Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
July 2009
From The Eponymous Pickle
Design Using the Golden Ratio
From the DownloadSquad ' .. The Golden Ratio has been used in design for ages. Such greats as DaVinci, Michaelangelo, Rembrandt, Mondrian, and LeCorbusier utilized it in many of their works. Even Mother Nature utilizes the proportion…
From Return 42;
Many Ways to Tag Taggables
Today, I was looking for a current version of acts_as_taggable for a small Rails project I am working on. It seems like there are more than a hand full at the moment. This is a list of all the tagging plugins for Rails that I…
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
Over 800 Reports of Health Data Breaches in California this Year
According to Wired.com's Threat Level, the new California law requiring "organizations in California to report suspected incidents of intentional and unintentional unauthorized breaches of a patient?s personally identifiable…
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
Hill Tech Happenings, Week of July 13
July 14
Meeting:
The Election Assistance Commission will meet and hold a public hearing. Part of the agenda will focus on accessibility and voting technologies. 1 p.m., 1225 New York Avenue, N.W., Suite 150, Washington, D.C…From The Eponymous Pickle
Demonstration Projects at Wolfram
I know I have been harping on Wolfram Mathematica, but since I have been re-introduced to their suite and have had a chance to scan their offerings I have noticed they have a really remarkable set of demonstration projects, as…
From Putting People First
Nokia patents gestural phone controls
A promotional video earlier today, and now a patent application — too much of a coincidence: “We know that Nokia is looking into more areas than just buttons and touchscreens for phone controls, and a recently revealed patent…
From Apophenia
I Want my Cyborg Life
For the last few years, I've been spoiled. I've been surrounded by people who, when asked a question, immediately bring out a digital device and look it up. The conferences that I've attended have backchannels as a given. Tweeting…
From Wild WebMink
links for 2009-07-13
Brilliant piece by Anil Dash. It took Microsoft until 2005 to start to grasp the issue he frames here, and they still aren't over it yet. IBM faced the same…
From The Eponymous Pickle
AAAI Opens Digital Library
The premier professional Artificial Intelligence society, AAAI, has opened its digital library to the public..
From Putting People First
Nokia
The Nokia Conversations blog reports: Designing gestures to help you interact with your device in intuitive ways is a challenge that Nokia is grabbing with both hands and welcoming with a respectful bow. Younghee Jung is one…
From Putting People First
Craiglist founder on the changing balance between authority and the crowd
In a short video interview on Nokia’s IdeasProject Craigslist founder and customer service expert Craig Newmark says Internet connectivity is adjusting the balance between centralized expertize and the power derived from online…
From The Noisy Channel
Design For Interaction: My SIGMOD Slides
From The Eponymous Pickle
Average Quicksand
Herb Sorensen of TNS Sorensen talks about "Average" Quicksand in shopping trips: ' ... What is the life experience of the average human being? Other than that they are born and die, it gets pretty complicated. That's why we…
From Wild WebMink
links for 2009-07-12
From The Eponymous Pickle
Augmented ID on Mobile
What you would love to see is a picture ID on any picture taken with your mobile cam. Even the ability, if it were reliable enough, to use it as a means to identify yourself to the phone itself. ReadWriteWeb describes this…
From The Eponymous Pickle
3DSee: 3D Modeling on the Web
Always looking for easier ways to take aspects of the real world and turn it into manipulable models online. Here reviewed in DownloadSquad. A means of building a 3D model using digital photos. See 3DSee. Examining. More…
From BLOG@CACM
Technological Garbage
Are Latin American countries prepared enough to deal with the environmental and health risks caused by techno-garbage?
From The Noisy Channel
Faceted Search Book Is Shipping
From The Noisy Channel
Catching Up On Last Week
From CSDiary
Carlos Guestrin Wins Presidential Early Career Award
Carlos Guestrin has just been given the highest honor bestowed by the US government for early-career scientists and engineers, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). One of just 100 so named…
From Putting People First
Augmenting Venice
The MIT Mobile Experience Laboratory has just published a recent project about location-based media, focusing on how the future of mobile contents are related to the physical environment. The project, Locast, was made in collaboration…
From Putting People First
Book: Mobile Communication
Mobile Communication by Rich Ling and Jonathan Donner Polity, 2009 200 pages With staggering swiftness, the mobile phone has become a fixture of daily life in almost every society on earth. In 2007, the world had over 3 billion…
From The Eponymous Pickle
BP Energy Consumption Data
This turns out to be useful for an ongoing project, impressive: ' ... Everything you always wanted to know about oil and gas prices, consumption, coal, hydro-electricity
From Putting People First
Privacy requires security, not abstinence
In a long essay on Technology Review, Simson Garfinkel reflects on what protecting an inalienable right might mean in the age of Facebook. “Privacy matters. Data privacy protects us from electronic crimes of opportunity–identity…
From Putting People First
The rating game
The spread of Internet rankings and reviews is freeing consumers to focus on the decisions that matter, writes Kevin Maney in the current issue of The Atlantic Monthly. “The more technology can help with decisions, the better…
From Putting People First
Introduction to service design
Culminatum Ltd – Helsinki Region Centre of Expertise has published a great online tool, entitled Introduction to service design. “The purpose of this digital communications tool is to establish a common ground and a starting…
From Putting People First
Rural India
The Wall Street Journal and India Knowledge@Wharton present a unique mix of reporting, analysis, interviews and video on life and business in rural India. The Rural India reader resource combines specially-commissioned material…
From Putting People First
Personas, devices, enterprises and diaries to illustrate life in 2020
Wired UK reports on a new foresight project by Ericsson: Ericsson, the company that, with Sony, gave birth to Sony Ericsson in 2001, has unveiled its Life in 2020 project, which involved 450 experts from inside and outside the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Losing Our Ability to Think Critically
From the Communications of the ACM: Are We Losing Our Ability to Think Critically?Computer technology has enhanced lives in countless ways, but some experts believe it might be affecting people's ability to think deeply ... '
From The Eponymous Pickle
Brick and Mortar
I have been involved with the understanding of brick and mortar stores, and the utilization of online commerce. Now a way to design a brick wall of the future with mathematics. Building a wall is something that has proven very…