Remembering the Future

[The brain is] clocked at 60 bits/second, according to this MIT Technology Review article. Their approach eventually led to Hick's Law, one of the few laws of experimental psychology. It states that the time it takes to make a choice is linearly related to the entropy of the possible alternatives. The results from various reaction-time experiments seem to show that this is the case. Although one byproduct of this approach is that the results are intimately linked to the type of experiment used to measure the reaction time. And that makes each study peculiarly vulnerable to the idiosyncrasies of the experimental approach. Today, Fermi Moscoso del Prado Martín from the Université de Provence in France proposes a new way to study reaction times by analyzing the entropy of their distribution, rather in the manner of thermodynamics.

Topics: Brain | Information

Ian is saying a spreadsheet isn’t Linked Data, even if it’s on the web and even if it’s linked to. The only standard for describing how one resource relates to others using URIs is RDF. Sure, you can put URIs into a spreadsheet, but there is no standard interpretation of what the sheets, rows and columns mean.

Topics: RDF | LinkedData

Even within an immanent teleological schema of the Aristotelean sort there are going to be things best explained as the result of regularities in nature (efficient causes), such as the tides of the sea or the orbits of the planets, whilst others are best explained by reference to actual mental states (desires/intentions/goals/plans) of agents, such as my writing these very words right now. Whichever way you go, you are going to have to have a schema whereby you can discern which belongs to the former and which to the latter. The ID movement has attempted to articulate that schema, and in this it has done a service to the intellectual community whatever the underlying metaphysics you happen to adopt, independently of whether you think this is the best way or not with which to oppose naturalistic atheism.

Isn't it, just maybe perhaps, the desperate desire to avoid being lumped with naive creationists that makes so many people dismiss even that which is good and proper and right about ID?

Topics: philosophy | evolution

If the attacker can fixate, hijack, or steal a Session from the victim, this type of attack will succeed no matter if the web site uses Forms Authentication, Windows Authentication, Client Certificates, etc. It doesn’t matter. As long as the attacker also has an account in the system as well as the victim’s Session ID, they can take over the session…that is unless the developer adds some additional checks
. . .
Once you couple session and the authentication mechanism together and than configure Forms authentication properly, you can provide adequate session protection. Another important point - don’t use Session anywhere outside of the authenticated areas of your site.

Topics: asp.net | Security

But whereas the phrase “data-driven” implies the use of data as the driving mechanism, a model-driven application is one in which the data is exposed and consumed as models, highly structured, interoperable data. Furthermore, while we often described the use to which data is put with the words “application state” data or “metadata,” in truth data is data. Application and state data (as well as metadata about both that application and its state data) can be equally stored, queried, and often executed by runtimes.

Topics: M | Oslo

The meta-data problem is enormous. Say you’ve got a field called “diagnosis date” for some disease. It’s in a database with a date type, so there’s no format issue. What exactly does that date mean? First appointment with a family doctor? First appointment with a specialist? Is it self-reported? Has the date always meant the same thing, or did the meaning of the field change over time as personnel changed? Those are all problems with interpreting data that is all sitting in one institution’s private database. It’s hard to “integrate” data that is supposedly already integrated.

Topics: Data 2.0 | Metadata

Open Government Data Principles

Government data shall be considered open if they are made public in a way that complies with the principles below:

1. Complete

All public data are made available. Public data are data that are not subject to valid privacy, security or privilege limitations.

2. Primary

Data are collected at the source, with the finest possible level of granularity, not in aggregate or modified forms.

3. Timely

Data are made available as quickly as necessary to preserve the value of the data.

4. Accessible

Data are available to the widest range of users for the widest range of purposes.

5. Machine processable

Data are reasonably structured to allow automated processing.

6. Non-discriminatory

Data are available to anyone, with no requirement of registration.

7. Non-proprietary

Data are available in a format over which no entity has exclusive control.

8. License-free

Data are not subject to any copyright, patent, trademark or trade secret regulation. Reasonable privacy, security and privilege restrictions may be allowed.

Compliance must be reviewable.

Topics: Data 2.0 | Government

In fact, .aspx files aren't too useful without ASP.NET, and XOML files without WF would be much less compelling. There are a number of runtimes and services being developed that will take advantage of "Oslo." These include a new version of ASP.NET supporting the MWeb Domain Specific Language (DSL) and the "Quadrant" Web editor, the "Dublin" Windows Server extensions supporting the "MService" DSL and the "Quadrant" service editor, the Entity Framework supporting the MEntity DSL and the "Quadrant" entity editor, and SQL Server 2008 with the MSchema language (discussed later in this article) and the "Quadrant" schema editor. You'll be able to load data into the repository and drive those runtimes.

Topics: oslo | metadata