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 Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Interesting Links Post 28 June 2010
This post is last this week. Why? Totally wrapped up in ISTE. OK I dis spend some of Sunday visiting the Mummies of the World exhibit at the Franklin institute and then a trip to Betsy Ross
From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
L.A. Noire: A Great Story Despite Its Linearity
My mind has been occupied by narrative lately. I've been surveying literature about non-linear / interactive narrative and storytelling with the goal of eventually coming up with new strategies for piecing together story fragments…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
The National Science Foundation and IEEE Spectrum Radio have partnered to produce a terrific series of reports describing
From Computational Complexity
Math on FUTURAMA and LAW AND ORDER:CI
MATH ON TV
FUTURAMA mentions the Banach-Tarski Paradox! In the June 23, 2011 episode Professor Farnsworth invents a Banach-Tarski-Dupla-Shrinker which takes a blueprint of an object (like a sweater or Bender) and some matter…From The Eponymous Pickle
GS1: The Digital Consumer and Trusted Product Information
Tomorrow!GS1 MobileCom/B2C Day 2011
What is it? GS1 MobileCom/B2C Day 2011 is global event to understand thegrowing potential of mobile commerce and digital business-to consumer interaction for the FMCG/Retail sector.
Through…From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
CCC Council to Meet in Washington on July 15
The CCC Council is scheduled to meet in Washington, DC, on Friday, July 15, and will be discussing the role of fundamental computing research in Smart Health & Wellbeing as well as Sustainability. Here’s a formal announcement…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Home Grown Computer Camp
Michael Scherotter who works for Microsoft decided to run a computer programming day camp in his home for his 9 year old son and 9 of his friends. Taking on teaching programming to 10-year olds may not be for everyone but from…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Amazon Sells ads Everwhere
Amazon has started an ad network where you can sell ads to just about everything, anywhere. A clever idea. Much more." ... The e-commerce giant has started what is effectively an ad network*, where it buys Web advertising inventory…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Adknowledge Moves Facebook Games to Web Portals
Interesting development includes monetization, which will probably see some more games appearing on sites. Is that good?
From The Eponymous Pickle
Solving Food Deserts with WalMart
Mark Perry posts about the potential for companies like WalMart to address such problems as the recently coined 'food desert' issue, using Washington DC as an example. Efficient delivery of a broad selection of foods, at low…
From The Eponymous Pickle
DemandTec and Dollar General
It has been a long time since I took a look at DemandTec for deep analytical applications like revenue management, promotion and assortment optimization. We looked at their impressive analytical methods shortly after theirthey…
From Putting People First
Achieving a sense of home for people who travel extensively
One of the people presenting at the DPPI conference in Milan last week was Aviaja Borup Lynggaard, an industrial Ph.D. scholar at Bang & Olufsen (B&O), attached to the Aarhus School of Architecture and Aarhus University. Her…
From Putting People First
Toyota and CIID open a Window to the World
Imagine when a journey from A to B is no longer routine, as your car in the near-future encourages a sense of play, exploration and learning. This is the image engineers and designers from Toyota Motor Europe (TME) and the Copenhagen…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
More Than Just The Box
Today has been a busy day at ISTE 2011 for me. I did some time at the booth and then went to a couple of sessions. Pat Yongpradit talked about what he is doing with XNA in his school. He
From The Eponymous Pickle
Enabling a Musem with Augmented Reality
An excellent example of augmented reality, enabling the J Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles to use Google Goggles to get more information about the museum's holdings while touring the space. I think that examples like this…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Art of Game Design
In Process: The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses, by Jesse Schell. Have made my way through the introductory parts of the book. Very well done overview of game systems inspires me to want the rest of the book as needed…
From Computational Complexity
FCRC 2011. Part 2 of... probably 2.
(A workshop on Coding, Complexity and Sparsity will be held at Ann Arbor, August 1-4, 2011. See this website.)
More thoughts on FCRC.
From The Eponymous Pickle
P&G Contributes Manufacturing Models
In the local press: Procter & Gamble has said they will contribute at no cost 3D process modeling programs to help create a ' manufacturing renaissance' in the US. The models are used today to model things like the flow of urine…
From The Eponymous Pickle
GeoIQ: Visualize and Analyze Real-Time Geo Data
I had the opportunity to look at a relatively new Geographical Information System: GeoIQ. Have worked on a number of company GIS projects and this looks to be a very good solution. In particular the ability to address large…
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
Hill Tech Happenings, Week of June 27
June 29 Hearing: The Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee will hold a hearing on consumer data privacy. 10 a.m., 253 Russell Building The House Financial Services Committee will hold a field hearing on cybercrime…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
MIT Professor
Fresh on the heels of Friday’s big announcement about a new National Robotics Initiative, I thought now would be a great time to feature a recent talk by MIT CSAIL Professor Leslie Pack Kaelbling. Speaking at the
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
On being happy
What if you could engineer happiness? What if you could redesign your life so that you are happier? With professors in mind, Brian Martin wrote an essay entitled On being a happy academic with this very purpose. He outlines a…
From Wild WebMink
links for 2011-06-27
The Failed Experiment of Software Patents – Open Enterprise One day one of these cases will have an outcome so outrageous that legislators will be forced to hold up a hand to the corporate hawks and ask them why they want even…
From Putting People First
Studying interaction design in Switzerland
A new master in interaction design will start in September in Switzerland — with some teaching support from Experientia — and a few places are still available. The MAS in Interaction design at the University of the Applied Sciences…
From Schneier on Security
Common PINs
There's some great data on common iPhone passwords. I'm sure the results also apply to banking PINs.
From Putting People First
Book: Ethnographies of the Videogame
Ethnographies of the Videogame: Gender, Narrative and Praxis by Helen Thornham, City University London, UK Ethnographies of the Videogame Ashgate, July 2011, 218 pages [Amazon UK link] Ethnographies of the Videogame uses the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
E-Books and Libraries
Good overview in ReadwriteWeb: More indications of if libraries will survive and what form they will take. Will they be in the Cloud with the rest of us? Or parceled out in book like pieces? How will compensation be delivered…
From Wild WebMink
? Coffee Time in Brazil
Just ending a relaxing Sunday with friends in Brazil, who have these coffee plants in their garden. It’s getting close to the time the berries need harvesting, although as we discovered last time we tried it the work involved…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Can Computers Communicate Visually?
Visualization Viewpoint in IEEE Computing Now, If they can, can we do the same working with them?Can Computers Master the Art of Communication? A Focus on Visual Analytics. by Klaus Mueller, Supriya Garg, Julia EunJu Nam…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Biologically Inspired Visual Search
And more about visual search. I worked on several projects in this area, and it is a difficult problem, though there have been advances in recent years." ... The technology, developed by Cortexica, a startup spun out of research…