Thoughts on Google Plus: The Magic Isn’t Social, It’s Semantic It’s been said that I’ve called Google Plus “one of the subtlest and most user-friendly ontology development systems we’ve ever seen.” I did, and you can listen for yourselves on the Semantic Link podcast. Why did I do so? Well, G+ follows some of the basic principles of linked data: it uses persistent HTTP URIs for people, Sparks (concepts) and posts. It allows you to indicate a relationship between to entities and give that relationship a type. It collects, and types, attributes about entities from the expected experts – the entities themselves. Let’s take those points one at a time, with pictures. Persistent URIs for People Everyone with a G+ account gets assigned a random string of numbers as their unique identifier. [click images to open them at full size in new tabs/windows] How is this ontological? Persistent URIs for Sparks Sparks are the name Google uses to refer to concepts, also known as subjects, categories, tags, terms (you get the idea.) Persistent URIs for Posts
75-year-old woman cuts off Internet to Georgia and Armenia A retired 75-year-old woman has single-handedly managed to cut off the Internet connection of two countries. She was digging around for scrap metal when she happened upon something far more valuable: Armenia and Georgia’s connection to the Internet. The interior ministry in Tbilisi said the woman hacked into a fibre-optic cable which runs through Georgia to Armenia, causing thousands of Internet users in both countries to lose connection for a few hours on March 28. Georgian interior ministry spokesman Zura Gvenetadze told the Associated Foreign Press that she found the cable and had intended to steal it. Gvenetadze said the woman’s age has been taken into account and she has been released pending the end of the investigation and upcoming trial. The cable is owned by the Georgian Railway Telecom company, which clearly now has some major repair work to do. More at BBC News and Yahoo! Jennifer’s Opinion
Without Internet, Urban Poor Fear Being Left Behind In Digital Age Jillian Maldonado is a 29-year-old student at the Mid-Manhattan Adult Learning Center and an Avon sales representative who earns $300 a week. On most nights, she takes the D train from her classes in Manhattan back to her third-floor apartment in the South Bronx. It’s a tough neighborhood. A few months ago she heard gunshots outside her window. Once home, Maldonado cooks dinner. A year ago, Maldonado’s computer stopped working and she cannot afford a new one. When she returns to her apartment, she rummages through her purse and places whatever money she can spare in a jar half-filled with coins and crumpled dollars. “My teacher assumes everyone has Internet at home,” she said. Maldonado is not alone. But being disconnected isn’t just a function of being poor. “The cost of being offline is greater now than it was 10 years ago,” said John Horrigan, vice president of policy research at TechNet, a trade association representing high-tech companies. “It’s a major inconvenience,” Mason said.
Death By Utopia John B. Calhoun relaxing in Universe 25 In the late 20th Century, John B. Calhoun decided to make Utopia; it started with rats. He bought the second floor of a barn, and there he made his office and lab. 2.7 metres square with 1.4m high walls. Society broke. The outside of Universe 25 The purpose of the experiment for Calhoun was to examine a pressing problem, overpopulation. After day 600, the male mice just stopped defending their territory, listless mice congregated in the centres of the Universe. The ‘beautiful ones’ withdrew themselves ever so quietly, removing themselves from the sick society. In the end the population sank, even when it was back down to a tolerable level none of the mice changed back. Poster for dystopian film Soylent Green In a time where people worried about the dangers of people gathering in cities it confirmed their worst fears. This purpose of the experiments was not to portend some imminent doom for humanity, in fact Calhoun was trying to be positive.
One Per Cent: 3D printer provides woman with a brand new jaw Paul Marks senior technology correspondent An 83-year-old Belgian woman is able to chew, speak and breathe normally again after a machine printed her a new jawbone. Made from a fine titanium powder sculpted by a precision laser beam, her replacement jaw has proven as functional as her own used to be before a potent infection, called osteomyelitis, all but destroyed it. The medics behind the feat say it is a first. Until now, the largest 3D-printed implant is thought to have been half of a man's upper jawbone, in a 2008 operation in Finland. In this operation, a 3D printed titanium scaffold was steeped in stem cells and allowed to grow biocompatible tissue inside the abdomen of the recipient. Poukens' team worked with researchers in Belgium and the Netherlands and a 3D printing firm called Layerwise in Leuven, Belgium, which specialises in printing with ultrastrong titanium to make dental implants (like bridges and crowns) and facial and spinal bone implants.
No Joke: Subway Systems Obey Emergent, Natural Laws As They Grow Subway systems are marvels of engineering and design, even more so for the ones (like London’s or New York’s) that were built in the early 20th century. But still, any rider of a mass transit system has no doubt cursed its design at some point. Why doesn’t the train go here instead of there? Who’s to blame (or praise) for mass transit system design? The three patterns that any major metropolitan subway system (with more than 100 stations) should have in common are: A core and branches, with core stations arranged in a ring shape above the city center A number of branches that tends toward the square root of the total number of stations About 20% of core stations contain transfers to two or more other lines. At first this seems obvious to the point of banality (except for the square root thing). Which poses an odd question about urban planning. [Read more at Scientific American; Images: ]Kentoh/Shutterstock and lightpoet/shutterstock]
Feature The Curse of XanaduBy Gary Wolf It was the most radical computer dream of the hacker era. Ted Nelson's Xanadu project was supposed to be the universal, democratic hypertext library that would help human life evolve into an entirely new form. I said a brief prayer as Ted Nelson - hypertext guru and design genius - took a scary left turn through the impolite traffic on Marin Boulevard in Sausalito. Nelson is a pale, angular, and energetic man who wears clothes with lots of pockets. Nelson's life is so full of unfinished projects that it might fairly be said to be built from them, much as lace is built from holes or Philip Johnson's glass house from windows. All the children of Nelson's imagination do not have equal stature. Xanadu, a global hypertext publishing system, is the longest-running vaporware story in the history of the computer industry. Among people who consider themselves insiders, Nelson's Xanadu is sometimes treated as a joke, but this is superficial. Page 2 >>
The lost souls of telecommunications history When Tim Berners-Lee arrived at CERN, Geneva's celebrated European Particle Physics Laboratory in 1980, he'd been hired to help replace the control systems for several of the lab's particle accelerators. Almost immediately, the inventor of the modern Web page noticed a problem: thousands of people were coming and going from the famous research institute, many of them temporary hires. "The big challenge for contract programmers was to try to understand the systems, both human and computer, that ran this fantastic playground," he later wrote. "Much of the crucial information existed only in people's heads." In his spare time, Berners-Lee was working on some software that might alleviate this fragmentation and spread more useful information around. Berners-Lee was pleased with what he eventually produced, but the PASCAL application ran on CERN's obscure and proprietary operating system, so he didn't take it with him when his contract expired. Four years later, Berners-Lee returned to CERN.
21st Century Description and Access Many recent articles, reports, and presentations in the library profession have identified major environmental, technological, and philosophical changes that are requiring us to completely rethink how libraries perform bibliographic control.1 Even the term bibliographic control is an anachronism: Bibliographic: This term has a lot to do with published literature – mainly book literature but to some extent also journal–, but not much at all to do with many of the forms of communication now being used on the Internet. When we harvest web sites, what is the part that we can call bibliographic? How bibliographic is, for example, a collaborative blog? We desperately need a more general and generic term for this, which for lack of a better idea I've decided to select descriptive, since no matter what the resource we are basically talking about describing a resource. Control: What part of this do I need to explain? Figure 3.