Moebius! Yes, he of the strip, was born on this day in 1790. In addition to the one edged, one-sided figure which bears his moniker, AFM made a number of other contributions to Math, and was the director of an observatory for a while. Maybe somebody came up with the strip before Moebius, but he got the credit and the ink.
Click on the link in the last line and read for yourself.
Archive for the ‘Databases’ Category
Happy Birthday August Ferdinand!
Tuesday, November 17th, 2009Does The Electronic Medical Record Make A Dif?
Monday, November 16th, 2009Not so far, anyway. In the future, maybe, but at the moment, it’s hard to say. This is a little bit disappointing to those circles that were hoping for big cost savings through the implementation of EMR systems. But, Administration potentates counter that not enough places have come online as of now, and that the true savings won’t appear for some time, maybe, for another five years or so. This rains on the Obama reform parade, a little, since encouraging the introduction of EMR methods in one of the big goals the Administration has set for itself, in the conviction that a lot of money spent on duplication, errors, missing data, etc. could be saved, and all add up to a big hit on the health care outlay of the nation. Right now, the only places with EMR systems in place, that also have been thorougly studied are big systems such as Kaiser Permanente or Cleveland Clinic, and these are atypical. We would all like it to be the case that great savings can be realized through implementing the correct technology, but Jiminny Cricket to the contrary notwithstanding, wishing does not make it so.
Safety in the Cloud.
Monday, November 16th, 2009Cloud computing is among the latest buzz-terms being tossed about. It’s come up before in these lines, with some lip-pursing and wincing on my part about another goofy Internet metaphor. CC simply means that you are using remote systems to manipulate and store your work, rather than having capable software on your machine proper. There are some pluses and many,many minuses, at least as far as I’m concerned. Among these are the loss of “control”, (OK, I have control “issues”) and security. How can you know that your whiz bang idea is not being poached by some clever dude who would rather use somebody else’s stuff rather than come up with his own? There has been a fair amount of beard-tugging about this, and among the beards being tugged is that of one Whitfield Duffie. You kids may not know the name, but us old-timers will recognize Duffie as one of the pioneers in the “public key” cryptography movement of the Seventies. Users would have two keys to use in encrypting and decrypting messages: one known only to them and another “public” one readily available to anybody. A message could be encoded with the public key, but decoded only with the private one. That’s about as far as I can take you, sorry. So, WD has been pondering cyber security matters for a while now, and his views are worth hearing. My view, for what it’s worth, is that we should be careful with this whole cloud thing, and I’ve said as much before.
Cloud
An “Integral” Holiday.
Thursday, October 29th, 2009Those whose hearts beat a little faster at the sight of an equation have cause to celebrate today, because, on this day in 1675 Gottfried Leibnitz first wrote the squiggle that has become universally adopted as the integral sign in calculus. It seems he wrote it first in an unpublished manuscript, but, over time, that mark beat out competing notation for that important function, so what students learn in Calc. 101 is what Gottfried came up with. The matter of who invented the calculus, Newton or Leibnitz, has been the stuff of some considerable discussion. The two did exchange a lot of letters about it, so the question of who did what when may never be ironed out fully, but apportioning the credit by precise fractions in probably pointless. Lift a cup to Leibnitz in recognition of his priceless doodle.
The Deal is Dead.
Friday, September 25th, 2009Well, almost dead, for sure, in its previous form. Judge Chin who is presiding over the case canceled an Oct. 7 hearing on the matter, because he had become aware of actions on both sides undertaken to meet objections raised by critics, including that ole meanie the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division. The judge said, in essence, that it would be pointless to hold a session to discuss the settlement when both sides were quite energetically engaged in renegotiating many key points. It would be more workmanlike to see what emerged from theses discussions and then bring them forward for consideration by the court. It makes sense to me.
Google Thinks About Changing Its Index.
Wednesday, August 12th, 2009Google usually plays its cards very close to the vest, but recently there has been a change in that behavior. The G is thinking about reworking its software, more than a little, a project known inside the outfit as “Caffeine”. The effort is supposed to revise the way in which Google crawls the web, indexes the captured materials and allows users to search them. A big departure comes in the fact that the company is making a preview version available for people to test-drive and then offer comments and suggestions. It’s quite a step away from the evasiveness of all the SE managers, who were understandably worried about losing some competitive advantage if they talked too much about how their products work, under the hood. I guess it shows the supreme self-confidence of the league leader, in that they are so far ahead of whatever is in second place that they don’t really have to worry about helping the competition, since there is none. Here is a item from the Resource Shelf which has a link to a good summary at SearchEngineLand:
Index
PS: I should have made it clearer: this is not a change in the user interface. It’s an effort to rework what is going on in the engine room and is pretty significant, since that is the core of how the gadget receives queries, processes them and returns replies to the searcher. It’s an area in which the company has spent a lot of time and money, and made some key decisions about structure and processing, such as what to do with numerals, special characters ( & for example) Roman numerals, and non-word strings (H2SO4, BRCA1 and BRCA-1). So more is at stake than changing top-page real estate around. It’s important, and we’ll have to stick with this story and report on it as more comes out, Google being Google and all
The Scientific Article, Version 2.0
Monday, August 3rd, 2009Everything is 2.0 nowadays, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. I ran across the link to this item on a discussion list for librarians and, I thought I would mention it here for the benefit of our readers. Cell Press and Elsevier ( I thought they were really the same thing, but maybe not) have commissioned studies to help them design what they are callling the new scientific article. Now that the migration of research journals from print to digital format has progressed as far as it has, people are beginning to think about the whole thing in a more fundamental sense. A favorite story of mine about fundamentals concerns the work of Lord Haldane, British Secretary for War around 1900. He was convinced that the structure of the British Army was hopelessly out of date and wanted to reorganize it. So, he proposed a radical re-think, based on the question: what is the Army for? As various answers came in, they were tested against the current structure, and those of other nations, and scrapped or considered more seriously. So, maybe it is time to go off someplace quiet and think: what is the article for?. Digital publication makes possible certain things that were not possible previously. Should they be done, just because they’re possilbe?
The study group has come up with two models, and they have some points in common: more use of graphics, more “outllinks” to other resources, embedded video, step-by-step instructions for repeating the experiment, and like that, to move away from the solely linear presentation required now. Both versions are intriguing, but there is noting final about either, so people with suggestions should forward them to the parties concerned. I wonder about the concept of the article as an argument rather than solely as a container of facts. Maybe that’s not an issue, and not what readers are seeking, most of the time anyway. All early days yet, of course, and no guarantees. But, for a while there has been a fair amount of grumbling about the timidy shown by publishers in merely…”merely”?…transferring the received architecture of the article to a digital platform, while largely ignoring, until quite recently, the possiblities of reader interaction with the text and the ability to supplement the basic item with other materials, on different media. It’s worth a look:
Article 2.0
Amazon Drops “1984″ and Animal Farm from Kindle.
Monday, July 20th, 2009There was general stupefication at the news that Amazon had extinguished from the list of works which can be downloaded for the Kindle family of e-book readers two of the most significant novels of the the XXth Century: George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm. Amazon explained that the company did not actually have the rights to disseminate the works, in the version in which they appear on Kindle, having failed to ensure that this feature was part of the deal made with its supplier. So, the company would have been in violation of the copyright code had it allowed downloading to continue. Refunds were sent to clients who had selected the two books from Amazon’s catalog. But, there was astonishment that such a thing would even be possible. Many Amazon clients did not realize that the company has the capablity to make downloaded content simply disappear, and they also did not know that Amazon monitored who was downloading what so closely. Librarians will note that there are “first sale” implications in the action. “First sale” is the legal doctrine that ensures a book buyer owns the item bought, and can dispose of it as is deemed fit: throw it away, donate it, give it as a present, leave it on a bus. The publisher/author has nothing to say about that. So, are downloads purchases, in the first sale sense? Or are they leases? Is there a contract, and if so, what does it say? Can Amazon make ALL your content disappear for business reasons? And not just Amazon; I’m not picking on them. It’s a delicious irony that the two Orwell novels deal with political tyranny, and 1984 in particular has the section in which inconvenient content is removed by being placed in an incinerator, called the Memory Hole. In 1948, the year Orwell wrote the novel, the process of “correction” required gathering all the previously released printed versions, destroying the offending item, and re-issuing “corrected” ones. That was an impossible task, and Orwell probably used the episode to show the craziness of the Regime. But, nowadays, the Memory Hole is just a mouse click away. Poof! And it’s gone. If everything resides on a digital archive, and something is removed, how can you prove it was ever there in the first place? The useflness of such technology is obvious for repressive regimes, and for not so repressive ones, at least not crudely and openly so. It’s not exactly life imitating art, but it’s close to it.
This is a link to TIDBITS, which covers the incident, and discusses its implications, very succinctly.
Buzz About Bing.
Tuesday, July 14th, 2009Today’s NYTimes has another story about Microsoft’s Bing search vehicle. In this piece, the writer reviews the apparent progress that Bing has made in elbowing its way into the consciousness of information seekers. According to the Times piece, Bing is doing very nicely for a startup product, especially in a field dominated by Google. Figures released show an 8% increase in June traffic on Bing, due in part to the heavy promotional campaign Microsoft has launched to pump the tool. Some industry observers are quoted in favorable comments on the product, and on the efforts being made to get it into the public eye. MS has done some good things in this venture, and people who play with Bing tend to like it and come back to play some more. The possibility of a resurrected bid by Micorsoft to acquire Yahoo was discussed. This was attempted last year, but the deal fell through. And, the apparent success of Bing is bringing some much needed street cred to Microsoft, since all its previous ventures to get into the search business were generally viewed as inept, or half-hearted. If MS is seen as really, really hungry to get ahead in the search market, new overtures to Yahoo might not be so long in coming.
Bing />
Milestones.
Monday, June 1st, 2009 The last definitely known survivor of the Titanic sinking has died, and General Motors filed for bankruptcy. Both stories were on NPR this morning, or at least the second one was. I think I found the other one on a headline someplace, but I know it was early today. The woman was a mere infant when the famous liner went down, and her death snaps the last living link to this event and turns it into History, something you study with documents and records, instead of asking somebody about what happened. What was the line from The Great Gatsby, something about being “drawn irretrievably into the past”, something like that?
To somebody my age, the idea of GM’s going bankrupt is very hard to process. For decades, GM was the Company, par excellence, and its legendary manager, Alfred P. Sloan, was enthroned as the Chief Prophet of management excellence, with every word of his scrutinized and parsed for insights which could be put to fruitful use in managing anything, anywhere. I don’t know much about cars and even less about the care business, but it still seem to me that it must have taken a whole series of very un-Sloan -like gaffs and bloopers in order to blow the tremendous lead the company had, and turn it into pitiable wreck it is now. There was a time when people, especially young people, especially teenagers, would impatiently await the new release of GM models, talk about them endlessly, rehashing their features and stoking their car lust. I don’t hang around with teenagers much anymore, but I think it has been a long, long time since they, or anybody else, felt excited about a GM product release. The best that could be mustered was relief that the new line wasn’t too bad. And, maybe that’s it, right there. Finally, after years of “not too bad”, not too bad caught up with them. Wait for the book(s); they’ll be out in plenty.