Communications of the ACM
The blog archive provides access to past blog postings from Communications of the ACM and other sources by date.
July 2012
From Putting People First
Book: This is Service Design Thinking
This is Service Design Thinking: Basics – Tools – Cases Edited by Marc Stickdorn and Jakob Schneider BIS Publishers, 2011 376 pages (Amazon link) This is Service Design Thinking outlines a contemporary approach for service innovation…
From Putting People First
Ethical decision-making apps damage our ability to make moral choices
A recent crush of smartphone and tablet apps claim to make hard decisions easier, and the range of ethical dilemmas they can weigh in on will only increase. At this rate, Siri 5.0 may be less a personal assistant than an always…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Computing Researchers Among Presidential Early-Career Awardees
This afternoon, the White House named 96 researchers — including a 2009 Computing Innovation Fellow (CIFellow) – as recipients of the 2012 Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), “the highest honor…
From Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information From Alfred Thompson
Interesting Links 23 July 2012
I had a great week and a great weekend. Busy weekend with family which is the best way to spend the weekend. I’m late with today’s posts though but hopefully you’ll all forgive me.
The Microsoft Research Faculty Summit hasResearch…From BLOG@CACM
John L. Hennessy on 'the Coming Tsunami in Educational Technology'
Stanford president John L. Hennessy delivered a provocative keynote speech, "The Coming Tsunami in Educational Technology," about the uncertain future of higher education at CRA's Snowbird conference.
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Is C/C++ worth it?
We routinely attribute the long battery life and power of our tablets and tiny laptops to better hardware. However, in many cases, this better hardware runs software that is an order of magnitude faster than older software. For…
From The Eponymous Pickle
LandSat at 40
LandSat imagery was the first example we saw of the value of images from space for business. We examined them for use in forest management for the pulp industry. Now Google Latlong has an excellent overview of what this data…
From Computational Complexity
CCC12- post 4 of 4- Misc Info.
CCC 12 post 4 of 4. The business meeting and other observations. Programming committee info: There were 119 submissions of which 18 were junk (more on that later). This is pretty large- Paris 2009 had 113 submissions. The…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Holistic Virtualization
Computerworld special edition on holistic virtualization. Increasingly important for the integration of analytics. Exploring.
From The Eponymous Pickle
Noise and Blank Display Ads
Former colleague Ted McConnell, exec VP at the Advertising Research Foundation, writes about the conundrum of blank display ads getting an impressive number of hits. And even a considerable ROI. He combines the investigation…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Biases are Running Rampant
We discovered in the very early days of the Web that the increasing access to more information made it very easy to feed your own biases. Ordinary employees and even advanced scientists were quick to find supporting information…
From U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM
Hill Tech Happenings, Week of July 23
July 24 Briefing: The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation is holding a briefing on assistive voting technology for veterans. 9:30 a.m., 188 Russell Building Hearing: The House Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing…
From Schneier on Security
How the Norwegians Reacted to Terrorism
An antidote to the American cycle of threat, fear, and overspending in response to terrorism is this, about Norway on the first anniversary of its terrorist massacre:
And at the political level, the Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg…From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
Introducing the CCC to Our New Readers
For those of you who have been regulars of the CCC Blog since the early days (back in late 2008), thanks for continuing to click on to us. For the rest of you — we’ve seen a surge in traffic in the last year, so many of you are…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Future of Manufacturing is in Amerca
Article quoted in length by MJ Perry. Saying that advances in robotics and artificial intelligence along with remote manufacture through 3D printing will drive manufacturing costs down in the West. I would add new analytics…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Smartphones Have Replaced ...
In Technology Review: What smartphones have replaced. I don't like lists for their own sake but I did notice the mention of a shopping list, which we studied in some detail. They have not yet been replaced by smartphones…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Nielsen and Watermarks
Engadget reports on a new technology to gather information about local viewing activity via set-top boxes. More information and press release at the link. Particularly interesting to me was the concept of a watermark. An…
From The Eponymous Pickle
OODA Loop
Nice piece on the history and implementation of John Boyd's OODA Loop.... The OODA Loop describes how to make decisions and act on them using a four-stage model: Observation, Orientation (perhaps better labeled Interpretation)…
From The Computing Community Consortium Blog
CCC Calling for Papers for Spatial Computing Visioning Workshop
The Computing Community Consortium (CCC) has issued a call for participation for an upcoming visioning workshop on spatial computing. Led by Shashi Shekhar (University of Minnesota), the workshop — to be held in Washington, DC…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Visual Curation and Shopping in Pinterest
In the NYTimes Mag: A breezy look at what has come to be known as 'visual curation' in systems like Pinterest . Asked by a connection to look at the relevance of Pinterest I set up an account and looked at how to link some…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Macy's and Shopkick
Macy's promotes mobile shopping for coeds using Shopkick. In their blog. Exclusive deals and rewards for simply walking into one of their 800 US locations. An example of a major retailer using location based merchandisingShopkick…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Metadata and the Stroop Effect
The Stroop effect is a clinical test that measures differences in reaction time when you are shown information that confirms or contradicts your own views, conscious or nonconscious. It has been used in neuromarketing studies…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Is Freemium Done?
In GigaOM: Freemium, the model of providing valuable, but limited in some way services free to attract large numbers of 'eyeballs' with the opportunity to up-sell, has been a wildly common and successful economic model. Is the…
From Gödel's Lost Letter and P=NP
How Good Is Your Translator?
Using fixed points to measure language translators Franz Ochs is a computer scientist whose main research is on machine translation of natural languages. He got his doctorate from RWTH Aachen University in his native Germany…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Google+ Again
Just had need to go back and use Google+ again. Had been noticing a number of things written about its demise. Also this article warning it was not quite dead yet. Agree with some of the points about its simplicity has value…
From The Eponymous Pickle
Sitting
A piece in the WSJ by the Numbers Guy about a recent study regarding how too much sitting could cause an early death. Well done, a classic correlation vs causation example that should be shown to all management for required…
From The Eponymous Pickle
SAS Loves Math
A series in SAS Voices. Which looks at how math is used in industry and at home. And how it relates to business analytics. Great to point out to students who may not understand how math relates to real jobs.
From Schneier on Security
Friday Squid Blogging: Preserved Squid
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered.
From The Noisy Channel
Upcoming Conferences: RecSys, HCIR, CIKM
Long-time readers know that I have strong opinions about academic conferences. I find the main value of conferences and workshops to be facilitating face-to-face interaction among researchers and practitioners who share professional…
From The Female Perspective of Computer Science
Point-and-Shoot Game Creation
Were you ever the type to pick up a newspaper just so you could complete the crossword puzzle? Apparently this was a point of entry into the paper for many people, but the concept didn't get translated very well when journalism…