Seb's Open Research
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Friday, September 19, 2003
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Share the Music Day
Seeing as today tomorrow is Share the Music Day (funny, seems the date has
changed since I was last there), I figured I'd chip in with a couple
compositions of my own. Interestingly, I can't seem to come up with
anything remotely resembling what I usually listen to. I figure these
short tracks belong in a videogame or something.
And in the spirit of Open Source, here are the corresponding MIDI
files. (The instruments are not set in there, so it's all pianos and
drums.)
I'm putting all this under the Creative Commons "by" license, so if you
feel like deriving whatever you like out of it, or sharing it, you can go right ahead.
 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
 7:21:23 PM
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Universal calls for papers collector
As Liz wrote, this is an amazingly useful site for academics. I picked the areas Artificial
intelligence & Related Technologies, Information Technology and Information Systems, Knowledge, Library and Information Sciences, and the keywords "learning", "knowledge", "web", "weblogs", and "online".
It’s called Papersinvited, and it collects calls for papers from conferences and journals worldwide.
When you register, you create a profile and tell the system what
topic areas you’re interested in following. In addition to the existing
topical categories (I subscribe to “Library and Information Sciences,”
“Knowledge Management,” “Communication,” “Digital Arts,” and “Internet
and Online Services”), you can specify up to five keywords to look for
in announcements (I have “weblogs,” “blogs,” “social software,”
“gender,” and “women”).
Each time you log in, it shows you current announcements in the
areas you’ve selected. You can delete them if you’re not interested, or
add them to a planner, which is a calendar that shows you upcoming
submission dates, notification dates, and conference dates.
4:56:59 PM
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Thursday, September 18, 2003
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Aggregator woes
For quite a while I've had the lingering suspicion that the Radio Userland
built-in news aggregator eats older items. Other Radio bloggers reading
this? I'd like to know if you've had the same experience.
I've been trying out SharpReader
for a while, in parallel. I find that many items show up in it that are
swallowed down by the Radiogator before I can see them. I conclude that
I miss a considerable number of items by relying on Radio. This in
itself is reason enough to switch, as I do not want to miss any of the
items in some of those feeds.
The Userland aggregator presents new items in reverse chronological
order, so its output pretty much looks like a blog (check out the edu_rss
aggregator to see what I mean). To read what it has picked up for you,
you simply scroll down until you reach the end or a post you've already
seen.
By contrast, SharpReader is in the class of so-called "three-pane
aggregators", in which you need at least one click to view each item,
and sometimes two. All I can say for now is that it's a different
experience; I'll let Andrew Grumet et al. tell you more about it while I continue getting used to it.
3:19:32 PM
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Beauty and the Web
Paul Ford's "Processing on Processing"
is a delightful ramble on building what might be called "the Elegant
Web". It contains this amusing piece of dialogue about the currently
emerging difficulties in defining and deploying the Semantic Web (which
Marc will undoubtedly appreciate):
[...] But a serious problem sometimes arises when a community that is
heavily invested in a set of ideas and practices (in this case, the
knowledge representation research community) defines the standard: they
solve problems most people don't care about; they build general systems
that incorporate decades of research and anticipate hundreds of complex
problems no one else knows exists.
There's nothing wrong with this, but it leads to strange dialogues between the standards-makers and the wider world. In the
case of the Semantic Web, the dialogue is like this:
World: I'd love to make my web site smarter, link things together more intelligently.
Semantic Web Research Community: Sure! You need a generalized framework for ontology development.
World: Okay. That'll help me link things together more easily?
SWRC: Even better, it will lead to a giant throbbing robot world-brain that arranges dentist's appointments for you! Just read
the Scientific American article.
World: Will that be a lot of work?
SWRC: No. But even if it is, we will blame you for being too stupid to understand why you need it.
World: Huh. I guess so. But I don't understand why I need it, exactly.
SWRC: That is because you are too stupid. It's fine, we have your best interests in mind.
World: I don't want to nag, but while I read a book on set theory, how about those fancy links?
SWRC: Well, if you insist, and can't wait, there's always XLink.
World: Aha. That looks handy...except, oh, there's no easily available implementation. And I'm not really sure what it's supposed
to do.
SWRC: That is because you are lazy and stupid.
World: Ah well. Do you think I should apply for grants for the development of my little web site Ftrain.com? Just enough for a
monthly unlimited Metrocard would be a help.
SWRC: We will have all the grants! Be gone with your bachelor's degree from a second-tier private liberal arts college! And where
is your RSS feed?
World: Sorry.
SWRC: Slacker! Bring me more graduate students, I am hungry!
Ford is engaged in a lonely quest to represent his whole site (over a
million words, and loads of links) in structured XML chunks, so that it
could be browsed in many different ways, and the piece touches upon
that. Very interesting.
[found via Read/Write Web]
1:44:36 PM
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Wiki missions and content
What should be done when pages on two separate wikis deal with the same topic? Productive wiki overlap proposes a sensible solution:
Every wiki has a mission. Keep the mission in mind when writing the entry.
This post also appears on channel wiki
11:32:39 AM
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Come to think of it, I believe there's an unhealthy dependence on representation efficiency in Aaron's proposal.
For instance, compressed classical music generally takes up less space
than rock music. This translates into less bandwidth and storage use
per hour of music played, and classical artists would end up getting
fewer votes per hour of music played. There would actually be an
incentive in making your music hard to compress! (and what happens to
poor John Cage's 4:33?)
I'm assuming here that listening time is a fair metric for artist compensation. Does that make sense?
9:09:00 AM
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Wednesday, September 17, 2003
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Sure, I'll take both
Fame *and* fortune (if you're good enough). Clay Shirky said
"with the power to publish directly in their hands, many creative
people face a dilemma they've never had before: fame vs fortune."
Cory Doctorow says:
"luckily for me, it appears that giving away the text for free gets me
more paying customers than it loses me." A bunch of new stories are
available for download, and they're just as great as his others. [HubLog]
5:01:58 PM
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Reading over Peter's shoulder
Peter has been thinking of interesting stuff to do with free literature.
I’m toying with a small project that I think is quite interesting. A while ago, I learned that Richard Gabriel had released his book Patterns of Software for free (PDF). It doesn’t say so on his site or in the PDF yet, but his intention (I mailed him about this) was to release it under the same Creative Commons license that most of his other material is made available under. This gave me the idea to annotate it as I’m reading it.
Then I thought about publishing an RSS feed along with the annotated book, where each item would point to an annotation. This is an interesting variation of the weblog concept. The front page would perhaps aggregate the latest n annotations, which can be clicked to visit the annotated passage.
Peter has started annotating the preface to Gabriel's book here.
5:00:32 PM
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Tihs has been baeetn to daeth
David Harris on the "Elingsh uinervtisy" memegraph:
[...] my Friday version spread pretty quickly through blogspace when it wasn't yet floating all over the web but the latest version which has only had a day to propagate in an already saturated web, hasn't made any impact, presumably because everybody already knows about it or people are just linking to the entry without copying the text now.
For tracking the meme, Michael recommends this Feedster query.
3:03:03 PM
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Freeing the music
If you're looking for freely downloadable sheet music, this section of the Google directory is a good starting point. In particular Mutopia is the Project Gutenberg of sheet music. Here's a PDF of Scott Joplin's ragtime piece The Entertainer (which was on The Sting's soundtrack).
Too bad we'll have to wait a century or two before we can freely get sheet music for many artists who are alive.
There's other good news on the free music front. Robert Nagle's new Share the Music blog offers "Recommendations for Great Free MP3's and Music Sharing Technologies". His introduction states,
While writing my piece in which I call for more sharing of music, I realize that the heart of the problem is not really technological or legal, but journalistic. It’s very hard to find out what musicians are out there. The radio stations have strict playlists, sites like mp3.com are promoting an artist’s CD’s, and IUMA is woefully slow and hard to navigate through.
Makes sense. If musicians could all take a cue from Brad Sucks and start posting mp3s of their work on a blog and spreading the linklove among themselves, I say the problem would be half solved.
(Do follow the link in that quote above - Robert has obviously been thinking about this a great deal.)
11:31:10 AM
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Radio TrackBack to TopicExchange test
Phil writes that Radio Userland should now automatically ping whatever TopicExchange channel one links to. I'm testing it out right now by linking to the topics in weblogs channel.
(Pardon the jargon if you're here for the first time.)
Update: it worked! More impressively, if you compare the timestamps, the TopicExchange appears to have known about my ping before I even published the post. Gotta revisit my special relativity courses.
Now I wonder if it will ping again when I republish...
9:00:17 AM
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Copyleft
2006
Sebastien Paquet.
Last update:
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