Category — General

Important attrition article. Pursuant to yesterday’s grad school rant, I was cruising the usual suspects when I came upon this summary of Barbara Lovitts’s research into grad school attrition. The full story is in her book Leaving the Ivory Tower (which you have read on my recommendation, right? Right?), but the summary hits… [Caveat Lector]

Ontology Primer.

What is an Ontology and Why We Need It is an essential overview to ontologies.

[vanderwal.net Off the Top]

Eco on Memory at the Alexandria Library. Three subjects of mine in one. [via McGee] [Alexandria] [Psybertron Knowledge Modelling WebLog]

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very interesting….

Conference presentations on eprint and thesis archiving. The presentations from the INDEST meeting on INDEST Extended, eprint archiving, and electronic theses and dissertations (Delhi, October 7, 2003) are now online. (Thanks to Subbiah Arunachalam.) [Open Access News]

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some papers here

Damn hard quiz.. King William's College annual quiz. Every year the students of King William's College on the Isle of Man are quizzed before xmas. The average score is apparently 2/180. The kids are then supposed to come back with all the answers after the holiday. Try it – it's pretty hard. (You'll have to wait another couple of weeks for the answers I'm afraid) [MetaFilter]

Thorstein Veblen. “The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where only one grew before.” [Quotes of the Day] [Seb's Open Research]

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this is an interesting quote

i want to eat better and excercise more. I think both of those will be aided by the other two resolutions. I'm thinking simply here, and am primarily aiming at eating more fruits and veggies, drinking water, juice, or tea instead of soda, etc.

exercise wise, i have my exercise bike that i should ride but don't and I'm thinking of taking up the 5bx plan with that, and ill probably combine that with some extra stretching and basic weight training.

and pretty much the final resolution is to get rid of stuff that i don't use or want but keep around sort of as a default keeping it mechanism, this includes clothes that i've not worn in 10 years, old magazines that I once thought i'd use for content analysis or the like and just general junk, like the roll of speaker wire, christmas tree lights, aquarium equipment that i don't use, computer equipment like a 486 motherboard, and such. Less is more in most of these cases, and if i want that stuff in the future, i can go buy it.

so that's my resolutions for 2004:

1. watch less tv
2. give up alcohol
3. eat better and excercise more
4. get rid of junk

ps. i'll finish my ph.d. too.

Cheers Halley [Joi Ito's Web]

Hidden data roundup.

It is time for the 2003 roundup of information leakage through hidden data.

This summer I finally got around to writing up my scaled exploitation of other peoples' hidden data through MSWord Documents. This has brought me many emails from users and administrators, including some from large organizations with sensitive data. It seems that many people find this cause for concern.

There have been several other events in this domain this year, some old and some new. Some examples have impacted major news stories but some have been simple eye candy.

[ATAC: Abusable Technologies Awareness Center]

TerraFly. TerraFly®
http://terrafly.fiu.edu/

TerraFly® changes the way you view your world. Simply enter an address, and our system will put you at the controls of a bird's view aerial imagery to explore your digital earth. A public service of Florida International University sponsored by the National Science Foundation, NASA, the United States Geological Survey, and IBM. [Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A. Author/Speaker]