Hello, I am Robert G. Male. Welcome to TechStop™. Here you will find links that I think are of interest. Furthermore these are links that I want to keep track of because they have given me either ideas or some other form of inspiration for my writing. Links are listed in order lowest to highest both in the date they are given and the order in which they appear (meaning: read them from the bottom up for a certain day's list). Some of these sites may require you to sign up for free. Without further ado, the links...

April 2008.

April 30, 2008

• The cloud infrastructure is changing everything it seems, and data is the next thing to be transformed. More importantly this highly technical article talks about the fundamental shifts that are going on in the way information is gathered, put to use, and who owns or controls it. The division between the data that will have to be shared and that which must be kept kept internalised to businesses and people is a muddled mess unlikely to be untangled even though it needs to be.

• This interesting look at the current change in the way that news is created and distributed brings up interesting questions about the nature of new and knowledge. The synthesis of data is also brought to mind as news is nothing but the most current information on what is going on, and is maybe more importantly the jumping board of learning about something now only new but now in the eye and the minds of the public. {Ref#2 - Th}

• This is a look at the difficulties of gathering data from disparate sources in particular the legal minefield. What it also illustrates is the change that could be made, the progress, and the knowledge that could be gained from a freer distribution of data. It's hard to gauge what could be learned until it happens.

• This article about a computer program that gathers data and writes books on a given subject gives a look at one of the advances that is very important to the creation of digital assistants even while it focuses on a system that writes educational books, helps teach languages, and looks albeit academically (or not) at creating fiction books and videos. {Ref#1 - CB: TGaSS}

• This is a commercial (more mundane but still interesting) use of related technology to the article below. This time the use involves recognising images to pull up data on them. The applications of this are varied and spread across the legal (and non-legal) spectrum.

• Technology brings one more way to track down people to the table. In the constant battle against crime more and more developments make it harder and harder to hide from the law. Now pictures and videos could be the downfall of a criminal, especially with the move toward exceedingly more coverage of the world.

• This look at the politics of going green is a good illustration of the difficulties, nuances, and multi-directional pull of priorities and ideals at odds even when the point of discussion and the final results are on the side of a good thing and the different parties essentially agree on the overall picture, just not the details.

• Not a lot of information directly here, and the lack of online sources are aggravating, but the idea itself is interesting. The requirement of signatories as well as broken and disseminated key fragments is something to explore, especially in Spies, Spooks, and Hackers™.

• This builds upon the social aspect of the page below with implications in a political sense of both the government/bureaucratic kind and the politics of inter-personal relationships. It also leads in to the page above. Of note here is the nature of PGP encryption as it involves the possibility of introducing trusted people along the web of a network.

• This is another implement and thus one of the building blocks of the emerging semantic web, which is likely to see several separate iterations before it becomes something more integrated, something yet to happen with non-semantic search. This is also related to the coding, impact, and connotations of current social networks. To better understand FOAF try this FAQ

• The implication that an algorithm or other mechanical derivation might limit the ability of people to express themselves sounds rather discriminatory at the minimum. At the same time the automation of filtering out gibberish sounds helpful. The idea of a set threshold levels allowing a user to filter out only stupidity up to a certain point could be interesting. Rather than limitation or discrimination a hierarchy that one could ascribe themself to certain levels and the communities that such divisions might create merits some thought.

April 23, 2008

April 16, 2008

April 09, 2008

April 02, 2008

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