Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
July 2011
From Putting People First
Detroit copies Torino
(English translation of article published yesterday in La Stampa newspaper – author Andrea Rossi): Michigan delegation between the cabbages and the red peppers Who would have thought that the regeneration of a city can start…
From Schneier on Security
Google Detects Malware in its Search Data
This is interesting:
As we work to protect our users and their information, we sometimes discover unusual patterns of activity. Recently, we found some unusual search traffic while performing routine maintenance on one of our…From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Are your students entered in the Windows Phone app contest
This Summer, build Windows Phone 7 apps and you could earn exciting prizes to catch a movie, eat ice – cream, buy camping gear and more!! This special competition is especially for students. It’s a great incentive to get creative…
From Geeking with Greg
Quick links
Some of what has caught my attention recently:Netflix may have been forced to change its pricing by the movie studios. It appears the studios may have made streaming more expensive for Netflix and, in particular, too costly[1]…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Microsoft Research Announces 2011 Faculty Fellows
Every year at this time, Microsoft Research recognizes
From Schneier on Security
Members of "Anonymous" Hacker Group Arrested
The police arrested sixteen suspected members of the Anonymous hacker group.
Whatever you may think of their politics, the group committed crimes and their members should be arrested and prosecuted. I just hope we don't get…From The Eponymous Pickle
Social Media for Customer Service. Infographic Impression
ReadwriteWeb on the topic via an Infographic. The topic itself is interesting.The infographic use is confusing. At first I thought it was an ad. Then noticed that they were trying to jazz up some information. Very little…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wal-Mart
Excellent post by MJ Perry about Wal-Mart as the most successful retailer in history. Some fascinating stats on the retailer and its operation.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Model Based Recommendation Agent
I became interested in a new recommendation smartphone App called Alfred, which recommends restaurants, etc, It is glowingly described and reviewed in ReadwriteWeb, The description says it uses Model based learning as opposed…
From Wild WebMink
links for 2011-07-19
FLOSS: Accept no substitutes | ITworld These sorts of scams were a serious problem that we spent a great deal of thought addressing in connection with OpenOffice.org. I am concerned there may be no-one dealing with them right…
From Putting People First
Report published on Behaviour Change
The main conclusion of the Behaviour Change report, published today by the UK House of Lords Science and Technology Sub-Committee, is that ‘nudging’ on its own is unlikely to be successful in changing the population
From Putting People First
Interestingly, the badly designed user interface of the in-car telematics system was the primary gripe among Ford and Lincoln owners and lessees in the latest J.D. Power survey. “After steady year-on-year improvement, Ford has…
From Putting People First
Beyond the cubicle
Allison Arieff talks in her New York Times Opinionator blog about the design of work. Paraphrasing Nathan Shedroff, she states that furniture is not the problem. Instead, she says, “design itself is the problem because it is…
From Schneier on Security
Telex Anti-Censorship System
This is really clever:
Many anticensorship systems work by making an encrypted connection (called a “tunnel”) from the user's computer to a trusted proxy server located outside the censor's network. This server relays requests…From Putting People First
Design and behaviourism: a brief review
Dan Lockton is publishing extracts from his Brunel University Ph.D thesis
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Small Basic 1.0 is here!
Have you been working with Small Basic? If so you probably know that it has officially been pre-release software. Well not it is released software and you can now download Small Basic 1.0.. With the addition of Icelandic (Yes…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
In a post on the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Blog today, Deputy Director for Policy Tom Kalil noted the Administration’s keen interest in Big Data — and singled out the CCC’s recent
From The Eponymous Pickle
Renting Textbooks
Now you can rent textbooks from Amazon via Kindle and Kindle Apps. ReadwriteWeb reports that is not cheaper than buying a used textbook. The market will likely adjust this price.
From Computer Science Teachers Association
Competitions Spark Fires of CS Enthusiasm
Students love competitions!
* Show off their skills * Earn public recognition for their work * Collaborate with other students * Solve deep and typically meaningful problems
And teachers should love them too. * Self-motivating…From Wild WebMink
? Drinks With ForgeRock at OSCON
Will you be in Portland (the one in Oregon in the USA) next week?
From Schneier on Security
<i>Liars and Outliers</i> Cover
My new book, Liars and Outliers, has a cover.
Publication is still scheduled for the end of February -- in time for the RSA Conference -- assuming I finish the manuscript in time.
From My Biased Coin
Rabin's 80th Birthday Celebration
Big announcement: We'll be having an 80th birthday conference celebration for Michael Rabin at Harvard at the end of August. Lots of great talks by big-name CS people! (And I'll be there too.) The web site has all the relevant…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Games Talk: Serious Play
I will be giving a talk this Wednesday July 20, at 6:30 PM in the Cincinnati area on the use of serious game mechanics. Providing details of a number of examples we experimented with in the enterprise that used interal and…
From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
Featured in 'Women In Tech You Need To Follow On Twitter '
On Friday evening, I was surprised to open my email after only a few hours and find that I had over 100 unread messages. For someone who almost always has inbox zero this was quite the anomaly! When I looked at my Twitter mentions…
From The Eponymous Pickle
eLearning and Serious Games
Heather Thomas at the Trivantis blog has posted a good article on the use of game mechanics for eLearning. Making learning immediately rewarding and inspiring and motivating continued development is a powerful idea. Post…
From Computational Complexity
Disproofing the Myth that many early logicians were a few axioms short of a complete set
While I was working on this post another blogger posted on the same topic here and I found a book review of Logicomix that touched on some of the same issues here. (For MY review of Logicomix see here.) They are very good sources…
From Schneier on Security
British Phone Hacking Scandal
Ross Anderson discusses the technical and policy details.
From Putting People First
CHI Sparks conference
On June 23, CHI Netherlands organised Chi Sparks, its bi-annual conference, and the keynote videos are now available. The theme of this year
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Interesting Links Post 18 July 2011
Quite a week last week. You may have read my posts about the CSTA CS & IT Conference. I hope you did because it was a great conference. The first ever WorldWide Imagine Cup finals to be held in the US was held in New York City…
From The Eponymous Pickle
In Analytics Magazine
Some good examples from the latest issue of this excellent magazine. About solving real business problems in business. Check out the magazine and the underlying organization: Informs.