] While still teaching at Berkeley, Stonebraker founded
] Ingres Corp. to commercialize the relational database
] technology. (The company was acquired in 1990 by ASK
] Computer Systems.) Shortly after launching Ingres Corp.,
] Stonebraker and his students pushed databases ahead yet
] again with POSTGRES, a relational database that could
] understand "objects," groups of simpler pieces of data.

29 years of relational databases...

] His research shows that not only are suicide terrorists
] significantly more educated than their peers, they are
] also significantly better off. According to Krueger,
] although one-third of Palestinians live in poverty, only
] 13 percent of Palestinian suicide bombers do; 57 percent
] of bombers have education beyond high school versus 15
] percent of the population of comparable age.
]
] The Defense Intelligence Agency also gave me profiles
] of all these people they were interrogating at Guantánamo
] Bay in Cuba. They divide them into Yemenis and Saudis.
] The Yemenis are sort of the foot soldiers. And they found
] that the Saudis, their leaders especially, are from
] high-status families. A surprising number have graduate
] degrees. And they are willing to give up everything. They
] give up well-paying jobs, they give up their families,
] whom they really adore, to sacrifice themselves because
] they really believe that it's the only way they're going
] to change the world.

These people are not stupid, nor poor, nor desperate. While there are reasons to focus on education and poverty in places like West Bank/Gaza, the idea that its going to prevent people from deciding to become suicide terrorists is apparently wrongheaded.

An interested oped on Religion in this article too...

Everything you know about terrorists is wrong.

] As described in the 15th November, 2002, issue of the
] journal Science (Ferber, 2002), the current
] administration has engaged in political screening of
] appointees to peer review study sections that are charged
] with evaluating the scientific merits of research
] proposals on HF/E issues in the workplace.

Strong protest from workplace ergonomics community about political interference from the Republicans in their scientific workgroups.

[IP] Political interference with scientific committees

] BlogPulse Key Phrases, Key People, BlogBites, and Top
] Links are mined daily from new entries in over 80,000
] weblogs using machine learning algorithms and natural
] language processing techniques. BlogPulse mines for
] bursty phrases and person names instead of for the most
] popular ones. The most popular phrases and names change
] very slowly over time. The burstiest phrases and names
] are those whose frequency of occurrence has increased
] significantly over the past two weeks, often
] dramatically.

] BlogPulse is powered by technology from the Intelliseek
] Applied Research Center.

BlogPulse [BETA]: Automated Trend Discovery for Weblogs

] Welcome to the e4Graph package, a C++ library that
] provides your program with reliable, efficient and
] portable persistent storage for graph like data.

Bindings for Tcl and Python. No Perl or PHP yet.

The e4Graph Package

One finding is that social networks embedded into systems do not match individuals’ perceptions of their personal social network. This finding and others raise issues for the use of social networks in groupware. Based on the evaluation results, several design considerations are discussed.

This paper by David McDonald appears in the proceedings of the ACM 2003 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Recommending Collaboration with Social Networks: A Comparative Evaluation [PDF]

For example, a display magically presents a personalized advertisement, the most relevant video feed, or the desired page from a secret government document. Such capability requires more than an abundance of networked displays, devices, and sensors; it relies implicitly on recommendation systems that either directly serve the end user or provide critical services to some other application.

This article appears in the October 2003 issue of IEEE Computer magazine. The author is David McDonald of the University of Washington.

Ubiquitous Recommendation Systems | IEEE Computer, October 2003

] The blog is reopen for business. It has been seven
] months since this site went silent. Time for everyone to
] get back to work. To all of you who have made this place
] so interesting with your informed and intelligent
] discussions, I thank you. For all who have been so kind
] as to inquire about my welfare - I also thank you and
] apologize for not being able to respond. When CNN
] politely (I mean this sincerely) asked me to stop
] blogging I felt it was my obligation to do so immediately
] and completely. CNN was signing my checks at the time
] and sent me to Iraq. Although I felt the blog was a
] separate and independent journalistic enterprise, they
] did not. Period. We move on.

He is in Iraq with MSNBC now. His weblog is not affiliated with them, and he is giving them right of first refusal on what he writes while he is there. It seems like a very reasonable arrangement that should work out well for both Sites and MSNBC. Its too bad CNN didn't allow him to do something like this the first time around.

Kevin Sites Blog is back

SunnComm drops its lawsuit.. That was quick.

] Jacobs said in an interview late last night that a
] successful lawsuit would do little to reverse the damage
] done by the paper Halderman published Monday about his
] research, and any suit would likely hurt the research
] community by making computer scientists think twice about
] researching copy-protection technology.
]
] "I don't want to be the guy that creates any kind of
] chilling effect on research," Jacobs said.

] I just thought about it and decided it was more important
] not to be one of those people. The harm's been done . . . if I
] can't accomplish anything [with a lawsuit] I don't want to
] leave a wake," he said.

The Daily Princetonian - Threat of lawsuit passes for student

] SunnComm Technologies Inc. (OTC: STEH), a leader in
] digital content security and enhancement for optical
] media, announced today that it intends to take legal
] action against the writer of a critical report titled:
] "Analysis of the MediaMax CD3 Copy-Prevention System."

CD 'shift-key' Hackers Sued