Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
September 2011
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
NIPS 2011 Calling for
The
From The Eponymous Pickle
Digital Gastronomy
This week I gave a presentation in Chicago and mentioned the idea of manufacturing food and beverage remotely, giving as examples the Coke Freestyle machine and work that had been done at MIT with food printing ideas. The whole…
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Beautiful Squid Drawings
From Italy.
As before, use the comments to this post to write about and discuss security stories that don't have their own post.
From Computer Science Teachers Association
Knowing That Order Matters
The start of a new year puts me once again in front of a second semester class, using as text the pdf of my book that is about to appear (shameless advertising). And once again I am trying to teach students more about organization…
From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
Game Papers at SIGGRAPH 2011 (Part 2 of 2)
A previous post talked about two game paper presentations I saw at SIGGRAPH 2011. Here is part two with a summary of the second two talks.
From Apophenia
Exciting News: Me @ Microsoft Research + New York University
When I was finishing my PhD and starting to think about post-school plans, I made a list of my favorite university departments. At the top of the list was New York University’s “Media, Culture, and Communication” (MCC) department…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Smartphones for Checking Out in Retail
Michael Koploy posts a great article on using smartphones for retail checkout. It is a topic I have talked to many retailers about. It is a key issue for retailers seeking to improve their experience. The biggest issue is…
From Computational Complexity
Guest Post on Conference Locations
(Samir Khuller Guest Post.)
On Conference Locations:
I recently looked at Orbitz for fares to Japan for SODA 2012 in Jan. The round trip fare from DC to Tokyo is close to $1700. Together with the train to Kyoto, we are…
From The Eponymous Pickle
IBM Predictive Perspectives
I will be at the IBM Predictive Perspectives Innovative Ideas for Analytics next Tuesday, September 13 in Cincinnati (Actually in Covington KY). Want to meet up? Need some help in interpreting the capabilities from a thirty…
From The Eponymous Pickle
DemandTec Promotes Retail Challenge
I have been a long time promoter of getting all students started early in Technology, Math and Science. It is hard to fill in the gaps later. Just got this note about how DemandTec, who I have linked to since their founding…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google to do Dart
Google is introducing a new structured Web programming language called Dart.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Driving Levels of Interaction
Gamification can get people minimally involved, but how can it lead to deeper levels of interaction? Some thoughts.
From Putting People First
Design ethnography field guide by Helsinki Design Lab
An essential part of any design activity is understanding the context one is working in, particularly the social context. Eventually when proposals are made, these too must be measured by their likely impact on the people who…
From Wild WebMink
? How Many Foundations Do We Need?
One of the sessions at Transfer Summit concerned open source foundations. I made a comment during the Q & A that some people wanted recorded, so here it is! ? Imagine you’re starting something new with some acquaintances. You…
From Putting People First
Marko Ahtisaari: Patterns of Human Interaction (the Nokia N9 design video)
Marko Ahtisaari is the global head of Nokia’s design unit, and he is responsible for Nokia
From Putting People First
What Does it Mean to Design Public Services?
Design thinking and techniques can help create radical innovations needed to meet the challenges facing local communities and services, says Philip Colligan, executive director of Nesta‘s public services lab. “What we’re now…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
NFTE World Series of Innovation
Innovation! What is is and how can we teach it to children? Big questions today as many of us believe that innovation in many forms is absolutely critical to success in these
From The Eponymous Pickle
Boot Camp Digital
See former colleague Krista Neher's Boot Camp Digital. Local Social media tips and tricks. Great stuff. "Krista really knows her stuff re: social media. She has high energy and can bring tremendous knowledge and skill to…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
ScriptTD: Tower Defense Game Creation Made Easy
Coding a game from scratch is hard. Make no mistake about there is a lot to it. OF course many people, especially students, think they are all ready to create the next great game. They can easily be frustrated when they find…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Fusion Tables
Had completely missed this idea in Google Docs: Fusion Tables. " ... a new option in Google Docs: creating tables. It seems that Google Docs started to integrate with Fusion Tables, a little-known Google service that lets you…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Open Badges
A clever, simple idea that also depends much on how it is implemented. An open infrastructure that is all about delivering badges for acquiring skills. Much more interesting than getting badges for visiting places. Thought…
From BLOG@CACM
Gender Discrimination in the U.K. Research Excellence Framework
The U.K. research assessment framework will discriminate against female researchers. We can't afford to lose more women from CS research!
From Schneier on Security
New Lows in Secret Questions
I've already written about secret questions, the easier-to-guess low-security backup password that sites want you to have in case you forget your harder-to-remember higher-security password. Here's a new one, courtesey of the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
A Single Molecule Motor
One of the great accomplishments of the 19th century was the electric motor. Converting electrical energy to controllable mechanical energy. Now a single molecule motor has been demonstrated. The smallest motor ever. What…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Junk Charts Again
In Junk Charts they illustrate one of my favorite examples of poor data visualization. It is the use of bar charts without using scales that start at zero. This is yet another example, and it is a very common one, of obscuring…
From The Noisy Channel
Attention CMU Students!
As many of you know, I’m a proud alumnus of the CMU School of Computer Science
From The Eponymous Pickle
New Blogger Interface
This is now live. Have not tried it yet, but plan to. Need a reworking of my blog format and capabilities.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Grow from Within
Grow from Within: Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation by Robert Wolcott and Michael Lippitz. Now on my stack of things to read. Recently heard Robert C. Wolcott present at Clareo Partners. More when I read it…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Using R for Big Data
Some excellent examples of the use of the Statistical/visualization/data mining language R for a number of real applications. Have started to use it more myself, very useful system.
From Computational Complexity
Next in the sequence
When I posted on sequence problems here some people said that they did not have unique answers. Many problems FORMALLY do not have a unique answer, but common sense and simplicity lead to a unique answer. This recently happened…