Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
May 2012
From Putting People First
Ecosystems rule over products now. Here
In order for designers to navigate the complex ecosystem of digital platforms, they’ll need to master business modeling and become comfortable working across disciplines, says Samsung’s design chief, Sunghan Kim. The big design…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Future of Gamification
PEW report on the topic of gamification. Useful overview.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Scaling and Power Laws
Good examination of power laws in the newly revived Exploring Complexity blog. An important idea that is introduced clearly here.
From Computational Complexity
STOC Business Meeting
Last night I ran my last STOC business meeting as SIGACT chair. It was a three-hour affair until the hotel staff kicked us out at midnight. Lots of highlights. I put many of the slides online if you want to see details. We had…
From Computer Science Teachers Association
Computer Science: The Big Picture
As I prepare to meet with a local School Board member and a magnet high school principal to discuss implementing computer programming in the high school, I have to wonder what has taken them so long! It seems like a no-brainer…
From Schneier on Security
Racism as a Vestigal Remnant of a Security Mechanism
"Roots of Racism," by Elizabeth Culotta in Science:
Our attitudes toward outgroups are part of a threat-detection system that allows us to rapidly determine friend from foe, says psychologist Steven Neuberg of ASU Tempe. The…From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Creating incentives for better science
Popper argued that science should be falsifiable. To determine truth, we simply try to disprove an hypothesis until we are exhausted. It is a nice theory, but actual science does not follow this process. I read many funding proposals…
From My Biased Coin
Non-travel
For the past few years, I've been the chair for one of the international review panels for Country X's research funding bodies. (It's probably all a matter of public record, but no need to name Country X for this.) I agreed…
From Schneier on Security
Security Incentives and Advertising Fraud
Details are in the article, but here's the general idea:
Let's follow the flow of the users:From The Eponymous Pickle
Supply Dynamics
Recently visited: Material Demand Aggregation: Your Solution for Better Supply Chain PerformanceLeverage aggregate demand WITHOUT consigning material, installing software, modifying ERP systems or redeploying personnel.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Occasion-Based Marketing at Coke
In CPGMatters: A classic approach to quantifying in-store behavior. Coke finds some insight along the way:Occasion-Based Marketing Triggers Coca-Cola's Solutions Understanding shopping occasions and trip missions to the grocery…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
The New York Times
From The Eponymous Pickle
Mobile Grocery Shopping
Are you ready? Catalina's acquisition of Modiv media. What will the outcome of this be? Are consumers ready to broadly utilize in-store scanning? Based on our research this has advanced for years, and it is inevitable " And…
From The Eponymous Pickle
A Business Intelligence Tool
I have worked for a number of small and medium size business intelligence applications. When a business has to address these kinds of problems without a consultant it is often an issue to properly scope out the problem. orthis…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Fast bitmap decoding
An old programming trick is to represent sets of integers as bitmaps. For example, the sequence of integers 1, 4, 6 becomes the number 0b1010010 in binary (or 82 in decimal). Bitmaps are efficient data structures. It is rather…
From My Biased Coin
Summer School on Massive Data Mining in Copenhagen
Rasmus Pagh asked me to advertise the following summer school he is organizing. Looks like a good deal to me:SUMMER SCHOOL ON MASSIVE DATA MININGAugust 8-10, 2012, IT University of Copenhagen, DenmarkThe summer school is aimed…
From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
Mini-Course 2012: The Games
I have posted the 13 games I received from my mini-course students onto my website. They are in exe format that should work on Windows machines without Game Maker. As usual, the girls have done amazing things!I'll list andcheck…
From Schneier on Security
Portrait of a Counterfeiter
Interesting article from Wired.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Smarter Commerce for the Mid Size Business
Good futures piece on this topic.To help companies understand the Smarter Commerce Institute, the SMB Group and CRM Essentials are working on a series of posts discussing how technology is empowering today
From The Eponymous Pickle
Curse of Innovation
In Innovation Excellence: Enumerating the curses of innovation. Regarding Intellectual property, and of course the patent system.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Semantic Smarts in Search
A report on how Google is adding new semantic smarts into its search." ... Reportedly spotted by several users, the search pages are now displaying semantic data nestled to the right of the regular results. Such information tries…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
CS URGE: A Resource for Undergraduates
The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) has developed a new website for undergraduates seeking summer research opportunities as well as advice and tips on applying for graduate school. The website is called CS URGE (CS Undergraduate…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Interesting Links 21 May 2012
I spent Friday visiting with high school Computer Science teachers at the St Joseph's College (Long Island NY) programming competition. This is always a good time for me. Every year I have some good conversations. Some with teachers…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Synthetic Biology Accellerator
I have heard the term 'synthetic biology' used many times. Most recently in the funding proposal for a startup. It is usually is misused in odd ways. These folks seem to have it right. It is about simulating biological processes…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Tailoring Billboards
Onstar patents a system to tailor billboards to individual drivers:" ... Like the billboards Tom Cruise encountered in Minority Report, the OnStar-linked ads would be tailored to passing motorists based on personal information…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Working Styles
Mindjet has an interesting document on workings styles. Surprisingly without any registration required. Good overview with useful links,
From BLOG@CACM
U.S. Women in Computing: Why Isn't It Getting Better?
We've known for over a decade that there are too few women in computing in the U.S., but recent reports point out that it's not getting better: Not in any academic degree, not in IT company management.
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Emergency Management: Incident, Resource, and Supply Chain Management
The following is a special contribution to this blog from Nabil R. Adam, a professor of computer and information systems and director of the recently-established information Technology for Emergency mAnageMent (i-TEAM) Research…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Brochures
A long time interest is about the way computers have been sold in media. The Computer History Museum has an online exhibit of brochures that sold computers with the same advertising principles that sold soap at the time. I…
From Putting People First
After ethnography, and other papers by Iota Partners
Iota Partners is a new Chicago-based venture of Rick Robinson and John Cain (with whom Experientia partner Jan-Christoph Zoels once worked at Sapient) that deals with user experience research, sensor-based data, and smart modelling…