Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
May 2014
From The Eponymous Pickle
Global Flow Reshaping the World
From McKinsey: Global Flow reshaping the world. Podcast and graphics. We examined some of these concepts in several redesigns of global supply chains. " ... Global flows have been a common thread in economic growth for centuries…
From Schneier on Security
Abusing Power to Shut Down a Twitter Parody Account
This is a pretty horrible story of a small-town mayor abusing his authority -- warrants where there is no crime, police raids, incidental marijuana bust -- to identify and shut down a Twitter parody account. The ACLU is taking…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Interesting Links 19 May 2014
The only blog post I wrote was the Monday morning links post. I feel like I’m slacking off but I sure was overloaded with other things to do last week. Some of the links below deserve posts of their own and if I have time this…
From Computational Complexity
''4col \le 3col is counter-intuitive and makes me sad'' NOT ANYMORE!
In my ugrad theory class (reg,P,NP,Dec,c.e) I proved that SAT is NP-complete. In the next lecture I proved that SAT \le 3-col, so 3-col is NP-complete. I then proved 3-col \le 4-col. I was planning on proving 4-col \le 3-col…
From The Eponymous Pickle
6th International Conference on Concept Mapping
Colleague Brian Moon reports (The link below provides much more)Deadline Extension - CMC2014Chief Technology Officer at Perigean Technologies LLCThe deadline to submit papers and posters to the 6th International Conference on…
From The Eponymous Pickle
On Inventory Analysis
I spent many years doing inventory analysis type work for big enterprises. This article makes some interesting and obvious arguments. But the basics are correct, it is a key ability of any business that provides physical goods…
From BLOG@CACM
The Good, the Hype and the Ugly
One of the most dazzling changes to the software development world in the past decade has been the spread of agile methods.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Quantifying Ourselves
Humans becoming Cyborgs. Simplistic piece in SciAM. We are continuing to quantifying ourselves, but does that mean we are knowing ourselves better? Not without better analytical methods.
From The Eponymous Pickle
CIOs and Open Source
CIOs and Open Source: Just becoming involved with examples where open source choices are in play.In CWorld: Field Notes: Clueless CIOs aside, open source is 'frightening and fantastic'Savvy enterprises tap open source as a legacy…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Connectedness and the Smartphone
In GigaOM: Other ways to connect are appearing. But the functionality of the smartphone remains distinctly powerful and convenient. Until we redefine their operation in new ways.
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Lifting The Edge
A simple but powerful lemma: LTE Preda Mihăilescu is a mathematician who solved a famous open problem. He was trained by some of the best mathematicians in the world, but spent his early career working on turbines and later on…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Lifting The Edge
A simple but powerful lemma: LTE Preda Mihăilescu is a mathematician who solved a famous open problem. He was trained by some of the best mathematicians in the world, but spent his early career working on turbines and later on…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Weekly Data Science Resources
Data Science Central puts together a nice list of related papers. Descriptions and links here. Well worth following, including technical and non technical contributions.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Consumer Human Interactions
A report from the recent CHI conference. On playful interactions with things like bubbles. I think game dynamics should have more playful interactions, when most of what we see is competitive interactions. Competition does…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Sankey Diagrams
I was reminded again yesterday of the Sankey Diagram. Their use has been influenced by examples in Edward Tufte's graphic design books. The link points to a blog devoted to their use for representing complex data interaction…
From The Eponymous Pickle
History of Photretouching
The extent to which we can trust a given image has changed much. This piece examines the history of the process. Suggesting that most photos today are fiction. I worry too that the same can be said about many data representations…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Fossil Squid
Rare fossilized cephalopods. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered....
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
USPTO Patent Public Advisory Committee Meeting on May 22, 2014
The USPTO Patent Public Advisory Committee will hold its next quarterly meeting on Thursday, May 22, 2014 from 9 am to 3 pm at the USPTO campus in Alexandria, Virginia. The meeting is open to the public. The meeting will also…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Computational and Cognitive Creativity
An interesting article about the use of systems like Watson to add creative dimensions to what were in the past purely computational problems. We made this observation a decade ago. If you can supply direct computational…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Visions 2025 – Interactions: Our Future with Social, Cognitive and Physical Intelligent Assistants
The following is a special contribution to this blog by Limor Fix. Limor recently retired from Intel, where she was the director of University Collaborative Research (UnCoR). UnCoR is the primary university-facing division…
From Schneier on Security
How to Stop an Insider from Stealing All Your Secrets
This article from Communications of the ACM outlines some of the security measures the NSA could, and should, have had in place to stop someone like Snowden. Mostly obvious stuff, although I'm not sure it would have been effective…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Expect Labs Mindmeld
Taking another look at Expectlabs. And their Mindmeld work. " ... We are undergoing a profound transformation in how we interact with our devices. Today, users expect that the services they tap into are smarter than ever. Predictive…
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
Nominations for National Medal of Technology and Innovation Due June 2
Nominations for the National Medal of Technology and Innovation are due by June 2, 2014. The award is bestowed by the U.S. President as the country’s highest honor for achievements in the science, technology, engineering, or…
From The Eponymous Pickle
On Data Science and Big Data in Pharma
New colleague Diego Kuonen, PhD in Statistics - CStat PStat CSci - CEO, CAO at Statoo Consulting, gives a presentation: " .... May 13, 2014, at the `SMi Big Data in Pharma' conference in London, United Kingdom: http://www.slideshare…
From The Eponymous Pickle
AppInventor and Teaching Logic
On teaching programming, and using it as a method to teach logic in general. Judy Robertson in the CACM.
From Schneier on Security
Forged SSL Certificates Pervasive on the Internet
About 0.2% of all SSL certificates are forged. This is the first time I've ever seen a number based on real data. News article: Of 3.45 million real-world connections made to Facebook servers using the transport layer security…
From updated sporadically at best
Dual Booting Windows 8.1 and Ubuntu 14.04
It appears that Windows remains ahead in this operating systems arm race: dual booting with Linux has become even more difficult. Here are some updated instructions from the last time I dual booted.Shrink the size of your Windows…
From Computer Science Teachers Association
New Docs Show Oracle Academy Alignment with CS Standards
The Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) and Oracle have released a series of new documents that demonstrate alignment between the CSTA K-12 Computer Science Standards and Oracle Academy's Java Fundamentals course and…
From The Eponymous Pickle
New Blog at Computer Now: Business Intelligence
Looks to be well done.MajorBI-All Things Business Intelligence:Is Your Company Ready to Deploy Business Intelligence Intelligently?" ... Although the majority of data-driven enterprises may have or use BI software or systems,…
From Schneier on Security
Is Antivirus Dead?
Symantec declared anti-virus dead, and Brian Krebs writes a good response. He's right: antivirus won't protect you from the ever-increasing percentage of malware that's specifically designed to bypass antivirus software, but…