Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
June 2011
From The Eponymous Pickle
Quest to Learn
I was recently introduced to the Quest to Learn school, using gaming ideas to teach. I like their approach, but it remains to be seen if it is effective. From their site:Learning by DoingDesigned to support the digital lives…
From My Biased Coin
FCRC Continued
I've been enjoying FCRC; of course, I like large conferences where lots of people show, as long as they're run well. Rooms have been pretty full at the talks, and lots of people around to talk to. I still don't understandrandomized…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Watson
David Ferrucci’s official title is “IBM Fellow and Leader of the Semantic Analysis and Integration Department at IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center.” But to the world, he’s the genius behind Watson, the question-answering supercomputer…
From Schneier on Security
Tennessee Makes Password Sharing Illegal
Here's a new law that won't work:
State lawmakers in country music's capital have passed a groundbreaking measure that would make it a crime to use a friend's login -- even with permission -- to listen to songs or watch movies…From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Programming is for Girls
Fair warning: Some gross generalizations and exaggeration for emphasis follow. But some valid points I think.
I wrote my first computer program over 35 years ago. There were more women in the field back then. Not as many as…From The Eponymous Pickle
FarmShoring
Colleague Steve King in Small Biz Labs gives a good overview of Farmshoring ... " Farmshoring - also called insourcing - describes outsourcing or locating operations in rural areas or smaller, lower cost towns in the US instead…
From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
Demoing Gram's House at Games for Change Festival 2011
I'm very excited to announce that I'll be demoing Gram's House at this year's Games for Change Festival. Even though the game did not make it through the first round of the Imagine Cup game design competition, I knew there was…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Nielsen and the Ethnic Consumer
Dissecting the Ethnic consumer: In Convience Store News, a look at data about ethnic shopping behavior. " .... From what people watch to what they buy, behavior across ethnic groups in the United States is as diverse as the…
From Schneier on Security
Fighting Terrorism with Cupcakes
MI6 hacked into an online al-Qaeda magazine and replaced bomb-making instructions with a cupcake recipe.
It's a more polite hack than subtly altering the recipe so it blows up during the making process. (I've been told, although…From Computer Science Teachers Association
Precise Language: It's All Relative
The term "precise language" has come up twice in the past few weeks in way that highlight the difference between computer science people and other people. (I wouldn't want to call them "regular" people.)
I am involved in a project…From The Eponymous Pickle
What is next in Windows 8
In what appears to be a fairly radical change, Windows 8 will be looking very different than Windows 7. I am thinking of moving to a new vendor's OS during my next upgrade. Right now I am 2/3 Apple.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Apple Provides Free Cloud
Announced by Apple today: iCloud will compete with and likely severely hurt vendors that have as part of their services file synchronization. Watch this carefully, it will also introduce many more people to the concept of…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Products Should Communicate Effectively
From the Harvard Blogs: Yes, designed well and communicate to their context transparently. " ... Obviously there are many dimensions of communication, but as these questions make clear, thinking carefully about the way products…
From Geeking with Greg
Eli Pariser is wrong
In recent interviews and in his new book, "The Filter Bubble", Eli Pariser claims that personalization limits serendipity and discovery.For example, in one interview, Eli says, "Basically, instead of doing what great media does…
From Geeking with Greg
Continuous profiling at Google
"Google-Wide Profiling: A Continuous Profiling Infrastructure for Data Centers" (PDF) has some fascinating details on how Google does profiling and looks for performance problems.From the paper:GWP collects daily profiles from…
From Computational Complexity
A Valiant Weekend
In my role as SIGACT chair, I got to attend the ACM Awards Banquet held at the beginning of FCRC in San Jose. I shared a table with Mitzenmacher who posted on the banquet earlier. Theory did well among the award winners but none…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
In Testimony, CISE AD Describes Research Contributions
Farnam Jahanian, the Assistant Director for CISE, testified at a U.S. House of Representatives hearing on May 25th. The hearing, convened jointly by the Subcommittee on Technology and Innovation and the Subcommittee on Research…
From The Eponymous Pickle
IBM Offers Cheaper City in a Box
Had to smile at this one. IBM has been pushing their Smarter City idea heavily in ads. Cities are in trouble financially today with the rest of government. So they can hardly afford IBM's usually expensive solutions. EvenSo…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Why I still program
People expect that, as you grow older, you give up practical jobs such as programming for more noble tasks such as managing a team and acquiring funding. This especially true in academia where “real professors” delegate the details…
From Wild WebMink
? Ending Division
LibreOffice Conference, Paris, 12th-15th October, 2011 The LibreOffice community is organising a conference. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all the various strands that corporate intrigue have torn the OpenOffice community into…
From Schneier on Security
Analysis of Redaction Failures
Redaction failures are so common that I stopped blogging about them years ago. This is the first analysis I have seen of technical redaction failures. And here's the NSA on how to redact.
From Putting People First
The future of money in a webbed-up world
Digital cash and online markets have the potential to loosen governments
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Interesting Links Post
Last week I celebrated eight years at Microsoft. I still miss the students which makes the guest talks I do in schools particularly valuable to me. Interestingly enough I was visiting a Microsoft office on the day of my anniversary…
From The Noisy Channel
Winning the War for Software Engineering Talent
The war for talent. It’s the latest metaphor for the challenge that tech companies face as excitement is building in Silicon Valley again. Well, not really — McKinsey coined the phrase in 1997 and used it as the title of a book…
From My Biased Coin
Harvard CS Hires (2011 Edition)
At FCRC, I'm getting asked a lot about hiring. Our hiring season still isn't quite yet finished, but I'm going to go ahead and announce three new faculty who will be joining Harvard. (At least, that's what they've told me!)On…
From The Eponymous Pickle
American Library Association Abstracts
Here the abstracts of the poster sessions from the American Library Association's recent meeting. Having dabbled in library science and its reaction to changes in technology over recent years, I found it refreshing to see what…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Games in Employee Recruitment
WSJ Piece includes a good example of how the enterprise is using gamification. I have seen similar examples in retail training: " ... While it's not clear if "Farmville" ever did anything to inspire future farmers, Marriott…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Explaining Relevance Metrics in Search
Relevance metrics are important. How can they be best explained? Very similar to the issues we had in artificial intelligence in explaining results satisfactorily to the decision maker.
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Taking a Square Root With DNA
Some research news last Friday that’s been the subject of much chatter in the popular press: Caltech researchers Lulu Qian and
From My Biased Coin
FCRC : Awards Banquet
I got to FCRC a little early to attend the ACM Awards Reception and Banquet. (Les Valiant nicely put my name on a list.) For more on the awards you can also go the ACM award page. They have a nice little award booklet they…