Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
June 2013
From The Eponymous Pickle
Short Non Mathematical Statistics Course
Nice idea, Kaiser Fung from Junkcharts. I have often been in the need of having concise statistics training for managers and executives. "How to do statistics without really doing statistics?" .... Not a math course. Have…
From Computer Science Teachers Association
CS2013 and K-12
Are you interested in what the future of computer science and computer science education at the college level looks like?
Roughly once per decade, the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) and IEEE-Computing Society form…From The Eponymous Pickle
Real Time Robotic (Agent) Game
In IEEE Spectrum: An intriguing view of upcoming robotics games and AI. Will this result in game style interaction with the real world? It could be described as a physical implementation of an agent model. " ... Anki, a startup…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Cyber Security from Recorded Future
Have presented Recorded Future a number of times as a forward looking unstructured analysis method. Nor they announced something new, using their unique methods to do Cyber Security Monitoring. Worth examining. Much in the…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Staying sharp requires “intellectual gardening”
Gardening requires consistency. A beautiful garden is unstable. Some plants want to expand their reach and kill out the competition. Some plants are simply out of their element and need a little bit of help. Generally, there…
From BLOG@CACM
CFP: Bridging the Divide: U.S. and E.U. Perspectives on Privacy
While we have heard from two representatives from the EU on privacy, no one from the US government will join us for the first panel.
From Putting People First
The culture of borrowing and debt: an ethnographic approach
What are people’s philosophy and attitudes toward loans and debt? And how financial marketers can respond to their basic emotional needs in the lending process? Americans have a complicated relationship with debt, one that defies…
From BLOG@CACM
CFP: Domain Seizures and Online Free Expression
The overwhelming secrecy surrounding seizures conducted under Operation in Our Sites is inexplicable.
From Schneier on Security
MAD in Cyberspace
Ron Beckstrom gives a talk (video and transcript) about "Mutually Assured Destruction," "Mutually Assured Disruption," and "Mutually Assured Dependence."
From BLOG@CACM
CFP: Experts Discuss Location Data and the State of the Laws Protecting IT
Advocates and industry representatives discuss location data and how far the law should go to protect it.
From BLOG@CACM
CFP: Workshop Explores Privacy By Design
Software developers discuss new technologies for protecting privacy.
From BLOG@CACM
CFP: Cybersecurity
Herb Lin and Jeff Greene emphasized that the industry status quo is not stable. Companies are being aggressively hacked and will not simply sit still.
From BLOG@CACM
CFP: Prism
PRISM may be least problematic of disclosed programs. -Ashkan Soltani
From BLOG@CACM
CFP: Intellectual Property v. Personal Property: Owning Digital Media and the First Sale Doctrine
There is a growing tension between consumers and content companies when it comes to the manner in which content is purchased and what consumers expect to be able to do with that content.
From Putting People First
Understanding human behaviour: taking a more complex approach
Large-scale surveys are useful but if we are serious about changing behaviours, we must use every tool to understand human complexity, writes Steven Johnson in the Sustainable Business section of The Guardian. Ethnographic approaches…
From Geeking with Greg
Quick links
What has caught my attention lately:
From Wild WebMink
MariaDB Progress
I just posted a State Of The Sea Lion report on the MariaDB blog detailing where we have reached with implementing a community-centric approach for the MariaDB Foundation.
From Schneier on Security
Spear Phishing Attack Against the <cite>Financial Times</cite>
Interesting story with a lot of details.
From Computational Complexity
Quantum Tecniques/Gen Functions- don't be afraid of new techniques
Ronald de Wolf gave a GREAT talk at CCC on the uses of Quantum techniques to Classical Problems. He made the analogy of using the Prob Method to prove non-prob results. This reminded me of the following false counterarguments…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Do Data Scientists Scale?
Andrew Brust on the nature of data scientists and the scalability of what they do, or claim to do. I agree with many of the points made. I will summarize my view .. the term Data Scientist implies that there is some deep science…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Batch Mode Productivity
Our wealth of digital tools allow a broad range of time sharing to perform tasks. This can be selectively useful, but is clearly not the way to get real things done. CIO Minute piece on the value and productivity of the Batch…
From Putting People First
Talking Design with Dan Hill
We are pleased to invite you to the second in the “Talking Design” lecture series with Dan Hill, CEO of Fabrica. On Thursday July 4th, designer and urbanist Dan Hill will speak about smart citizens, in his talk “The not-so-smart…
From Putting People First
Advice from a former Apple director who coined the term ‘user experience’
Having worked on Apple’s User Interface Technologies and introducing the term “user experience” to company execs in the early 90s, Mitch Stein knows a thing or two about how humans interact with computers. “The term ‘user experience…
From Putting People First
Brian David Johnson on being more human
Intel’s resident futurist reflects on how the steampunk culture offers clues to building a better tomorrow. “Steampunk reveals three relationships that people want with their technology. First, they want their technology to have…
From Putting People First
Thirteen tenets of user experience
Robert Hoekman Jr. provides his list of 13 beliefs on the value of user experience strategy, design, and designers, “one for every year [he has] been in the web industry”.
From Schneier on Security
The Future of Satellite Surveillance
Pretty scary -- and cool.
Remember, it's not any one thing that's worrisome; it's everything together.
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Interesting Links 24 June 2013
Second year in a row I am not at ISTE this week. I understand that there are twice as many computer science sessions this year than last. That’s a good thing and something I believe that ISTE really needs to continue. I hope…
From The Eponymous Pickle
The Nature of the Data Scientist
Stephen Few writes about the nature of the term 'data scientist'. I personally don't like the term, I prefer the term 'analyst', which has fewer implications of complexity. The term also is more of a grouping of technical…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google Now Topics
A piece on the access of topics in the intelligent assistant Google Now. Intrguing, but it did give me what I expected when I accessed the topics page. Interesting because it reveals the structure of some of the knowledge that…
From My Biased Coin
How Should We Choose Students?
Some of my previous posts have led me to think about the following -- something I'm hoping to write a longer piece about in the near future.In the past few weeks, at Harvard (and elsewhere) there have been reports about the "decline…