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
Optimization in the Enterprise
For many years my specialization in the enterprise was to optimize systems. We used many packages, up to including ones that dealt with very large problems of hundreds of thousands of variables. Problems like those need special…
From Putting People First
Design ethnography and mood maps
Will Evans, principal, experience design for Twin Technologies, writes in a somewhat rambling post about the value of mood maps to document and map the emotional states of a user so that it can guide the creation and communication…
From Putting People First
Digital diaries
Celine Perin, design researcher at frog design, describes on Use8 what digital diaries are, and why this a great methodology for interactive, international user research. “Our solution was to conduct a “digital diary study”:…
From Putting People First
The future of money
Stowe Boyd, an internationally recognised authority on social applications and their impact on business, media, and society, launched a new interview series examining the future of money. The series is sponsored in part by Neo…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wind Telecom and Netezza
Press release about WIND Telecom and Netezza. ' ... The Netezza system was specified and installed by Netezza partner ICare, a local data warehousing and BI specialist. WIND Telecom users are particularly impressed by their new…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Digital Barbarism?
Reading Mark Helprin's Digital Barbarism: A Writer's Manifesto. A good contrast to previously reviewed The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind, by Peter Boyle. I have read a number of Helprin's novels and he takes…
From BLOG@CACM
What's That You Say?
Science fiction has long told of a Universe thick with real-time speech-to-speech translation devices, and recent experiences in the land of the rising sun suggest that this reality may not be that far away.
From Wild WebMink
links for 2009-07-04
Great analysis of the folly of the laws proposed in Brazil that makes President Lula's decision to block them, announced at FISL, seem obviously…
From The Noisy Channel
Taking Time Off
From CSDiary
Claytronics, Cars, and Princess Leia?
Like any research project at CMU Computer Science, the CMU-Intel Claytronics Project publishes lots of papers in research conferences and journals. The project has also gotten more than its fair share of attention in the popular…
From The Eponymous Pickle
On Neuromarketing
Bruce Hall on NeuromarketingMakes the point that this adds to the existing rationally-directed methods, but not that NM can add a deeper and more complete dimension to understanding the consumer.
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Column stores and row stores: should you care?
Most database users row-oriented databases such as Oracle or MySQL. In such engines, the data is organized by rows.
From The Eponymous Pickle
SEO Analysis Using Data Visualization
Nice little case study:SEO Keyword Analysis: How to Use Data Visualization to Make it Quick and Easy by Niels Hoven Do-it-yourself keyword strategy for under $10.The foundation of a good search engine optimization (SEO) strategy…
From Return 42;
The other side of the table: Scott Aaronson
It is time for the next one. This time we feature the open question of Scott Aaronson.Since 2007 Scott Aaronson is a faculty member in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at the Massachusetts InstituteShtetl…
From The Noisy Channel
The Wild World of SIGMOD
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Is collaboration correlated with productivity?
Apparently, it is prestigious to write research papers with people from other countries. Funding agencies routinely favor collaboration between different
From Putting People First
Interview with the director of UX of the New York Times
Vicky Teinaki talked to Alex Wright, Director of User Experience at The New York Times, and author of Glut, a book on the history of information architecture from human evolution to the internet, about how a librarian gets into…
From Putting People First
From
A few months ago, we wrote with satisfaction how the Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) got inspired by the theme of its first European regional conference (Turin, December 2008 – co-chaired by Experientia partner Michele…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Freeconomics: Giving it Away
From Wharton's Knowledge Today, a view of alternate economic models: ' ... Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine, extols the market power of giving your product away in his new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price. But…
From Putting People First
Videos of Compostmodern conference online
All videos of the Compostmodern conference (San Francisco, February 2009) are now online. Presented by the San Francisco chapter of AIGA and the AIGA Center for Sustainable Design (CFSD), this interdisciplinary conference explores…
From Putting People First
July-August issue of Interactions magazine is out
The July-August issue of Interactions magazine is out and more and more content is publicly available online (thank goodness): Editorial: Interactions: Time, Culture, and Behavior Jon Kolko Over the past 10 issues, interactions…
From Putting People First
Steelcase research insights
Two interesting articles on recent Steelcase research, and particularly on the challenge of how to best gather relevant insights from qualitative research: How to find insights from your research You did the interviews, got the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Marco Polo Explorers
An interesting innovation consultancy group. ' ... Marco Polo Explorers is an innovation consultancy that transforms consumer insights, market intelligence and proven instinct into powerful new product and service ideas. This…
From Putting People First
Pattie Maes on interfaces and innovation
Pattie Maes, an associate professor in MIT
From The Eponymous Pickle
Designing for Behavior Change
In IEEE Computer, Ubifit: Designing for Behavior Change in Everyday Life. I have seen a number of lab attempts at this basic idea, this one looks good.
From Putting People First
The benefits (and challenges) of user-generated news
Matt Rhodes reflects on the role that users can play in generating news content, and the implications for us all. “I
From Putting People First
Towards tomorrow
Today work is somewhere you travel to – in the future work will come to you. So says a report attempting to work out what the offices and workplaces of 2030 will be like, reports the BBC. The report, which is sponsored by Johnson…
From Return 42;
35 Years of The UNIX Time-Sharing System
Earlier this year, people in many places wrote about the 40th anniversary of the moment Ken Thompson sat down and started to work on UNIX (which is actually in August). In fact, UNIX celebrates another birthday this year, even…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Twitter Versus Online Reviews
An excellent piece from Adage: Forget Twitter; Your Best Marketing Tool Is the Humble Product Review Feedback Has Influenced Design, Supplier Relations for Samsung, Walmart. I agree, Twitter is not the place to go for reviews…
From Putting People First
When I
Cory Doctorow reflects in his latest Guardian column — which is subtitled “Tales from the encrypt” — on how important it is to have a secure, long-term solution for decrypting our data if we croak. “What I found surprising all…