darcusblog

Sean Takats blogged awhile back about the dismissal of Thomson Reuters suit about Zotero. I had a chance to read the transcript of the hearing. As Sean wrote, the judge dismissed the Thomson Reuters complaint due to a lack of jurisdiction. What exactly does this mean? From my non-expert read, the dismissal was on a technicality: that Thomson Reuters asserted damages ($10 million/year worth) it could not demonstrate. There was never any discussion of the substance of the suit; rather, virtually the entire hearing focused on the question of how Thomson Reuters came up with the $10 million figure. Answer: a very precise 80% of a vague estimate of number of downloads from the Zotero site, multiplied by $200 (the average price of Endnote software). The judge recognized this as ridiculous, and so threw out the case.

Here’s hoping Thomson Reuters has learned a lesson here and backs off refiling.

So I’ve for awhile now been thinking I need to get more serious about a storage and backup solution for my personal and household data. After casually looking around at alternatives, I finally decide on a solution. I effectively took this information about hardware, with this and this information about using OpenSolaris and ZFS for software, and now have 1 TB of mirrored networked storage (and automated snapshots when I get to it), all for less than $500.

It was far more of a PITA getting OpenSolaris running as I wanted than I’d hoped, but I think the end product is both better and cheaper than the commercial alternatives.

Shelley Powers, on a rather typical IRC conversation on RDFa in HTML 5:

Unfortunately, too many people who really don’t know data are making too many decisions about how data will be represented in the web of the future.

As usual, Shelley nails it.

So I just got this note from Thomson Reuters in my inbox, regarding their new ResearcherID service:

When you register with ResearcherID you are assigned a unique author identifier that expressly associates you with your work, helping to eliminate the common problem of author misidentification.

I’m presented then, with an ethical dilemma: do I participate because it’s probably in my personal interest to do so, or do I boycott this in favor of larger principles because of Thomson Reuters’ otherwise reprehensible activities (the Zotero suit)?

My tentative answer: boycott. I already have something that identifies me: http://bruce.darcus.name/about#me.

Just in case someone out there is interested in helping out, Frank Bennett has been working on a complete rewrite of Zotero’s CSL engine. The new code is designed along functional lines, and intended to be easier to extend and debug and to integrate into different kinds of contexts, as well as be faster. Code is in the xbib repository currently.

Zotero has recently moved its 1.5 release into beta status. Key new features:

• XHTML “rich text” notes
• server-based syncing of libraries (no more rsync to keep my home and office machine in sync)

Aside: I’m a little worried about centralized services, particularly after the Magnolia debacle. Would prefer something more distributed a la laconi.ca.

The Zotero team has also updated its website to reflect the beginnings of the social-networking functionality they will be building out in the future. To wit:

• my profile
• my library

The website functionality also allows you to generate a CV from your library collections. I’ll be adding one once they add support for “smart collections.”

For anyone interested in understanding how citation and bibliographic formatting code might work conceptually, the documentation for Andrea Rossatto’s Haskell implementation of CSL is a great place to start.

I find Haskell a bit tough going at the level of details, but the type definitions are really clear. For example, the Text.CSL.Proc documentation includes a citeproc type, whose signature is: citeproc :: Style -> [Reference] -> [[(String, String)]] -> BiblioData The documentation then usefully tells us this means:

With a Style, a list of References and the list of citation groups (the list of citations with their locator), produce the FormattedOutput for each citation group and the bibliography.

So Dan Chudnov’s been digging into RDF and the semantic web, and posts of few of the questions he’s collected. I’ll answer at least some of them below, though I (still) don’t really consider myself an expert.

• I have never understood FOAF. It seems like a fine way to serialize a cult-of-personality network (e.g. “see? i’m only two steps from timbl himself!!”) Similarly I don’t get the whole “social graph” buzz either. I’m not a marketer looking to harvest customer data. I’m not doing any affinity indexing just now. What other use is there for saying who my friends are, besides those two?
  I’m actually not that interested in the foaf:knows property. That seems less immediately useful than being able to describe, say, the kind of data in my CV: who I am, my bio info, publications, and maybe also more specific kinds of relations with other people (say collaborators?). I see FOAF as a simpler RDF version of the sort of thing MADS does. Reminds me: I need to update mine!
• Does the linked data movement really depend upon RDF? It doesn’t seem like it has to. Maybe it could grow faster if it didn’t.
  Let’s turn the question around and ask: if not RDF, then what? You definitely need some model on which to base it, it seems to me, and things like GRDDL, microformats, etc. leave a lot of flexibility on the encoding end. The key for linked data is really the URI, of course, which becomes kind of like a key for a global database.
• If blank nodes are bad (end of the section), how do I represent sets of literals that mean the same thing but are expressed in different languages? I need to do that right now and I can’t figure out how without blank nodes.
  What’s wrong with multiple literals, each with a language tag?
• I’m still mainly interested in Description (talking about things) and am completely disinterested in modeling knowledge (what things are and mean) and seem to keep finding examples where arguments about best practices hinge on notions of essential truths …
  You totally lost me on this one Dan!
• er, that last one was over-long, so I’ll try it this way instead. I think I’m interested in Linked Description, not Linked Data.
  Aren’t we splitting hairs here?

John Resig on a new, free (as in speech), and very nice twitter clone he’s been working on, complete with SVN repo and Trac. As one would expect, it makes very nice use of Ajax.

Hmm … I wonder if/how something like this might be adapted for academics?

Over the past year, my wife and I have slowly worked our way through the first four seasons of the HBO serial drama The Wire. We found the first episode or so of the first season a bit slow, but before long were utterly hooked. We just finished the recent DVD release of the fourth season last week.

Wow, what a breath of fresh air this series is! In an article in Slate, Jacob Weisberg proclaimed the show surely the best TV show ever broadcast in America. I have a hard time arguing with him. The story-line is sprawling and intricate and absolutely compelling, and the characters—every single one of them—have a three-dimensionality that makes everything else on television look like cardboard cutouts.

Perhaps most importantly, this shows deals with issues that matter deeply to the contemporary present with an intelligence and nuance and even humor that makes the current presidential campaign disturbingly shallow by comparison: the changing role of cities like Baltimore in an increasingly globalized and liberalized political-economy, the politics of race in urban America, the hypocrisy of failed federal anti-drug and education policy, and the dysfunctions of institutions all come together the Wire in a way that works beautifully.

Since we don’t subscribe to HBO, I guess we’ll have to wait another year to see the fifth, and final, season. Sigh … it’s going to be a long year!