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| compos mentis. Concision. Media. Clarity. Memes. Context. Melange. Confluence. Mishmash. Conflation. Mellifluous. Conviviality. Miscellany. Confelicity. Milieu. Cogent. Minty. Concoction. |
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Mathematician Fills in a Blank for a Fresh Insight on Art |
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| Topic: Arts |
5:50 am EDT, Aug 1, 2002 |
Escher's goal was to create a cyclic bulge "having neither beginning nor end." Carried to its logical extent, the process would have generated an image that continually repeats itself, a picture inside a picture and so on, like a set of nested Russian wooden dolls. After a recent talk Dr. Lenstra gave at Berkeley, the audience remained seated for several minutes, mesmerized by the spiraling scene. This article goes into some detail about the recently-blogged project using Escher's "Print Gallery". Mathematician Fills in a Blank for a Fresh Insight on Art |
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The Technology Secrets of Cocaine Inc. | Business 2.0 |
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| Topic: Business |
10:37 pm EDT, Jul 31, 2002 |
Colombian cartels have spent billions of dollars to build one of the world's most sophisticated IT infrastructures. It's helping them smuggle more dope than ever before. ... High-tech has become the drug lords' most effective counter-weapon in the war on drugs -- and is a major reason that cocaine shipments to the United States from Colombia hit an estimated 450 tons last year, almost twice the level of 1998. ... "If they want it, they buy it." ... Recently, the cartels have built their own submarines. ... The mainframe was loaded with custom-written data-mining software. ... Cartel leaders have sent members of their own families to top US schools. The talent and tools are among the best that money can buy. I've discussed this issue before, and here is a recent article that explains why keeping certain research results out of _Science_ and _Nature_ is not a very effective defense strategy. If the cartels can spend billions on IT, they can surely do a little biotech on the side. They can use the results to improve their products, and they can also license the technology to others who may lack the necessary research infrastructure. The Technology Secrets of Cocaine Inc. | Business 2.0 |
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Public Diplomacy: A Strategy for Reform | CFR |
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| Topic: International Relations |
9:52 pm EDT, Jul 31, 2002 |
The Council on Foreign Relations has issued this report calling for changes in US "public diplomacy." A consensus is emerging, made far more urgent by the war on terrorism, that US public diplomacy requires new thinking and decision-making structures that do not now exist. We must make clear why we are fighting this war and why supporting it is in the interest of other nations as well as our own. Because terrorism is considered the transcendent threat to our national security, it is overwhelmingly in the national interest that the United States formulate and manage its foreign policies in such a way that the war on terrorism receives the indispensable cooperation of foreign nations. We must make clear the US government's commitment to public diplomacy as a central element in US foreign policy. Significant reform is urgently needed to bring strategic planning, focus, resources, and badly needed coordination to this effort. Public Diplomacy: A Strategy for Reform | CFR |
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Bush to Create Formal Office To Shape US Image Abroad |
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| Topic: International Relations |
9:48 pm EDT, Jul 31, 2002 |
The Bush White House has decided to transform what was a temporary effort to rebut Taliban disinformation about the Afghan war into a permanent, fully staffed "Office of Global Communications" to coordinate the administration's foreign policy message and supervise America's image abroad, according to senior officials. The office will add "thematic and strategic value," along with presidential clout, to the efforts of the State Department. The State Department has begun producing "mini-documentaries on Muslim life in America" to air on satellite stations in the Middle East. Bush to Create Formal Office To Shape US Image Abroad |
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Toward a 'New Deal' for Copyright for an Information Age [PDF] |
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| Topic: Intellectual Property |
9:28 pm EDT, Jul 31, 2002 |
UC Berkeley's Pamela Samuelson has written a detailed review of (and response to) Jessica Litman's 2001 book, _Digital Copyright_. Jessica Litman believes the public needs a very good copyright lawyer, and if I have not mistaken her intentions, she is volunteering for the job. ... In _Digital Copyright_, she outlines a framework for a copyright law that would be a new and better deal for the public and would be short, comprehensible, and normative in character. ... _Digital Copyright_ is Litmans paean to a future in which copyright will once again be a component of the nations enlightened information policy. ... Digital Copyright explains how and why some of these limiting doctrines have eroded and why the public should care. ... Litman has done a great service in translating the arcana of copyright law into plain English, in masterfully explicating the breakdown of the copyright policy process, and in re-conceptualizing copyright law for an information age. Toward a 'New Deal' for Copyright for an Information Age [PDF] |
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| Topic: Society |
5:19 pm EDT, Jul 31, 2002 |
Swarming is a classic example of how once-isolated individuals are discovering a new way to organize order out of chaos, without guidance. It reverses the idea that geography, in an Internet age, has become irrelevant -- the whole point is to bring people together in one location for face-to-face contact. Swarming is also leading to such wondrous social developments as "time-softening," "cell dancing," "life skittering," "posse pinging," "drunk dialing," and "smart mobs." Cell Biology |
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| Topic: Software Development |
10:20 pm EDT, Jul 30, 2002 |
The handling of user preferences is becoming an increasingly important issue in present-day information systems. Among others, preferences are used for information filtering and extraction to reduce the volume of data presented to the user. They are also used to keep track of user profiles and formulate policies to improve and automate decision making. We propose here a simple, logical framework for formulating preferences as preference formulas. The framework does not impose any restrictions on the preference relations and allows arbitrary operation and predicate signatures in preference formulas. It also makes the composition of preference relations straightforward. Preference Queries |
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WebTheme: Understanding Web Information through Visual Analytics |
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| Topic: Software Development |
7:49 pm EDT, Jul 29, 2002 |
WebTheme combines the power of software agent-based information retrieval with visual analytics to provide users with a new tool for understanding web information. WebTheme allows users to both quickly comprehend large collections of information from the Web and drill down into interesting portions of a collection. Software agents work for users to perform controlled harvesting of web material of interest. Visualization and analysis tools allow exploration of the resulting document space. Information spaces are organized and presented according to their topical context. Tools that display how documents were collected by the agents, where they were gathered, and how they are linked further enhance users' understanding of information and its context. WebTheme is a significant tool in the pursuit of the Semantic Web. In particular, it supports enhanced user insight into semantics of large, pre-structured or ad-hoc, web information collections. WebTheme: Understanding Web Information through Visual Analytics |
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Trusting Information Sources One Citizen at a Time |
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| Topic: Software Development |
7:48 pm EDT, Jul 29, 2002 |
This paper describes an approach to derive assessments about information sources based on individual feedback about the sources. We describe TRELLIS, a system that helps users annotate their analysis of alternative information sources that can be contradictory and incomplete. As the user makes a decision on which sources to dismiss and which to believe in making a final decision, TRELLIS captures the derivation of the decision in a semantic markup. TRELLIS then uses these annotations to derive an assessment of the source based on the annotations of many individuals. Our work builds on the Semantic Web and presents a tool that helps users create annotations that are in a mix of formal and human language, and exploits the formal representations to derive measures of trust in the content of Web resources and their original source. You can get this paper directly from the author at http://www.isi.edu/~gil/papers/GilRatnakarISWC2002.pdf Trusting Information Sources One Citizen at a Time |
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The Role of Semantic Relevance in Dynamic User Community Management and the Formulation of Recommendations |
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| Topic: Software Development |
7:45 pm EDT, Jul 29, 2002 |
In recent years, an increasing interest in recommendation systems has emerged both from the research and the application point of view and in both academic and commercial domains. The majority of comparison techniques used for formulating recommendations are based on set-operations over user-supplied terms or internal product computations on vectors encoding user preferences. This paper proposes a recommendation algorithm based on user profiles and their dynamic adjustment according to user behavior, as well as dynamic management of communities, which contain "similar" and "relevant" users and which are created according to a classification algorithm. The algorithm is implemented on top of a community management mechanism. The comparison mechanism used in the context of this work is based on semantic relevance between terms, which is evaluated with the use of a glossary of terms. The Role of Semantic Relevance in Dynamic User Community Management and the Formulation of Recommendations |
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