Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
October 2012
From The Eponymous Pickle
Innovation Survey
A Forrester blog innovation survey. How much time do you spend on business innovation? It will be interesting to see the results.
From My Biased Coin
STOC deadline extended
Due to inclement weather, the deadline for STOC submissions has been extended to Monday, November 5, at 5:00 pm EST. Check the STOC web page for more details
From Computational Complexity
Sandy Extension
The deadline for submissions to STOC has been extended to Monday, Nov 5 2012 5:00 p.m. EST.
From Wild WebMink
Air New Zealand Goes Hobbit
Their safety video is the first I’ve actually wanted to watch all the way to the end…
From The Eponymous Pickle
The Marketing and Video
In eCommerceTimes: A look at new content marketing. Video is getting more powerful as a tool. We have seen this for some time. The more attention gathering, the more likely the connection. Video, though is still an unstructured…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Radical Transparency
What is the value of radical transparency? " ... Radical transparency, the idea of everyone knowing everything, could actually be a major driver of increased organizational performance. Private research software firm Qualtrics…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Mouse Facing Extinction
Is the mouse facing extinction? Its now more about touching a screen but the finger is still too big, and we still want partial touches and hover-overs as an alternative to click through.
From BLOG@CACM
Teaching Programming To A Highly Motivated Beginner
I recount what I learned from spending nine months teaching computer programming to a person with no prior programming experience.
From Putting People First
Manuel Castells on the rise of alternative economic cultures
Prof Manuel Castells is regarded as one of the most-cited sociologists in the world. When most of us were still struggling to connect our modems in the 1990s, the Spanish academic was documenting the rise of the network society…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Mathematical Mischief Night
Real implications from a fake-paper prank? Composite of src1, src2 Marcie Rathke was not among the speakers whose talks I heard at the Algorithms Workshop at St. John’s College, Oxford University, two weeks ago. She is “famous”…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Random Thoughts
A friend of mine posted the picture below on Facebook recently. About as basic, and wrong, random number generator as one can get. But it brings home a point – computer generated random numbers are not really random. They are…
From Schneier on Security
Doping in Professional Sports
I updated a 2006 essay of mine on the security issues around sports doping.
From The Eponymous Pickle
The Design of Business
Recently brought to my attention again: Roger Martin's 2009 book: The Design of Business, Why Design Thinking is the next competitive Advantage. It has bee on my list for a long time, but forgotten. Chapter 4 : Transforming…
From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
Two Interesting Games With a Message
I found a couple of interesting games after reading Kotaku's recent article The Complicated Truth Behind Games That Want to Change the World. One has more gameplay time than the other, but both can be experienced in a shortSweatshop…
From Schneier on Security
Rap News on Internet Surveillance
Wow.
From My Biased Coin
WSDM 2013 Accepted Papers
The list of papers accepted to WSDM 2013 is now up. Looks like the usual fun mix of papers.
From Schneier on Security
Dan Ariely on Dishonesty
Good talk, and I've always liked these animators.
From Putting People First
Book: Meta Products – Building the Internet of Things
Meta Products Meaningful Design For Our Connected World by Wimer Hazenberg and Menno Huisman BIS Publishers, 160 pages 2012 Meta Products discusses the rise of the Internet of Things, a twenty-first century phenomenon in which…
From Putting People First
Designing products for value
By encouraging more focused collaboration among multiple functional groups (notably marketing and sales, operations, engineering/R&D, and procurement), these leaders are combining deep insights about customers [particularly in…
From Putting People First
Google and the UX challenge of augmented reality
The new Google FieldTrip app probes the question: What digital information do you want to see overlaid on the physical world? A challenge that Bruce Sterling describes as “‘experience design’ problems”. Alexis G. Madrigal explores…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Tesco Invests in Global e-Comerce
Always impressed with Tesco's retail technology savvy, so this is worth following:With 6,234 stores in 13 countries and annual sales of 72 billion pounds ($116 billion), U.K. retailer Tesco is well established in the globalTesco…
From Schneier on Security
Detecting Fake Hurricane Photographs
A short tutorial here.
Actually, it's good advice even if there weren't a hurricane.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Gamification in Business
On Gamification in Business. Have been involved in conceptualizing and delivering several of the these projects. None were a complete success. But the metaphor is worth thinking about.
From Schneier on Security
Protecting (and Collecting) the DNA of World Leaders
There's a lot of hype and hyperbole in this story, but here's the interesting bit:
According to Ronald Kessler, the author of the 2009 book In the President’s Secret Service, Navy stewards gather bedsheets, drinking glasses,…From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Is reading memory faster than writing on a PC?
For human beings, reading is much faster than writing. The same is often true for computers: adding a record to a database may take an order of magnitude longer than reading it. But the speed differential can often be explained…
From Computational Complexity
Fall Jobs Post
Time again for the annual fall jobs post. As always the best places to look for academic CS positions are the job sites at the CRA and the ACM. Also check out the postdoc and other opportunities on the Theory Announcements site…
From Apophenia
Truth, Lies, and ‘Doxxing’: The Real Moral of the Gawker/Reddit Story (from Wired)
I wrote the following piece for Wired. I’m keeping it here for posterity, but check out the comments over on Wired. Sitting U.S. President Ford was visiting San Francisco in 1975 when a woman attempted to shoot him. A former…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Tips vs Bribes
An HBS Working knowledge piece on Tips vs bribes. Which reminds me of early training in this area. always saw the training as very well thought out, but always wondered about it in practice. Never had to apply it directly.
From Schneier on Security
Sony Playstation 3 Master Key Leaked
Oops.
From Wild WebMink
Triangulation And Butter
Why should we care about protecting small items of personal data, such as our date of birth, parents’ names, post code and so on? Why does it matter when we’re asked for them by someone with no need to know them? What does it…