"Semantic search log analysis" by Hollink, Tsikrika, and de Vries. Categorize the semantic classes of query reformulations. For a professional image search service, the most common non-identity reformulation is to find the spouse of the first query's result.
A call to boycott ACM and IEEE program committees and journal reviewing until they allow free distribution of final paper versions. I sympathize, but it's selfish to boycott reviewing if you're not boycotting submitting, and there are no IR venues of repute that allow free paper distribution.
Progress in e-discovery technology making lawyers redundant; and similar progress in linguistic technology to hollow out other professions. This report has gone viral, with Paul Krugman using it as the basis for an opinion piece on the shrinking employment utility of mass university education.
The Australian Academy of Science reviews the evidence for climate change. The "Trends in Australia Rainfall" graph (Figure 3.6) is particularly disheartening.
A laptop with a built-in eye tracker.
HTML5+CSS are Turing complete.
It's rather surprising that IEEE and ACM are moving backward on the open-ness front. I'm surprised more people don't object to the process of contributing papers to journals or conferences and then buying the rights to them through their university.
After ten years in industry where I could only see author-hosted copies of IEEE and ACM papers without paying around $20/paper, I got fed up with the whole business.
We opened up Computational Linguistics Journal fully last year. The conferences have always been open access. They're subsidized by ACL membership fees. The main advantage of membership now is that member rates for the conference plus membership is cheaper than non-member rates for the conference. So it's really a tax on conferences. They're easy to tax, as they're the main "high prestige" (read "low acceptance rate") publishing venues for computational linguistis, playing much the same role as SIGIR and CIKM in IR.
The path taken by Journal of Machine Learning Research was instructive. It formed out of the ashes of the for-pay Machine Learning journal when the editorial board resigned en masse because ML wouldn't go open access.