Alarmist? You bet! Ding ding ding ding!. “First they came for the Greens…” Texas' proposed “Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act,” which its backers are hoping to extend nationally, is the next step after Patriot Acts I and II. The president of the Center for Constitutional Rights says the legislation criminalizes “basically every environmental and animal-rights organization in the country,” which means that if you don't even march with, but send money to any of them, you may be tacitly waiving your 4th-amendment rights. [More inside] [MetaFilter]

i am consistently amazed at what people think they should let their representatives do….

http://kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/akt/MnM

MnM is an annotation tool which provides both automated and semi-automated
support for annotating web pages with semantic contents. MnM integrates a web
browser with an ontology editor and provides open APIs to link MnM to ontology
servers and for integrating MnM with information extraction tools. MnM works with a number of representation languages, including RDF, DAML+OIL and OCML. The annotated documents can be used to populate ontologies or as a training corpus for information extraction (IE) engines. The MnM IE plug-in is generic and documented and therefore developers can add new IE mechanisms to the system.

The version of MnM available for download has been integrated with Amilcare Version 2.1, a tool for Adaptive Information Extraction from Texts. Amilcare has been developed by Fabio Ciravegna, University of Sheffield, F.Ciravegna@dcs.shef.ac.uk, http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~fabio. This version of Amilcare has been released as demo as part of the MnM tool and CAN BE USED ONLY AS PLUG-IN FOR THE MnM tool. It cannot be used in stand alone or as plugin for any other annotation tool.
Please contact Fabio Ciravegna if you want to use Amilcare in commercial applications, distribute it to other colleagues or integrate it in other tools.

MnM is provided “as is” and it is free of charge for non commercial
use (see http://kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/akt/MnM/license.html for more details).

For more information about MnM you can have a look at the published papers
(http://kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/akt/MnM/publications.html), and at the user
manual and developer guide (http://kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/akt/MnM/documents.html).

SID2003 CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

Social Intelligence Design International Conference
Royal Holloway, University of London 6-8 July 2003

Conference website:
http://www.rhul.ac.uk/Management/News-and-Events/conferences/SID2003/

This is the second workshop on the subject of social intelligence design
focused on the significance of information technology in our lives, work,
home, and on the move. In this workshop we consider Social Intelligence
(SI) as the ability for people to relate to, understand and interact
effectively with others. Our particular concern is how SI is mediated
through the use of new technologies.

The workshop is organised around four main themes:

1. INTERACTIONS – with presentations covering theory, modelling and
analytical frameworks that have been developed with Social Intelligence
Design in mind.

2. COMMUNITIES covering topics community media, communication patterns in
online communities, knowledge-creating, network and anonymous communities.

3. COLLABORATION TECHNOLOGIES and tools – presenting innovations to support
interactions within communities, covering a range from knowledge sharing
systems, multi-agent systems, interactive systems, Embodied Conversational
Agents.

4. APPLICATION DOMAINS – including architecture, education, policy and
business.

Intended Participants:
This workshop is intended for all who are concerned with the impact of
advanced information and communication technologies on social intelligence,
in particular, researchers, developers and designers of new ways of
communicating enabled and supported by such technologies. The contributions
will be published in the workshop proceedings.

Please visit the conference website for further information and
registration details

WORKSHOP ORGANISERS:
Prof. Duska Rosenberg, School of Management, Royal Holloway, University of
London, Egham, Surrey, UK.
Prof. Toyoaki Nishida, Department of Information and Communication
Engineering, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan.
Dr. Renate Fruchter, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering,
Director of Project Based Learning Laboratory, Stanford University,
Stanford, USA.

Wag the dog?. The alleged truth about how Private Jessica Lynch was saved.
This is a pretty amazing story, coming originally from the BBC and now a front page story on the Guardian. There's a program on it on BBC on Sunday.

Story courtesy of Karlin Lillington, where I picked it up. [MetaFilter]

oh yes, this is nothing new, the social construction of facts and their provision to a certain audience for certain effects, which in this case actually seemed to work, i wonder how far this story will be distributed though?

The Personality Forge. The Personality Forge. Create an AI bot, and set it loose. [MetaFilter]

this somewhat follows the model that i and probably millions by now have thought could work, which is intelligence through simulation.