Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
August 2012
From Schneier on Security
Sexual Harassment at DefCon (and Other Hacker Cons)
Excellent blog post by Valerie Aurora about sexual harassment at the DefCon hackers conference. Aside from the fact that this is utterly reprehensible behavior by the perpetrators involved, this is a real problem for our community…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Computer Science Course Now Online at the Khan Academy
Last month at the Computing Research Association’s (CRA) biennial Snowbird Conference, a session titled “Reflections on Teaching Massive Online Open Courses” featured Peter Norvig from Google and Salman Khan (via Skype) from…
From Schneier on Security
<i>Liars and Outliers</i> on Special Discount
Liars and Outliers has been out since late February, and while it's selling great, I'd like it to sell better. So I have a special offer for my regular readers. People in the U.S. can buy a signed copy of the book for $11, …
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Try Kinect at your K-12 School
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| Capturing students' interest and making concepts come alive is an educator's greatest challenge… |
From The Eponymous Pickle
Khan Academy Computer Science
The much talked about Kahn Academy now has a Computer Science Curriculum. With code examples: " ... All of the code in the Khan Academy Computer Science platform is written using JavaScript and Processing.js. Feel free to browse…
From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
Alan Turing Deserves More Attention From the General Public
Alan Turing was an incredibly important mind from the the twentieth century. Most computer scientists would recognize his name, but I think more of the general public needs to know about him.
Turing was a mathematician…
From The Eponymous Pickle
The Digital Games
Lots of statistics from the Google blog about searches and other artifacts and commercial interest indications that have to do with the Olympics. Creative stats too, even something called a per capita medal tally.
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
The Speed of Communication
Fifty years of acceleration src Kurt Gödel has been keeping a low profile recently. It’s not in his nature to distract from all of the celebrations of Alan Turing these past months, especially when he never met the man. Plus…
From Putting People First
Care at a Distance : On the Closeness of Technology
Care at a Distance : On the Closeness of Technology By Jeannette Pols Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2012, 204 pages This widely researched study demonstrates convincingly that neither grandiose promises nor nightmare…
From Putting People First
Touch in cars is still too complicated
It is not a secret that touch is not as easy as it seems and very difficult to get right, writes Wolfgang Gruener on Conceivable Tech. Cadillac is the first company that is trying to translate touch in a comprehensive way to…
From Schneier on Security
Schneier in the News
Here are links to three news articles about me, and two video interviews with me.
From Computational Complexity
Book Review Column (a bit late)
I try to post my book review column when it comes out but I am behind on that. This is the one that came out a few months ago. The column is here though I have removed the list of books I want reviewed since it is out of date…
From My Biased Coin
Mail Issue
Last week I had an issue where I sent an e-mail to someone (non-work-related), and a while later got the response forwarded to me from my wife, with a note that Harvard was rejecting the response e-mail. It seemed to be a one…
From Schneier on Security
Measuring Cooperation and Defection using Shipwreck Data
In Liars and Outliers, I talk a lot about social norms and when people follow them. This research uses survival data from shipwrecks to measure it.
The authors argue that shipwrecks can actually tell us a fair bit about human…From The Eponymous Pickle
Everything is Still Measurable
A recent conversation that dealt with how to establish the measurable aspects of a difficult process improvement problem led me to think once again about the book: How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in,…
From The Eponymous Pickle
An Introduction to Bayesian Networks
I may have included this in a previous post, but it is worth repeating. A good basic introduction to Bayesian Network methods from Conrady Science, which integrates some writings by Judea Pearl. Essential reading if you are…
From The Eponymous Pickle
CRM Data is Incorrect or Out of Date
Frost & Sullivan and IBM write about the problems with CRM data. The article contains many statistics about the problem and how integrating solutions that making connections between the channels your customers have started23…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Recursion First
I’ve long had mixed feelings about recursion. (I’ve written about recursion several times in this blog.) In one post, Recursion Early, Recursion Late, I wrote about the suggestion that recursion be dropped from a first programming…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Using Technology to Drive Loyalty
It has now been many years since the first use of loyalty data processes. Technology continues to help leverage these ideas by leveraging the economic exchanges we can put in place that work with human behavior. Some good.…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
“Dining With Robots in Silicon Valley”
From The New York Times‘ Bits Blog yesterday: Millions of people watched a robot descend last week on Mars, about 154 million miles away, while it shared video, photos and status updates from its own Twitter account. I had…
From Schneier on Security
Cryptocat
I'm late writing about this one. Cryptocat is a web-based encrypted chat application. After Wired published a pretty fluffy profile on the program and its author, security researcher Chris Soghoian wrote an essay criticizing…
From Wild WebMink
Saving Mandriva
Can a community-centric approach save Mandriva from bankruptcy? My article today on ComputerWorldUK takes a look.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Better, Simpler, Cheaper
What makes the the European retailer Tesco great? I have interacted with them a number of times and they are impressive in their use of technology and analytics. Always looking for a better, simpler and cheaper way. An interesting…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google Acquires Frommers
This content acquisition includes some 350 travel guides. Searchable I assume. Making Google more of a published travel content location rather than just a portal. More here.
From Schneier on Security
Preventive vs. Reactive Security
This is kind of a rambling essay on the need to spend more on infrastructure, but I was struck by this paragraph:
Here's a news flash: There are some events that no society can afford to be prepared for to the extent that we…From Daniel Lemire's Blog
On Feeding Your CPU With Data
Can you guess the speed difference between these two lines of code? The first line of code does N additions: for (int i=0; i<N;i++) sum+=arr[i]; The second line of code does N/16 additions: for (int i=0; i<N;i+=16) sum+=arr[i]…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Printing a 3D House
Via Mark Perry. Points to a TED talk. Not close to feasible yet, see the comments section for some thoughts on that, but an indication of where the proponents of remote manufacturing are heading. Some aspects of this are aimed…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Best Tech Investments They Never Made
An interesting piece in CW about how CIO's decide to make investments in technologies. What they have done or not and why. Done in a story format. Useful from either side of the proposal table.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Data Analytics in the Utility Industry
Last year I attended a GE Smart Grid meeting and was inspired to take a closer look at how smart data and analytics are improving utility efficiency. I continue to follow the trends. Here is a good overview article on the subject…
From Schneier on Security
U.S. and China Talking About Cyberweapons
Stuart Baker calls them "proxy talks" because they're not government to government, but it's a start.