Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
July 2012
From The Eponymous Pickle
Information Technology is Still Important
Surprise, IT is more more important than ever, the recent debate is about who will bring what portions of it to the table, and what are the implications of that change? Is it good enough to be reactive? And what does preparation…
From BLOG@CACM
Worked Examples For Learning Programming: Choosing Better or Choosing MOOC
I'm teaching on study abroad, which means small classes, intense interaction, and the opportunity to try something new. We can choose to make higher education better, like this. Or we could choose MOOC's.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Games in the Workplace
In Mashable. a number of interesting examples of games in play at work.
From The Eponymous Pickle
iPhone and iPad Photography
In GigaOM: On advanced uses of the iPhone and iPad. This leads me to thinking about tablets and smartphones as sensory devices. How can you provide information to the picture taker to make sure the right information is gathered…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Innovation Silos
A frequent situation in the large organization. Because different areas are not seen as competent to recognize useful innovations in others. One answer is to have a multi-functional, experienced screening team to pass on useful…
From Wild WebMink
OSI Membership In Two Minutes
I was approached in the OSI booth at OSCON to explain OSI’s membership categories. That URL again: opensource.org/join
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Tentacle Doorstop
Now this is neat.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered.
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
DARPA I2O Director at the Computer History Museum
Dan Kaufman, director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Information Innovation Office (I2O), was interviewed on Tuesday evening by New York Times‘ tech writer John Markoff – the first in a series of conversations…
From Schneier on Security
<i>Liars and Outliers</i> Summed Up in Two Comic Strips
I don't know the context, but these strips sum up my latest book nicely.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Analytics and Decision in Health Care
Tom Davenport on new frontiers in health care via analytics. I agree, the frontier has arrived in the form of accessible data, sensors and readily available analytics." ... advances in information technology and emerging new…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Social Media and the Olympics
Have been following the use of social media by Procter & Gamble and others in conjunction with the Games. This article has a good overview of a number of efforts going on.
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
AHRQ Requesting Information on Health Quality Measurements
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has issued a Request for Information (RFI), “seeking ideas and input from the public … on successful strategies…
From Wild WebMink
HP, Open Source and OpenStack
While HP was making plenty of noise at OSCON about its deployment of OpenStack as HP Cloud, it was the discovery that they have moved their open source program office to the heart of the company that convinced me they’re serious…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Microstyle: Writing Little
Reading: Microstyle, The Art of Writing Little, by Christopher Johnson. About the rise of compressed writing in things like branding and social networks. So far this mostly deals with naming and branding for marketing as…
From Schneier on Security
Criminals Using Commercial Spamflooding Services
Cybercriminals are using commercial spamflooding services to distract their victims during key moments of a cyberattack.
Clever, but in retrospect kind of obvious.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Package Goods Beats Sales Expectaton
All but one major packaged goods company has exceeded sales expectations. Spending increases. The pressure is on. In AdAge.
From BLOG@CACM
Conferences vs. Journals in Computer Science: An Alternative Perspective from Education
What if computer science conferences required proposals for presentations and then selected some for consideration in journals and book chapters?
From The Eponymous Pickle
Global Intelligence and Advanced Data Discovery
Manny Aparicio of Saffron Technology sends along this note and links to supporting video:"At this year’s Gartner BI Summit in Los Angeles, Rita Sallam identified a new era of Hybrid (Big) Data Analytics. Hybrid data comes from…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Curriculum is Hard
I’ve been involved in a number of curriculum projects over the years. The big one has been the ACM/IEEE CS 2013 task force that is making recommendations on undergraduate computer science curriculum. (The CS2013 Strawman draft…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wal-Mart Labs and Social Shopping
In ReadWriteWeb: Another look at Wal-Mart Labs. I like to think that they were inspired somewhat by our work. " ... “Transaction data often works, but it often fails, in large part because it’s so narrowly focused,” said…
From Computer Science Teachers Association
Interest in K-12 Policy Growing
I just returned from the Snowbird Conference in Utah and I was astounded at the level of attendee interest in education policy issues relating to computer science education in K-12. I Perhaps our time has finally come to work…
From BLOG@CACM
Data Mining the Web Via Crawling
This post focuses on the data collection via crawling the web, by covering some of the challenges around collecting and discovering new content via a web crawler.
From The Eponymous Pickle
DARPA Unshredding Challenge
In CACM: Solved it says. I encountered a related problem very early in my enterprise career. Not involved with anything secret. We partially solved the problem and got real value from it. These additional learnings would…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Simplified Programming for Expertise
Domain Specific Languages (DSL) have been proposed for years to bring the capability of computer programming to the non computing domain expert. By formulating and editing domain rules. We worked with them in the form of expert…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
“Imagining Tomorrow’s Computers Today”
Following a talk at the Euroscience Open Forum earlier this month, Intel principal engineer and futurist Brian David Johnson sat down with ScienceNOW to discuss his forecasts about “the interaction between humans and computers…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Predicting Illness
In New Scientist: Here using data that comes from Twitter. I mentioned worked we did some years ago that used over the counter sales data. Twitter data is probably much more real time, if it has the required accuracy. The…
From Schneier on Security
Police Sting Operation Yields No Mobile Phone Thefts
Police in Hastings, in the UK, outfitted mobile phones with tracking devices and left them in bars and restaurants, hoping to catch mobile phone thieves in the act. But no one stole them:
Nine premises were visited in total…From Wild WebMink
Call For Participation
Have you ever attended an open source conference? In my article for ComputerWorldUK today, I briefly review four good choices that you can attend over the next few months.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative Mobile Talks
In the latest Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative newsletter there are a number of videos from a recent conference that deal with mobile customer behavior. Here are the descriptions of the talks, the links can be found at"…
From Wild WebMink
Explaining OSI Membership
The video of my keynote at OSCON is now live on YouTube: That link I mentioned: opensource.org/join