Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
July 2010
From The Eponymous Pickle
Bubble Generation
By economist Umair Haque:The Bubble Generation "?EVOLUTIO?ARY ORGANIZATIONS CHANGE the WORLD. HERE'S HOW to BECOME ONE. create thick value. spark smart growth. start with social strategy. ignite awesomeness, not just innovation…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Getting the Best
The Seriosity blog on getting the best out of your employees. More in this blog about Seriosity's work on games and engaging customers and employees. Including my review of Byron Reeves excellent book: Total Engagement, on the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Five Billion Connections
In the BBC: there are now over 5 billion phone connections worldwide. Staggering thought. The globe is a heavily interconnected network.
From Computational Complexity
CRA Snowbird Part I
I just returned home from my first trip to the CRA Snowbird Conference, the biennial meeting of CS chairs and other leaders in the CS community. I really enjoyed the short meeting and saw many old friends who are now chairs,
From The Noisy Channel
SIGIR 2010: Day 2 Keynote
The second day of the SIGIR 2010 conference kicked off with a keynote by TREC pioneer Donna Harman entitled “Is the Cranfield Paradigm Outdated?”. If you are at all familiar with Donna’s work on TREC, you’ll hardly be surprised…
From Wild WebMink
links for 2010-07-22
ForgeRock Releases OpenAM 9.5 Software Quite a milestone – this is our first independent release, sourced entirely from community members. It's good stuff too – read to enable migration from the old OpenSSO 8 that so many existing…
From Schneier on Security
More Research on the Effectiveness of Terrorist Profiling
The use of profiling by ethnicity or nationality to trigger secondary security screening is a controversial social and political issue. Overlooked is the question of whether such actuarial methods are in fact mathematically…
From Wild WebMink
? First Post!
Today is a significant milestone for the new venture I’m helping, ForgeRock. We’ve announced availability of our first full independent release of OpenAM, the open source authentication and access management system. If you look…
From Putting People First
Questions for Microsoft Research
Indrani Medhi, associate researcher in the Technology For Emerging Markets Group at Microsoft Research India, was recently rated one of the
From The Eponymous Pickle
Packaged Goods Company Develops Game
In Mediapost. I like the approach, will follow to see how it develops. ' ... Reckitt Benckiser has created a branded social-media game called poweRBrands, in which players solve marketing dilemmas and move up a virtual corporate…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
DARPA a year later
Dr. Ken Gabriel, the deputy director of DARPA, delivered a plenary address at CRA
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Over-Educated, Yet Under-Qualified?
You
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
USACM Comments on National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace
In late June the White House issued a second Draft of the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace. They opened a public comment process only on an Ideascale online space for three weeks. As a result, USACM was…
From Schneier on Security
Book on GCHQ
A book on GCHQ, and two reviews.
From Computational Complexity
Do you want to review a book
I will be sending my next book review column for SIGACT NEWS off on July 28, 2010. It has LOTS of books on its BOOKS I WANT REVIEWED list. YOU get a chance to look at the book list and request one to review before the list goes…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Intel and the Social Scientists
An interesting post of how Intel is increasingly adopting a social science view. It is intriguing to think of how a company of engineers can move in this direction. Has it moved too far? How are the two directions combined…
From Putting People First
The web means the end of forgetting
Legal scholars, technologists and cyberthinkers are wrestling with the first great existential crisis of the digital age: the impossibility of erasing your posted past, starving over, moving on. Jeffrey Rosen reports in The New…
From Putting People First
The unintended consequences of Facebook
Facebook is about to celebrate its 500-millionth user, but the social media application has had wide consequences, even for those who have never signed on, writes the BBC. Many of the problems that are identified with Facebook…
From Putting People First
Coercing people into a brave new digital world
Design consultant Martyn Perks thinks that a UK government-backed campaign to get the entire UK adult population online “threatens to make cyber slaves of us all.” “Is it not possible that some people simply don
From Wild WebMink
links for 2010-07-21
Phase relationships in the standardization process James Gosling wrote in 1990: "standards are increasingly being viewed as competitive weapons rather than as technological stabilizers. Companies use standards as a way to inhibit…
From Schneier on Security
EU Counterterrorism Strategy
Interesting journal article evaluating the EU's counterterrorism efforts.
From Apophenia
MySpace and Facebook: How Racist Language Frames Social Media (and Why You Should Care)
(This post was written for Blogher and originally posted there.) Every time I dare to talk about race or class and MySpace & Facebook in the same breath, a public explosion happens. This is the current state of things. Unfortunately…
From BLOG@CACM
Why Is Great Design So Hard?
Why is good design so hard to accomplish for organizations? People are coming to the realization that design really matters, but it's not that they don't want to follow suit, it seems that they are not able to.
From Putting People First
Happy birthday Experientia
From The Noisy Channel
SIGIR 2010: Day 1 Posters
The first day of SIGIR 2010 ended with a monster poster session–over 100 posters to see in 2 hours in a hall without air conditioning! I managed to see a handful: “Query Quality: User Ratings and System Predictions” by Claudia…
From The Noisy Channel
SIGIR 2010: Day 1 Technical Sessions
I’ve always felt that parallel conference sessions are designed to optimize for anticipated regret, and SIGIR 2010 is no exception. I decided that I’d try to attend whole sessions rather than shuttle between them. I started by…
From The Noisy Channel
SIGIR 2010: Day 1 Keynote
As promised, here are some highlights of the SIGIR 2010 conference thus far. Also check out the tweet stream with hash tag #sigir2010. I arrived here on Monday, too jet-lagged to even imagine attending the tutorials, but fortunately…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wegmans Introduces Employee Blog
Always innovative retailer Wegmans has set up a blog contributed by employees. Worth a look.
From Apophenia
Skin Whitening, Tanning, and Vaseline
Growing up as a white girl in Pennsylvania, I was taught that being tan was beautiful. My wealthier classmates would go on vacations to Florida in the winter, coming back with the most glorious tans. And the moment that it…
From Schneier on Security
Economic Considerations of Website Password Policies
Two interesting research papers on website password policies.
Abstract: We examine the password policies of 75 different websites. Our goal is understand the enormous diversity of requirements…