Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
July 2013
From The Eponymous Pickle
Communications of the ACM
The ACM is the premier computing association in the US. It's the only major technical group that I have remained a member of for many years. This blog is mirrored in their home page. The ACM covers both academic and professional…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Smartphones Attract Crime
In AdAge: Always thought that smartphones decreased crime by adding a new element of crowdsourced communications to inform authorities. But it turns out that smartphones also strongly attract crime: " ... more than 1.6 million…
From Schneier on Security
Obama's Continuing War Against Leakers
The Obama Administration has a comprehensive "insider threat" program to detect leakers from within government. This is pre-Snowden. Not surprisingly, the combination of profiling and "see something, say something" is unlikely…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Interesting Links 29 July 2013
Short week last week as my wife and I headed down to Walt Disney World for a bit of actual real vacation. That doesn’t mean I didn’t collect a good batch of links to share with you today before I left.
Google pilots teaching…From The Eponymous Pickle
Blended Realities: Glass and Printers
I like the idea of blending emergent technologies. Here the sensory absorption of Google Glass and the realization capability of 3D Printing. " .... It was great to catch up with Aarti Shah from The Holmes Report, and Matthew…
From My Biased Coin
In Sickness...
One of the more amusing conversations at the social part of the Microsoft faculty summit (initiated by the humorous commentary of Kevin Leyton-Brown) started with the idea that our support staff all have some number of sick days…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Sales Force Motivation
Using Gamification dynamics at Ford Canada. Sales teams, which by their nature are already competitive, are a natural place to insert gaming methods that enhance and focus competition. It has been done historically in the background…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Augmented Reality as Maintenance Tool
Via Junaio. Work on using augmented reality as an after service maintenance delivery tool for Bosch. Maintenance enhancement in manufacturing was also an area we examined. Consider also the interaction of compliance and…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Secure Stealth Clouds
In GigaOM: Amazon battles IBM to build a stealth cloud for the CIA. Is this, as the article suggests, a battle for the soul of the future Information Technology?
From Apophenia
Baby Ziv
Ziv Lotan Boyd was born into this world shortly after midnight on Sunday, July 28 after a movie-esque labor (complete with a NYC cabbie running honking like mad and running red lights to prevent me from delivering in the cab)…
From The Eponymous Pickle
R Video
So just what just is the open source statistical, data science and visualization language R? A short video that describes the history, community and applications of the method. Designed to be very introductory and suitable…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Mathematics of Poker
Some recent exposure to card game theory led me to this WSJ article. " ... This growth over the past decade has been accompanied by a profound change in how the game is played. Concepts from the branch of mathematics known as…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Sharing Location Data
A Secure Location Data Locker: " ... OpenPaths is a secure data locker for personal location information .... Using our mobile apps you can track your location, visualize where you've been, and upload your data to the OpenPaths…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Thirteen Sigma
Monitoring fabrication in industry and chess “Hall of Fame” source. Bill Smith joined Motorola as a quality control engineer in 1986. He coined the term Six Sigma to express technically a goal for vastly reducing the fault rate…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Government Controlling Your Car
In Forbes: A demonstration about how you can hack into an automobile via a government mandated port and perform some very worrisome actions. Hackers and the government can control your car. I am more worried about the government…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Die Empty
Todd Henry of Accidential Creative's curiously named new book: Die Empty: Unleash Your Best Work Every Day is available for pre-order. Link to read chapter 1 free. And Chapter 2. I have enjoyed his previous books. Send me…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Big Data Theory and Analytics
Big Data Analytics at Microsoft Research. From a recent workshop there. " ... “The top-level takeaway for attendees was that big-data analytics is an area where important innovations can happen by a joint effort of the theory…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google's IT Mission Statement
In Forbes: A view of where they are going and the kinds of empowerment being developed. Google CIO Ben Fried speaks: " ... Fried and his leadership team defined Google IT’s mission as “To Empower Googlers with World Leading…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Song
It's "Sparky the Giant Squid."
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
NIH Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) Initiative
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has announced the Centers of Excellence for Big Data Computing in the Biomedical Sciences (U54) funding opportunity announcement, the first in its Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) Initiative…
From Schneier on Security
NSA Cracked the Kryptos Sculpture Years Before the CIA Did
We interrupt this blog for some important inter-agency rivalry.
The fourth part is still uncracked, though.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Data Mining for the Midsize Business
In the large enterprise we constructed a number of datamining efforts that looked to classify solutions based on measurements we had gathered. One popular technique, called Regression Tree Classification, made it easy to create…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Confronting Neuroscam
Roger Dooley author of Brainfluence, seeks to answer a number of the criticisms that have emerged recently about neuromarketing methods in the nontechnical press. Worth a read, Roger is usually reasonable about expectations "…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Honey bees are not going extinct
There is much argument about what science is. To some people, it appears to be mostly the belief that information should be derived reputed sources. That is, if your belief regarding the age of the Earth comes from your local…
From The Eponymous Pickle
George Dyson on the Decision Problem
Historian of science George Dyson in The Edge. " ... The ultimate goal of signals intelligence and analysis is to learn not only what is being said, and what is being done, but what is being thought. With the proliferation of…
From The Eponymous Pickle
On Innovation Performance
Bain & Company on the topic. Very well done. Taking measure is very important. " ... Innovation is one of the most popular acts in business, but one of the hardest to pull off. Bain & Company recently surveyed nearly 450…
From Schneier on Security
Secret Information Is More Trusted
This is an interesting, if slightly disturbing, result:
In one experiment, we had subjects read two government policy papers from 1995, one from the State Department and the other from the National Security Council, concerning…From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
CS Educator Interview: Louis Zulli Jr
Lou Zulli Jr is a quiet unassuming man. What he does with his students is anything but minor though. The projects his students have done with smartphones, SharePoint and other hardware and software have gotten him international…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Robots as Army Squad Members
Not unexpected. A play on the drone idea, but with a higher element of cooperation. Which should require a higher level of autonomy and AI. " .... The U.S. Army wants to move from using robots as tools to creating a human-robot…
From Computational Complexity
Ph.D. Attrition
Leonard Cassuto writes in the Chronicle an article Ph.D. Attrition: How Much Is Too Much? He presupposes the answer with the subtitle "A disturbing 50 percent of doctoral students leave graduate school without finishing". The…