Wednesday, November 20, 2002

It's wonderful to live in a city that has a wide variety of music, professional and amateur, which one can choose to hear at the last minute. Ancient Voices, a Penn a capella ensemble, gave a nice concert of medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque Christmas music last Sunday. A particular pleasure was to hear some of Afonso o Sabio's Cantigas de Santa Maria in what the program called "Galician dialect", that is, in fact 13th century Galaico-Portuguese. 11:54:11 PM

MIT wants to build a super database for research papers.  Earth to MIT, give everyone a Radio weblog.  Let them post notes and documents to an Intranet.  Get Google's search appliance and convert all of the documents to HTML.  Save yourself a bundle, let alone the revenue producing discussions open access to a browsable archive would enable.  Geeze.  Lead a horse to water, that's schooled in big cos logic and they will inevitably die of thirst (it is going to be amazing what the pinheads come up with to refute this). [John Robb's Radio Weblog] Let me try. The problem is that the academic research workflow is very different from blog flow. I find it hard to context-switch between my day-to-day work and Radio, which partly explains the occasional gaps in this blog. Academic practices and traditions push collaboration to private or semi-private media, which only the final product appearing online. For the finished product, CiteSeer provides excellent Google fodder. I've been working on several research proposals involving many researchers and academic institutions. The collaboration tools we use are dismal (email, attachments, temporary Web sites), but there is nothing on offer that could help. We need open standards, multi-platform, multiple document formats. And even the simple things, like converting bibliographies from one format to another (that's what I was doing tonight) is ridiculously laborious. But unsurprising. Semi-structured data is hard, because the semantics of superficially similar categories are subtly different. No, the Semantic Web won't solve that. 11:40:36 PM