Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
May 2012
From The Eponymous Pickle
Cisco Provides Mobile Forecast
Some interesting stats from Cisco on the increasing use of mobile and how it is driving internet traffic. A tidal wave is rising. " ... The
From The Eponymous Pickle
Excellence in Retailing Prize
The second annual Hub Prize competition, honoring excellence in the retail experience, is now underway and will run through July 31. Honored entries will be featured in the Hub Magazine's November edition. You can find more details…
From Schneier on Security
Tax Return Identity Theft
I wrote about this sort of thing in 2006 in the UK, but it's even bigger business here:
The criminals, some of them former drug dealers, outwit the Internal Revenue Service by filing a return before the legitimate taxpayer files…From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
How do they know they are interested?
Or more importantly how do students know that they are NOT interested in computer science? As I mentioned recently I had a conversation with Mike Zamansky from New York
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Data alignment for speed: myth or reality?
Compilers align data structures so that if you read an object using 4 bytes, its memory address is divisible by 4. There are two reasons for data alignment: Some processors require data alignment. For example, the ARM processor…
From Putting People First
Facebook threatens to
Andrew Keen, a British-American entrepreneur and the author of “The Cult of the Amateur” and “Digital Vertigo”, tells CNN why he believes that Facebook is stealing the innocence of our inner lives, by sabotaging what it really…
From Putting People First
My life as me
Ethnographic research by the Ericsson User Experience Lab, in collaboration with Trendethnography, aimed to discover unconscious behaviour related to health and to describe patterns of action. The study looked at events or insights…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Bring Your Own Devices
An acronym I have just learned: BYOD, bring your own devices. The policy of companies allowing employees to use their own devices for internal use. The practice and the policy has been tested formally and informally used for…
From Computational Complexity
17x17: Paper that solved it available!/A contest inspired by it!/NPC result inspired by it!
Three new 17×17 items: The paper (and some sequels) that SOLVED the 17×17 problem and the 17×18 problem are now available here. (I can't seem to link to the page directly--- from this page click on the picture of Bernd Steinbach…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Future of Money
An impressive special report in IEEE Spectrum on the Future of Money. With emphasis on the near future direction of electronic payment methods. Are we in the last days of cash? How will the changes be controlled? Devices…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Finding Your Smile
An idea related to previous work at MIT to determine how people reacted to ideas, products and interaction. We examined this previously to determine how people reacted to specific products and displays in a laboratory store,…
From Schneier on Security
Bar Code Switching
A particularly clever form of retail theft -- especially when salesclerks are working fast and don't know the products -- is to switch bar codes. This particular thief stole Lego sets. If you know Lego, you know there's a vast…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Data Science Summit Videos
A number of videos from the Data Science Summit via Greenplum that are worth examining. Useful selection from 2011 as well: The few I have looked at so far are insightful. ".. Data Science Summit brings together thought…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Why we Lie
Why we Lie. by Dan Ariely. Why we do, and how he has experimented with methods to increase and decrease the likelihood of the lie. As usual a thought provoking article.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wearable Computing
In the WSJ: More on wearable computing solutions like Google Glasses. A favorite topic based on our own experiments. Inevitable? " ... Some computer scientists increasingly envision a world in which people wear glasses-like…
From Schneier on Security
The Psychology of Immoral (and Illegal) Behavior
When I talk about Liars and Outliers to security audiences, one of the things I stress is our traditional security focus -- on technical countermeasures -- is much narrower than it could be. Leveraging moral, repetitional, and…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Grades and Tuitions are Inflated
Data and graphs from Mark Perry on the inflation of grades and college costs. Are they related? Hearing more talk about the necessity of a college education. I remain traditional on this topic.
From Wild WebMink
Java ME Fragmentation
Sun acknowledged in 2008 and 2009 that Java ME was fragmented – and had been for years – without any help from Android. More in today’s article on ComputerWorld UK.
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Scanning the Robots at ICRA 2012
Our colleagues at IEEE’s Spectrum have posted a neat montage of the exhibit hall at last week’s
From Schneier on Security
The Problem of False Alarms
The context is tornado warnings:
The basic problem, Smith says, it that sirens are sounded too often in most places. Sometimes they sound in an entire county for a warning that covers just a sliver of it; sometimes for other…From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
There Is Only So Much You Can Cover
I
From The Eponymous Pickle
Evolving Mind Mapping
I worked with concept and mind mapping for a number of years, and use it still for consulting interactions. It is still evolving. Allowing us to co-create conversations. And see innovations through other people's eyes. And…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Turing Centenary
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
21st Century Computer Architecture
In April, the Computing Community Consortium (CCC) commissioned members of the computer architecture research community to generate a short report to help guide strategic thinking in this space.
From Computer Science Teachers Association
Planning a Summer Institute
I think my last blog was written while I was monitoring my final exam. This one is written as I take a break from planning for a summer institute for teachers for AP Computer Science. This will be a one-week crash course event…
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
Hill Tech Happenings, Week of May 29
May 31 Hearing: The Communications and Technology Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee will hold a hearing on international proposals to regulate the Internet. 10:15 a.m., 2322 Rayburn Building June 1 Hearing…
From My Biased Coin
More Entrepreneurial Harvard?
One thing I noticed talking to CS graduates from Harvard this year is -- entirely anecdotally -- more seem to be going to small start-ups. This has been an increasing trend the last few years, and strikes me as a big change. …
From The Eponymous Pickle
Taming the Big Data Wave
I have been reading: Taming The Big Data Tidal Wave: Finding Opportunities in Huge Data Streams with Advanced Analytics by Bill Franks. I read this in preparation for several invited talks about the intersection of Big Data…
From The Noisy Channel
HCIR 2012: Call for Participation
Human-computer Information Retrieval (HCIR) combines research from the fields of human-computer interaction (HCI) and information retrieval (IR), placing an emphasis on human involvement in search activities. The HCIR Symposium…
From Computational Complexity
Theory Jobs 2012
The theoretical computer science job market has mostly settled so time for the annual spring jobs posts. I set up a Google Spreadsheet that everyone can edit so we can crowd source who is going where next year. The rules I set…