Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
February 2009
From Computer Science Teachers Association
Advocacy Action in Ohio
Ohio is on the move, or at least we would like to think so.
During the eTech State Technology Conference in February we were able to present four sessions on topics in computer science education. The eTech coordinators worked…From Wild WebMink
Link round-up for 26th & 27th February
Music industry's Irish ISP shakedown letter leaked This is the way things work these days. The Irish music industry association IRMA is afraid to sue its customers as aggressively as RIAA has, so is trying to get others to do…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Clever Digital Marketing
HardKnoxLife demonstrates a bit of digital marketing from GE that combines a single printed page, the camera on your PC and some 3D modeling to show you how clever they are. Technically very clever and interesting. Thinking…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Package Unseen
A new blog that looks to be interesting:The Package UnseenObservations about package design, culture, and context ... ' About the Author, Richard Shear.-
From The Eponymous Pickle
Agent-Based Complexity Models
For a request I dug out this article on some work I was involved in a number of years ago, then remembered that I had never posted it here. It is about solving tough supply chain complexity models with agent-based simulations…
From insideHPC
UAH Partnering with
The University of Alabama Huntsville has announced a new partnership with Oak Ridge National Lab.
From insideHPC
OSC boosts bioscience with super
OSC announced yesterday that they are expanding their IBM Cluster 1350 to add more capacity to the center’s support for state bioscience efforts The Ohio Supercomputer Center today announced the purchase of a $4 million expansion…
From insideHPC
Express Parallelism, Don
Provocative title from an article at DevX.com For example, it’s very tempting to use the operating system’s native threading library directly on a multicore platform, such as WinThreads on Windows or Posix Threads on Linux. But…
From insideHPC
Comparing Cilk++ and
Multicoreinfo.com points us to an article at Cilk Arts comparing some of the differences between their parallel environment, Cilk++, and OpenMP If your code looks like a sequence of parallelizable Fortran-style loops, OpenMP…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Think Like a Startup
I have heard this suggestion many times in the large enterprise. Usually more like: 'What would you invest in if this was your own money?'. Though that was directed at being bold while also minimizing risk. Adage has some…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Alice Sells Toilet Paper
Was just pointed to a private beta called Alice. The site appears to want to sell common CPG products at some discount via subscription with free delivery. Using subscription re-stock has always been a dream of CPG companies…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Finding Your Customers
Good basic outline about how to find your customers while social networking.
From Wild WebMink
See you at CeBIT?
Next week is CeBIT, the monster IT trade show that has outlived COMDEX and all the others. Held in Hannover in Germany, it is an exhibition of staggering proportions that every geek should attend at least once (my preference:…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Application Store Analysis
An interesting view of the IPhone application store. Overall sales are increasing, but few apps are used long after purchase. " ... users who download free applications from the App Store, only 20 percent use the app the next…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Twitter's Fiscal Fate?
Short piece on the state of Twitter. Still attracting lots of people. Collecting eyeballs. It reflects the two minds I have about it. It is a collection of very bored people with nothing else to do. It is also a way to connect…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Students using podcasting and skipping class
According to a recent study, students do better if they skip class and listen to the podcasts. The article has been discussed in the New Scientist and the New York Times, but here is a direct quote: Results indicated that students…
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Are solo authors less cited?
Sylvie Noël submits to us the following fallacy—which appears in the editorial of a peer-reviewed journal. The editor-in-chief makes the following observation: (…) only a small fraction of the top 100 papers ranked by the number…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Ethnography and the In-Home Interview.
Fascinating piece on the the use of in-home interviews by Tesco's Fresh&Easy. " ... did Tesco grasp the method they were using? There is a distressing habit these days to think the ethnographic due diligence has been satisfied…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Gut Feelings: Intelligence of the Unconscious
Gerd Gigerenzer is the director of the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute. I have been reading his 2007 book: Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious. At first I thought this was…
From insideHPC
The word of the day is
I freaking love this story, from the UK’s Webuser site. A supercomputer used to predict which words may soon fall out of common use in the English language. The words ’squeeze’, ‘guts’, and ‘dirty’ could fall out of common usage…
From insideHPC
Asian
The Top500 list started it all, and then came the Russian Top50. Now there is an Asian Top500. Why the new list? ince 1993, www.TOP500.org has taken the initiative to assemble and maintain the list of the 500 most powerful computer…
From insideHPC
One million for the
CPU hours, that is. From a release posted at HPCwire earlier this week: The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in collaboration with the Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science (I-CHASS)…
From insideHPC
Fusion-IO: a little bit of Woz and a lot of
CNet News ran a feature yesterday about Fusion-IO, about whom we have previously written. Steve Wozniak joined Fusion-IO as its chief scientist recently, at least partly to create the kind of buzz that generates articles at CNet…
From insideHPC
ISC
Found at HPCwire this am, news that the 2009 program for ISC (in Hamburg this time, a lovely city) is set: In addition to world-renowned keynote speakers, ISC’09 will feature four in-depth sessions examining some of the most…
From insideHPC
Dan Reed on why he joined
The day before yesterday the always interesting Dan Reed spent a few minutes writing on his blog about what motivated his most recent career choice What I have not done is write about why I came to Microsoft and what I am doing…
From insideHPC
Chippewa Falls Seymour Cray
The Chippewa Falls Museum of Industry and Technology has opened an exhibit entitled: “Seymour Cray Supercomputers.”
From Wild WebMink
Link roundup to February 26
From The Eponymous Pickle
Morphological Neuromarketing
In today's New York Times, an interesting case study on a Neuromarketing method used by US snack goods manufacturer Frito-Lay, which used the morphology (structure and size) differences between women's and men's brains to change…
From Computer Science Teachers Association
Why It is Time To Get Political
In the last year, CSTA has put s great deal of effort into developing a strong advocacy arm for CSTA and there are times when I wonder if this is a good use of our precious and limited resources when there is so much that needs…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Dealing with Reliability
Can you rely on services like Gmail? Or the Web? Sobering thoughts.