Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
May 2013
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Pronouns
The translated version of a Spanish menu contains the entry "squids in his (her, your) ink."
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered.
From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
Working With Google Spreadsheets Data Directly
On Wednesday I talked about assigning numbers to my princess-and-dragon story. I have all my data in an easily parsable format in a Google Spreadsheet. I decided to use Python to do my story-related computations because ofGoogle…
From Writing
10 recipes for turning imperative Java code into functional Scala code
At LinkedIn, we've started to use the Play Framework, which supports not only Java, but also Scala. Many teams have opted to write their apps in Scala, so I've spent a fair amount of time helping team members learn the language…
From Putting People First
How Obama used ‘Ethnography Project’ to defeat Mitt Romney in 2012
Ken Walsh reports on how Team Obama made an unprecedented effort to understand the voters and speak their language, slicing and dicing the electorate with a sophistication and savvy that the Republicans couldn’t match and are…
From Putting People First
Smart cities and smart citizens
For future smart cities to thrive, it must be centred around people, not just infrastructure. This was the overwhelming message from a group of influential thinkers speaking at this year’s FutureEverything Summit. sustain’ went…
From Putting People First
The art of staying focused in a distracting world
James Fallows of The Atlantic interviewed tech-industry veteran Linda Stone, coiner of the term “continuous partial attention,” on how to maintain sanity and focus in an insane, unfocused, always-on, hyperconnected world. “We…
From Schneier on Security
The Rise of Amateurs Recording Events
Interesting article on a greatly increased aspect of surveillance: "the ordinary citizen who by chance finds himself in a position to record events of great public import, and to share the results with the rest of us."
From Putting People First
The city as interface: an interview with Manuel Portela
Hillete Warner of The Enabling City, an initiative started and guided by the very inspiring Chiara Camponeschi, interviewed interaction designer and an event coordinator Manuel Portela about about collective brainstorming, community…
From Putting People First
How to design for the gut?
Visceral design is the key to creating experiences people can’t get enough of. Game designers and mobile app developers have done a great job of leveraging visceral design, web designers can and should leverage it too. So what…
From Putting People First
Are you ready for the era of Big Data?
Business agrees with governments — the more personal information they gather about us, the more “helpful” they can be. Should we give in to this “harmless” new science of benign surveillance, asks Steven Poole in The New Statesman…
From The Eponymous Pickle
More Smart Glasses
Its not all about the Google Glass idea. The notion of head-wearable, camera enabled augmented reality is being promoted by a number of vendors. Metaio reports on another example. All of these ideas are augmented reality plays…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Personal Clouds
Controlling your own data, is this a great idea? Prompted by data ownership issues and speed in conventional clouds. Only a limited specialty concern?
From The Eponymous Pickle
Algorithms that Writes Books
In Mashable: We have a huge compendium of knowledge on the web, some public, some private, some hidden. It has always seemed to me there are ways to integrate this information into compact accumulations of knowledge. in other…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Visualizing Service Design
I like the idea of visualization of design. Its very natural for most people to think this way. Add it to a presentation and you will capture their attention. And applying it to services? In a presentation today I tried to…
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
USACM Statement on House Ways and Means Subcommittee Hearing on U.S.-EU Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership Negotiations
The ACM U.S. Public Policy Council today submitted the following statement to the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Trade for the hearing on the U.S.-EU Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations. …
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
CCC Sponsors Challenges and Visions Track at AAMAS 2013
The following is a special contribution to the blog from Jeff Rosenchein, Head of The Rachel and Selim Benin School of Computer Science and Engineering at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In this entry, Jeff highlights the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Digimind, Brought Back to my Attention.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Adjusting to the Digital Landscape
Well, yes, hope its not too late. " ... As consumers turn to digital and mobile sources for product information and purchases, retailers have no choice but to adjust, experts say. For example, through partnerships with food-makers…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Designing Your Next Product
Should a five year old? Not unless five year olds buy it. Naive does not necessarily make your product good.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Gamification Is Individual
Interesting thoughts. " ... A recent article by the IT specialist website Lifehacker Australia describes the most common pitfall of gamification; businesses often assume that gamification will instantly improve their business…
From My Biased Coin
Review are In, 2013
Teaching reviews are in! I'm happy to say students were more forgiving than last year. But also, I notice in the reviews the effects of 4 significant changes from last year. (The best is saved for last.)1. Students knew…
From Computational Complexity
The High Quality Research Act
Lots of talk, mostly negative, about the proposed High Quality Research Act. Prior to making an award of any contract or grant funding for a scientific research project, the Director of the National Science Foundation shall On…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
NSF and NICT of Japan Announce Partnership in Next-Generation Networking
Yesterday the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) of Japan signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU), facilitating a partnership on research in networking…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Three questions about e-learning in college
Timothy Taylor observes that research about online instruction tells us that online teaching is just as effective as classroom teaching. The main drawback of asynchronous online teaching is the high drop-out rate. He moves on…
From BLOG@CACM
Coping With Linux Distro Fragmentation (visualized in One Giant Diagram)
I describe software incompatibility problems caused by fragmentation in Linux-based operating systems and present one potential solution.
From Schneier on Security
Why We Lie
This, by Judge Kozinski, is from a Federal court ruling about false statements and First Amendment protection
Saints may always tell the truth, but for mortals living means lying. We lie to protect our privacy ("No, I don'tIch…From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
White House Open Data Executive Order Echoes USACM Recommendations
In early May the White House issued an Executive Order outlining a policy to make open and machine readable the ‘default’ for new and ‘modernized’ government information. This Open Data Policy would be implemented for federal…
From Computer Science Teachers Association
Nanotechnology Careers
The career prospects look bright for CS graduates and according to the Kiplinger Management Group Letter there is an exciting reason for the news.
Amazing new computer chips are in the works as American chip makers, universities…From Schneier on Security
Are We Finally Thinking Sensibly About Terrorism?
This article wonders if we are:
Yet for pretty much the first time there has been a considerable amount of media commentary seeking to put terrorism in context -- commentary that concludes, as a Doyle McManus article in the …From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
You Never Know Who The Computer Science People Are
Apparently Justine Bateman, yes Justine Bateman the actress who played superficial Mallory Keaton on Family Ties, has started a new role as a college freshmen at UCLA. Theatre major? Not hardly. With a long successful career…