Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
August 2011
From The Eponymous Pickle
Personal Computer in the Executive Suite
I saw this post about IBM's first personal computer, not the consumer PC, but the IBM 5150. In 1981 we received a loaner from IBM. One ended up in our Chairman's office where he and I programmed it in an early attempt to provide…
From Schneier on Security
Counterfeit Pilot IDs and Uniforms Will Now Be Sufficient to Bypass Airport Security
This seems like a really bad idea:
...the Transportation Security Administration began a program Tuesday allowing pilots to skirt the security-screening process. The TSA has deployed approximately 500 body scanners to airports…From The Eponymous Pickle
Made in China Spending
MJ Perry on US consumer spending on goods made in China. Less than 2%. Surprising that it is so low.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Shopping in 3D
Is it more fun to shop online in 3D rather than 2D? I experimented with this concept in the seminal virtual community Second Life, and found it less than satisfying. The thought was to use virtual environments to experiment…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Amex Gives You Credit for Network
Interesting development I was late to: " ... Creating a social network is so last week. Today, American Express is unveiling a social media platform called "Link, Like, Love" that gives card members personalized deals on Facebook…
From The Eponymous Pickle
More on Wolfram CDF
Wolfram's blog has a long post on Computable Document Format (CDF) which explains it nicely. Now experimentally built into WolframAlpha. The idea of having a computable document is very appealing. You have a document and"…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Seeking Ideas for
The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has just announced a Request for Ideas (RFI) about Data Intensive Science: The increasing volume and complexity of scientific data are overwhelming current research practices, and create…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Brandwashed
Just starting to read: Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade us to Buy by Martin Lindstrom. To be available September 20. Have enjoyed Lindstrom's earlier books such as Buyology: Truth and. …
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
Policy Highlights from Communications of the ACM
Below is a list of items with policy relevance from the May issue of Communications of the ACM. As always, much of the material in CACM is premium content, and free content one month may slip behind a pay wall the next. You need…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Coming to a Mall Near You
The esteemed Mayo Clinic is opening a retail outlet at the Mall of America. In MJ Perry's blog.
From The Eponymous Pickle
P&G: Kinds of Innovation
Jonathan Salem Baskin on innovation at P&G. Is P&G succeeding because of innovative branding, or because of functional innovation? I have certainly seen both, but I think that Salem Baskin has something here. You surely…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Rules of Exception:Adapting the Process
In ReadWriteWeb: The way to address this is to have the process have the ability to adapt to changes. That can and has been done. It does not need AI, just a flexible process: "Sameer Patel of the Sovos Group wrote an …
From The Eponymous Pickle
Macy's and Predictive Analytics
How Macy's uses predictive analytics. Visualization and other techniques. " ... The machinery of predictive analytics is only as good as the human-engineered models on which it runs. Creating accurate models isn't easy, but…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Fast computation of scalar products, and some lessons in optimization
Given two arrays, say (1,2,3,4) and (4,3,1,5), their scalar product is simply the sum of the products: 1
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Low Level Programming
A blog post by Andy Firth, an Engineer Architect at Bungie, called The demise of the low level Programmer is getting some attention lately. In the post he lists some things that low level programmers (or perhaps he should have…
From Computational Complexity
My Cruise Vacation
Last week, my wife and I took a vacation to the Caribbean on the biggest cruise ship there is. I like cruising, just relaxing, swimming, reading, eating, drinking and not having to think much. There is something cool to zip-lining…
From Wild WebMink
links for 2011-08-11
Apple, publishers conspired against $9.99 Amazon e-books, says lawsuit It's not enough to be the richest company in the world. Everyone else has to fail as well. (tags: Apple Kindle antitrust) Apple ruling blocks Samsung Galaxy…
From Schneier on Security
Security Flaws in Encrypted Police Radios
"Why (Special Agent) Johnny (Still) Can
From The Eponymous Pickle
WiFi at McDonalds
I have now been a long time user of Wifi in the wild and note the many ways that it is applied. In some cases simply, in other places logging you out periodically to keep the traffic down. How they respond to differing operating…
From Putting People First
Mobile Learning Toolkit published
The mobile phone is now a ubiquitous item even among the world
From The Eponymous Pickle
Meeting Wiz Appears in Smart Meeting Mag
Russell Brumfield, 'the Wiz', who we have worked with in the area of smart meeting technology and scent delivery strategies, appears in the August 2011 issue of Smart Meeting Magazine, page 54. He is the head of Wizard Studios…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Semantic Webs in the Enterprise
The movement of the semantic web into the enterprise. One domain area at a time. I have seen this direction as well. Creating a completely generic solution,even with an enterprise, would mean dealing with disambiguating meaning…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Kindle in the Browser
Amazon now offers a Kindle application for the Safari and Chrome Browsers (others coming) for access to the book reading cloud. I use their App on the iPhone and it works well.
From Schneier on Security
GPRS Hacked
Just announced:
Nohl's group found a number of problems with GPRS. First, he says, lax authentication rules could allow an attacker to set up a fake cellular base station and eavesdrop on information transmitted by users passing…From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
PCAST Sustainability Report Emphasizes
The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) released a report titled Sustaining Environmental Capital: Protecting Society and Economy,
From Wild WebMink
? Amazon Escapes The App Trap
As I predicted in June, Amazon has quietly launched read.amazon.com, a full-featured HTML 5 version of the Kindle that runs perfectly on the iPad, looks for all the world like a native application after it’s been added to the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Collaborative Asynchronous Searching
I recently mentioned SearchTeam. I see it has now been looked at and reviewed in detail in Information Today, Note in particular the description of the Semantic Topic network, a novel and powerful capability. " ...ZaktaSearchTeam…
From Schneier on Security
"Taxonomy of Operational Cyber Security Risks"
I'm a big fan of taxonomies, and this -- from Carnegie Mellon -- seems like a useful one:
The taxonomy of operational cyber security risks, summarized in Table 1 and detailed in this section, is structured around a hierarchy…From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Computer Science Before Programming
For most people the first real computer science course is introduction to programming. It may be called something else but effectively what it is is a course that teaches programming. Along the way concepts like encapsulation…
From The Eponymous Pickle
New Benchmark for AI
In CACM: Top chess players can now be defeated by computer programs. But this has not been the case for the Japanese game Go. New methods use Monte Carlo simulation to address this game. Will this lead to new more broadly…