Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
August 2010
From Computational Complexity
But This One Is Different...
This summer I took a two part vacation: Touring Ireland July 26-August 5, with my wife to celebrate twenty years of marriage and a short trip to Santa Fe, Augut 9-12, to catch opera with my elder daughter. Let's talk about what…
From Wild WebMink
links for 2010-08-16
Oracle/Google: the strategy behind Sun, Oracle and the OSS implications This whole Oracle-copies-SCO mess has many degrees of complexity – historical, legal, technical, political and personal – and I personally think there's…
From Schneier on Security
Breaking into a Garage
In seconds.
Garage doors with automatic openers have always seemed like a lot of security theater to me.
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Interesting Links 16 August 2010
I was on vacation last week. I could not seem to stay away from the Internet and from blogging though. So there were blog posts and I was on Twitter a good bit. I also scanned my email regularly (otherwise catching up after vacation…
From The Eponymous Pickle
FourSquare Style Case Studies
Walter Riker, author of the excellent introductory Ease of Blogging space, points me to an good set of examples of using FourSquare type methods. Thanks Walter. How is it being used, effectively or not? See in ClickZ: The Best…
From Wild WebMink
links for 2010-08-15
Oracle v Google: Why? Excellent discussion by Stephen O'Grady together with pointers to other commentary that's worth considering. No conclusions, of course, since the whole scenario still beggars belief. (tags: Oracle Google…
From The Noisy Channel
Exploring Nuggetize
I’ve been exchanging emails with Dhiti co-founder Bharath Mohan about Nuggetize, an intriguing interface that surfaces “nuggets” from a site to reduce the user’s cost of exploring a document collection. Specifically Nuggetize…
From BLOG@CACM
A Tale of A Serious Attempt At P≠NP
This is a discussion of the recent claimed proof that P≠NP by Vinay Deolalikar.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Brave New Google and Intelligence
Nick Carr satirically views the interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt in the WSJ yesterday. Schmidt positions the future of search as an artificial intelligence (AI) driven world where the engine will try to anticipate my needs…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Physics Wins in Net Neutrality
Colleague Mark Montgomery in the KYield blog, On Net Neutrality: " ... The net neutrality issue is finally being debated, thanks not to populist politics, but rather the supply and demand dynamics of electromagnetic spectrum.…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Pricing
Sammy Haroon on behavior and pricing.
From The Eponymous Pickle
24 Hour Customer
Newly acquired: The 24-Hour Customer: New Rules for Winning in a Time-Starved, Always-Connected Economy by Adrian C. Ott. Just started, nicely focused to the time that consumer has online. Emphasizing the time-value tradeoff.…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Looking for Entelligence
The concept of dedicated devices that reside on the net and update us with key information and services is not a new one.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Nanotech Electronic Noses
New work in building electronic noses. We experimented with the idea for blending beverages. In general the electronic sensors were not accurate enough.
From Computer Science Teachers Association
Student Collaboration in the Classroom: Making it Happen!
In my last blog entry, I posed questions regarding what we want for our students and how we are designing interactions in the classroom to cultivate those characteristics in our students. One of my favorite presenters at the …
From The Eponymous Pickle
Panic in the Science of Crowds
The science of crowds is another thing we followed to understand what goes on in retail. This is not directly related to the retail context, but shows the depth of work going on.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Solar Storm Watch
There have been a number of notable recent solar storms. BBC article provides some detail. There are some new sites which are crowdsourcing our defense. With that and a number of new satellite observations, we can observe our…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Computer Virus
It wasn't me:
A hardened computer hacker has been arrested on suspicion of writing a computer virus that systematically destroys all the files on victims' PCs and replaces them with homemade manga images of squid, octopuses …From The Eponymous Pickle
Live Auction
I posted a while back that I have been helping Cowans, an Auction house. There is a live auction on Decor going on now that you can track via smartphone. The IPhone App Store has an App called LiveAuctioneers. It's free. Load…
From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
Carcassonne
Some friends finally got me to download the iPhone version of the addicting game Carcassonne, and I've quite enjoyed it so far. But thanks to my recent desire to study games academically, I couldn't just enjoy it - I had todiscussed…
From My Biased Coin
In Need of a Few Bad Papers
For my graduate class this semester, there's a lot of paper-reading, and I view learning how to critically and constructively read papers as part of the student goals for the class. A corollary of this, it seems to me, is that…
From My Biased Coin
STOC tutorial online
Paul Oka asked me to announce that the STOC 2010 tutorials are now all online. You can find them here.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Sensors on Broadway
In ReadWriteWeb: An intriguing use of RFID tags to determine and improve the acoustical characteristics of live performances. Unusual application that could have other locational applications, linking simulations to live data…
From Computational Complexity
P vs NP vs IEEE (Guest post by Paul Beame)
(Update on P vs NP: The proof uses Finite Model Theory which is sometimes called That stuff that Neil Immerman does.. Neil Immerman has found a flaw in it. See Lipton's Blog for more information. My prediction is still thatMuch…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Gamers Beat Algorithms
It has been suggested that gaming and the human senses can perform better than analytical algorithms. Here is an example in determining protein structures. We also briefly dabbled in this space. Also some links to other gaming…
From BLOG@CACM
How to Attend an Academic Conference
Tips on attending academic conferences for young CS researchers
From Schneier on Security
Cloning Retail Gift Cards
Clever attack.
After researching how gift cards work, Zepeda purchased a magnetic card reader online, began stealing blank gift cards, on display for purchase, from Fred Meyer and scanning them with his reader. He would then…From Wild WebMink
? Crocodile
The news: Oracle sues Google over Android and mobile Java Hmm. Aren’t these both Linux Foundation members and OIN licensees? Fighting over open source technology in a Linux distro? Presumably this also indicates Oracle’s decision…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Non-Myths About Programming
Mark Guzdial attended the first day of the ICER 2010 conference in Denmark this week. He blogged about that day (Blogging the first day of ICER 2010) and it sure does make me wish I had been able to go. Next year the conference…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Mosaic Theory of Search
Have been involved in the use of a number of technologies like GPS and RFID which can determine the location of someone in a context. A colleague send me a note about this wondering if those capabilities could be considered a…