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Re: Brown University Computer Scientists Create Air-Drawing Tech Device

Tom Morris — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 06:15:29 -0000

The only innovative piece here is the software (not to minimize the value of software). The claim that the stylus technology is new, a claim the researchers never made, isn't supported by the photo showing a 10+ year old Sensable Phantom haptic input device. There have been two subsequent generations of devices introduced since that one.

Re: What I learned about security, privacy and Apple (Scripting News)

Tom Morris — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 11:30:42 -0000

On the plus side, the price you were quoted was cheap. My friend was quoted $408 by the local Mac store for the same job. I think CompUSA quoted $210 and the local independent Mac repair place $80/hr plus parts.

I had her buy a bigger drive at CompUSA for $100 (paying the brick & mortar retail premium) and used the instructions at iFixit to replace it. Not a trivial job, but not that hard either.
http://www.ifixit.com/Guide...

Sounds like there's more than enough blame to go around. The data should definitely have been encrypted, but a service oriented establishment would have given you the drive back for a surcharge. Of course everyone knows that Apple isn't service oriented, so you bought into that when you bought your laptop.

Re: Google Squared Is No Freebase-Killer

Tom Morris — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 16:52:15 -0000

You won't find out anything interesting by looking at the Typewriter code. It just pulls items from a private queue stored on a separate server. All the interesting stuff in offline processing on the backend before deciding to put an item in one or more queues.

I don't think Metaweb has ever described the algorithm, but it appears to be mainly (entirely?) just Wikipedia categories. I'm not sure whether the WP category to Freebase type correspondence is manually curated or not, but occasionally there are wild mistypes. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any kind of feedback loop or learning involved, so if a list of Hungarian footballers gets tossed into in the Location queue, you end up just having to slog through them all saying, "No," "No," "No," ad infinitum.

Of course Wikipedia categories are fraught with problems of their own since the editors tend to be pretty loose about what they toss in them.

Re: SMBNH – Community

Tom Morris — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 12:16:12 -0000

A date would be a useful addition to the post (particularly since EventBrite appears to have decided to block access to the smbnh6 subdomain)

Re: New Linking Open Data group on CKAN

Tom Morris — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 19:56:17 -0000

The licensing data display is misleading. Instead of showing a red X for missing information, wouldn't it be more appropriate to show a question mark (?) or some other symbol to let them know what's going on?

Currently you have to dig through several screens to figure out that a bunch of these entries just got created without any license information at all. That's not the same thing as "not open."

Re: Why Google Bought Metaweb

Tom Morris — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 12:28:32 -0000

Google makes acquisitions based on video commercials? Wow, who knew...

p.s. You'd be a better shill if you spelled their Twitter account correctly.

Re: How Google DataWiki Differs from FluidDB

Tom Morris — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 15:48:19 -0000

"Validation" is an unusual word to use for what most people call access control.

I'd comment more on DataWiki except it says "This Google App Engine application is temporarily over its serving quota. Please try again later." How funny is that for a Google Labs app?

Re: Google Refine Gets Fusion Tables Import and More

Tom Morris — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 01:40:05 -0000

Thanks for picking up the announcement, but formally, it's really just known as Google Refine. Of course, it used to (ie formerly) be known as Freebase Gridworks.

You can find the original announcement here http://groups.google.com/gr... including discussion of some of the cool extensions as well as a call for contributors (it is open source after all).

Re: SXSW 2012 - Creating an Internet of Entities

Tom Morris — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 00:05:45 -0000

Any thoughts of including the big players like Freebase (Google) and DBpedia or the alternatives like Fluid? Perhaps another geo player or two a la Foursquare or an open data geo provider to provide a little contrast?

Re: SXSW 2012 - Creating an Internet of Entities

Tom Morris — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 00:23:10 -0000

Dinah,

POI is an abbreviation for "Point Of Interest." Geo-folk use it when they mean "place" (or more specifically when they mean a point-like place as opposed to a place with an area or shape).

Re: Freebase Fictional Job Title Topics From The Fictional Universe Domain data set | Infochimps

Tom Morris — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 13:42:59 -0000

The License section says "LicenseAdded by: Infochimps Created: 6 months ago Updated: 5 months ago"

which I'm having a hard time parsing into a meaningful license, despite being relatively familiar with many types of IP topics.

The standard Freebase license is a CC-BY with particular attribution requirements. Does this have different licensing (perhaps because you paid extra for it)?

Re: What's This I Hear About Proprietary Open Source?

Tom Morris — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 14:37:36 -0000

This view is simultaneously naive and revisionist. When you say "By definition, not by presumption, all parties in the development process agree that all of their intellectual products are both sharable and shared with the rest of the world," who's definition are you referring to? Can you provide a citation, because it doesn't sound close to any definition I've heard or read in years of involvement with open source software.

The definition of open source software is tied to licensing, not distribution, not development styles, not business practices, not a myriad of other things. Even within the narrow domain of open source licenses, there is a variety from the very restrictive (e.g. GPL v3 + Affero) to the very permissive (e.g. MIT).

I'm disappointed that RWW doesn't have a better understanding of intellectual property issues.

Re: 40 Years Celebrating Email

Tom Morris — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 20:04:32 -0000

I got my first email account in 1979 when I joined a DEC's LDP product line which had an unheard of 100% of its employees on email. I was hired to work on DEC's internal email system (the precursor to their commercial DECmail offering which I co-developed a year or two later).

I'm with Marshall -- it's frightening how little has changed in all that time. Everything's bigger and faster, but mostly it's more of the same old stuff.

BTW, that early MCIMail app was developed by DEC too. The software services organization did it as a custom application for MCI.

Re: Common Misconceptions about the Semantic Web - semanticweb.com

Tom Morris — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 15:47:48 -0000

A single original sentence in the entire article? That's an interesting view of what constitutes "fair use."

You don't even cite the author by name so we can figure out who is the "I"/"me" being continually referenced.

Re: http://127.0.0.1:5000/

Tom Morris — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 17:14:22 -0000

My Mendeley-based graph refuses to render in Chrome, giving the error:
error on line 5934 at column 33: Entity 'ouml' not defined
From looking at the SVG source, it appears that the entity is meant to represent an "ö". It gets unescaped correctly in the <text> element, but no in the <title>.

Re: Who Do We Want? Anyone But Romney… | Infochimps Blog

Tom Morris — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 15:34:34 -0000

That's a great infographic. Don't you think the creator deserves a little link love? A fuzzy 4-pt embedded text string isn't much in the way of attribution.

Re: iPhylo: Correcting OCR using hOCR in Firefox

Tom Morris — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 18:12:40 -0000

What did you use to convert the FineReader XML to hOCR?

Re: http://bryce.vc/post/15300645787

Tom Morris — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 16:02:03 -0000

If you read Tog's entire post, particularly the update, you'll see that your characterization of "befuddled engineers" is wide of the mark. I read it as much more a management and communication style issue than a simple data visualization issue.

I also agree with those commentors who point out that without the underlying data, no amount of visualization magic would produce a result. Good data, insightful analysis, and clear presentation are all necessary *together* to get a useful result.

Re: Entity Search Results

Tom Morris — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 19:14:05 -0000

It's interesting that you chose film as an example, because that's a domain in which Google has invested heavily for data entry into Freebase. It's almost certainly the strongest domain in Freebase.

In addition to all the film/actor/director/etc facts, they've also got links between their entities and the corresponding records in IMDB, Netflix, and Rotten Tomatoes (as well as some non-U.S. sites), allowing them to cross-correlated references to those sites too.

Re: http://lmbgp.tumblr.com/post/15879596896

Tom Morris — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 15:22:03 -0000

The easier you make it for people, the more likely they are to participate. Why not tack a "ping -n 3 " in front of each address so that people can just cut and paste the complete list of commands and include the email address that you want the results sent to. (Also, the first two addresses aren't currently reachable)

Re: Semantic Tech the Key to Finding Meaning in the Media

Tom Morris — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 16:07:55 -0000

I think all the content asses are here.

"A URI is a pointer into a database." WTF?"I am not able to predict..." -- but let me write about it anyway (and have RWW publish it!).

Re: iPhylo: Using Google Refine and taxonomic databases (EOL, NCBI, uBio, WORMS) to clean messy data

Tom Morris — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 09:32:10 -0000

A way to do this which preserves your reconciliation data is to "Create a column based on this column" for the Names column and just use 'value' to copy the original value to a new column named 'Original Names' or some such.

If you just want to facet on name mismatches, you can create a custom text facet on the reconciled column using the expression 'value == cell.recon.match.name' (or perhaps value.toLowercase() == cell.recon.match.name.toLowercase)

Re: Andrey Tarantsov: The third definition of open, or How I nearly picked GPL for my product, but ended up simply publishing the source with no license (for now)

Tom Morris — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 10:07:59 -0000

Wow, that's long. I'd encourage you to continue learning about intellectual property protection and your options. For example, you can license the software under whatever license you want and still reserve rights to the name, preventing other people from using it without your permission. Dual licensing (GPL + commercial) is an option if you are the sole contributor (or all contributors agree). Making money is at least as much about your business strategy as the particular license.

In my opinion, not choosing a license is the worst of all worlds. Conscientious and legal minded people are completely prevented from using your code while unscrupulous types are given a tiny opening to claim that they thought it was public domain. At least put a clear copyright notice with your name and date on the code.

Re: As Journal Boycott Grows, Elsevier Defends Its Practices

Tom Morris — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 09:35:35 -0000

Kind of ironic, given the present discussion, that Mendeley claims copyright on that list of papers curated by scientists around the world. http://www.mendeley.com/gro...

Re: As Journal Boycott Grows, Elsevier Defends Its Practices

Tom Morris — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 18:50:41 -0000

[This is intended to be a reply to Mr. Gunn's reply, but that comment has no Reply button. Sorry for the thread confusion!] One of the very first lines in that RSS feed is {copyright}Copyright 2012, Mendeley Ltd. {/copyright} [begin/end tags modified so they don't get munged].

If Mendeley isn't attempting to assert copyright on the RSS feed, then that line should be removed. Also, copyright and licensing are disjoint. Saying stuff is CC-BY (where the BY in this case is Mendeley, not the contributor) doesn't say anything about its copyright status (although if it's not copyright or Mendeley isn't the copyright holder, I'm not sure why I'd care what license they think should apply). If you're attempting to assert that the RSS feed consists of licensed data, it would be useful to include license information in the feed in addition to the copyright statement.