Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
June 2012
From The Eponymous Pickle
Postal Strategy
It has been obvious that the US Postal Service needs to adapt to change. Wharton discusses this in some detail. They have changed considerably, introducing many new services, but with only marginal improvement. Yet the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Degrees of Separation
In CACM: Reexamining the popular meme of tight connectivity of our social network. The small world. In 2000 we visited the Santa Fe Institute for a workshop on the use of such connectivity to understand the flow of marketing…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
NIST
“How is the general population of researchers and institutions to meet [the needs of] ‘Big Data’?” That was the question posed last week by Ian Foster, director of the Computation Institute at Argonne National Laboratory, before…
From Computational Complexity
The Ketchup Problem
MIT scientists are working on a bottle of ketchup where you CAN get out every last drop. See here for details and some nice videos of the new bottle in action. This will be used on other products (like Mayonnaise) and will save…
From Schneier on Security
Apple Patents Data-Poisoning
It's not a new idea, but Apple Computer has received a patent on "Techniques to pollute electronic profiling":
Abstract: Techniques to pollute electronic profiling are provided. A cloned identity is created for a principal.…From Wild WebMink
A Database Ripe For Abuse
The draft Communications Data Bill is of great concern, not primarily because it lacks controls over who can access private data – these will be added – but because it creates a privacy-destroying surveillance resource which…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Greening the Supply Chain
A Wharton special report on practices for sustainability and greening the supply chain. Best practices and future trends.
From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
How Important is Gameplay for Educational Games, Anyway?
Gameplay
From Wild WebMink
Help test Ubuntu for Android
Want to get hands-on with Ubuntu for Android?
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Do not waste time with STL vectors
I spend a lot of time with the C++ Standard Template Library. It is available on diverse platforms, it is fast and it is (relatively) easy to learn. It has been perhaps to conservative at times: we only recently got a standard…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Can You Hear the Shape of a Quantum Computer?
Debate round 3: Computation cannot hide the physics Mark Kac was a great mathematician, and worked mainly in probability theory. Kac is famous for the Erdős-Kac theorem, which is often called “the fundamental theorem of probabilistic…
From Putting People First
Nathan Shedroff on the past and future of experience design
Nathan Shedroff (bio), the pioneer in Experience Design, Interaction Design and Information Design, and the chair of the MBA in Design Strategy at California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco, CA, is looking back on…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Mobility in Healthcare IT
In ComputerWorld: Will health care organizations need what is akin to a Chief Mobility Officer? Mobility is a key to efficient healthcare. Linking together wherever the patient may be with wherever the multiple kinds of professional…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Thinking About Next School Year
As the rolling schedule of school year openings and closings continues it looks like school is just about done everywhere in the US this week. Today is the last day with students at the school my wife teaches at. It seems like…
From Schneier on Security
Switzerland National Defense
Interesting blog post about this book about Switzerland's national defense.
To make a long story short, McPhee describes two things: how Switzerland requires military service from every able-bodied male Swiss citizen -- a model…From Putting People First
Spaniards turn to barter, alternative banks to alleviate economic pain
Spanish institutions are in no shape to help struggling Spaniards, so they’re turning to alternative banks and ways of exchanging goods to get by, reports Andr
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
A nice article on The New York Times‘s Bits Blog yesterday, about Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist Luis von Ahn and his Duolingo experiment: Language does not come naturally to machines. Unlike humans, computers…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Future Thinking
In Wired: Future thinking relies on out memory of the past. And our memories of the past are not as reliable as we think. They are easily altered and deceived. Research into this whole seemingly unreliable memory system takes…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Bill Wulf resigns from the University of Virginia in protest
Eminent computer scientist Bill Wulf, who has been a leader by example for so many years in so many ways, has resigned from the University of Virginia to protest the recent conduct of the UVa Board of Visitors in removing President…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma
The work of Robert Axelrod and William Poundstone fascinated us in graduate school as we tried to apply AI techniques to decision strategies. I see that The Edge has a good piece that elaborates a conversation between them…
From Schneier on Security
Attack Against Point-of-Sale Terminal
Clever attack:
When you pay a restaurant bill at your table using a point-of-sale machine, are you sure it's legit? In the past three months, Toronto and Peel police have discovered many that aren't. In what is the latest financial…From The Eponymous Pickle
Chemistry of Enthusiasm
Bain Insights: Which makes considerable sense. " ... The revenues and stocks of companies with highly engaged workers outperform those of companies with low engagement levels. Yet too many companies still seek to foster engagement…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Safeway Supports Shopping Research
In Progressive Grocer: Safeway joins with Duke-Ipsos on shopping research. More on that effort. There has been relatively little I have found on this shopping effort since its start. Can someone from Duke or Ipsos contact…
From Schneier on Security
The Failure of Anti-Virus Companies to Catch Military Malware
Mikko Hyponnen of F-Secure attempts to explain why anti-virus companies didn't catch Stuxnet, DuQu, and Flame:
When we went digging through our archive for related samples of malware, we were surprised to find that we already…From The Eponymous Pickle
Video Mining
Analyzing raw video from cameras. Videomining, a company we talked to as a potential solution for analyzing retail video lab stores that examined shopping contexts. " ... VideoMining Corporation is the leading provider of in…
From Wild WebMink
See you at OSCON?
I’ve news. My talk – about why OSI is more relevant than ever – has been accepted for OSCON
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Studio K
The other day the Kodu team announced Studio K. What is Studio K you ask? In my opinion it
From The Eponymous Pickle
On Universal Remotes
I see in Engadget the military is looking for universal remotes for drone fleets. I was thinking about the general idea of how to make a remote universal the other night, as I used one remote on an upstairs device, and another…
From My Biased Coin
Simons Institute Call
Alistair Sinclair asked me to post the call at http://simons.berkeley.edu/cfp_summer2012.html for the Call for Proposals for Simons Institute programs. The deadline is mid-July.Worth noting -- two semester-long programs for…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Shelf Publishing on the Kindle
Brought to my attention. Worth examining as an alternative to blogging with the ability to directly monetize the interaction.