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 Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
2012 Microsoft Research Faculty Summit Day One
Oh what a day! I’m at the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond WA this week. This is a big event for Microsoft Research with over 400 faculty from around the world hear for two days of presentations…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
An Education Tsunami
Will on-line courses destroy universities? Daphne Koller is a famous researcher who is on the faculty at Stanford University. She started her career as a theorist; I especially remember the paper “Constructing small sample spaces…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Greenplum Analytics Blog
I have seen some interesting things out of Greenplum. They have just announced an analytics blog." ... Datastream, Greenplum’s official blog, delivering analytics news and exploring emerging data science trends.
From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
No Screen Time Under Two
We've got two computer scientists in our three-person family. Would it surprise you that our daughter, currently seven months old, is not allowed to watch any TV, videos or games, and does not play with our iPhones at all?Yup…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Unlocking the Predictive Power of the Web
A piece in Singularity Hub on the temporal search in the forward looking search engine Recordedfuture, which I have now followed for some time. It now has a new user interface in Beta, which provides a timeline-style interaction…
From Schneier on Security
Remote Scanning Technology
I don't know if this is real or fantasy:
Within the next year or two, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security will instantly know everything about your body, clothes, and luggage with a new laser-based molecular scanner fired…From The Eponymous Pickle
Benefits of Being Out of Touch
As PC use declines, we still expect to be in touch. Our devices call us to attention. We share the devices with personal communications and the difference blurs. They make it easy, 24/7. But this can decrease focused productivity…
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
Hill Tech Happenings, Week of July 16
July 17 Hearing: The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee will hold a hearing on the electric grid and cybersecurity. 10 a.m., 366 Dirksen Building July 18 Hearing: The Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law…
From Computer Science Teachers Association
Cure for the CS Blues
Are you the only CS Teacher in your district? In your area? Are you feeling the pressure of trying to promote a curriculum that the schools/states do not always recognize? Do you need a friendly face that understands your struggles…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Revisiting P&G's Connect & Develop
Fast Company on P&G's Connect & Develop Approach. Good article on the purpose and direction of P&G's outsourcing of innovation using Connect and Develop. I would suggest that anyone who has ideas they would like the CPG giant…
From Computational Complexity
CCC12: Post 1 of n
(Post 1 of n on CCC 2012. I don't know how large n is yet.) I will discuss the papers in the order they were presented. June 26, 2012. Morning
From The Eponymous Pickle
Immersive Visualization
From Mindjet: Good overview of the concept of immersing yourself, and your business teams, in your data. I have covered the broad idea a number of times.
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Interesting Links 16 July 2012
The Microsoft Research Faculty Summit starts today (about noon eastern US time) Much of it will be streamed at http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/events/fs2012/virtualfacultysummit.aspx This is a first for the conference…
From The Eponymous Pickle
PC Sales Slump
PC Sales are decreasing. Good statistics. Traditional sales leaders like HP and Dell are getting hit with the expectation of the company and worker that software solutions will be available on convenient mobile devices. .…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Meaningful Use of Complex Medical Data
Organizers of the second annual symposium on Meaningful Use of Complex Medical Data (MUCMD)
From Putting People First
The Machine and The Ghost
Moralizing Technology: Understanding and Designing the Morality of Things Peter-Paul Verbeek University of Chicago Press, 2011 183 pages (Amazon link) Christine Rosen has written a very long and excellent book review / reflection…
From Putting People First
The psychology of content design
In a long article Jonathan Cutrell talks about a strategy for creating content that revolves around its portability to multiple scenarios, devices, and access frames, and particularly about creating content that taps into multiple…
From Putting People First
How Google is becoming an extension of your mind
Stephen Shankland thinks that Google is becoming an extension of your mind, an omnipresent digital assistant that figures out what you need and supplies it before you even realize you need it. He also thinks that should both…
From Putting People First
That
Peter Maass and Megha Rajagopalan argue in the New York Times Sunday Review that the device in your purse or jeans that you think is a cellphone, is in fact a tracking device that happens to make calls. “We have all heard about…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Health Care via Big Data
In GigaOM: Not much detail here, but lots of players mentioned. It is not only the idea of Big Data, but sometimes even just some data, intelligently sharing data, and most importantly, doing smarter things with it.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Interview with Alan Kay
Good interview with Alan Kay. Developer of Smalltalk. We talked to him long ago about the use of 'object oriented' methods for making development more efficient. That worked, partially, but has not yet brought development capabilities…
From Wild WebMink
Published
The feature I wrote for O’Reilly is also an e-book.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Comment Thoughts
Anyone who runs a blog has noticed that there are sharply increasing amounts of Spam being received. I approve all comments to this blog. I cannot approve anything that is written in any language but English and German. So…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Social Media Replace Personal Relationships
Cooking information like recipes are a typical currency exchanged in families. Now that is being replaced by online resources. I have noticed that in my own cooking relationships. Another example of how social information…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
It Don
Hitting hardness makes a 30-year-old conjecture harder Alan Selman is one of the founders of Complexity Theory, both through his deep research and his unselfish service. We will discuss his research in a moment, but his service…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Five National Parks on Streetview
A further archiving of our landscape. Very nicely done. Tour the parks from your armchair. As an amateur botanist this allows me to link to specific plants, though I would further like to get a view that is more plant centric…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
AFOSR to Hold 60th Anniversary Event This Fall
The Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) has announced plans for a daylong event this fall marking its 60th anniversary. The conference and exhibit — titled “A Force of Discovery: 60 Years of Air Force Basic Research”…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Algorithms Writing Articles
Based on the kinds of things I have seen in the press lately, and the increasing need for content to fill so many empty spces, perhaps it is inevitable.
From The Eponymous Pickle
New Kind of Science, Again
Steven Wolfram looks back at the publication of 'A New Kind of Science', which we examined ten years ago as a means to model certain kinds of group interaction. At that same time we were utilizing artificial neural networks as…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Future of Medical Visualization
We live in a world that will increasingly bring sensors, experts, databases and models of many kinds closer together to provide help to the decision maker. And that decision maker will increasingly be all of usA look by Technology…