Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
June 2010
From The Eponymous Pickle
Variable Sun
In an earlier academic life experience I did sun modeling. This field has made considerable strides over the years. I am no longer involved with the technologies at play, but it is clear that the models used do not predict. It…
From Putting People First
UXnet disbanded
Louis Rosenfeld, president of the Board of Directors of UXnet, announced last night that the user experience network is being disbanded: “On behalf of UXnet
From Putting People First
New Masters in Service Design at Domus Academy
From Putting People First
Parliament of Things
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: LOLSquid
It's supposed to be a classic, but I've never seen it before.
From Computational Complexity
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From Schneier on Security
Remote Printing to an E-Mail Address
This is cool technology from HP:
Each printer with the ePrint capability will be assigned its own e-mail address. If someone wants to print a document from an iPhone, the document will go to HP's data center, where it is rendered…From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The fallacy of absolute numbers
I often come across the following type of arguments in research papers: You could save 3 bits of storage for every value in your database. Surely that’s irrelevant. Nobody cares about saving 3 bits! You can sort arrays in 10…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Visual Concept Search Solved?
From a paper by Cees Snoek and Arnold Smeulders of the University of Amsterdam, suggests that the machine understanding of images is within reach. Minimal abstract here. Good paper which addresses semantic issues of the problem…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Critical Thinking
Friday is not the day to talk about thinking. I think a lot of people in general and students in particular are looking to stop thinking right about now. But critical thinking skills are something I feel is really importantteaching…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Nestle Supermarket Barge
Had heard of this before but only briefly... a novel idea which uses a barge on tributaries of the Amazon river in Brazil to engage truly emerging markets. Much more in Bloomberg.
From The Eponymous Pickle
FMI Revamps Website
FMI provides excellent technical information, over the years have been to a number of their conferences: FMI (Food Marketing Institute) has updated its website, www.fmi.org, improving ease of navigation and making it easier for…
From Putting People First
Deciphering the cause of human motivation
From Schneier on Security
The Continuing Incompetence of Terrorists
The Atlantic on stupid terrorists:
Nowhere is the gap between sinister stereotype and ridiculous reality more apparent than in Afghanistan, where it's fair to say that the Taliban employ the world's worst suicide bombers: one…From Wild WebMink
? BCS Members: Vote Now
If you’re a BCS Member or Fellow you’ve received a voting pack in the mail that needs your attention. Please vote this weekend so that there’s no risk of missing the deadline. I’ve written one more time on my ComputerWorldUK…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Visual Experience Management
From Saffron. Intriguing linkage of associative memory and visualization. Will examine it more closely."
From My Biased Coin
Fly-By Conferences (ISIT edition)
I'm writing this from ISIT (Int'l Symposium on Inf. Theory) in Austin. In fact, I'm sitting in on the session on for "Coding for Memories", a topic I did some work on last year and could see returning to (if I could figure out…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Watson: The Next Ken Jennings?
Ken Jennings, the man known for his record-breaking streak of 74 consecutive
From Schneier on Security
Hot Dog Security
A nice dose of risk reality:
Last week, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a statement calling for large-type warning labels on the foods that kids most commonly choke on
From Putting People FirstResistance is futile and the design of politics
From Putting People FirstUser-driven innovation for Nordic businesses
From Computational ComplexityAlternative Careers for Logicians
(Will post on Complexity next week. I am waiting until the invited talks have their slides online so that I can point to them.)
Lets say you just got a PhD in Logic. (ASIDE- my spell check program flagged PhD, but it gets…
From The Eponymous PickleIndoor use of Augmented Reality
From a Junaio press release, a good example:"Indoor Usage of junaio
From Putting People FirstJon Kolko on design that changes human behavior
From The Eponymous PickleDePaul Program in Predictive Analytics
First of its kind program in the US. Useful to see this kind of thing happening, and I hope it is linked strongly to MBA programs there and elsewhere
From Putting People FirstCollaborative consumption
From Wild WebMinklinks for 2010-06-17
UK keeps three times as many patents secret as the US Not only is the patent system broken (it has forgotten to protect the public good in return for granting a temporary monopoly), but it turns out that thousands of the things…
From Schneier on SecurityPatrolling the U.S./Canada Border
Doesn't the DHS have anything else to do?
As someone who believes that our nation has a right to enforce its borders, I should have been gratified when the Immigrations official at the border saw the canoe on our car and informed…
From ApopheniaFour Essays Addressing Risky Behaviors and Online Safety
At Harvard’s Berkman Center, John Palfrey, Urs Gasser, and I have been co-directing the Youth and Media Policy Working Group Initiative to investigate the role that policy can play in addressing core issues involving youth and…
From BLOG@CACMValuing High School Computing Teachers
Thoughts on why high school computing teachers are so important and how we can help them.