Survey shows increasing business interest in Open Source software. According to The Register, “A report on business attitudes to open source software published this week indicates steady progress in the UK, with a growing number of CIOs seeing OSS as a means to tackle Total Cost of Ownership, and indications that it is being used in more sophisticated roles. The study, conducted by Trend Consulting on behalf of OpenForum Europe and published this week in the IoD's Director magazine, reveals growing confidence in open source, and notes that avoidance of lock-in is as much a driver as TCO. ..”. [Living Without Microsoft]

this is good, but we need more info

A Flat Lens That Breaks The Laws of Nature.

A University of Toronto researcher has developed a flat lens that doesn't respect the “normal” laws of nature and could significantly enhance the resolution of imaged objects. NewsFactor has the story.

The creation of an unusual flat lens may finally resolve a long-running controversy about the existence of materials that have metaphysical qualities — so-called “metamaterials” — that transcend the laws of nature.

[Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends]

The key to understanding this is to understand what people think are normal actions in nature as opposed to unexpected actions. in truth, our mental vision is what allows us to construct this identification of normal laws, not necessary any relation between that mental state and the world as it exists, though perception mediates of course, so does imagination and 'reason'. reason being the one that tells us that if x, y, z work like so, then w should too.

This is a reminder that the U.S. Department of Energy Carlsbad Field Office
(DOE/CBFO) makes 31 training/ed material packages available to businesses,
government agencies, educational institutions, non-profits, consultants,
students, and citizens at no cost to recipients through a federal knowledge
sharing program:

+ Web user, instructor, general employee, training manager, educational
administrator, and manager training needs evaluation tools

+ Training organization, work obstacle, conduct of operations, proposal, and
HR organization self-evaluation tools
+ Management, TQM, and grantwriting courses
+ Training effectiveness measurement tools
+ Employee performance appraisal and development system
+ Employee and managerial communication surveys
+ 360-degree leadership development needs feedback system

A number of recipients have created web-based training/ed programs and tools
from these materials (see Central Michigan University's Star Program). To
obtain these materials at no cost, complete an online application at the
newly-revised website that we operate for DOE/CBFO:

http://www.t2ed.com

We will obtain necessary approvals and send to you a username and a
password, allowing you to download the requested material directly from the
website.

3rd International Workshop on Multimedia Data and Document Engineering
(MDDE-2003)
www.sciences.univ-nantes.fr/info/recherche/sic/djeraba/mdde03/mdde-2003.html
September 8th, 2003, Berlin, Germany,
Ê
in conjunction with
Ê
29th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases
(VLDB-2003)
http://www.vldb.informatik.hu-berlin.de/
Ê
OBJECTIVES

Call For Papers

Workshop on Semantic Integration
at ISWC'2003

http://smi.stanford.edu/si2003

Monday, October 20, 2003
Sundial Resort, Sanibel Island, Florida, USA

In numerous distributed environments, including today's World-Wide Web, organizational intranets, and the emerging Semantic Web, the applications will inevitably use the information described by multiple ontologies and schemas. Interoperability among applications depends critically on the ability to map between them. Today, matching between ontologies and schemas is still largely done by hand, in a labor-intensive and error-prone process. As a consequence, semantic integration issues have now become a key bottleneck in the deployment of a wide variety of information management applications.

The high cost of this bottleneck has motivated numerous research activities on methods for describing mappings, manipulating them, and generating them semi-automatically. This research has spanned several communities (Databases, AI, WWW), but unfortunately, there has been little cross fertilization between the communities considering the problem.

This workshop examines semantic integration issues, with an emphasis on schema and ontology matching, ontology integration, and object matching and fusion. It will bring together researchers from different communities to examine cutting-edge approaches to semantic integration, to consider how different communities can leverage each other's strengths, and to discuss additional challenges brought by new application contexts.

Workshop Format

O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. The Etech conference put on by O'Reilly is coming up near the end of April and I'm already getting excited for it. Last year's was the best conference I've ever been to. In contrast to many conferences I've attended, the panels and presentations were just as valuable as the hallway conversations between panels.

This year looks very promising, with tracks on Internet applications, social software,… [kottke.org]

this looks like it would be a great con.