Posts from — March 2004

Lalo Alcaraz on Schwarzenegger's $15 billion bond issue

 

[Politics in the Zeros]

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were people this responsible….

this is great, all the calvin and hobbes fit to eat.

Accessing and preserving data. Tony Hey and Anne Trefethen, The Data Deluge: An e-Science Perspective, forthcoming in F. Berman et al. (eds.), Grid Computing, Wiley. The preprint is on Hey's web site. Abstract: “This paper previews the imminent flood of scientific data expected from the next generation of experiments, simulations, sensors and satellites. In order to be exploited by search engines and data mining software tools, such experimental data needs to be annotated with relevant metadata giving information as to provenance, content, conditions and so on. The case for automating the process of going from raw data to information to knowledge is briefly discussed. The paper argues the case for creating new types of digital libraries for scientific data with the same sort of management services as conventional digital libraries in addition to other data-specific services. Some likely implications of both the Open Archives Initiative and e-Science data for the future role for university libraries are briefly mentioned. A substantial subset of this e-Science data needs to archived and curated for long-term preservation. Some of the issues involved in the digital preservation of both scientific data and of the programs needed to interpret the data are reviewed. Finally, the implications of this wealth of e-Science data for the Grid middleware infrastructure are highlighted.”

Also see Why engage in e-science? Library Information Update, March 2004, an anonymous commentary on the Hey-Trefethen article. Excerpt: “Librarians may not have noticed, but there is a revolution going on – the democratisation of science. This is a sub-agenda of the campaign to persuade researchers to deposit their research results in open access archives. It is not all about breaking commercial publishers' monopoly of copyright in scientific journals. It means that someone who didn't do the original research will be able to analyse someone else's data and even win the Nobel Prize, using that data. And it reflects the fact that, in science and engineering, at least, the data changes. This creates its own challenges, because research databases have complex metadata and you need to make sure that the metadata also changes appropriately – which is where librarians come in.” [Open Access News]

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it would be good if we could develop and require standards for publishing, which would then allow us to build a document infrastructure upon those standards. right now, the difficulty is that very little of the content exists in a standard compliant format and thus parsing becomes labor intensive. but it could be done, and it probably should be done, but it will be expensive work if it is performed in the academy, and not outsourced like Time did for their archives.

the abstinence campaigns in sexual education in the u.s., which stopped pretty much prevent young people from being educated about their sexuality, have caused, over time, and increase in sexually transmitted diseases….

Death for Cursing Parents
All who curse their father or mother must be put to death. They are guilty of a capital offense. Ê (Leviticus 20:9 NLT)

God Kills the Curious
Ê And he smote of the men of Beth-shemesh, because they had looked into the ark of Jehovah, he smote of the people seventy men, `and' fifty thousand men; and the people mourned, because Jehovah had smitten the people with a great slaughter.Ê And the men of Beth-shemesh said, Who is able to stand before Jehovah, this holy God? and to whom shall he go up from us?ÊÊ (1Samuel 6:19-20 ASV)

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many, many christian's don't know exactly what they are to believe about the world they live in and how they should live…. the bible is very clear on this, go read it. this page exemplifies some of its core tenet's, which in our modern world might seem 'evil' but surely are not.

Presentations on interoperability and repositories. The presentations from the conference, Breaking Boundaries: Integration and Interoperability (Melbourne, February 3-5, 2004), are now online. [Open Access News]

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some nice presentations here, i still have to download a few.

Critical Information Infrastructure Protection.

The Center for Security Studies of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology has published the 2004 Critical Information Infrastructure Protection (CIIP) Handbook entitled An Inventory and Analysis of Protection Policies in Fourteen Countries, 2004 (pdf).

[ITU Strategy and Policy Unit Newslog]

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interesting report, well worth reading.

or how not to be happy without caring. or something like that

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Hands Off! That Fact Is Mine. Congress is considering a bill that would allow companies to copyright databases and other sets of information. Critics say the bill would circumvent the core of copyright law, which says no one can own a fact. By Kim Zetter. [Wired News] [A blog doesn't need a clever name]

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it is unclear to me that they own the fact, which could be reproduced outside of the media… what they own is the fact that held in the media. sort of like a secret, you own it if you don't tell anyone, but if you tell then you can't control it or own it.