From the publicity chair for this year’s ISWC: “Submissions now open for the Tenth IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers! Submissions can include full papers (8 pages), short papers (4 pages), poster papers (2 pages), demonstrations, tutorials and workshops, and exhibits. All submissions are due on April 21st at http://iswc.net.”
See the call for papers for more details.
ISWC 2006 submissions now being accepted Read More »
The ACLU is hosting an online national town-hall meeting tonight (6pm PDT / 9pm EDT) called Our Freedom at Risk: Spying, Secrecy and Presidential Power. The ACLU has a strong opinion on the matter, obviously, but hopefully it’ll still provide more light than heat. Questions are being taken via the Web, and archives will show up within 24 hours at the ACLU town hall site.
Webcast tonight on warrantless wiretapping Read More »
For the record, I’d like to say that yesterday’s FoxTrot comic was especially cruel to those of us who just don’t know when to leave well enough alone and go to sleep.
I’m just saying…
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FoxTrot unfair to the compulsive Read More »
Remember my continuing rant about how it’s time to just cache the entire Web and keep it local? A start-up named Webaroo has a similar idea. They’re offering free software (Windows only) that caches “webpacks” of pages that make up certain interest areas, and update those caches whenever you re-synch. Their current plan is the usual “pay for it all through advertising” model.
I’ve not tried it yet and don’t know how easy it is to personalize webpacks or how well they handle things like accessing pages that require sign-in, but it definitely looks like a good start. (And if they do the job well, I could easily see them winding up being purchased by one of the big players in search.)
(Thanks to Aileen for the link!)
Almost exactly 20 years ago, Students from Harvey Mudd College pulled one over on their rival Caltech by relocating a Spanish-American War cannon from Caltech’s Fleming House to their own campus. Now the cannon has a new home: MIT hackers posing as the Howe & Ser Moving Company have relocated the cannon to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus in Cambridge, MA. The cannon now also sports a giant gold-plated Brass Rat, the MIT class ring. A plaque dedicating the cannon notes that “In honor of its previous owners, the cannon points towards Pasadena, CA.”
Caltech cannon upgrades to better tech school Read More »
It took them longer than I expected, but it looks like Google has finally come out with a Related Links feature that people can add automatically-updated links to related searches, news or web pages on to their sites. Think Google Adwords only with search results instead of pay-for-placement advertisements. The text-box is simple to add to any webpage (it took me all of 30 seconds) and gets updated to whatever info is current when the page is viewed — essentially adding dynamic related content even if your page remains static.
I’m pleased to see this concept finally becoming mainstream, especially since the Margin Notes system I developed back in 1999 was a pioneer in the area. One issue that was tricky to figure out is what scope to use as the automatic search term. You can see the problem if you’re viewing this post in an aggregator like LiveJournal or even on my own main page — the search results are probably related at least in part to other posts on the page and not just this one. It’s a hard problem in the general case, but they should be able to get it to work most of the time. (I’ve not yet looked at their code to see what they’re actually doing — more after I check it out.) [Update 12:45pm: actually, LiveJournal strips out all Javascript so it won’t show up anyway… click here to see the actual post if you’re in LJ and have no clue what I’m talking about.]
One thing I didn’t have to worry about with Margin Notes was how to keep the system from being gamed by spammers and Google-juice stealers, though I did have to worry about relevance to individual readers. Something I’d like to see is a similar system that uses my own RSS subscriptions as the core source of info, plus perhaps one level of linkage out (e.g. take my blog-roll & RSS subscriptions plus the blog-roll and RSS subscriptions associated with each of those sites). That would give me some amount of personalization as well as make it harder to game the system.
(via Google Blogoscoped)
Update 12:30pm: I took a quick peek at the JavaScript, and as you probably could guess all it does is send a specially formatted request to http://www.googlesyndication.com/relcontent/content?… that includes the page’s URL. Sure enough, one second after I loaded the page in my browser I saw another retrieval from Google. Makes sense — you don’t want to have to deal with parsing the source document in the JavaScript itself — though it does mean the feature probably won’t work at all on pages that are behind a firewall. (That’s probably all for the best, as otherwise it’d be all too easy to slip up and start broadcasting supposedly-secure information out to Google.)
That said, I’m surprised at how lousy the results are. It looks like they’re relying on their cached copy when available, which for a blog post is, of course, almost guaranteed to not be related to the current post. As for the post-specific page, I’m getting lots of related links about blogs in general, which makes me suspect they’re doing a bad job of distinguishing actual page content from my page’s window dressing, Javascript and navigation bars. That really surprises me (if in fact it’s where the trouble lies) since that’s a problem they clearly know how to solve for their normal indexing.
Google Related Links Read More »
My brother is working on a documentary called Reality Made Over, about Fox’s plastic-surgery reality TV show “The Swan”. Of course, since his subject matter television there’re lots of questions about what he needs permission to use and what counts as fair use under copyright law. Talking to him about it reminded me of the recent Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use that was put out by several associations of video and filmmakers, in consultation with the Center for Social Media at American University.
From their introduction:
This Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use makes clear what documentary filmmakers currently regard as reasonable application of the copyright “fair use” doctrine. Fair use expresses the core value of free expression within copyright law. The statement clarifies this crucial legal doctrine, to help filmmakers use it with confidence. Fair use is shaped, in part, by the practice of the professional communities that employ it. The statement is informed both by experience and ethical principles. It also draws on analogy: documentary filmmakers should have the same kind of access to copyrighted materials that is enjoyed by cultural and historical critics who work in print media and by news broadcasters.
Statement of fair use in documentary films Read More »
Dang, I’m late to the party as usual. In case you haven’t seen it yet, as cures for information overload go this looks like it has potential…
(Thanks to Jim for the link.)
Cure for information overload? Read More »
Wow — an original 1941 Wehrmacht Enigma machine is selling on eBay with a current bid of €15,750. But really, what on Earth good would owning an Enigma machine do me?
…now two Enigma machines — that’d be another thing altogether!
A riddle wrapped in a mystery Read More »
Stanisław Lem, in memoriam (1921 – 2006)
Klapaucius thought, and thought some more. Finally he nodded and said:
“Very well. Let’s have a love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit.”
“Love and tensor algebra? Have you taken leave of your senses?” Trurl began, but stopped, for his electronic bard was already declaiming:
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n,
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!Come, every frustum longs to be a cone,
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.In Riemann, Hilbert, or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.I’ll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou’lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love’s lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?Cancel me not — for what then shall remain?
Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
The product of our scalars is defined!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
Cuts capers like a happy haversine.I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a2 cos 2 phi
— from The Cyberiad, 1967