I am getting 100 spam comments every couple of days so, I am afraid, it is time to start closing down comments. From Matt K’s site I found Cammy’s Software: MT-Close2 and I will use it to shift to a model where recent posts are open and older ones closed. Sorry. Go to my site to figure out my e-mail and send me a note if you want.
The alternative is to upgrade or switch blog engine, but I want to write not fiddle.
Alexander McCall Smith and Philosophical Lit
The Sunday Philosophy Club by Alexander McCall Smith, of No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency fame, has started another series around Isabel Dalhousie in Edinborough. Isabel is a the editor of the “Review of Applied Ethics” and organizer of a Sunday philosophy club (which never meets). She sees a young handsome man fall to his death and pursues the truth through meditations on Kant and everyday ethics. At the end it is Hume and his call for sympathy which McCall Smith seems to feel is the better ethics. The novel is a deliberately philosophical novel where meditations on ethical issues are interwoven with unfolding detective work. While it is one of the better philosophical novels I have read, there are moments when it lectures too much. Give McCall Smith a few more installments and he should find his stride and not feel he has to cover everything in each new novel.
What I still ask myself is why the Sunday philosophy club, after which the novel is names, never meets in the story? Will it meet in a future story? Will Isabel continue to never have the will gather the club? It strikes me that there is a hint in the missing club that gives a title to the book, but I can’t quite fix that hint.
Navigating a New World
On Saturday I went to “An extraordinary day of ideas, debate and discussion focusing on Canada and the urgent challenges facing the international community today.” The title of the event was, Navigating a New World and it was a extraordinary sequence of Random House Canada writers speaking from Irshad Manji, RomÈo Dallaire to Llyoyd Axworthy. The title for the day came from Axworthy’s new book, but what does it really mean?
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Konfabulator Moves to Windows
According to Slashdot, Arlo Rose is porting Konfabulator to Windows. The Konfabulator site now goes to a strange “notebook” essay on “Ten Days In The Wild” which pretends to have discovered two types of creatures in the wild (Macs and PCs.) To see what Konfabultator in Windows would look like see image here.
This came to me from Chris. See also a previous grockwel: Research Notes: Konfabulator blog entry.
First Spam Conviction
Convicted spammer gets nine years in slammer – Computerworld is a story about “the nation’s first-ever felony spam convictions…” Hurrah!
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Stock Exchange: Free Photo Site
stock.xchng is a site with free photos that can be searched. By and large they are fairly good “office” quality – suitable for illustrating points in PowerPoint. I just went through grabbing images to put together an essay for students on working in groups in the workplace. The semiotics of stock images is interesting – search for “office” and ask yourself about the images available. Can you tell the difference between different office cultures? Do offices really look like that? Why are there so many images of simple office supplies like pencils and so few of messy desks? This link came from Audrey.
Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names Online (TGN)
The Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names is a ” a hierarchical vocabulary of around 1.1 million names, and coordinates and other information for around 892,000 geographic places.” (From Getty Vocabularies Download Center)
In other words it is an controlled vocabulary of place names that can be searched online or, with permission, downloaded in XML form (or relational database or MARC.) I wonder if this could be used to create text engines that search by place and use the TGN records (which contain hierarchical information) to provide context? To put it another way, is TGN an ontology?
Continue reading Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names Online (TGN)
CAIDA: Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis
CAIDA (Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis) has a wealth of information, papers, analysis, and tools on their web site, including mass information visualization tools that have been developed and links to information about the visualization techniques. You can also get cool posters of the Internet. In their “about” page they write that CAIDA is,
a collaborative undertaking among organizations in the commercial, government, and research sectors aimed at promoting greater cooperation in the engineering and maintenance of a robust, scalable global Internet infrastructure. CAIDA provides a neutral framework to support cooperative technical endeavors.
Bravo Andrew
Bravo Andrew, The Votemaster of Current Electoral Vote Predictor 2004. You deserve our thanks for running a great site.
Sabine Scholl: Book Interface
Sabine Scholl has a simple and interesting interface to her personal site which looks like a very tall book that you can scroll up and down. I don’t know if it is intentional, but there is a visual joke on flipping pages and scrolling up and down to the site. All the links are just to anchors further down the “page”. This is courtesy of Ross Scaife.