Let’s say you have a box that (completely legally) spits out 1 dollar per day. I’m using “box” in an abstract sense here: maybe it’s an investment or a business opportunity. How much would you pay for this box? In other words, what’s its fair market value?

What if it spit out one dollar per hour? Would you pay exactly 24x as much for it then? Or one per week–would you pay 1/7th as much?

What if it’s hard to measure how much money comes out of it–maybe sometimes it emits a dollar, but sometimes you have to put one in. Then what? -m

Celebrating 500 posts since I went to WordPress in May 2006. Prior to that, an additional 730 posts as I floated through a typical evolution of blogging platforms:

• Easy start: blogger (299 posts in 24 months)
• Succumbing to the desire to roll your own (259 posts in 12 months)
• Realizing that rolling your own is too difficult: Pyblosxom (172 posts in 12 months)
• Moving to a mature platform you don’t need to worry about much: WordPress (500 posts in 42+ months)

-m

If this site is accurate, it’s now possible to have superconducting material at household freezer temperatures: 254k, or a tiny bit below 0F. From power lines to maglevs to supercolliders to energy storage, the potential applications boggle the mind. -m

Note: I’m having trouble finding independent verification of this, other than what appears to be re-hashes of the superconductor.org article. If you have any additional proof or refutation, please post it in the comments.

Link credit goes to Joho.

This looks pretty significant. The AZ Supreme Court ruled that document metadata must be disclosed under existing public records law. This may start a chain reaction with other states following suit. With the movement toward open data including data.gov and the Federal Register, this fits in well. Quite often metadata including creation date and author and the like make for much better searching and faceting. -m

In case any of the 7 regular readers here aren’t following xml-dev, check out and add to the discussion about Pragmatic Namespaces, proposed as a solution for the “distributed extensiblity” problem in HTML5.

For years people have been pointing to Java as the model for how XML namespaces should work, so this proposal goes that direction. Either it will work, or else it will get people to finally shut up about the whole idea. :)

It’s heavily based on Tom Bradford’s Clean Namespaces proposal, which doesn’t have a living URL anymore but is available on archive.org.

-m

I spent 2 days at the Yahoo! campus at a VoCamp event, my first. Initially, I was dismayed at the schedule. Spend all the time the first day figuring out why everybody came? It seemed inefficient. But having gone through it, the process seems productive, exactly the way that completely decentralized groups need to get things done. Peter Mika did a great job moderating.

Attendees numbered about 35, and came from widely varying backgrounds from librarian to linguist to professor to student to CTO, though uniformly geeky. With SemTech this week, the timing was right, and the number of international attendees was impressive.

In community development, nothing gets completely decided just because a few people met. But progress happens. The first day was largely exploratory, but also covered plenary topics that nearly everyone was interested in. Namely:

• Finding, choosing, and knowing when to create vocabularies
• Mapping from one vocabulary to another
• RDBMS to RDF mapping

Much of the shared understanding of these discussions is captured on various wiki pages connected to the one at the top of this article.

For day 2, we split into smaller working groups with more focused topics. I sat in on a discussion of Common Tag (which still feels too complex to me, but does fulfill a richer use case than rel-tag). Next, some vocabulary design, planning a microformat (and eventual RDF vocab) to represent code documentation: classes, functions, parameters, and the like. Tantek Çelik espoused the “scientific method” of vocab design: would a separate group, in similar circumstances, come up with the same design? If the answer is ‘yes’, then you probably designed it right. The way to make that happen is to focus on the basics, keeping everything as simple as possible. If any important features are missed, you will find out quickly. The experience of getting the simple thing out the door will provide the education needed to make the more complicated follow-on version a success.

From the wrap-up: if you are designing a vocabulary, the most useful thing you can do is NOT to unleash a fully-formed proposal on the world, but rather to capture the discussion around it. What were the initial use cases? What are people currently doing? What design goals were explicitly left off the table, or deferred to a future verson, or immediately shot down? It’s better to capture multiple proposals, even if fragmentary, and let lots of people look them over and gravitate toward the best design.

Lastly, some cool things overheard:

“Relational databases? We call those ‘legacy’.”

“The socially-accepted schema is fairly consistent.”

“It’s just a map, it’s not the territory.”

-m

The central thesis of The Inmates are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper is dead on: engineers get too wrapped up in their own worlds, and left entirely to their own whims can easily make a product incomprehensible to ordinary folks. For this reason alone, it’s worth reading.

But I do question parts of his thesis. He (with tongue in cheek) posits the existence of another species of human, called Homo Logicus. Stepping on to an airplane, Homo Logicus turns left into the cockpit with a million buttons but ultimate control over every aspect of the plane. Regular Homo Sapiens, on the other hand, turn right and tuck themselves into a chair–no control but at least they can relax.

But if there was only one “species” of Homo Logicus, members (like me) would never experience usability issues in software created by fellow Logicians. But ordinary fax machines give me fits. The touch-screen copier at work instills dread in my heart. And the software I need to use to file expense reports–written by enterprise software geeks probably very similar to me–is a usability nightmare. Words fail me in expressing my disdain for this steaming heap of fail.

The book is sub-titled “Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy”, but one doesn’t have to look very far to find similar usability bugs in the low-tech world. Seth Godin, for example, likes to talk about different things in life that Just Don’t Work, along with reasons why. Some examples:

• airport cab stand (75 cabs, 75 people, and it takes an hour)
• “don’t operate heavy machinery” warning on dog’s prescription medicine
• excessive fine print on liability agreements–intentionally hard to read and figure out
• official “Vote for Pedro” shirts that look nothing like the ones in the movie
• more examples on the web site

If anything, I think Cooper’s work doesn’t go far enough. It is relatively short on good examples, stretching out only four examples over four chapters. If properly-designed software is so hard to come up with examples of, then there are bigger problems in play (that would need to be dealt with by something more manifesto than book).

The book now 5 years old. Perhaps it’s time for an update. Particularly in the world of web software, lots has happend in 5 years. Flickr. Gmail. Yahoo Pipes. Google Docs. Even SearchMonkey. Instead of focusing on pointing at crappy software, I’d like to see more emphasis on properly-done interfaces. More delving into nuance, and common factors behind why both high-tech and low-tech products miss the mark.

But maybe that’s just me. -m

This brilliant bit is almost a throwaway paragraph on page 304, near the end.

[Two men in a satirical dialog] managed only to demonstrate that the mathematical limit of an infinite sequence of “doubting the certainty with which something doubted is known to be unknowable  when the ’something doubted’ is still a preceding statement ‘unknowability’ of something doubted,” that the limit of this process at infinity can only be equivalent to a statement of absolute certainty, even though phrased ans an infinite series of negations of certainty.

It’s not like the whole book is like this…far from it. But it is chock full of little gems.

-m

This article seems encouraging. I’ve never been able to come to grips with the anti-CF bias of the scientific community. Sure a few researchers made fools of themselves two decades ago, but what has that got to do with falsifiable hypotheses? A small amount of research goes on with minimal funding, under the newer name of Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR), and the signs are encouraging.

From the article, researchers used plastic as a permanent record of neutron movement and found that, indeed, neutrons are being produced, leaving tiny tracks behind.

Another recent article from Jeffrey Kooistra has more details of current research. Good stuff, and important if it works. Heck, it’s important if it doesn’t work, because that still expands what we know. -m

This is fantastic. Brian May (yes THAT Brian May) not only blogs, but talks about all kinds of challenging subjects. Like how and why space and time are linked. Worth a read. -m

I’m (just barely) enough of a writer that I can spend cycles on Steorn’s claims without being branded a crackpot. After all, the novel I’m working on involves a similar device being invented 4,000 years ago. It’s all research.

Imagine if Earth’s gravitational field, instead of being a constant 1.0G, rocked back and forth between 0.99G and 1.01G at some fixed interval. That’d be perhaps not enough to feel, but enough to extract “free energy”. Arrange a heavy weight on a wheel, and time it so that it moves downward (doing work) during the heavier phase and returns to the top during the lighter phase. You’d have more than perpetual motion, you would be able to extract real work out of the device on a continuous basis.

Steorn’s claims are similar, but with permanent magnets instead of gravity.

Orbo is based upon time variant magnetic interactions, i.e. magnetic interactions whose efficiency varies as a function of transaction timeframes.

I get the feeling that they are being very, very careful about what they write. In particular, the word “efficiency” is very odd in this sentence. In my earlier example, it would sound unnatural to talk about the “efficiency of the gravitational interaction”. Unless one talks about the kinds of efficiency that go above 100%…. So let’s roll with it.

It is this variation of energy exchanged as a function of transaction time frame that lies at the heart of Orbo technology, and its ability to contravene the principle of the conservation of energy. Why? Conservation of energy requires that the total energy exchanged using interactions are invariant in time. This principle of time invariance is enshrined in Noether’s Theorem.

So some hitherto unknown process temporarily nudges a magnetic interaction in one direction, only for it to bounce back in the opposite direction, like in the gravity example. Get the timing right and presto, free energy. I don’t understand why they are so cavalier about “contravening” the principle of conservation of energy though. It seems to me that more observations would be in order. As in “the device produced 100 watts for 6 months straight, with no input power sources”–which could be true in various ways that don’t contravene conservation of energy. It’s almost as if they are deliberately being provocative in their statements. Go figure. -m

Honestly, I don’t even need to write a punchline for this one, it sounds so much like the setup of a Monty Python-esque joke. Give it your best shot in the comments… -m

Bob DuCharme, Innodata Isogen

Content analysis: why? You’ve “inherited” content. Need to save time or effort.

Handy tool 1: “sort”. As in the Unix command line tool. (Even Windows)

Handy tool 2: “uniq -c”  (flag -c means include counts)

Elsevier contest: interface for reading journals. Download a bunch of articles, and see what’s all in there.

Handy tool 3: Trang. Schema language converter. But can infer a schema from one or more input documents. Concat all sample documents under one root, and infer–this gives a list of all doctypes in use.

trang article.dtd article.rng
trang issueContents.xml issueContents.rng
saxon article.rng compareElsRNG.xsl | sort > compareElsRNG.out

compareElsRNG.xsl has text mode output, ignores input text nodes, and checks whether the RNG has references to each element, outputing “Yes: elementname” or “No: elemenname”. (which gets sorted in step 3)

Helps ferret out places where the schema says 40 different child elements are possible but in practice only 4 are used.

Handy tool 4: James Clark’s sx, converts SGML to XML.

Another stylesheet counts elements producing a histogram. [Ed. I would do this in XQuery in CQ.] Again, can help prioritize parts of the XML to use first. Similar logic for parent/child counts; where @id gets used; find all values for a particular attribute.

Another stylesheet goes through multiple converted-to-rng schemas, looking for common substructure. Lists generated this way can be pulled into a stylesheet.

Analyze a SGML DTD? dtd2html -> tidy -> XSLT. Clients like reports (especially spreadsheets). The is more like lego bricks.

-m

Mark Birbeck, Web Backplane.

Problem statement: You shouldn’t have to “scrape” government sites.

Solution: RDFa

<div typeof="arg:Vacancy">
  Job title: <span property="dc:title">Assistant Officer</span>
  Description: <span property="dc:description">To analyse... </span>
</div>

This resolves to two full RDF triples. No separate feeds, uses existing publishing systems. Two of the most ambitious RDFa projects are taking place in the UK. Flexible arrangements possible.

Steps: 1. Create vocabulary. 2. Create demo. 3. Evangelize.

Vocabulary under Google Code: Argot Hub. Reuse terms (dc:title, foaf:name) where possible, developed in public.

Demos: Yahoo! SearchMonkey, (good for helping not-so-technical people to “get it”) then a Drupal hosted one (a little more control).

Next level, a new server that aggregates specific info (like all job openeings for Electricians), incuding geocoding. Ubiquity RDFa helps here.

Evangelizing: Detailed tutorials. Drupal code will go open source. More opportunities with companies currently screen-scrapting. More info @ rdfa.info.

Q&A: Asking about predicate overloading (dc:title). A general SemWeb issue. Context helps. Is RDFa tied to HTML? No, SearchMonkey itself uses RDFa–it’s just attributes.

-m

Ronald Reck, SAP; Kenneth Sall, SAIC

“I wish I knew when people were saying bad things about me.” Sentiment analysis. Kapow used initially. From 800k news articles (from 1996 and 1997), extracted 450M RDF assertions. The 13 Reuters standard metadata elements not used in this case. Used Redland for heavy RDF lifting. Inxight ThingFinder (commercial) for entity extraction, supplemented with enumerated lists (Bush Cabinet, Intellegence Agencies, negative adjectives, positive admire verbs, etc.) End result was RDF/XML.

(Kenneth takes the mic) SPARQL Sentiment Query Web UI. Heavy SPARQL ahead… Redland hasn’t implemented the UNION operator yet, making the examples more convoluted.

PREFIX sap: <http://iama.rrecktek.com/ont/sap#>
SELECT ?ent ?type ?name
WHERE {
?ent sap:Method "Name Catalog" .
?ent sap:Type ?type .
?ent sap:Name ?name
}

Difficult learning curve. Need ability to do substring from entity URI -> article URI.

Next steps: current news stories. Leverage existing metadata. RDF at the sentence level. Improve name catalogs. Use rule-based pattern matching engine. Slides.

-m

I won a bronze medal (white ribbon actually) in the Mixed Styles category for my Dusseldorf Altbier, the first non-mead-related beverage I’ve ever entered. It’s a deep copper-colored ale made with a special Alt yeast and with a strong balance of clean malt and hops. There are very few bottles of it left at this point.

The competition itself was a blast–I got to spend the day judging barleywines, including a spectacular one that went on to win the category. Official results should be posted soon. -m

A special comment. My most vivid memory of my late Grandpa.

Even after retiring, Grandpa needed to do small jobs around town to make ends meet. One was cleaning a small sporting goods store. Once, with all the excitement of visiting family from out of town (that would be us), he forgot to clean one night. The next day, the shopkeeper was understandably irate, and waited around to speak face-to-face. “I screwed up,” Grandpa simply said. A short exchange followed, with typical Midwestern bluntness and politeness, the resolution being that it would never happen again. The shop got exceptionally well cleaned that day. Crisis averted.

That’s been a powerful lesson for me. When you screw something up, admit it, fix it the best you can, and move on.

-m

P.S. No, I haven’t done any major screw-ups lately, at least any that I know about. I was reminded of this by a much-publicized interview on Letterman.

I’ve been playing lately with this site, and it’s a fantastic resource. The word carboy probably comes from Persian qarabah “large flagon.” Who knew? -m

I know what it’s like to be laid off, I’ve been through it twice. If you need help connecting up with a new gig, whether at MarkLogic or a hand-off to one of the zillion headhunters that constantly harry me, let me know. Send me email and I’ll do what I can. -m

My quest for a backup brain is (almost) at an end. Evernote flat out rocks. It runs as a great Mac app (on that other OS too, in case through some disaster I ever need it). It has a nice web interface, including a web clipper. It’s on the iPhone. Anything I put in there is immediately at my fingertips.

It only needs one more thing, one of several actually: ability to sync notes to the filesystem OR an API (which is reportedly on the way). Even a way to backup all notes would be a good start.

Check it out. -m

I think it’s really cool that Palin could be the next vice president of the US. I thought a VP had to be a resident of the US, though. Wait, what to you mean “not that one”…? -m

He won an olympic silver medal in the much-publicized race where the gold winner came in 0.01 second faster. And he blogs. He writes:

On winning a SILVER medal: I am completely happy, and still in complete disbelief that I was able to achieve this feat! I’m not joking… It’s a tough loss, but I’m on cloud nine. I congratulated Phelps and his coach Bob Bowman. I’m just glad the race was fun to watch for everyone. It was a pleasure for me, really.

What a fantastic attitude. I wish I had my head on that straight soemtimes. Milorad, if you are ever in the South Bay, I will buy you a beer, or a 1000-calorie energy drink, or whatever. -m

Without the bike commute, I’m back to barefoot running for exercise. I can now do a stretch of 2 miles on asphalt with no problems (other than sore calves). Why barefoot? Because it feels better, and it’s ultimately easier on the joints. The human biomechanical system does excellent work if you let it, and is easily capable of soft landings via shock-absorption in the knees, ankles, and musculature. In contrast, when one wears shoes, it’s too easy to slam the feet down and let the padding (attempt to) take care of impact management.

If you want to get started, go slowly. For a month I only walked, starting out with very short distances. I’m at the point now when I see a new texture of carpet, hardwood, or other floors, I’m tempted to kick my shoes off and sample.

Alas, I don’t think I’ll be ready for the Nike+ Human Race 10k coming up on August 31. (And I wonder how many runners in a shoe-company-sponosred race will be barefoot) :-) -m

From the observing-the-human-condition department.

Seems I have a hard to pronounce name. For the record my first name has a long I; it’s MY-ka, not MEE-ka. When someone gets it wrong, I don’t hold anything against them. Afterall, how to pronounce any given name is pretty arbitrary.

But there are a few names that are easily mockable. Either a letter of two off from a word with a less favorable meaning, or a shared name with an infamous person–a few notable examples being a popular figure in the XML world and one of the current U.S. presidential candidates. I find that in these infrequent cases, an easily-mockable name can be a useful thing, since it allows me to immediately flip the bozo bit on any commentator/blogger/reporter who chooses to engage with the mockery. Without such low-hanging invective, sometimes it’s harder to tell when somebody is an idiot.

If you want to constructively criticize someone, go for it. But make sure to use founded, fact-based arguments that can stand on their own without resorting to childish attacks. Go forth and na-na-na-boo-boo no more. -m

The W3C RDFa specification is now in Candidate Recommendation phase, with an explicit call for implementations (of which there are several). Momentum for RDFa is steadily building. What about eRDF, which favors the existing HTML syntax over new attributes?

There’s still a place for a simpler syntactic approach to embedding RDF in HTML, as evidenced by projects like Yahoo! SearchMonkey. And eRDF is still the only game in town when it comes to annotating RDF within HTML-without-the-X.

One thing the RDFa folks did was define src as a subject-bearing node, rather than an object. At first I didn’t like this inversion, but the more I worked with it, the more it made sense. When you have an image, which can’t have children in (X)HTML, it’s very often useful to use the src URL as the subject, with a predicate of perhaps cc:license.

So I propose one single change to eRDF 1.1. Well, actually several changes, since one thing leads to another. The first is to specify that you are using a different version of eRDF. A new profile string of:

"http://purl.org/NET/erdf11/profile"

The next is changing the meaning of a src value to be a subject, not an object. Perhaps swapping the subject and object. Many existing uses of eRDF involving src already involve properties with readily available inverses. For example:

<!-- eRDF 1.0 -->
<img class="foaf.depiction" src="http://example.org/picture" />

<!-- eRDF 1.1 -->
<img src="http://example.org/picture" class="foaf.depicts" />

With the inherent limitations of existing syntax, the use case of having a full image URL and a license URL won’t happen. But XHTML2 as well as a HTML5 proposal suggest that adding href to many attributes might come to pass. In which case this possibility opens:

<img src="http://example.org/picture" class="cc.license"
href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/" />

Comments? -m

Andy King’s Website Optimization is now in print from O’Reilly. This book covers it all: performance, SEO, conversion rates, analytics, you name it. If you run a web site, you’ll find this useful. I tech edited and contributed a small portion, about the growing trend of metadata as site advantage. Go check it out. -m

That’s my game idea. Unfortunately I won’t have time to develop the idea, so somebody else go for it–just mention my name in the credits ;)

My 7-year-old has just discovered Oregon Trail, or more accurately Westward Trail, a respectable online clone.

-m

I haven’t seen an announcement about this, but try the following query on Yahoo Search: [searchmonkeyid:com.yahoo.rdf.rdfa] (link). It shows documents containing RDFa, with Digg at the top. Since this is a Searchmonkey ID, it’s also usable in Searchmonkey to actually extract the metadata and use it to customize search results.

Does your site use RDFa yet? -m

Day 3 and the first real difficulty: I can’t type most of my passwords except by muscle memory.

Overall, though, I’m enjoying the challenge, even if my postings are conspicuously short. :-) -m

I hoped for something fresh, but this from Len Merson is only warmed-over GTD. Avoid–go for the original. -m