spiritual Reaction In Brains
Another post on spiritual/religious reactions seen in brain scans. The subject of a recent BBC documentary. This reminds me of work mentioned in Martin Lindstrom's provocative book on religion and branding in his bookBuyology…
From Computational Complexity
Is Computer Science Cool Again?
Back in 2005 I worried about loss of excitement about computer science among America's youth. Today computers have become almost as commonplace as televisions and teens use them for a variety of tasks, including researching Yesterday…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Empathy as Brand Equity in Retail
In my own experience in the retail world I saw several examples of this. Empathy, un linked to a profit motive has a very powerful effect. HBS article.
From Schneier on Security
BIOS Protection
NIST has released "BIOS Protection Guidelines."
From BLOG@CACM
The Impact of Console Games in the Classroom
A summary of some interesting findings relating to the use of console games in Scottish primary and secondary school classrooms.
From Putting People First
Mike Kuniavsky on somatic data perception
Mike Kuniavsky was one of the speakers at this week’s Augmented Reality Event and his presentation Somatic Data Perception – Sensing Information Shadows (pdf) is already online. His main point is that “augmented reality is the…
From Putting People First
Design in Life
This Tuesday Dassault Syst
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Seven Rules for Beginning Programmers
Paul Vick posted these Seven Rules for Beginning Programmers earlier this week and I have been thinking about them a lot. They make sense to me. As a professional developer you have to understand that these are the rules for…
From Putting People First
Africa is becoming a test lab for mobile phone development
Lessons in innovation that Vodafone learns from its work in sub-Saharan Africa will be applied to its projects around the world. For Vodafone, sub-Saharan Africa is proving to be the testbed for R&D development that will transition…
From Putting People First
Power Lines
Power Lines, the latest paper by the UK’s Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA), follows on from the RSA
From Putting People First
Compendium for the Civic Economy
The Compendium for the Civic Economy is the latest publication by NESTA, the UK’s National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (an independent body with a mission to make the UK more innovative). It showcases 25 trailblazing…
From Putting People First
Interaction design in France: an overview
Beno
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The perils of filter-then-publish
Why do I prefer the publish-then-filter system, which dominates social media such as blogs, to the traditional filter-then-publish system used by scientific journals? Because the conventional peer review system (filter-then-publish)…
From My Biased Coin
Serving Non-Majors in CS Classes
At the end of the year, I gave a short in-house presentation highlighting some aspects of the state of CS at Harvard. In gathering data, one thing that struck me -- and I highlighted in our presentation -- is that most of the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Free Shipping
Many more orders online are now including 'free shipping'. Of course this is driven by the magic econometric term 'free', which takes something that used to be up front and is now hidden in the background of the cost of something…