Jackson quotes Tim Berners-Lee

“When you look at putting government data on the Web, one of the concerns is … to not just put it out there on Excel files on Data.gov,” he said. “You should put these things in” the Resource Description Framework.

and later describes a project at RPI to republish information from data.gov in RDF leaded by another UMBC alumnus, Li Ding.

“Our goal is to make the whole thing shareable and replicable for others to re-use,” said project researcher Li Ding. By rendering data into RDF, it can be more easily interposed with other sets of data to create entirely new datasets and visualizations, Ding said. He showed a Google Map-based graphic that interposed RDF-versions of two different data sources from the Environmental Protection Agency, originally rendered in CSV files.

AP CS no Longer Counts for High School Graduation in Georgia (for now)

“Up until September, Georgia and Texas were the (only) two states in the US that accepted a computer science course as fulfilling high school graduation requirements. In Texas, the Advanced Placement Computer Science (AP CS) course fulfilled a mathematics requirement. In Georgia, it fulfilled a fourth science course requirement. As of October, however, Georgia has rescinded that decision. … ”

I wonder how other countries treat computing and informatics in primary and secondary education.

“Designed to be simple and useful, the Dashboard summarizes data for each product that you use (when signed in to your account) and provides you direct links to control your personal settings. Today, the Dashboard covers more than 20 products and services, including Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Web History, Orkut, YouTube, Picasa, Talk, Reader, Alerts, Latitude and many more. The scale and level of detail of the Dashboard is unprecedented, and we’re delighted to be the first Internet company to offer this — and we hope it will become the standard.”

This is a good move on Google’s part. But while there’s a lot of information included, it’s not everything that Google knows about you — e.g., data in cookies, click throughs data from search results and information from companies it’s acquired, like Doublclick. Still, it is a big step in a positive direction.

Takoma Park, MD used the Scantegrity system for its municipal election after testing it in a mock election last April. Technology Review has a story, First Test for Election Cryptography, that quotes Anne Sergeant, the chair of the Takoma Park board of elections

“Before trying Scantegrity in an official election, the city held a mock vote in April to work out kinks in the system. In that test, she says, about 30 percent of participants went home and used the system to verify their votes. Sergeant says that Scantegrity representatives talked extensively with voters and election officials after the April test and have improved their system accordingly. “I hope we can provide an experience where people walk away and say, ‘That was awesome,’” she says. “It’s a goal to which we aspire.”

The Scantegrity system was created by a group of universities, including UMBC. A voter uses a paper ballot marked with invisible ink, which is exposed with a special marker. That marker reveals a code, which the voter can then use to check online whether their vote was tabulated correctly.

Ben Adida has been auditing the election and documenting the process on his blog.

See also the ComputerWorld story, E-voting system lets voters verify their ballots are counted, and audio report on WAMU.

Now the Times is also using RDF to publish some of information as linked open data. Yesterday the Times announced the publication of an LOD collection covering about 5,000 people at http://data.nytimes.com/ under under a Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution License and plan to put their full collection of 30K topics online soon.

“Over the last several months we have manually mapped more than 5,000 person name subject headings onto Freebase and DBPedia. And today we are pleased to announce the launch of http://data.nytimes.com and the release of these 5,000 person name subject headings as Linked Open Data.
…
Over the next several months, we plan to expand http://data.nytimes.com to include each of the nearly 30,000 subject headings we use to power Times Topics pages, a collection that includes locations, organizations and descriptors in addition to person names.”

“To mark the 40th anniversary of the Internet, DARPA has announced the DARPA Network Challenge, a competition that will explore the role the Internet and social networking plays in the timely communication, wide area team-building and urgent mobilization required to solve broad scope, time-critical problems.

The challenge is to be the first to submit the locations of ten moored, 8 foot, red weather balloons located at ten fixed locations in the continental United States. Balloons will be in readily accessible locations and visible from nearby roadways.”

According to the rules, the balloons will be on display from 10:00AM to 4:00PM on Saturday, 5 December 2009. A prize of $40,000 will be awarded to the first participant to submit the latitude and longitude of all ten weather balloons within the contest period, which ends on 14 December 2009.

“Today W3C announces a new version of a standard for representing knowledge on the Web. OWL 2, part of W3C’s Semantic Web toolkit, allows people to capture their knowledge about a particular domain (say, energy or medicine) and then use tools to manage information, search through it, and learn more from it. Furthermore, as an open standard based on Web technology, it lowers the cost of merging knowledge from multiple domains.”

The news today is that Wolfram|Alpha has released an API, as noted in their blog:

“The API allows your application to interact with Wolfram|Alpha much like you do on the web—you send a web request with the same query string you would type into Wolfram|Alpha’s query box and you get back the same computed results. It’s just that both are in a form your application can understand. There are plenty of ways to tweak and control the results, as well.”

The pricing plan runs from $60/month for 1000 (6 cents a query) queries to $220K for up to 10M queries/month (2.2 cents a query). programming language bindings are available for Java, PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby and .NET.

Their original web interface remains free, but the TOS specifies that it “may be used only by a human being using a conventional web browser to manually enter queries one at a time.”

Well, now they have — in the October issue of the First Monday, “one of the first openly accessible, peer–reviewed journals on the Internet”.

Carter Jernigan and Behram F.T. Mistree, Gaydar: Facebook friendships expose sexual orientation, First Monday, v14, n10, October 2009.

The paper has a lot of detail on the methodology for collecting the data and how it was analyzed. Here’s the abstract.

“Public information about one’s coworkers, friends, family, and acquaintances, as well as one’s associations with them, implicitly reveals private information. Social networking Web sites, e–mail, instant messaging, telephone, and VoIP are all technologies steeped in network data — data relating one person to another. Network data shifts the locus of information control away from individuals, as the individual’s traditional and absolute discretion is replaced by that of his social network. Our research demonstrates a method for accurately predicting the sexual orientation of Facebook users by analyzing friendship associations. After analyzing 4,080 Facebook profiles from the MIT network, we determined that the percentage of a given user’s friends who self–identify as gay male is strongly correlated with the sexual orientation of that user, and we developed a logistic regression classifier with strong predictive power. Although we studied Facebook friendship ties, network data is pervasive in the broader context of computer–mediated communication, raising significant privacy issues for communication technologies to which there are no neat solutions.”

As we had previously noted, this datamining exercise only accesses information that Facebook users explicitly choose to make public. The authors note that their analysis “relies on public self–identification of same–gender interest in Facebook profiles as a sentinel value for LGB identity”. The privacy vulnerability is that the default setting for a Facebook account is that friendship relations are public and you can not control the privacy settings of your friends. So if your leave your friend list public and many of your Facebook friends open up their profiles, it may be possible to draw reasonable inferences about your age, gender, political leanings, sexual preferences and other attributes.