Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
July 2011
From The Noisy Channel
Upcoming Information Retrieval Conferences
I hope everyone who attended the recent SIGIR 2011 in Beijing had an excellent experience. I didn’t manage to make it to that side of the globe myself, but I’m looking forward to hearing back from my LinkedIn
From The Eponymous Pickle
Neural Prosthetics
Good piece on neural prosthetics, prompted by military injuries, considerable progress is being made.
From The Eponymous Pickle
The Hubble and Enterprise Planning
I have been reading Eric J Chaisson's Book: The Hubble Wars, a detailed view of the launch and operation of the Hubble Space Telescope. My background is in astrophysics, so the details of goals and scheduling ring true. My later…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google Maps Changing the Look of Data
in GigaOm. Good example of using Google maps based mashups to visualize data. I have seen a number of good examples of this. Simple representations.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Whats the Value of a Facebook Fan?
How many friends they have. Obvious answer but the piece makes a reasonable justification.
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
An Online AI Course
This fall, our colleagues Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig are offering a free, online version of their popular Stanford University course, “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence”: A
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: 25-foot Giant Squid Caught in Fishing Net
A 25-foot (or maybe 23-foot) giant squid was caught off the coast of Florida.
Also, I'm going to try something new. Let's use this weekly squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I didn't cover. I'll…From The Eponymous Pickle
Gartner's Value Chain Transformation Imperatives
A very good piece in the Informs Analytics Magazine. I agree. Have been recently involved in looking analytically at the transformation of major supply chain operations. Lots of interesting opportunities exist.Organizations…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Innovative Education Forum–Judging Day
Wow! Just WOW! I spent yesterday judging teacher projects as part of the US Innovative Educator Forum in Redmond. It was absolutely inspiring. In fact I would go as far as to say this was the most encouraging day in regards to…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Innovative Education Forum
Wow! Just WOW! I spent yesterday judging teacher projects as part of the US Innovative Educator Forum in Redmond. It was absolutely inspiring. In fact I would go as far as to say this was the most encouraging day in regards to…
From Schneier on Security
Luggage Hack
Bypassing the lock on luggage.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google Maps and the London Underground
I have navigated London by the Underground with the usual paper in hand and surveying the overhead route maps. This new development gives you mobile direction finding I would love to try. Now if they would only update some…
From Schneier on Security
Hacking Apple Laptop Batteries
Security researcher Charlie Miller, widely known for his work on Mac OS X and Apple's iOS, has discovered an interesting method that enables him to completely disable the batteries on Apple laptops, making them[…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Sands Neuromarketing Alliance in China
Just received, an impressive partnership and direction: Sands Research and Brain Intelligence Establish Neuromarketing Alliance in China and GloballyPartnership to assist clients in fast growing consumer market El Paso, Texas…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Vision for Digital Public Library
The DPLA: Taking some of the Google scanning work further and non profit: " ... Last year, Robert Darnton, a cultural historian and director of Harvard University
From Apophenia
The Unintended Consequences of Obsessing Over Consequences (or why to support youth risk-taking)
Developmental psychologists love to remind us that the frontal lobe isn’t fully developed until humans are in their mid-20s. The prefrontal cortex is responsible for our ability to assess the consequences of our decisions, our…
From Putting People First
Review: Paul Dourish & Genevieve Bell
Michiel De Lange has published a very long and somewhat critical review of the book Divining a Digital Future: Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing by Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell. “In Divining a Digital Future D&B reiterate…
From Putting People First
Good mobile experiences unfold and progressively reveal their nature
Successful PC and mobile experiences are built on fundamentally different conceptual models and leverage different psychological functions of the user, argues Rachel Hinman. Understanding these differences will help you create…
From Putting People First
Art that interacts if you interface
The New York Times reviews Paola Antonelli’s “Talk to Me” show at the Museum of Modern Art. “At its best
From Putting People First
Digital fluency: empowering all students
Liz Losh writes on DMLCentral on an inclusive and interdisciplinary approach to
From The Eponymous Pickle
P&G Minimizes Management Meddling
By Michael Schrage in HBR Blogs: Was somewhat both proud of and surprised by this revelation. I saw some of both behaviors. And still think more could have been done with even less meddling. Yes, though to innovative analytics…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Children Play Like Scientists
In Wired, the results of a study. They appear to isolate variables in play. But is the scientific method all that influences scientists? Or Children?
From Schneier on Security
ShareMeNot
ShareMeNot is a Firefox add-on for preventing tracking from third-party buttons (like the Facebook "Like" button or the Google "+1" button) until the user actually chooses to interact with them. That is, ShareMeNot doesn't disable…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Live Right Now: NSF Announcing New Innovation Corps
In just a few minutes, during a special session of the National Science Board — and before a large gathering of senior leadership from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the White House Office of Science and Technology…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Unilever and Groupon Work with Retail
In Progressive Grocer:" ... Supervalu, Inc.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Wal-Mart Shares Data with Nielsen
After being out of the process for a long time, it is reported that Wal-Mart will start sharing data with Nielsen again. We were always told that Wal-Mart did not feel that it was of value to them to share data. Has a deal been…
From Computational Complexity
The Problems of LaTeX
By request a post that may create the biggest backlash since I declared myself Unix free. \begin{rant} LaTeX is a great system for mathematical documents...for the 1980s. But the computing world changed dramatically and LaTeX…
From BLOG@CACM
What We Owe Google, and What Google Owes Us
We rely on online information sources—maybe too much. What is our responsibility to make sure that they're accurate, and what responsibility do the sources have to us?
From Schneier on Security
Data Privacy as a Prisoner's Dilemma
Good analysis:
Companies would be better off if they all provided meaningful privacy protections for consumers, but privacy is a collective action problem for them: many companies would love to see the ecosystem fixed, but no…From Putting People First
Are we becoming too analytical?
Or, why did Google PowerMeter fail? In his latest post, James Landay questions whether over-analysis of data gets in the way of designing a product that truly understands the needs of its users. He provides several examples of…