Wednesday, March 17, 2004

http://reasoning.cs.ucla.edu/samiam/index.html SamIam is a comprehensive tool for modeling and reasoning with Bayesian networks, developed in Java by the Automated Reasoning Group of Professor Adnan Darwiche at UCLA. Samiam includes two main components: a graphical user interface and a reasoning engine. The graphical interface allows users to develop Bayesian network models and to save them in a variety of formats. The reasoning engine supports many tasks including: classical inference; parameter estimation; time-space tradeoffs; sensitivity analysis; and explanation-generation based on MAP and MPE. [http://reasoning.cs.ucla.edu/samiam/index.html] 12:49:10 PM      Google It!.

Slashdot tunes into the elegance of RSS-plus-BitTorrent. [Scripting News] 12:45:07 PM      Google It!.

3Com launches desktop IP phone. KitWatch Hear a PIN drop [The Register] includes speakerphone 9:57:10 AM      Google It!.

Nokia goes it alone on push-to-talk. Technical standards punch-up looming [The Register] 9:54:50 AM      Google It!.

Profs join students in blogging - Lindsey Paterson, Michigan Daily. History Prof. Juan Cole’s weblog receives 200,000 page views per month — reaching people in The United States and Iraq with information about developments in the Middle East. He is one of the many individuals who have come to count on this Internet inf [Online Learning Update] 9:51:15 AM      Google It!.

Your MIT Diploma: Coming to Singapore - Tatyana Lugovskaya. MIT will soon begin granting Master of Engineering degrees to students from the National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University as part of the second phase of the Singapore-MIT Alliance. Starting next year, the students at the tw [Online Learning Update] 9:50:20 AM      Google It!.

Lessig: copyright balance needed for innovation. Robert McMillan, Lessig: Be wary of "IP extremists", ComputerWorld, March 17, 2004. Summarizing Lawrence Lessig's Tuesday talk to the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco. Excerpt: "Citing a decision last year by the World Intellectual Property Organization to cancel a meeting on the role of open source in world intellectual property law [PS: the meeting would also have covered open access to research literature], Lessig said that the argument over intellectual property law has become unnecessarily polarized because entities such as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) claim that there are only two choices when it comes to IP: maximum copyright protection or anarchy....Lessig argued that balanced intellectual property laws were essential to innovation, which often flourishes without strict IP encumbrances. 'This debate is not commerce versus anything,' he said. 'This debate is about whether powerful interests can stop new innovations. It is a cultural dilemma.' Without the abdication of at least some intellectual property rights, important 'intellectual commons' such as the Internet, the Human Genome Project, and even the Global Positioning System could never develop, he said." [Open Access News] 9:44:22 AM      Google It!.

Project Gutenberg controversy. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, the leading online library of open-access books in the public domain, has licensed the PG name to Project Gutenberg 2, a for-fee site. Is this a sell-out or just a source of needed income that doesn't impede the OA mission of the original PG at all? (Thanks to LIS News.) [Open Access News] 9:42:37 AM      Google It!.