Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
June 2009
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Death to the 3-hour exam
As an undergraduate student, I hated the 3-hour exams. But I knew how to do well on them. The secret? Get your hands on all exams from the last ten years for this class. Sit down for a couple of days and grind through all questions…
From Putting People First
R&D 2.0: fewer engineers, more anthropologists
Navi Radjou argues on the HarvardBusiness.org Voices blog that R&D in emerging markets needs fewer engineers and more anthropologists. “To effectively identify and address the explicit and unmet needs of the broader consumer…
From The Noisy Channel
Google Wave or just a Blip?
Yesterday, I was fortunate to attend a presentation from a Google Engineering Director about Google Wave, an online communication and collaboration tool that Google recently unveiled at the Google I/O developer conference. For…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Can Math Provoke all Emotions
Science author Ian Stewart talks about the emotions that can be produced by the use and study of math.-
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
House Science and Technology Committee Starts Hearings on Cybersecurity
On June 10 the Research and Science Education subcommittee of the House Science and Technology Committee held a hearing on cybersecurity. This is the first of three planned hearings prompted by the Obama Administration's recent…
From Putting People First
From little things
The Future Tense programme on Australia’s ABC Radio features bottom-up, user-generated innovation in Africa: “In this program we’ll highlight several interesting initiatives, one in Africa and one in the South Asia region, initiatives…
From Apophenia
Twitter is for friends; Facebook is everybody
I was talking with a friend of mine today who is a senior at a technology-centered high school in California. Dylan Field and his friends are by no means representative of US teens but I always love his perspective on tech practices…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Flu Models Wrong
Yet another example of models being wide of the mark. In the NYTimes a look at the models done for the flu and how poorly they have performed. As a person who has constructed models for many years this adds further concern…
From BLOG@CACM
Latin America & Internet Security
How are our countries dealing with internet security issues?
From Putting People First
The Mobile Difference
The Mobile Difference, a new report by the Pew Internet & American Life project covers at length the current social implications of mobile internet access in the United States: “Some 39% of Americans have positive and improving…
From Putting People First
Fabio Sergio, a design and user experience strategist, creative director at frog design, and former associate professor at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, was one of the speakers at the Frontiers of Interaction conference…
From Putting People First
Barclays on less becoming more in product and service design
Barclays 360 magazine, a quarterly thought leadership magazine for senior management within the Barclays Group, is devoted to simplicity in product and service design. Here are the feature articles (of which the last one, which…
From Putting People First
SVA lectures on service design
Last night the School of Visual Arts in New York hosted a lecture on service design. “While far more attention is still paid to the design of products, there is an argument to be made that we
From Putting People First
Video interview with M-PESA pioneer Nick Hughes
The people of Microfinance Podcast have just posted a short video interview with Nick Hughes, Head of International Mobile Payment Solutions at the Vodafone Group, who has been instrumental in getting M-PESA up and running. Watch…
From Putting People First
The Bottom of the Pyramid
This week the Institute for Money, Technology & Financial Inclusion hosted a conference about the “Bottom of the Pyramid” and Elizabeth Losh, author of Virtualpolitik and writing director of the Humanities Core Course at the…
From Putting People First
Designing things that think they are services, and services that think they are things
Matt Jones, founder and former lead designer at Dopplr and also former director of UX design at Nokia, is now a principal designer at Schulze & Webb in London. He was also one of the speakers at the Frontiers of Interaction…
From Putting People First
What Is conversational currency?
Jay Deragon argues in a short piece on AlwaysOn that social media and related tools are generating a new currency that is created by the propagation of your conversation and its relevance to your audience, and whose worth increases…
From The Noisy Channel
Back from Endeca Discover
I hope that regular readers forgive the recent sparsity of posts. I spent most of the last three days attending Discover, Endeca’s annual user conference. It might come as a shock to some (especially the PR folks who keep sending…
From BLOG@CACM
Enviro Scientists Call on Comp Scientists to Bridge Gap in Solving NP-Hard Problems
Environmental scientists are unaware of advances in computational complexity and have been limiting problems they tackle, but they are hopeful as result of First Conference on Computational Sustainability. But funds and politics…
From The Eponymous Pickle
The Fragile Hawthorne Effect
The Hawthorne effect is often brought up in industrial psychology. It was brought up when constructing industrial experiments and simulations where the behavior of people was involved. As it was presented, an experiment introduced…
From BLOG@CACM
Cornell Economist Says Disaster Relief Workers Need AI Tools
Economist Christopher B. Barrett has been developing decision trees to help CARE relief workers analyze conditions in disaster zones. They need more efficient and simple ways to decide what type of aid is best for survivors,…
From BLOG@CACM
More on Bridging the Gap Between Ecologists and Computer Scientists
At the First Conference on Computational Sustainability, Cornell's Evan Cooch, evolutionary ecologist, describes what happened in the past when he asked an engineer to collaborate on an ecology problem. We need to find ways to…
From The Eponymous Pickle
P&G Pumping Digital Media
In AdAge: Marketing mix and other analytical methods are starting to show large companies that there is real value to using digital at a greater level. This has been known for some time, but it finally appears to be resulting…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Grocery Strategies
A good BW overview article on new strategies by retail grocery. ' ... From ready-to-eat meals to eco-friendly offerings, food retailers are finding more ways to distinguish themselves and win customers ...' -
From Wild WebMink
OpenJDK Board gets Google & Red Hat Members
Over the weekend, Mark announced he's updated the OpenJDK Interim Governance Board page to add details of the two new members Sun has asked to join the Board to navigate towards a permanent OpenJDK governance system. They are…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wordnik for Words
Wordnik. A beta site that seeks to be more than a dictionary. Sort of an encyclopedia of words. A modern OED. ' .... An ongoing project devoted to discovering all the [English] words and everything about them. More than 1…
From The Noisy Channel
Attending Endeca Discover
Apologies for the unusual hiatus in posting–I’ve been attending Endeca Discover (an annual user conference) and haven’t managed to allocate time for blogging. I’ll make up for it by blogging about the conference tomorrow, when…
From BLOG@CACM
Low-Cost Sensors Help People Turn 'Green'
University of Washington and Carnegie Mellon researchers are building sensors for phones and homes that give people feedback on their habits and encourage them to save resources.
From BLOG@CACM
Matching Digital Photos to Identify Wildlife
Dutch Scientists create digital "collective intelligence" system to compare photos of animals' markings.
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Why senior researchers and managers should analyze data themselves
Scientists, businessman and even spies are supposed to analyze data collaboratively. Are they? If you are a scientist, you are familiar with the following type of research collaboration: