Book Reviews


[Day Permalink] Thursday, October 17, 2002

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A special interest group on knowledge management research: "Hard work and a lot of e-mails of last two weeks had paid off: Special Interest Group on KM Research (Quaerere) was created at Knowledge Board." [Mathemagenic] [Seb's Open Research]


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Upbeat Nokia exceeds forecasts: "The world's biggest mobile company posts a near-17% jump in profits, and says the market for handsets may no longer be shrinking." [BBC News | TECHNOLOGY]


[Item Permalink] Supporting knowledge creation -- Comment()
Another followup to my previous posting about knowledge creation. This article by Richard Gayle presented a list of "Short-term Goals". I read through these and thought that this is about what I'm currently doing at work, and we have managed to reach these goals. (And have been doing this for the last ten years.) Here is a modified list of goals:
Form a bridge between toolmakers and tool-users.
My group at CSC acts as a bridge between supercomputers, databases, and scientific software, and the researchers at universities and research laboratories. I believe a central part of this bridge is people, not technology. During the last year I have recruited four new experts to my group, all with Ph.D's, and their background is in various fields: computational chemistry, biochemistry/bioinformatics, drug discovery, and computer science. Our job is to help researchers to reach their goals.
Help scientists to use online tools effectively.
When you have skilled people with multidisciplinary skills, you can provide consultation, courses, guides, manuals, tutorial articles, lectures, visits to laboratories, and joint research work.
Identify a network of experts for answering inquiries.
In addition to our experts, we use our contacts in the universities and research institutes for solving problems. In a few key areas we run active expert networks: bioinformatics, DNA microarray analysis, physics, etc.
Lead focus groups to determine needs.
This partially overlaps with the network of experts idea. We also make surveys and more informal polls to find areas for improvement. One good forum for feedback are our courses (about 40 annually), which also help us to improve our services by observing researchers in action.
Investigate web-based approaches for collaboration.
Were are developing extranet-style solutions, as well forming discussion forums. Currently we are providing web-bases applications in a few key areas. We also provide software licenses for desktop machines from our license server. For the heaviest users, our Unix supercomputing environment is the most powerful in Nordic countries. But for the collaboration to work, you have to have personal contacts also.


[Item Permalink] Creating knowledge -- Comment()
In a previous posting, I pointed to a text about knowledge creation. This is a nice article, although a bit unpolished. I decided to draw my own version of the central diagram included in the article. (This was easily done in OmniGraffle by OmniGroup.)

A quote from the article:

In a strict sense, only individuals create knowledge. The authors postulate two forms of knowledge, and converting between the two forms often leads to the creation of new knowledge. The first form, explicit knowledge, can be expressed in words and numbers, can be easily communicated and shared in the form of data, codified procedures or universal principles. This is the hard knowledge that we store in databases. Tacit knowledge is highly personal and hard to formalize. Subjective insights, intuitions and hunches fall into this category. This is the soft knowledge that we store in our heads. It is the knowledge of people, of personal observation.


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Security update for Microsoft Office v.X 10.1.1: "This update addresses a security vulnerability that can enable an attacker who had a valid security certificate to issue an invalid subordinate certificate that would appear to be valid. This update also addresses a vulnerability in Word's field codes that could allow an attacker to maliciously use field codes and external updates to steal information from your computer without your knowledge. For more information about this these vulnerabilities, see Microsoft Security Bulletins MS02-050 and MS02-059. This update also addresses several stability issues that may be caused by running Office v. X using Mac OS 10.2."


[Item Permalink] Google searches and weblogs -- Comment()
Google is not indexing all pages on my weblog properly. Today I tracked down my post on spam filters and Bayesian statistics. This items was in the Google cache of a previous home page, dated September 4th. Thus the information at Google was 1.5 months old.


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Apple Security Advisory: StuffIt Expander: "StuffIt Expander version 7 is now available via Apple Software Update for systems running Mac OS X 10.2 or later. As a convenience to our customers we are providing an alternative means to obtain the update, as it has been available via the Aladdin web site since the announcement of this vulnerability on October 2." [MacMegasite]


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Milky Way's giant black hole pinned down: "S2 orbits Sagittarius A* every 15.6 years at a distance of between 17 light hours and five light days. The orbit and the star's estimated mass allow researchers to calculate that the Milky Way's black hole has a mass 3.7 million times that of our Sun, but is just 17 light hours across." [blackholebrain] [Loebrich.org]


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In 'Quiet' Finland, Bomber Draws Attention to Internet: "For months, Petri Gerdt had been discussing bomb-making techniques with other enthusiasts on a Finnish Internet Web site devoted to bombs and explosives. By Sarah Lyall." [Headlines From The NY Times]


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Jaguar Sets A Ferocious Pace: "When we spoke recently with Avie Tevanian, senior vicepresident in charge of software, he remarked on how the move to OS X and its tools had vastly improved the speed of development for Apple and thirdparty developers." (The Age via MyAppleMenu) [MyAppleMenu]


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DMCA forces Red Hat to limit patch documentation to non-Americans. "Open source hackers who've written a security patch for Red Hat Linux are requiring the company to limit disclosure of the documentation for the patch because of fears of DMCA prosecution. The DMCA makes it illegal to provide information that can be used to circumvent technical measures used in protecting copyrighted works, and so the patch's documentation -- which presumably describes a vulnerability in some security component -- might break US law. Before you may read these documentation, you have to aver that you are not an American or under American jurisdiction." [Boing Boing Blog]


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The book mentioned below is listed on my list of recommended non-fiction. It is good that also slightly older books live and find new audience. Carl Sagan: The Demon-Haunted World: "Carl Sagan was, simply, the world's best science teacher. The sub-title "Science as a Candle in the Dark" is itself a worthy reminder in an age where gullible mysticism grows ever stronger. Sagan states his position in a very, human way, leaving his mind open to possibilities but quietly insisting that popular "paranormal" beliefs meet the same tests of evidence he faces. A readable, enjoyable, compellingly-argued, and very human book on an important subject." [Blogcritics]


[Item Permalink] Accepting "trusted computing"? -- Comment()
Making trusted computing safe for Democracy:
Trusted computing might be a useful component in end-to-end secrecy. [...] But I don't think it will be a tool for helping the public to keep its private data private from the IRS or hospital administrators, since that supposes that the public can convince the IRS or hospital administrators to accept information in crypto wrappers that favor the public. All the people against whom I would like to protect my private data are people whom I can't compel to accept my data in my privacy wrapper. If I was in a position of power over those people, I wouldn't need trusted computing!

Moreover, the anti-competitive aspects of trusted computing must be stressed. Trusted computing can be used as a tool to eliminate unauthorized interoperability: in English, that means that trusted computing can be used by, say, your the company that sold you your word-processor to ensure that you can't open your own documents with their competitors' products.


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The value of trackback and pingback to news sites: "Trackback is an interesting and somewhat controversial idea that opens opportunities for news sites to tap into the blogosphere." [Hypergene MediaBlog]


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Apple posts net loss of $45M after charges: "Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2002 fourth quarter (which ended September 28). For the quarter, it posted a net loss of $45 million, or $0.13 per share, after more than $52M in one-time charges. These results compare to a net profit of $66 million, or $0.19 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Revenues for the quarter were $1.44 billion, flat with the year ago quarter, and gross margins were 26.4 percent, down from 30.1 percent in the year-ago quarter." [The Macintosh News Network]


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inessential.com tells that a new beta of Huevos has been released: "Huevos is a Web search utility. Type a search string and choose a search engine, then click Search or hit Return to run the search in your default browser. You can configure the list of search engines."

Huevos main window