Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
September 2009
From Schneier on Security
Ass Bomber
Nobody tell the TSA, but last month someone tried to assassinate a Saudi prince by exploding a bomb stuffed in his rectum. He pretended to be a repentant militant, when in fact he was a Trojan horse:
The resulting explosion…From The Eponymous Pickle
Two Billion IPhone Applications Sold
Apple reports 2 billion apps have been 'sold'. I have slowed down in purchases and am about to do a purge of applications I have not used for months. Still love the idea for mobile intelligence. Have made a number of useful…
From The Noisy Channel
Human-Computer Information Retrieval in Layman
One of the great benefits of practicing, as Daniel Lemire calls it, open scholarship is that I have many opportunities to see how ideas translate across the research / practice divide. In particular, I obtain invaluable feedback…
From BLOG@CACM
Donation of Technological Goods and its Impact on a Society
What are the possible consequences of donation of technological goods on the society
From The Eponymous Pickle
Free from any Source
Finally getting to Free: Future of a Radical Price, by Chris Anderson. I did not get it during the free download period, but it was just as free from the library. An easy and thin read, covers many useful examples, good read…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Neurocinema
It is inevitable that neuromarketing methods be used to analyze high cost and leverage businesses. In the 90s we saw two applications of complexity modeling applied to this same problem. As far as I know that approach is no longer…
From Wild WebMink
Organic Software
This weekend we went to Winchester Farmers' Market. It was a beautiful day and the season is especially rich so there's a wonderful range of produce on offer. Our larder and fridge are now full of produce grown nearby: onions…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Web Squared A Tipping Point?
More in Forbes on Web Squared, by Tim O'Reilly and Jennifer Pahlka. It is about adding more of our increasing set of smart sensors to the web and then adding real-time intelligence. This was suggested very early on with web cams…
From Wild WebMink
? Topical Music
Tina has uploaded these four excellent videos of her performing in the open air in Mainz. She is sounding and looking better than ever, and is the perfect antidote for …
From The Noisy Channel
Information Retrievability
Last year, I wrote a post about Leif Azzopardi and Vishwa Vinay’s work on information accessibility: Instead of an actual physical space, in IR, we are predominately concerned with accessing information within a collection of…
From The Eponymous Pickle
What is the Semantic Enterprise?
Although many people understand what the word semantic means, what exactly it means when it applies to complex things like Networks, Webs or Enterprises has always been less clear. Mark Montgomery of Kyield gives a concise view…
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
CS Education in the States
If you've read a recent piece I co-wrote in Communications of the ACM (membership required), you know that the States largely drive education decisions in the US. Because of this, our community has to play "wack-a-mole" when…
From My Biased Coin
UC President Interview
Luca Trevisan points to this NY Times Magazine interview with UC president Mark Yudof. Is it just me, or is this guy just completely tone deaf to the current situation in the UC system? If I were a faculty member, or student…
From Putting People First
Design and gender: going beyond shrink it and pink it
Femme Den is a small internal cadre of designers of Smart Design — the company that was responsible for the OXO Good Grips kitchen tools and the Flip Mini Digital Camcorder — that is devoted to thinking about the differences…
From Putting People First
The city is a battlesuit for surviving the future
Matt Jones, design director at Berg in London, has published a piece in Future Metro which Bruce Sterling “would like to call ‘the greatest design-fiction writing I
From Putting People First
Intel describes TV of the future
The world’s biggest chip maker predicts that by 2015 there will be 12 billion devices capable of connecting to 500 billion hours of TV and video content. The audience heard from a number of speakers on what promises to be a new…
From Putting People First
Do you want that on your permanent record?
In his Wall Street Journal De Gustibus column, Eric Felten describes Total Recall, a Microsoft project that will archive every detail of our daily lives. “A certain kind of techno-triumphalist may find this idea appealing, but…
From Putting People First
Changing Behaviour
Changing Behaviour is a project that aims to support change in energy use and energy services. They do so by applying social research on technological change to practical use. Their focus is on the interaction between energy…
From Putting People First
Users
The Nordic Innovation Centre just published a report on the role of user-driven innovation in the growing Nordic sports equipment industry. Not only on how users help firms develop better technical products but also on how taking…
From Putting People First
Yahoo looks to improve search experience
The Mercury News reports on how Yahoo believes it can build its search audience by focusing on the user “experience,” rather than viewing search as a raw data query. “‘What’s notable about many of the stable of researchers at…
From The Eponymous Pickle
New Google Sketchup
New Sketchup version includes a number of useful changes. Remarkable package used briefly for a project.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Five Trends in BI
Good overview piece:Five Trends Changing the Face of BI Predictive analytics, agile development, user-centric business intelligence and improvements in visualization are giving new life to this mature technology ...' -
From Schneier on Security
A Stick Figure Guide to AES
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: 20-Foot Squid Caught in the Gulf of Mexico
First one sighted in the Gulf since 1954:
The new specimen, weighing 103 pounds, was found during a preliminary survey of the Gulf during which scientists hope to identify the types of fish and squid that sperm whales feed on…From Computational Complexity
Inspiring a Love of Math
A reader writes
I come to you by way of your computational complexity blog. I get that there is some really good stuff there, but frankly don’t understand about 99% of it. What I do understand is that math can be fascinating…From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Inducing Innovation with Prizes
The awarding of the $1 million Netflix Prize this week reopens an interesting bigger question:
From The Eponymous Pickle
Aggregating the Conversation
Godin's Squidoo 'Brands in Public' aims to aggregate the conversation, then you pay for some control. Examining. Site here:' ... Brands in Public is a collection of interesting, accessible, public-facing dashboards for your favorite…
From Wild WebMink
links for 2009-09-25
With Tom Watson gone and his former staff apparently reassigned, this comes as no surprise. My feeling is that the UK Government probably got some…
From Wild WebMink
links for 2009-09-25
With Tom Watson gone and his former staff apparently reassigned, this comes as no surprise. My feeling is that the UK Government probably got some…
From The Noisy Channel
Free Chapter on Faceted Search User Interface Design