Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
August 2009
From Putting People First
Surveying the use of mobile phones in education worldwide
Michael Trucano explains on the World Bank’s EduTech blog why the World Bank will be kicking off a study next month looking at “The Use of Mobile Phones in Education in Developing Countries“. “This study is intended to help to…
From Putting People First
BBC Digital Revolution blog
The new BBC Digital Revolution blog explores the way the web is changing our lives. Some recent posts: Tim Berners-Lee on the web and the developing world It’s the connection, the sharing, the two-way communication that seem…
From Putting People First
Predicting what mobile phones will do for us next
Cambridge Design Partnership and Instrata, a Cambridge-based user experience specialist, recently teamed up to approach mobile communications innovation from the experience of the consumer. More in particular, the team developed…
From Putting People First
A manifesto for slow communication
The Wall Street Journal has published an excellent manifesto by John Freeman, the acting editor of Granta magazine, on the need for slow communication. “We will die, that much is certain; and everyone we have ever loved and cared…
From BLOG@CACM
Perception Matters
The rapid pace of technology means that there are solutions that worked well, but are now abandoned -- not always for technical reasons. Perceptions about a technology matter.
From Putting People First
Participle test driving a new youth services model
Participle, the UK social design consultancy, is doing on-the-ground testing of a new model for universal youth services. According to Sarah Schulman, it
From Putting People First
Service design
The UK service design consultancy live|work is working with the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) to design better community security services for humanitarian and development organisations. A news article…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Cross-layer Reliability Visioning Progress
The Cross-layer Reliability Visioning Study Group met July 8-9, 2009 in Los Alamos, NM.
From The Eponymous Pickle
CTO Discussion on Cloud Computing
CACM Queue holds a very good CTO round table discussion. Plus lots of good links. While I believe I have a good understanding of what cloud computing means, no full view of what its implications and its unintended consequences…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Gartner's Hype Cycle Indicators
Mark Montgomery points me to this image of the Gartner Hype Cycle Chart. Just something I was looking for a while back. Thanks.-
From The Eponymous Pickle
Optimism Bias
Dan Ariely on The Curious Paradox of Optimism Bias. Also in Business Week.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Pushing 3-D TV
From Knowledge@Wharton. How do you push 3D TV? Use an upcoming 3D movie that the studio says will be a blockbuster. Still, the technical quality has to be there.
From CSDiary
A Transition
I’m writing today from Boston, having just wrapped up a week at the annual DARPA ISAT retreat at Woods Hole. It was really an exciting week, with lot of people working hard to imagine the future of computing technology and, in…
From The Noisy Channel
Payola? There
From The Eponymous Pickle
Now You See it
In the midst of reading Stephen Few's: Now You See It: Simple Visualization Techniques for Quantitative Analysis. So far very nice, reminds me of Tufte's work, with a more practical and better focused direction. The last chapter…
From CERIAS Blog
More customer disservice
I have a Facebook account. I use it as a means to communicate little status updates with many, many friends and acquaintances while keeping up to date (a little) on their activities. I'm usually too pressed for time to correspond…
From Wild WebMink
links for 2009-08-22
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Apple Answers the FCC
From BLOG@CACMAtonement
A pointer to the petition to get an apology to Alan Turing from the British Government.
From The Eponymous PickleSemantic Web and Kyield
Long-time correspondent Mark Montgomery writes in SemanticWeb. Plus more about Kyield.
' ... Is your enterprise getting smarter? Shouldn
From Return 42;The other side of the table: John Langford
Time for another issue of The other side of the table. This time taking place on the opposite chair: John Langford. John Langford is a senior researcher/doctor of learning at Yahoo! Research, and has formerly worked for places…
From Return 42;On Source Code Annotations
"The best comments aid the understanding of a program by briefly pointing out salient details or by providing a larger-scale view of the proceedings." - Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike (inThe Practice of Programming)Task…
From The Eponymous PickleVideo in Paper Magazines
Much in the news, the addition of chips in paper magazines which can present up to 40 minutes of images or videos on a small cellphone-size display. Appears to be a waste, a kind of inversion of book readers ... a single purpose…
From The Eponymous PickleNumenta: Modeling Based on the Neocortex
I was prompted by client discussions to look again at the Numenta site recently. I previously wrote about Jeff Hawkins' book: On Intelligence and Numenta's early work. They seem to have taken a stronger approach towards doing…
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACMFCC Seeks Comments on Definition of Broadband
As part of the National Broadband Plan that is within the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) seeks "tailored comment on a fundamental question?how the Plan should interpret the…
From BLOG@CACMVenture Research
HCI research is moving out of the lab and onto the web. This new style of research -- Venture Research -- calls for a different set of skills and different metrics for success than traditional research.
From Wild WebMinklinks for 2009-08-21
Very interesting overview of the story of Mono and Miguel's role in it. If you've not been following that story all along, it's an especially useful…
From BLOG@CACMBreaking the Cycle
Today's practice of a deadline-driven approach to research is potentially bad for our field. Instead, our focus should be on the quality of the research we do. And our goal should be on advancing the frontiers of science and…
From The Eponymous PickleUpdate on WolframAlpha
Stephen Wolfram gives an update on the evolution of WolframAlpha. Played with it for a while and did see some interesting results at times, but too often it just did not understand my simple queries. I am an explorer so I have…
From The Eponymous PickleKroger, Unilever Partner for Digital Coupons
Kroger is promoting a partnership with Unilever in which shoppers can browse an online catalog of exclusive coupons and download offers identified by their loyalty cards.
From The Noisy ChannelUIE Virtual Seminar on Faceted Search: A Great Experience!