Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
February 2010
From The Eponymous Pickle
Posterous
A friend recommended the Posterous package some time ago. It's a quick and easy way to set up a blog from email and mobile. I will not be replacing this blog, but I will use it as a place to store more informal information, drafts…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Smartphones and PCs
Post and discussion about how Smartphones will displace PCs. I agree, if I can project from my smartphone when it is needed, and have a means for rapid text entry. -
From The Eponymous Pickle
Math Models for Solving Crimes
From recent predictive modeling advances: " ... Most crime happens somewhere familiar to the criminal. Burglars return to the scenes of a crime to replicate the success or exploit vulnerabilities identified during previous offenses…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Tableau Examples Blog
A blog of Tableau examples. For example, constructing radial charts.-
From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
Teaching Computer Science in High School
Continuing on the theme of excellence in education, I would like to briefly reflect on teaching computer science in Ontario high schools. I have to point out that I don't what exactly the state of the subject in our province…
From The Noisy Channel
You Can
Lately, I’ve been musing about the Herb Simon quote that launched–or at least popularized–the concepts of information overload and attention economics:
in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of…From Wild WebMink
links for 2010-02-28
At a recent debate in the House of Lords on the Digital Economy Bill, a number of amendments designed to ensure citizen rights (as opposed to most terms of …
From Putting People First
New media and its superpowers
Mimi Ito, cultural anthropologist and associate researcher at the University of California Humanities Research Institute, co-led a MacArthur Foundation-funded three year ethnographic study, the Digital Youth Project (DYP), which…
From Putting People First
When American and European ideas of privacy collide
An Italian ruling against Google highlights the clash between Europe
From The Eponymous Pickle
New Songdo City, South Korea
Regret I cannot attend this call. I have been pitched a number of these 'smart cities' and related ideas during my connection with innovation centers. All intriguing in their approach and scope. The Songdo City's officialis…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Augmented Maps
Ted talk on augmented maps in Bing from the Snapdragon developer and how it includes Twitter, Flickr and other geolocated blog content Have not taken a look at Bing Maps in detail yet, but will do so.
From Wild WebMink
Blog Moved
A reminder: If you are following me here on blogs.sun.com, please change your bookmarks and feeds to read http://webmink.com instead, as I have moved all my blogging there. I'll be turning of the daily link posts early next…
From Wild WebMink
links for 2010-02-27
While this is all good, it is not sufficient as ACTA will address far more than just "garduated response". This looks to me like a co-ordinated…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Being Investigated?
My former colleague John Sopko has published a paper from the Washington Legal Foundation titled
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
NASA Be A Martian Pathfinder Innovation Challenge
Back last November I posted a short link to NASA
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Homophone Lessons
Squids make great examples.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Recommending New Things
New ideas in adding novelty to recommendation algorithms. Have always thought that accuracy is not everything. I don't always want the same thing, give me something new.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Creating a Location-Based Service
In Adage, I like the basic idea. Especially since the more I have looked at services like FourSquare, the more I think there is a big idea that is being missed. ' ... Some, including Bravo, HBO and Warner Brothers, are partnering…
From The Eponymous Pickle
New Random Number Generation Method
Having a good random number generator is critical for constructing simulation methods to build models. Some new reported progress is reported:" ... New Approach to Generating Truly Random Numbers May Improve Internet Security…
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
Policy Highlights from Communications of the ACM - February 2010 (Vol. 53, No. 2)
Below is a list of items with policy relevance from the February issue of Communications of the ACM. As always, much of the material in CACM is premium content, and free content one month may slip behind a pay wall the next.…
From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
Recognizing Excellence in Education
The TA Mentor program here at Carleton has been run in some departments for a few years now, but is in its first year in the School of Computer Science. One of the big pushes this year is to create a TA Award in departments
…
From Computational Complexity
Is Math too hard?
Are humans good at Math?
In the movie Oh God Book II God (played by George Burns) says that Math was a mistake, I made it too hard!. While I am reluctant to contradict God, George Burns, or God as portrayed by George Burns…
From My Biased Coin
Conflicts of Interest, Yet Again
I was just asked to serve on the ACM CoNEXT 2010 PC (I'll have to think about it -- NSDI,SIGCOMM, and CoNEXT all in one year?), and the chairs (Muriel Medard and Tim Griffin) sent along a note explaining the conference, the reviewing…
From Schneier on Security
Me on Surveillance Cameras
My fourth essay for CNN.com, on surveillance cameras. The Al-Mabhouh assassination made a nice news hook.
From Putting People First
Content strategy
Content strategy is more or less on the same trajectory as social media was three years ago, argues Kristina Halvorson (of Brain Traffic). “I think it
From Putting People First
Streams of content, limited attention
Danah Boyd, a social media researcher at Microsoft Research, wrote a long piece for UX Magazine on “what it means to be ‘in flow’ in an information landscape defined by networked media”, based on a talk she gave at O
From Putting People First
Women and mobile
Women & Mobile: A Global Opportunity is a study on the mobile phone gender gap in low and middle-income countries. Mobile phone ownership in low and middle-income countries has skyrocketed in the past several years. But a woman…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Multiple Agent Decision Making
From the CACM, very instructive piece:Making Decisions Based on the Preferences of Multiple Agents, by Vincent ConitzerComputer scientists have made great strides in how decision-making mechanisms are used.Communications of the…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wearable Patches Contain Scannable Code
Stan Dyck points me to this example of a scannable code that can be placed on clothing and then read from a smartphone. Cleverly called in the image an 'extended identity'. Note somewhat of a similarity to TalkingTag, which I…
From Schneier on Security
Hitler and Cloud Computing
Funny video by Marcus Ranum and Gunnar Peterson.