The Solar Electric Light Fund sounds like a great thing. The combination of green technology and the strategy of working at a small scale to get into places where large scale operations wouldn’t make economic sense has a lot of power.
It’s really fascinating, this world…
Since I’m too lazy to try to find such a product, and not motivated enough to create and market it if it doesn’t already exist, I’ll just describe this thing, float the description gently on the ether, and maybe by the time I need one, it will materialize for me. By the way, if you find yourself motivated enough to market it, you could give me the motivation to create it by consulting with me to do so. You take the risk, I provide the skills :-).
I am in the early stages of getting ready to buy a house. I will need a whole-house network. I will not want to make this network wireless because I don’t feel confident in the security, I’d like to reduce spurious radiation if possible, and I want the speed and reliability of wired LAN that wireless just doesn’t seem to match.
On the other hand, I may not want to bore holes in ceilings and floors to run conduit, should it not be in place already. But, it seems to me that a purpose-tuned application of wirless network technology could be used to patch across the gap, while simultaneously avoiding the (perceived) shortcomings of wirless. Given that the stations are fixed and close to one another, highly directional antennas with just-enough power could be used to increase security and reduce radiation. That the stations don’t have to talk to anyone but their single partner gives some potential advantages in security, speed and ease of installation.
(OK, now, this is an article about data structure design, not some euphemistic battle of some genders.)
(Are open-Internet confessions of ignorance really a good idea? I only post such a thing in the hopes that someone may find it useful as a bridge to some subject they hadn’t though about before. In this case, if you’re a ‘programmer’, maybe you haven’t though much about ‘knowledge bases’ before.)
In messing around with Protégé, I’m learning about the knowledge-base concept of slots versus the programming concept of members. Please keep in mind in that I still haven’t bothered to even read the Protégé project’s no-doubt-excellent tutorial on ontology design, nor any books on knowledge-bases, -capture, -management, etc., though I really will some day. Anyway, for the purposes of this article I’m just a software developer who happens to have stumbled upon an interesting tool.
Many popular programming languages (C, Java, Python, etc.) have a simple mechanism by which you can create your own application-specific types. You create classes/structs that have members, like so*:
struct HairInfo
{
float Length;
float CurlFactor;
...
}
If you had another struct
struct String
{
float Length;
char *Str;
...
}
the two ‘Length’ members would not conflict with one another because they’re in different namespaces. One would tend not to think of them as being related in any very deep manner. In fact, if you wanted to represent the fact that the members _were_ deeply related, you’d probably create a new type to use instead of ‘float’, and use that type for both members.
In the Protégé world, trying to create two ‘members’ with the same name _will_ lead to a conflict. Cuz you’re not creating members, you’re creating slots, and those all live in the same namespace. Which seems weird, coming from classes’n’members background. Members are pieces of an object; slots are descriptions attached to an object.
Protégé does it this way, I’m guessing (because I haven’t actually read), to add an additional dimension of semantic richness to knowledge structures. This concept is also found in another topic I don’t know enough about, RDF/Semantic Web, where there’s a (universal) namespace of predicates. The point is that, for example, you may be able to apply the predicate ‘creator’ to a book, a web page, a magazine, a tree, etc., and that in a connected world, you can search the world for, say, “creator=’Steven Ourada'” and find all the things someone claims I created, without having to know beforehand to what sorts of things that predicate might be attached.
So a system like Protégé shares predicates, or descriptors, or slots, or whatever, rather than types. That’s interesting. That’s my only point.
* A long time ago, I shared space (in a rented GE trailer. Did you know GE rents trailers for temporary office space? I did not know that before I worked in one.) at Engineering Animation Inc. (EAI) (I wish the Wayback Machine kept images. How useful is this?) with the Barbie Magic Hairstyler team. One of the things I remember hearing people talk about was the HairInfo struct. This is by far not the oddest thing I ever heard in that trailer, but it still sticks out.
In case you want to know more about the making of Barbie Magic Hairstyler, contact Adrian Sannier. Yeah, I didn’t think so.
I’m thankful for… biodiversity, the vast web of intricate interrelated behaviors in the world. Like octopuses who walk on two arms, for one of the bizillion exizamples.
I’ll have to talk to Carolina about this: Projection-Based Virtual Environments and Disability.
I’ll have to dig into this: A new generation of communication aids under the ULYSSES component-based framework. I’m slowly forming some ideas about the ways in which computers can assist in communication by transcoding between different world-models for transmission over different channels. To which this paper is clearly relevant.
Good stuff: Eldercare Robotics: A Personal Mobility Aid, a project that attempts to strike a dynamic balance between assisting the user and letting them be in control. Which, when you think about it, is what all technologies should be trying to do… Anyway, this one adds a robotic element to a ‘walker’ with an agent-based control architecture to allow the user and the robot to complement one another.
A conference paper is available at the site or in the ACM archives.
Reading about a project like this is inspiring, in a weird sort of way. That someone would bankrupt themselves creating it in the first place, then someone would spend 12 years and who knows how much money restoring it 50 years later, well, it just shows you… ummm, it shows you… something.
I don’t know if this tends to get cataloged along with the rest of the common argument fallacies, but it should. It’s annoying :-).
You probably can think of a number of times you’ve heard an argument that starts like “If just one percent of these people…”, and ends with some spectacular outcome.
Well, guess what? There are lots of numbers smaller than one percent! For example, in case you don’t believe me, 0.0001% is smaller than 1%. Zero itself is. There is even, some speculate, meaning in what are called ‘negative numbers’. Just because 1% seems ‘small’ when we ponder it disconnected from any real quantity, it doesn’t follow that there’s always 1% of something to be had to realize some particular goal you dream up.
End rant.