Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
September 2013
From The Eponymous Pickle
Apple and iBeacon Location
We examined location intelligence for a long time as it pertained to retail presence. Notable now in the US are Apples current trials with Baseball. " ... Baseball's beacon trials hint at Apple's location revolution CNET…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Institute for Large Scale Innovation
The Institute for Large Scale Innovation, and its founder John Kao was recently brought to mind. After our introduction to their work quite a while ago. " ... The Institute for Large Scale Innovation (ILSI) is a NGO whose…
From Computer Science Teachers Association
Are The Girls in Your Class Being Bullied?
Perhaps many of you have read the recent Letter to my daughter's high school programming teacher, a blog post from an impassioned journalist whose daughter was bullied in computer science class by the males in the classroom.…
From Computational Complexity
Long Tails and Fat Heads
Sometimes words or phrases are used in MATH and then spread to the REAL WORLD. I have blogged about how the terms Prisoner's Dilemma has become a real-world-phrase here and speculated about the terms Venn Diagram, Zeno's Paradox…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Big Data Myths and Misconceptions
I am in the midst of preparing an executive presentation about the use of analytics for companies in our region. Our group consists of experienced practitioners from academia and industry. As part of our preparation we have…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Service Manual AR from Metaio and VW
What is growing as an application for Augmented Reality, the delivery of automobile service manuals for a concept car. Here for technicians. GigaOM discusses. Here is the Metaio press release with many more details. Will…
From My Biased Coin
Notes from the Andreessen Horowitz Academic Round Table
I've spent the last couple of days attending the Andreessen Horowitz Academic Round Table.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Simpson's Paradox
I recall this coming up on some testing we did, the danger of a lurking explanatory variables. Is very easy to have conformation bias here. A visual of description of the paradox. Which shows how it is important to selectively…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Interesting Links 30 September 2013
If you are a regular (or irregular) reader of my blog here I hope you will do me the honor of taking a few minutes to respond to a short survey I created last week. It is at http://sdrv.ms/177xb96 I thank you for you time and…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Concept Maps Delivered on an iPad
Brian Moon of Perigean Technologies helped us elicit knowledge from experts in the enterprise and convert it to the form of concept maps. He continues to work with my former colleagues to extract knowledge and transform using…
From The Eponymous Pickle
15% Unconnected
A remarkable 15% of Americans are choosing to opt out of the Internet. In a Computerworld article. " ... according to a study done by the Pew Internet & American Life Project showed that 15% of Americans 18 and older don’t…
From Writing
The 10x developer is NOT a myth
Last night, I tweeted the following:
I'm confused by the claim that "10x" or "rockstar developers" are a myth. Are star athletes, artists, writers, and, uh, rock stars, a myth?— Yevgeniy Brikman (@brikis98) September 29, 2013a…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
Two Bits About FOCS 2013
How to save money and attend the upcoming FOCS John Cherniavsky is a theorist who published a paper in FOCS 1973, forty years ago. He has done much great work at NSF, and is currently the senior science advisor for research in…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Understanding the Economics of Media
Google's chief economist speaks on the media. I can barely remember when we had chief economists in the enterprise. " ... Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, talked about the challenges facing the newspaper business in…
From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
Gearing Up for Grace Hopper Next Week
For me, today is all about getting ready for the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing next week. As usual, I'm involved with the conference in many different ways, from presenting a poster and talk to being a member…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Problems with Big Data Correlations
Short piece that makes good points. Most telling: People are discontinuous. Big Data suggests that the more data we have results in better correlations and thus better causal implications. Not necessarily so.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google Acquires Nets Research Company
Google acquires Neural net focused company DNNresearch. We worked with artificial neural nets to replace some statistical techniques for shopping behavior analysis." ... Google acquires Toronto University startup focused onIDG…
From BLOG@CACM
The Frontier of Small Data
A quick view of Deborah Estrin's small data work.
From Putting People First
The problem with big data correlations
“The people using big data don’t presume to peer deeply into people’s souls,” argues David Brooks in the New York Times (in a March 2013 column). “They don’t try to explain why people are doing things. They just want to observe…
From Putting People First
The Qualified Self
Looking at yet another tweet and another post about the Quantified Self, I started reflecting this morning on the Silicon Valley-driven fascination with the quantification of one’s own activities, body and habits. The Quantified…
From Putting People First
The science behind using online communities to change behavior
Sean Young, a behavioral psychologist, a family medicine professor and director of innovation at the center for behavioral and addiction medicine at UCLA, addresses the challenge of technology entrepreneurs on how to engage people…
From Computer Science Teachers Association
Share Your Ideas and Experiences at the CSTA Conference
The call for proposals for the 14th Annual CSTA Conference is now live. The conference will be held on July 14-15, 2014 at the Pheasant Run Resort in St. Charles, Illinois (just outside of Chicago).
Serving as a member of…From The Eponymous Pickle
GePhi Open Graphics Blog
Started to follow the GePhi open graphics blog. Its all about networks, big and small. Free and open research software. Examining now. " ... Networks are everywhere: email systems, financial transaction systems and gene…
From Computational Complexity
Complexity and FOCS
The Conference on Computational Complexity Call for Papers is out, deadline November 27. The deadline for early registration and hotel for the FOCS conference in Berkeley is October 4. Student travel support is available.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Asking Questions to Tell a Story
Speculative. Story-asking? ... A post by Althouse brought this to mind. Where she relates the game played in Tom Stoppard's play (and movie) Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead . This reminds me of the knowledge elicitation…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Story Driven Data Analysis
In the HBR blog (Registration required). A well told story is the essence of analytics." ... Great analysts tell great stories based on the results of their analyses. Stories, after all, make results user-friendly, more conducive…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Realities of Mind Control
In Mind Hacks: A discussion of experiments in mind control. All communications, and most specifically, advertising, are methods of influence. So we are rightly worried about how easy this will be to do. With some implications…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Pay Attention Eye Tracking
An interesting concept .... can eye tracking software force you to pay attention during company training? Intrusive, but for some specialized applications. perhaps. A measure of how often you look away might further measure…
From Schneier on Security
Senator Feinstein Admits the NSA Taps the Internet Backbone
We know from the Snowden documents (and other sources) that the NSA taps Internet backbone through secret-agreements with major U.S. telcos., but the U.S. government still hasn't admitted it.
In late August, the Obama administration…From Putting People First
Ethnography and speculative fiction
Two new articles on Ethnography Matters: Ethnographies from the Future: What can ethnographers learn from science fiction and speculative design? Laura Forlano (@laura4lano) is a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Design at…