July 2003 Archives

After seeing Zempt mentioned on a couple of weblogs where my peripatetic interest occasionally alights. I decided to download it and give it a try. I've tried two other Windows desktop blog clients, w.bloggar and another whose name eludes me, but was disappointed by both, either because of the interface or the lack of connection to MovableType. Zempt appears to be designed for MT exclusively.

I did have some luck with the blogging client in my newsreader of choice, NewzCrawler.

Gustav Holmberg, Imaginary magnitude, has collected a couple of blogs by people in Science and Technology Studies, a field I've often considered for graduate school.STS blogs.

One of the blogs on this list is by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, an STS program graduate who works at the Institute of the Future.  Earlier, on May 26, Holmberg cited a paper Alex on working in forecasting after having studied the history of science.  That paper STS at Work: Applying Science and Technology Studies in Technology Forecasting and Scenario Planning looks very interesting.

To make the connections even more redundant.  I realized that I had read some of Relevant History, Alex's weblog, before in relation to a discussion about the current state of academic employment.  For which the Invisible Adjunct is a good place to begin.

Now this is a very interesting idea.  I have been toying with the idea of a think-tank, university-public cooperation project for some time.  Here's a simple idea to take an free university and run it through the web.

AnarchistU: Toronto free school My former school-chum, roommate, and co-worker Erik "Possum Man" Stewart is hard at work on building a free-school called AnarchistU in Toronto, coordinated via Wiki.

The Anarchist U is a volunteer-run collective which organizes a variety of courses on social science and the humanities. Most courses run for ten weeks and meet once a week. The Anarchist U follows the tradition of free schools in that it is open, non-hierarchic and questions the roles of teachers and students.

Here are some recent points about using MT to manage all of your content: Beyond the Blog, and Doing your whole site with MT by Brad Choate.

For possibly building a content management system in XML and PHP see this article at Sitebuilder. Build an XML-Based Content Management System with PHP

Another article from IBM using XML and XSL. Fundamentals of Web publishing with XML

I've worked for the past year on a computer security committee at work and just wanted to put a couple of items out here to spur my memory.

The Information Systems Audit and Control Association & Foundation has two certifications CISA-Certified Information Systems Auditor and CISM-Certified Information Security Manager. They also provide the intriguing Control Objectives for Information and related Technology CobiT. A lot of the content of the CobiT framework seems to parallel some of the efforts I've worked on to create a strategic plan for our corporate IT department.

Certified Information System Security Professional is another example of a trend in the computer world toward greated professionalization. I guess this means the industry is really maturing.

Information security seems to be particularly prone to this certification trend. The SANS Institute has its own certification: the GIAC, Global Information Assurance Certification.

I'm fascinated by all of the discussions and research that is going on in the weblog world about the interconnections between people and the communities of interest and/or practice that seem to naturally form.

One interesting project in this area is the NITLE Blog Census, this site has an entire database of weblogs that can be downloaded and used for research. Another database that might be useful is Journal Citation Reports.

I was prompted to include the journal citations as an example of prior art because of an entry at Thoughts Arguments and Rants about academic tenure. Brian Weatherson focuses on the most influential philosophy journals and reaches the conclusion that there are not nearly enough quality publication slots available to allow even a majority of professional philosophers to be published regularly. I don't have the expertise to judge his numbers but the question of deciding on what makes a journal 'influential' seems to parallel the question of what makes the a-list in blogland.

I'm happy to see that Martin Sabo, a congressperson from Minnesota, has sparked a few articles and debates about copyright and access to federally funded scientific research. The free research movement by Farhad Manjoo at Salon and Open Access and the Case for Public Good: The Scientists' Perspective by Michelle Romero at Information Today give two good summaries of the issues. More can be found at the Open Access News weblog.

A.S. Byatt is one of my favorite writers. Initially I was disappointed to see an article in the New York Times entitled "Harry Potter and the Childish Adult" because I expected another of the long line of complaints about science fiction and fantasy taking us away from the concerns of the real world and denying us the pleasure of real fiction. Her critique skirts the territory that rejects fantasy but redeems itself by praising a few good fantasy writers such as Terry Pratchett and Ursula K. LeGuin.

But in the case of the great children's writers of the recent past, there was a compensating seriousness. There was — and is — a real sense of mystery, powerful forces, dangerous creatures in dark forests. Susan Cooper's teenage wizard discovers his magic powers and discovers simultaneously that he is in a cosmic battle between good and evil forces. Every bush and cloud glitters with secret significance. Alan Garner peoples real landscapes with malign, inhuman elvish beings that hunt humans.

Reading writers like these, we feel we are being put back in touch with earlier parts of our culture, when supernatural and inhuman creatures — from whom we thought we learned our sense of good and evil — inhabited a world we did not feel we controlled. If we regress, we regress to a lost sense of significance we mourn for. Ursula K. Le Guin's wizards inhabit an anthropologically coherent world where magic really does act as a force. Ms. Rowling's magic wood has nothing in common with these lost worlds. It is small, and on the school grounds, and dangerous only because she says it is.

In this regard, it is magic for our time. Ms. Rowling, I think, speaks to an adult generation that hasn't known, and doesn't care about, mystery. They are inhabitants of urban jungles, not of the real wild. They don't have the skills to tell ersatz magic from the real thing, for as children they daily invested the ersatz with what imagination they had.

I've read the first two Harry Potter books and never found them to be very interesting. If I were eight, ten, or twelve my feelings might be very different.

Byatt makes a real point when she says that most adults have no connection to mystery or magic in today's world. I can see this effect in contemporary politics where everyone screams loudly and refuses to admit that they could possibly be wrong, that there could be some mystery in the world which their solid convictions or philosophies do not admit. There is more in the world than is dreamed of in most all of our philosophy.

Byatt concludes:

It is the substitution of celebrity for heroism that has fed this phenomenon. And it is the leveling effect of cultural studies, which are as interested in hype and popularity as they are in literary merit, which they don't really believe exists. It's fine to compare the Brontës with bodice-rippers. It's become respectable to read and discuss what Roland Barthes called "consumable" books. There is nothing wrong with this, but it has little to do with the shiver of awe we feel looking through Keats's "magic casements, opening on the foam/Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn."

The dig at cultural studies seems a little gratuitous. My reaction to reading cultural studies and postmodern literature is to continually call into question my own judgments about cultural value. It doesn't prevent me from making cultural judgments. I can still say that The Matrix is a better science fiction film than Star Wars or that Wallace Stevens is the greatest poet of the twentieth century. I'll have to argue for those positions some other time.

I rarely follow daypop but every once in a while something hits a nerve and this Orwell-like description of a reeducation camp for teens in Jamaica is truly a "horrifying article about a kiddie reeducation camp" .  I don't have children but the the lengths to which parents will go is astonishing.

These are classic Tranquility-parent feelings. For example, Mozingo believes his son had a serious drug problem before coming to Jamaica and Josh agrees. What was he taking? 'I was doing marijuana. I was doing cigarettes. Alcohol.' He looks disgusted with himself. 'Mostly, though, I stole prescription pills from my grandmother.'

Also striking is the assumption parents make of entitlement to their child's affection, as though this is a legal right. 'She's a neat kid, she really is,' a former student's mother says. 'She just didn't like us.' But now, 'I don't believe she's lying to me any more, and that's a neat feeling.'

Messy divorce and remarriage are the norm among these parents. Their expectations of loyalty from their children, though, suggest a gilt-edged ideal of American family life so brittle any rebellion or defiance is literally terrifying. This culture then creates its own logic - for once adolescence is criminalised, Tranquility becomes the obvious solution.

Two ongoing research projects that look intriguing.

• Clancy Ratliff | University of Minnesota, home page and Kairosnews


• Template Authoring Log of Anders Fagerjord's research project on popular template tools, such as Blogger

via jill/txt

Found on JavaWorld: An AI tool for the real world-Knowledge modeling with Protégé, an open-source tool for developing ontologies.

While artificial intelligence (AI) is often regarded as an exotic academic playground, its tools and techniques have matured to contribute to real-world software technology as well. This article introduces Protégé, arguably the most successful open source knowledge-modeling platform. Using Protégé, developers and domain experts can build conceptual models and knowledge bases and access them via an easy-to-use Java API. The resulting models can implement decision-support systems, capture software requirements, populate databases, generate Java classes and UML diagrams, share and reuse domain models, and access the Semantic Web.

And the actual project page at Stanford.