Seb's Open Research

Friday, March 28, 2003

VRlogging I keep discovering cool weblogs these days, it seems. Peter Murphy, who's in Australia, regularly posts panoramic virtual reality snapshots that are quite fun to get inside of. Full, 4Pi steradian solid angle images - makes me wonder how exactly he does them. It's a little shocking not to find feet of some sort when looking down. What do you think? []  links to this post    10:42:15 AM   Object Learning weblog Here's an interesting new weblog by Brian Lamb that focuses on reusable media. Brian is Learning Object Discoordinator at the University of British Columbia. What do you think? []  links to this post    10:31:28 AM   2003 Information Architecture Summit Victor Lombardi's notes. Stewart Brand gave a keynote speech. Many interesting issues were covered, including ontology development. I ought to follow that field more closely. What do you think? []  links to this post    10:15:07 AM   blam! to blog The blam! review authoring tool will now automatically post your reviews to your Movable Type, Radio or Blogger weblog (provided you give it the appropriate information). Here's what a review looks like once posted to a MT blog. Reviews are also collected over at blaxm! (which looks like it's down as I write this). What do you think? []  links to this post    9:56:05 AM   Philosophical markup Philosophers often ask important questions, but these ones strike me as especially interesting from a practical point of view while quite challenging from an intellectual standpoint. American Philosophical Association Pacific Division Seventy-seventh Annual Meeting Program Formal Ontology and Philosophical Content on the Semantic Web Date and time: Friday March 28, 2003, 4-6 p.m. Location: Georgian Room, Westin St. Francis Hotel, San Francisco, CA Chairs: Edward N. Zalta (Stanford)         Colin Allen (Texas A&M) Speakers:         Jon Bosak, Sun Microsystems         Christopher Menzel, Texas A&M University         Eugene Miya, NASA Ames         Mary Tiles, University of Hawaii Symposium Questions:   Should (can?) philosophers, as a discipline, build a formal   ontology of philosophical concepts to enhance searching,   linking, and cross-referencing of philosophical content on the   World Wide Web?   Should the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy project develop   such a formal ontology for managing the metacontent in its   reference work (i.e., for managing cross-references as entries   come online or are changed, for building other thematic   navigation tools, etc), or will statistical techniques in   computational linguistics suffice?   What do philosophers need to know about markup languages such as   XML and XHTML?   What should philosophers be doing about developing common   practices, standards and tools for electronic publishing? It would be so tremendously cool of them to build this. If they can. (And if they can't, who can? :-) ) What do you think? []  links to this post    9:29:08 AM

Thursday, March 27, 2003

Principles of simplicity In Simplicity Peter [Tesugen.com] analyzes Edward de Bono's principles of simplicity in design, from the book Simplicity. Very good material, the kind of thing you want to read while gently sipping a cup of tea. The more I think about it, the more it seems Tesugen is the weblog I'd take with me on a desert island if I were only allowed one. What do you think? []  links to this post    10:24:44 PM   Dick Cavett. "It's a rare person who wants to hear what he doesn't want to hear." [Quotes of the Day] What do you think? []  links to this post    10:12:01 PM   Getting everybody on the same page Here's Jon, insightful as ever, exposing the ins and outs of project blogging. Publishing a project weblog. A couple of years ago I predicted that Weblogs would emerge within the enterprise as a great way to manage project communication. I'm even more bullish on the concept today. If you're managing an IT project, you are by definition a communication hub. Running a project Weblog is a great way to collect, organize, and publish the documents and discussions that are the lifeblood of the project and to shape these raw materials into a coherent narrative. [Full story at InfoWorld.com] ... [Jon's Radio] What do you think? []  links to this post    1:03:30 PM   Reasons not to become a scientist On the heels of my previous post Are doctorates worthwhile? comes Don't Become a Scientist!, another rather dispiriting view of why science today might not be the best spot for bright young people to settle into. I became a scientist in order to have the freedom to work on problems which interest me. But you probably won't get that freedom. As a postdoc you will work on someone else's ideas, and may be treated as a technician rather than as an independent collaborator. Eventually, you will probably be squeezed out of science entirely. You can get a fine job as a computer programmer, but why not do this at 22, rather than putting up with a decade of misery in the scientific job market first? [...] Suppose you do eventually obtain a permanent job, perhaps a tenured professorship. The struggle for a job is now replaced by a struggle for grant support, and again there is a glut of scientists. Now you spend your time writing proposals rather than doing research. Worse, because your proposals are judged by your competitors you cannot follow your curiosity, but must spend your effort and talents on anticipating and deflecting criticism rather than on solving the important scientific problems. They're not the same thing: you cannot put your past successes in a proposal, because they are finished work, and your new ideas, however original and clever, are still unproven. It is proverbial that original ideas are the kiss of death for a proposal; because they have not yet been proved to work (after all, that is what you are proposing to do) they can be, and will be, rated poorly. Having achieved the promised land, you find that it is not what you wanted after all. What can be done? The first thing for any young person (which means anyone who does not have a permanent job in science) to do is to pursue another career. Think this sounds bleak and gloomy? Then you can cheer yourself up with Philip Greenspun's illustrated Career Guide for Engineers and Computer Scientists. Now I wouldn't want to appear one-sided on this issue; I think there might be good reasons to become a scientist as well. I'll try to find counterpoints out there and report on what I find. What do you think? []  links to this post    11:33:25 AM   New game blog titled Got Game? and written by Andy Phelps, who teaches at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Definitely worth keeping an eye on. Corante's lineup gets better every month! But, sadly, still shows no trace of RSS anywhere. [via Liz] What do you think? []  links to this post    10:19:31 AM   The perils of pushing abstraction Sean McGrath: "It's time for the Semantic Web proponents to stop trying to teach us to think at their level of abstraction." A thought-provoking piece that deals with a very real problem ("every layer of abstraction costs you 50% of your audience"), though I wish the author had spent more space developing his alternative vision of "semantic shadows". More reactions in and around Don Park's blog. In particular, in these comments Danny Ayers stresses the need for more appropriate representations to make the RDF porridge more enticing to humans: "Everyone agrees that this syntax is ugly. But it is meant for machine- not human consumption. If you wanted to grok it, then you could generate a visual graph or use a domain-specific tool." What do you think? []  links to this post    9:48:53 AM

Wednesday, March 26, 2003

Creating change From Dave Pollard's excellent new blog, How to Save the World, comes a piece of advice that could be helpful for people who want to effect change in just about any sphere of activity. It also hints at the challenge inherent in such an agenda. [...] Change Management is all about getting people to do different things, or things differently. In business, the guru of the moment on this subject is John Kotter. In his book Leading Change he describes the eight steps to getting people to do different things or things differently, and they are irrefutable: Establish a sense of urgency Form a powerful guiding coalition Create a vision Communicate the vision Empower others to act on the vision Plan for and create short-term wins Consolidate improvements  Institutionalize the change The underlying principle here is that, in business as in real life, you don't bring about sustained, meaningful change by edict. You need to persuade, enthuse, and engage people in sufficient numbers to change behaviours, laws or processes. If you want to do this in your business, buy Kotter's book, since that's what it's focused on. But the same preconditions apply to political, economic, artistic, scientific, spiritual or moral change. Whether the change agent is a preacher or a politician or a philosopher or a post-modernist, the process is the same. [...] What do you think? []  links to this post    7:26:06 AM

Tuesday, March 25, 2003

A distributed product review data standard Stefan Smalla independently imagined standards-based distributed product reviews at about the same time I wrote structured blogging. Our lines of thought are eerily analogous, given that we didn't know each other at the time of writing. I recommend you go and read Stefan's piece - it's well-written, approaching the problem from an angle that is slightly different from mine, and the ensuing discussion is insightful. When similar ideas start popping up in disconnected places it sometimes means that they are getting ripe... What do you think? []  links to this post    1:31:29 AM   Google tips A modest webmaster's introduction to Google grokkery provides an interesting collection of tips for people who want to be good friends with (almost) everyone's favorite search engine. What do you think? []  links to this post    12:45:18 AM

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