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 The Noisy Channel
Norbert Fuhr
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wiring You Up
For what useful reasons might you allow your brain to be wired up with a neural implant? A poll gives some answers.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Bing vs Google
From Knowledge@Wharton: Bing Gives Microsoft a Boost, but Can It Compete with Google?. I have been using Bing occasionally, even comparing the two at times, but it is not enough of a difference to capture me. ' ... Wharton marketing…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Federal CIO Dashboards
Steve Few examines the design of existing Federal CIO dashboards. He makes some excellent points. I believe that DBs should show the right data for a given responsibility ... plus easily allow the extension of the revealed…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Learning Through Games
From the ACM: Learning Through GamesElectronic games can inspire players to explore new ideas and concepts. By gaining a better understanding of the dynamic between player and game, researchers hope to develop more interesting…
From The Noisy Channel
Public Expression, Liability, and Anonymity
From Return 42;
Evolution of the Google File System
This week seems to be review week. While I would love to finish some more technical posts, a new article in ACM Queue stopped me from actually doing that. The article I am talking about is called GFS: Evolution on Fast-forward…
From BLOG@CACM
How We Make Decisions About CS1
How do we decide what to put in our introductory courses, and for who, and using what language? My experience suggests that we make our decisions more on the basis of history, fads, and social pressure, than on what we believe…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Roambi BI on the IPhone
Always thought there was a place for good interactive Business intelligence visualization on the IPhone. For example in retail where I had to get lots of supporting data while in the aisle. Now from the developers of Xcelsius…
From Return 42;
How Does Pair Programming Work?
November last year, Stuart Wray, senior lecturer at the Royal School of Signals in Blandford, United Kingdom, submitted a paper called How does pair programming work? to IEEE Software, which today showed up as a pre-print onAnecdotes…
From Computer Science Teachers Association
The Worst That Could Happen
No doubt CS teachers in the USA are aware of the Julie Amero case, where the Connecticut substitute teacher was convicted on four counts of risk of injury to a minor or impairing the morals of a child when students in her class…
From The Noisy Channel
Will Browsers Ship With Ad Blockers?
From Wild WebMink
links for 2009-08-07
It slipped past me when it was announced in June, but the US Federal Government has appointed an excellent candidate to serve as Ombudsman for federal…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
A review of
I learned programming on my own when I was twelve years old with a TRS-80 and Microsoft Basic. The documentation that came with the TRS-80 was fantastic. Alas, today, no vendor would ever think of including an introduction to…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Brain Waves and Ad Effectiveness
Sands Research releases a new article, good details. Particularly useful here, a comparison to more traditional methods. What can measuring brain waves tell us about an ad
From The Eponymous Pickle
Selling into the Right Ear
Years ago, when I did experiments with sleep learning, this was part of the process, emphasize use of the right ear. I had thought all of that was debunked, but here it is again. Minus the sleep learning. At the end of this…
From Return 42;
Congratulations to Susan Dumais
Today, the ACM issued a press release that Susan Dumais from Microsoft Research (formerly Bell Labs/Bellcore) received the Gerard Salton Award for her innovative contributions to information indexing and retrieval systems that…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Asia Innnovation
Asia Poised for Innovation, in the World Flattener.-
From The Eponymous Pickle
You are Approach the End of the Moving Walkway
Moving walkways. You have seen them in airports, Vegas and in limited ways in transit systems. Why have they not taken off more broadly? They have a surprisingly broad history. At one time looking like they might be widely implemented…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Virtual Worlds in Business
Building, Populating, and Interacting with Virtual Worlds. I continue to believe this is something to figure out, though I have yet to see a solution that does this effectively.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Crowdsourcing Electronic Design Automation
In IEEE Spectrum, a good example of mixing the pattern recognition capabilities of humans and complex simulations. Essentially a game and an excellent example of crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing the Complexities of Electronic Design…
From Apophenia
Teens Don't Tweet... Or Do They?
Yesterday, Mashable reported Nielsen's latest Twitter numbers with the headline Stats Confirm It: Teens Don't Tweet. This gained traction on Twitter turning into the trending topic "teens don't tweet" which was primarily kept…
From Putting People First
Web Squared: when Web 2.0 meets Internet of Things
Richard MacManus reports on ReadWriteWeb that Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle released a white paper entitled Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On, which focuses on the intersection of social web technologies with the emerging Internet…
From Putting People First
The information architecture of social experience design
Christian Crumlish, curator of the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library and author of The Power of Many, describes the patterns that are relevant when adding a social dimension to an existing experience. “Designing and building a successful…
From BLOG@CACM
Beyond Current Horizons
A brief description of a UK project which attempts to predict what society will be like in 30 years time.
From BLOG@CACM
Progress in Internet Networking in La
Access to the Internet has always been a problem in South America and especially in some areas where there is no infrastructure, but this is slowly changing.
"Castilla la Nueva" Colombia
From The Eponymous Pickle
Web Squared: an Internet of Things
Good piece in the ReadWriteWeb on the the concept of WebSquared, or the intersection of Web 2.0 and the Internet of things. Commenting on the O'Reilly - Battelle paper on this topic. I was introduced to the internet of things…
From The Noisy Channel
Guest Post: Rich Marr, Media As a Search Term
From Wild WebMink
links for 2009-08-05
From Putting People First
A user perspective on mobile banking in Tanzania
Gunnar Camner and Emil Sj