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
Surviving Technological Sea Changes
MJ Perry on the survival of IBM during a hundred years of technological changes.
From My Biased Coin
New Books Worth Looking At
New books are coming out all the time, but here are two big ones that stick out in my mind (perhaps because I've seen the authors recently). [Feel free to mention others worth noting in the comments.]Recently available (I saw…
From Computer Science Teachers Association
Priorities
Recently I was asked by a younger teacher, how I allocate my time because he knew that I teach both computer science and mathematics. I never thought much about it prior to his question. I responded to him with, I work on what…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Controlling Swarms of Tiny Robots
From IEEE Spctrum: We proposed a variant of this idea years ago. Unleash a hoard of tiny robotic 'turtles' in a confined space like a warehouse to take inventory, use sensors to sniff out problems, track individual items for…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Web Illiteracy
This ReadWriteWeb piece struck home. Lately I have been in a number of conversations where I discovered that less is known about operational aspects of the Internet than I thought. It is a kind of illiteracy that is not always…
From The Eponymous Pickle
About Faces
Revisiting About Face: The Secrets of Emotionally Effective Advertising, by Dan Hill. What is more primal than a face? A good portion of our brains are devoted to interacting with faces. How can faces be interpreted in terms…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Impact Games
From a colleague: ... A company called ImpactGames www.impactgames.com and it
From The Eponymous Pickle
On the Future of Quantum Computing
A good description and view of the future of quantum computing, by IBM and others. In Computerworld: " ... Quantum computers could provide a big boost to technologies that are problematic for conventional computers, such as…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Why Chrome?
I wondered about this question. It just seems much less versatile than other browsers. It is fast. Is it in the Chromification of the operating system?
From The Eponymous Pickle
Continuous Web Showcase
Attended an excellent Web Startup Showcase today hosted by ContinuousWeb today. One of the best I have ever seen, with some excellent presenting projects. Hosted by Joshua Johnson of local Mindbox Studios. That company was…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Jeff Bezos on Innovation
Be stubborn on the vision and flexible on the details. Jeff Bezos on innovation in Techdirt
From The Noisy Channel
Foo for Thought
Last weekend I had the extraordinary privilege to attend Foo Camp, an annual gathering of about 250 Friends Of O’Reilly (aka Foo). Tim O’Reilly, Sara Winge, and their colleagues have amazing friends, as you can see if you scan…
From Schneier on Security
Fourth SHB Workshop
I'm at SHB 2011, the fourth Interdisciplinary Workshop on Security and Human Behavior, at Carnegie Mellon University. This is a two-day invitational gathering of computer security researchers, psychologists, behavioral economists…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
ITA Software
Remember the electronic reservation system that you used to book your summer vacation this year? Well, in all likelihood, it was powered by information technology from ITA Software — the 450-person, Cambridge, MA-based company…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Barbara Liskov receives an honorary degree from Northwestern
… and a shout-out early in Stephen Colbert’s hilarious commencement address. Congratulations Barbara!
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Beautiful Deep-Sea Squid Picture
From the Telegraph (also here).
From Michael Nielsen
Data-driven intelligence
I’ve started a new blog, on data-driven intelligence. In future, this is where technical posts like my Google Technology Stack posts will go. There are two posts up: A post describing Pregel, Google’s system for implementing…
From Schneier on Security
Horse "No Ride" List
Excellent satire.
From Schneier on Security
Court Ruling on "Reasonable" Electronic Banking Security
One of the pleasant side effects of being too busy to write longer blog posts is that -- if I wait long enough -- someone else writes what I would have wanted to.
The ruling in the Patco Construction vs. People's United Bank…From The Eponymous Pickle
New Google Analytics
The latest version of Google Analytics now includes new breakdowns of regions in many other parts of the world. Very useful additional extraction. See also the Google Analytics blog for more useful information, training and…
From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
On Telling the World My Life is About to Change
I recently unleashed the following announcement to Facebook and Twitter:
BabyFactory.RequestNewInstance(BABY_TYPE_GEEK);That's right! I'm expecting!I have been saving up that geeky little announcement for…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Internet of Things
A good overview article in the BBC on the Internet of Things. Really a relatively old idea that we explored with MIT with such ideas like replacing the bar code with RFID tags. Has this changed with the flurry of solutions…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Call for Papers: Collective Intelligence 2012
Tom Malone and Luis von Ahn — with funding from the
From Wild WebMink
links for 2011-06-17
NZOSS Wins Patent Opposition So Microsoft doesn't have a patent on XML in document processing in New Zealand. Excellent result for the New Zealand Open Source Society here – congratulations to everyone who has been involved over…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Mobile Marketing Rules
Well put: 4 Rules of engagement for mobile marketing. Author Carla Paschke ... is Director of Mobile Innovation at Engaugewhere she is responsible for providing best-in-class mobile strategies for clients, including Coca-Cola…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Crowdsourcing to Create Metadata
Tagging images is one of the oldest crowdsourcing applications of constructing metadata...Dartmouth College researchers have developed Metadata Games, an experiment that uses crowdsourcing to create archival metadata. The researchers…
From My Biased Coin
NSF Changing Broader Impacts
The NSF is changing its description of its merit criteria -- specifically, what the Broader Impacts criteria will be. The details are still being worked out, and comments are being collected until July 14. More informationthis…
From Schneier on Security
The Decline of al Qaeda
Interesting essay.
From My Biased Coin
Dr. Georgios Zervas
Congratulations to Georgios (alternatively, Giorgos), who defended his thesis today.* (There's still some paperwork to get in, but we drank the champagne afterward, so I'm calling it official.) He gave a great presentationan…
From The Eponymous Pickle
In Search of Structure
Searching for data structure, From the Noisy Channel by Daniel Tunkelang. Some discussuib and lots of links about making data more useful.