Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
July 2014
From The Eponymous Pickle
Whats New in Social Science?
Am a long time reader of The Edge. So What's new in social science? Pretty massive and have only peeked at it, but take your time ...." ... Now, for the first time, we are pleased to present the program in its entirety,…
From Schneier on Security
Fingerprinting Computers By Making Them Draw Images
Here's a new way to identify individual computers over the Internet. The page instructs the browser to draw an image. Because each computer draws the image slightly differently, this can be used to uniquely identify each computer…
From The Eponymous Pickle
IT as Creatives in the Enterprise
In CIO: How could this not be so? An efficient means to gather data, pass it to the parts of the entperprise that need it the most and leverage it with continually evolving analytical techniques, available in and outside the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Simulating Cardiovascular Drugs
The idea of this kind of in-silico drug testing has been around for a long time, we worked briefly with an effort at the University of California San Diego in a related effort. Simulation is a powerful capability, if you can…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Facebook Buy Button Test
In Retailwire: Will people buy directly on Facebook? Possibly, but I have never see FB as a commercial context. A test is underway. " ... Users on desktop or mobile will be able to click the Buy call-to-action button on…
From The Eponymous Pickle
High Resolution Flexible Display
Flexible screens continue to emerge. We examined them for applications like advanced packaging and integrated shelf displays. Its likely now that they will be used for wearable applications as well.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Watson and Academic Institutions
Have had some discussions on this concept. There is considerable interest in academia, but the ideas have to be tied to course structure, AND be of real interest to hiring companies. You have to work both sides of the knowledge…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Interesting Links 21 July 2014
What a week I had last week. The CSTA Annual Conference, the National CS Principles Summit and then the CSTA Board meeting. I need a rest. I tweeted a lot from the first two events. Not from the board meeting though because that…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Project Adam AI for Visual Recognition
There is more going on in AI than just IBM's Watson, here more focused, addressing one of the most important tasks of sensory recognition. In TechTimes: See also comparisons to similar work by Google. " ... Microsoft isMicrosoft…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Thinkvine and Damon Ragusa
Have followed Thinkvine here for some time, out enterprise connected with them and have touched base number of times since their creation in 2000 by Damon Ragusa. They have done some very novel work integrating agent based…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Lost Links
Received another query about links that no longer point to the information that they should. This is a common thing on the Web. Unless what you are pointing to is a entity that has the resources to maintain their content,'Internet…
From BLOG@CACM
Human Subjects Research For the Twenty-First Century, Or, What Can We Learn from the Facebook Mood Study?
There is tremendous value to society in doing large-scale A/B studies, and the current framework we have for human subjects research is a poor match for the 21st century. Furthermore, the Facebook mood study is just one of many…
From Putting People First
Baking behavioral nudges into the products we own
Maria Bezaitis, PhD and Principal Engineer of Intel’s User Experience Ethnographic Research Lab, discusses the Real World Web and how internet-enabled sensors will create new kinds of intimacies and engagements. “Commitment and…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wearables in the Enterprise
Will wearables be widespread in the enterprise? Well not too many years ago I could not have imagined hand held computer-phones there. An interview with Bill Briggs of Deloitte. " ... Deloitte Digital, a mix of ‘ creative…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Learning from Extreme Consumers
In Experientia: " ... Traditional market research methods focus on understanding the average experiences of average consumers. This focus leads to gaps in our knowledge of consumer behavior and often fails to uncover insights…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Forbes Sells Majority Stake to International Investors
This was of interest because I had a very small connection to Forbes. 'To accelerate growth they say ... '. I liked their coverage of technical and management issues. How this will change it is unclear. ' ... Forbes Family…
From Putting People First
[Book]: Nursing Research Using Ethnography
Nursing Research Using Ethnography: Qualitative Designs and Methods in Nursing Mary De Chesnay, PhD, RN, PMHCNS-BC, FAAN (Editor) Pub. Date: 08/28/2014 372 pp., Softcover Springer [Amazon] Ethnography is a qualitative research…
From Putting People First
Learning from extreme consumers
Learning from Extreme Consumers by Jill Avery, Michael I. Norton Teaching Note, 9 pages, January 2014 Traditional market research methods focus on understanding the average experiences of average consumers. This focus leads to…
From The Eponymous Pickle
On Neuroscience
Short BBC piece that barely covers the topic. Less about mind reading than it is about behavior understanding in context.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Amazon Bundles
Amazon is Bundling. It has been talked about and tested for a while, and I received an offer yesterday. To pay a fixed monthly price for full online access to any number of a group of 600K books. It's called bundling, and…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Oracle Social Intelligence and Linkedin
In CWorld: It is interesting that Linkedin is leveraging these kids of analytical techniques against the data that we are openly opening providing here. Should this require further disclosure about what they are doing? " ..…
From Putting People First
Jibo the “family robot” might be oddly charming, or just plain odd
The “world’s first family robot” is based on efforts to elicit emotional response in humans—a powerful idea, but one fraught with challenges, writes Will Knight in the MIT Technology Review. “Resembling a static but animated…
From Putting People First
Book: Enchanted Objects
Enchanted Objects: Design, Human Desire, and the Internet of Things by David Rose Scribner (July 15, 2014) July 15, 2014 320 pages [Amazon] In the tradition of Who Owns the Future? and The Second Machine Age, David Rose, an MIT…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Dissection
A six-hour video of a giant squid dissection from Auckland University of Technology. 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 Eponymous Pickle
Migrating to the Cloud
In EETimes: " ... IBM is limbering up its cloud storage. Already committing $1.2 billion to establish for-rent datacenters in every country that needs them, today IBM announced a complete hardware/software/storage capability"With…
From Schneier on Security
NASDAQ Hack
Long article on a sophisticated hacking of the NASDAQ stock exchange....
From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
Reflections on 'Learn to Program With Python'
This past June, I designed and taught an introductory programming course through Girl Develop It! Ottawa called Learn to Program With Python. It was a two-part course hosted at Shopify and geared toward complete beginners. You…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Business Value in Content Marketing
In Clickz: Includes a step by step look at what this means:" ... A new study shows marketers can't tie business value back to their content marketing tactics. So how can marketers better measure the success of their contentDefinition…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Judging Risk is Difficult
Why we underestimate risk." ... In hindsight, many risks seem obvious. And when we do take the time to evaluate potential risks, there is often not much that is profound about them. Yet so many of us fall prey to unforeseen…
From Putting People First
Financial consumer protection: 5 lessons from behavioral research
In its new Focus Note, Applying Behavioral Insights in Consumer Protection Policy, CGAP (a unit affiliated with the Worldbank) presents a summary of the growing evidence from consumer and behavioral research for consumer protection…