Enough Already

I have been trying to decide which professional membership to drop, ACM or IEEE-CS. CACM and Computer are, IMHO, of roughly equivalent high quality. It looks as though there are two deciding factors. One is the terrible job IEEE has done placing Spectrum online; they are using qmags.com, who are not content with PDFs, but feel the need to litter the PDFs with navigation controls and other garbage. Why put navigational controls in a document that is viewed in a viewer with fine navigational controls? QMags' garbage is impossible to transfer to a Kindle, making it useless to me as an electronic format. The other is that ACM Computing Surveys remains excellent, and IEEE has nothing comparable.

Further, today I read "Living in a Digital World" by Samuel Greengard, 10/2011 CACM (http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2011/10/131393-living-in-a-digital-world/fulltext). It reminded me of the excellent idea of the digital sabbath and of the nice work done by Nicholas Carr in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (Norton, 2010). The technology surrounding us is dehumanizing and reducing our ability to function, and we need the scientific and engineering communities to continue to remind themselves of this.

ACM 2, IEEE-CS, -1

About About.com Part 2: "Introduction to Security Tools"

Well, I've finished About U's Introduction to Security Tools, and I can't say I'm the least bit impressed. There was no depth to any of the sections of the course, and the "final exam" was largely random, insignificant memorization in which many of the correct answers could be guessed since the other choices were so obviously wrong. Should we care? Maybe not, but I'm always concerned about people thinking they know something about an area when they don't. And this Introduction to Security Tools will generate a few of those people. OTOH, I'd like to mention their Spanish Word of the Day as a worthwhile use of time.