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 The Noisy Channel
Udorse: Give Product Placement a Chance
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The hard truth about research grants
You must do many silly things to get a large research grant:
You must know precisely what you will do for the next five years. Yet, in my experience, good researchers only have a vague idea of where they will be in 5 years.…From Wild WebMink
links for 2009-09-15
From Schneier on Security
Skein News
Skein is one of the 14 SHA-3 candidates chosen by NIST to advance to the second round. As part of the process, NIST allowed the algorithm designers to implement small "tweaks" to their algorithms. We've tweaked the rotation…
From My Biased Coin
SIGGRAPH article
The "final version" of our SIGGRAPH Asia paper, Real-Time Parallel Hashing on the GPU, is available here.I was primarily involved in the "hash table construction" part of the paper. The ideas there are familiar in various works…
From Putting People First
Case study: NPR.org
On July 27, 2009, National Public Radio (NPR) relaunched the website www.npr.org through the efforts of its in-house design team and interactive agency Schematic. Senior interaction designer Neylan describes the massive task…
From The Noisy Channel
Bing Visual Search Beta
From The Noisy Channel
Is Bing Optimizing for the Short Snout?
From Computational Complexity
Ambiguity
I recently heard or read the following phrases.
- former cop killer
- ideal compromiser
- even prime numbers have their uses
From The Eponymous Pickle
Zakta Search Engine
I see that Mahendra Vora and Sundar Kadayam have founded a startup called Zakta. Much more here. He and his colleagues are best known for founding Intelliseek, which was ultimately sold to AC Nielsen. We had a number of conversations…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Unilever and Crowd Sourcing
More details in AdAge about Unilever's use of crowd sourcing to replace some kinds of some product marketing. The comments are also interesting.
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
Hill Tech Happenings, Week of September 14
September 14
Hearing: The Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee will hold a hearing on cyberattacks and industry. 10 a.m., 342 Dirksen Building
September 15
Meeting: The Health Information Technology Standards…From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How things change: Cheaters are Innovators
If you seek approval above all else, you are unlikely to innovate outside the rigid bounds of the current system:
You do not convince existing journals to give more respect to this new field you created. You go out and create…From Wild WebMink
? Truly Random
From My Biased Coin
Colleges, Newspapers
A colleague sent me this link to a Washington Post article, on how colleges are going to be "torn apart" like newspapers have been by the Internet. Dramatically, "The business model that sustained private U.S. colleges cannot…
From Schneier on Security
Robert Sawyer's Alibis
Back in 2002, science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer wrote an essay about the trade-off between privacy and security, and came out in favor of less privacy. I disagree with most of what he said, and have written pretty much…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Spotfire BI Blog
Wim Van de Velde points me to Tibco Spotfire's new Business Intelligence Blog which I have put on my feed. I like their current post on five unconventional uses for BI software. Will point to posts there as I find them useful…
From The Eponymous Pickle
UK Lifts Product Placement Ban
Apparently in the UK placed products on imported shows are often blurred. Inside the UK product placements are banned. The BBC reports that this placement ban is to be lifted, a least for foreign shows. The way I read the article…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Norman Borlaug Dies
We see that Norman Borlaug, father of the Green revolution, Nobel scientist, died yesterday at the age of 95. It is estimated that he has saved many millions of lives. That may not be too green of him, but as a botanical dabbler…
From Putting People First
Intel
In a two-part podcast Genevieve Bell, Intel Fellow and Director of the User Experience Group, discusses the intersection of technology and society, with a special focus on the social media explosion and worldwide technology adoption…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Turing Test for Bots
Tech Review writes about fascinating work creating a test to determine if a bot is human. The original Turing Test came from a proposal by computing pioneer Alan Turing to demonstrate machine intelligence by fooling humans into…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Vintage Visualization
Mike Cristia of Market Intelligence Group (MIG), points me to a Flowingdata post on Vintage Infographics from the 1930s. Some nice examples and links to the whole resource.
From The Noisy Channel
Micro vs. Macro Information Retrieval
From Apophenia
Sometimes I Feel Like a Bitch
For the most part, I'm a fuzzy lovable energetic creature (or at least I like to think so). But new technologies combined with information overload sometimes bring out the inner bitch in me. And then I feel guilty. I am drowning…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Stinky Squid
It's a mushroom: Pseudocolus fusiformis.
From The Noisy Channel
Yahoo on Key Scientific Challenges in Search and Machine Learning
From The Eponymous Pickle
Lindstrom Newsletter
Brand Futurist Martin Lindstrom now has his newsletter out. Lots of interesting branding and advanced marketing ideas and resources. Fun videos on the topic. Read it and subscribe.
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Where do the best mathematicians come from?
Americans think that the best scientists come from their best universities.
From Computer Science Teachers Association
Binary "Bits" For All!
In 1988 David Macaulay's classic The Way Things Work was published. In 1998, he followed up this very successful book with The New Way Things Work, which includes a chapter entitled "The Digital Domain." This chapter begins…
From The Eponymous Pickle
BI for the IPhone
Sy Truong, whose blog Becoming a SAS Programmer in the Pharmaceutical Industry, sends along a post: SAS iPhone App Architecture. This is a technical post for those with SAS/BI and Iphone application background. I remain very…