Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
September 2010
From The Eponymous Pickle
Grasp Lab at Penn
I don't remember Penn being particularly well known for robotics work. Yet their Grasp lab (general robotics, automation, sensing and perception) around since 1979, has been in the news lately for putting flying drones through…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Carrefour Reinventing the Hypermarket
An interesting piece that seems to indicate that Carrefour is taking a more revolutionary that evolutionary approach in design. Nice to see this direction. Considerable statistical data from pilot stores is included in the piece…
From Computer Science Teachers Association
I Know What You Did Last Summer
If you are like most of the teachers I know (and how I used to be) then you probably spent your summer doing any combination of the following: vacationing, resting, conferencing, professionally developing, or working. And I would…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Gamification!
It has been called 'serious games', 'total engagement', and collaborative competition. Now Russell Brumfield, who we worked with on a scent branding project, has come up with a set of methods to game-ify real work in the enterprise…
From The Eponymous Pickle
New Category Management Paradigm
Interbrand top 100 brand brand report and a new approach to category management. " .... Now, in 2010, we are seeing the starts and stops of a recovery coupled with profound changes in the relationships between brands and their…
From Putting People First
The digital panopticon
In a three-part series Joshua-Mich
From The Eponymous Pickle
Razors and Razor Blade Strategy
An interesting piece in Techdirt, commenting on an original paper in the Social Science Research Network, about the classic business strategy of razors and razor blades. We heard it often as a governing profit strategy. That…
From CERIAS Blog
Can Your IPv4 Firewall Be Bypassed by IPv6 Traffic?
Do you have a firewall? Maybe it's not as useful as you think it is. I was surprised to discover that IPv6 was enabled on several hosts with default firewall policies of ACCEPT and no rules. This allowed IPv6 traffic to completely…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Metadata Management
From TDWI: Cost Justification for Metadata Management. " ... Pinning a dollar value or other metric to metadata
From Putting People First
Cutting edge sharing and bartering in Brooklyn
From farming to art, practices like sharing and bartering are being revived and updated for the Twitter age. The New York Times reports from Brooklyn. “Concepts like sharing and bartering
From Schneier on Security
Questioning Terrorism Policy
...what if we chose to accept the fact that every few years, despite all reasonable precautions, some hundreds or thousands of us may die in the sort of ghastly terrorist attack that a democratic republic cannot…
From Putting People First
Values in technology design and use: ethnography
A couple of months ago former Nokia ethnographer Tricia Wang gave a talk at the Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto, CA, and she just posted the slideshow and the abstract on her blog. “My talk today is about how I came into my…
From Putting People First
All together now, to each his own sync
New York Times cultural commentator Anand Giridharadas reflects on the fact that as the very idea of mass culture erodes, many people are synced with themselves but unsynced with those around them. “The digitizing, globalizing…
From Putting People First
Intel: it
The Intel announcements this week, particularly those by CTO Justin Rattner, are quite visionary. But also anthropologist Genevieve Bell’s approach is making waves in the community, such as this article by TechRadar.com. Before…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing 2010
I really like this award program so I am happy to promote it on my blog. The following is from the official announcement. I strongly encourage you to share this opportunity with high school women and with teachers who may be…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Eyes
From The Eponymous Pickle
Social Tech Retail Value.
An interesting early experiment with a restaurant using social technology. Did McDonald's get a 33% increase in foot traffic from Foursquare? ReadWriteWeb looks at the numbers.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google Scribe
This Google writing capability fills in phrases for you. Generally a reasonable idea, but can also be annoying unless you are used to it. -
From Schneier on Security
Master HDCP Key Cracked
The master key for the High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection standard -- that's what encrypts digital television between set-top boxes and digital televisions -- has been cracked and published. (Intel confirmed that theunclear…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Can Science be wrong? You bet!
A common answer to my post on the reliability of science, was that fraud was marginal and that, ultimately, science is self-correcting. That is true on one condition: that the science is question is bona fide science. Otherwise…
From Schneier on Security
Automatic Document Declassification
DARPA is looking for something that can automatically declassify documents:
I'll be honest: I'm not exactly sure what kind of technological solution you can build to facilitate declassification. From the way the challenge is…From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
Thoughts on Writing My First CHI Paper
I've been working on a paper for CHI2011, one of the (or the?) top conferences in human computer interaction. I'm aiming really high with this and know full well that it's a competitive conference that I can't expect to getknow…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Liespotting
An interesting article on detecting lies in conversations. The article makes the case that there is currently an epidemic of deception. Everyone wants to know how reliable the information they get is, so there is lots of interest…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Billion in Digital Book Sales
Barnes & Noble expects to have a billion dollars in digital book sales by 2013. Another example of the changes from paper to digital format. Get your readers ready..... " Online retailer Amazon.com has also found that e-book…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Pex for Fun
Can you read code in C#, F# or Visual Basic? Do you like programming puzzles we (well the Pex Team, part of the Research in Software Engineering (RiSE) group at Microsoft Research) has a site for you. Pex for Fun is a web…
From Putting People First
Context-aware devices that become our natural extensions
Much coverage on the presentation by Justin Rattner, Intel’s CTO at the Intel Developer Forum, where he discussed a future with so-called context-aware computers and mobile devices. PC Magazine Rattner describes the future of…
From Putting People First
The relationship revolution
The Internet may seem like a 21st-century nightmare version of the worst excesses of the marketplace, writes Melinda Blau in the Psychotherapy Networker. But it’s also creating new possibilities for connection and conversation…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Myths and Truths About Innovation
Mark Montgomery of Kyield posts on Myths and Truths about Innovation. Something he has been working on for some time. " ... In my daily filtering of news and intelligence, I usually find one or more quotes on innovation that…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Mapping Remarkable Relationships
Colleague Julie Anixter video on her new Youtube presence:On Mapping Remarkable Relationships: Four Seasons The essence of every great customer experience is a human experience, a relationship. Not with a brand or a company,…
From Wild WebMink
? Copyright Aggregation Essay
My essay on copyright aggregation in open source projects has finally moved to the Essays section of the web site; future updates and edits will happen there.