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
Mind Over Mass Media
Always interesting Steven Pinker writes an opinion piece in the NYT entitled Mind over Mass Media. ' ... NEW forms of media have always caused moral panics: the printing press, newspapers, paperbacks and television were all…
From Apophenia
(Newbie note: If you have never heard of 4chan, start with the Wikipedia entry and not the website itself. The site tends to offend many adults’ sensibilities. As one of my friends put it, loving LOLcats or rickrolling as outputs…
From My Biased Coin
Hectic Week, Finally Over!
Co-located conferences make for a hectic week! Again, my thanks to the Microsoft local arrangement team (especially Paul Oka) for setting up STOC, which I thought went very well. (The space worked out very nice -- even with…
From Putting People First
Closing the digital frontier
From Putting People First
The defense of computers, the Internet and our brains
From Putting People First
Using stories for a better user experience
From The Eponymous Pickle
How Blind to Change are We?
From the BBC, via Richard James. A good piece about how neuroscience and artificial intelligence have been exploring how our filters work and don't work when we want to explore complexity in our world.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Auctioning History Update
Based on messages received I know that some of you have been following my auction technology thread. I wrote about the Cowan auction of Lincoln history. That auction completed today, and the lot that included the Mary Todd Lincoln…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Future of Education
Does this mean the commoditization of higher education? Once you have lots of training courses online, and a way to rate them AND a means to pay the teachers, will formal classrooms just go away?A Self-Appointed Teacher RunsAre…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Software Cost in Cars
Even our locomotion is getting more complex:How much does software add to the cost of today's vehicles? How about tomorrow's electric cars?by Sebastian Blanco Back in 2005, the Center for Automotive Research, with help from other…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Polymer Clay Squid Ornament
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
Senator Lieberman and Colleagues Introduce Another Cybersecurity Bill
Cybersecurity legislation is sort of popular in this Congress. Several bills have been introduced, but there are enough cybersecurity bills working through the process that it's unclear whether or not anything will be passed…
From Schneier on Security
Security Cartoon
Hi and Lois, no less.
From My Biased Coin
STOC/FOCS Opinion : Guest Post by Boaz Barak
Boaz Barak asked to give a guest post on the recent STOC/FOCS issue and the question of accepting more papers. So I hand the floor over to Boaz:
Do we really need more papers in STOC/FOCS?
Continuing the discussion in the STOC…From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
Augmented Reality on Bloomberg Innovators, and Current Gaps
The weekly links post over at Games Alfresco - a blog about the latest and greatest industry and research advances in augmented reality - had a link to a documentary made by Bloomberg News. It's an episode of their Innovators…
From Schneier on Security
Mainstream Cost-Benefit Security Analysis
This essay in The New York Times is refreshingly cogent:
You've seen it over and over. At a certain intersection in a certain town, there'll be an unfortunate accident. A child is hit by a car. So the public cries out, the…From Schneier on Security
Botox as a Terrorist Threat
From Scientific American, no less.
From Putting People First
Poor user experience with smart meters a risk for energy suppliers
From Putting People First
Clay Shirky
From Putting People First
Recognising the nuances of privacy
From Putting People First
The anti-web movement is gathering pace
From The Eponymous Pickle
Whats Next for Publishing? Conference Report
Special report from Knowledge@Wharton: Turn the Page: What's Next for Publishing?. Excellent."Emerging technologies and strategies to reach new audiences are changing all aspects of the publishing industry, according to speakers…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Choice: Semantic Structure or Systemic Crises
Mark Montgomery of Kyields's blog post on the Gulf spill and the need for polymath perspective/philosophy for overcoming challenges.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Laptops of the Future
Computerworld looks at some of the early prototypes of laptops from a number of vendors. Most of what we see are multiple screens that can be used independently. Not really very novel at all. Flexible screens, where you could…
From Apophenia
How COPPA Fails Parents, Educators, Youth
Ever wonder why youth have to be over 13 to create an account on Facebook or Gmail or Skype? It has nothing to do with safety. In 1998, the U.S. Congress enacted the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) with the best…
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
USACM Comments on Internet Privacy Bill Discussion Draft
Representatives Rick Boucher (D-Virginia) and Cliff Stearns (R-Florida), who are the chair and ranking member of the House Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and Internet, introduced a discussion draft of an internet…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Voice Driven Web
From the CACM:" ... IBM Exploring voice-driven methods for the third-world webIBM Research India has launched the Spoken Web, a network designed to use phones, not computers, to bring information on the Web to mainly under-served…
From Schneier on Security
Ninth Workshop on Economics and Information Security
Earlier this week, the Ninth Workshop on Economics and Information Security (WEIS 2010) was held at Harvard. As always, it was a great workshop with some very interesting papers. Ross Anderson liveblogged the event.
From The Eponymous Pickle
AI and Stock Picking
In Technology Review: Text analytics method that picks stocks better than the pros. Which pro? Any pros? I have seen such methodologies of various stripes. My questions are always: In which kinds of markets? And why would you…
From BLOG@CACM
Robots: From 'What If' to 'Now That'
Our panel at CFP will explore how robotics implicates civil liberties today, and in the near term. We will discuss issues from the ethical ramifications of robots in warfare and law enforcement, to the promise and perils of autonomous…