I can't help with the fog lights... but my standard procedure for high beams behind me is to simply "adjust" my center rear-view mirror.
After you shine the light back at them a few times, they tend to drop their brights.
Now, if only I could do something about those people who insist on driving with their hazard lights on when it's pouring down raining at night, not realizing that it (1) means that either their turn signals or brake lights are effectively disabled and (2) screws up your night vision even worse so you can't see the difficult to see lane striping (3) gives people massive headaches which can slow down their reaction time driving. If you feel unsafe driving in the rain... pull over and stop. (but make sure you pull really far over, as some other idiot might have his hazard lights off, and the person behind him won't see you pulled over, or the lane markings)
So I was at a data.gov meeting in the spring, and got to talking to someone from NARA... he said their digital archive was um... I can't remember the exact size, but I want to say it could all fit on a single disk, so given the time, 2TB or less.
Some of the government agencies have PB of storage already... we'd love to turn it over to NARA for long term archiving, but there's no procedures in place, and I don't think they currently have the infrastructure or personnel to deal with it.
(note, I'm taking a broad definition of 'record' here; I help to manage an archive of solar physics images; our discipline's data is growing at a raw, compressed rate of ~1.5TB/day due to SDO... some of the earth science groups have multiple satellites with those sorts of rates).
I'd say bring in the group from PDS (planetary data system) who built OODT, which is now an Apache project, the iRODS folks from UNC, the folks who did LOCKSS, and all of the other large-scale distributed data networks, and have them discuss the benefits / flaws in each one, and come up with a good solution. If they pass this off to yet another standard government IT vendor, it's going to blow up on them again.
You mean like OODT ( ) ? or something more like iRODS ? Both are used by various 'big data' groups (NASA, NIH, NOAA, NOAO, super computing centers) to share data across multiple sites.
As for the indexes.... well, if science.gov and data.gov are any example, they could use some work. Although, hopefully in this case, you're describing bibliographic records, so the necessary metadata is a little more standardized.
In some cases, I'd be better to just put the records out there under standardized open APIs, and let interested parties make interfaces to the stuff they're interested.
If you don't mind driving up long, windy roads and turning off your cell phone, the National Optical Astronomy Observatory has a visitor center at Kitt Peak -- they have a bunch of telescopes there, including a solar telescope, so it's possible that they might be observing if it's not too windy. (it was too windy when I went there).
My guess is that they signed some deal with the content providers that they'd pay them for streaming their movies based on the number of Netflix customers...
So, you unload the DVD customers to a separate company, and suddenly, they don't have to pay for the people who never would've been able to stream in the first place.
Of course, if this were the case, they should've said something... telling the customers that it was a move to screw over the distributors might've given them some goodwill rather than just piss people off.
Agreed... odds are, they're not running homebrewed circulation software and someone in the library community has tried to extract metrics from whatever they're using.
To test the online lessons, and see how kids react to them. (which likely wouldn't need a full 'school')
To develop and test modules of instruction for other teachers to combine the online learning Khan provides with classroom activities.
To train teachers; possibly with the teachers as the students, but with what's being described, more likely as a hands-on test of their interaction with students.
To watch effective teachers, and see what sort of lessons and recomendations they can come up with for other classroom teachers.
That last might be done better in the teacher's own classroom; at least as an initial survey, and then see how they change to deal with a more normalized environment.
Yes, in theory -- anyone else who has the GPL'd source can fork it.
Unfortunately, I can think of another case where this wasn't quite true -- ExtJS 3. For those who don't know the story, basically, they released ExtJS as LGPL, but then switched to GPLv3... and started making claims that no one else had ever heard (that you'd have to release all source code to your backend services for using their javascript toolkit, and there were questions of if users downloaded the javascript files, was that 'distribution') Due the the Sencha "interpretation" of LGPL, they then claimed the fork wasn't legal.
... and after all of that badmouthing, it seems like they might've wised up, as they now list an 'Open Source License Exemption', so those of us using BSD, artistic, or GPL2 can use it. I guess I'll have to look to see if they're still claiming you have to release your server code:
It may be less efficient than it could be, but as it's not all in one place, it doesn't mean that everyone's email breaks because their centralization efforts didn't include redundancy, so a hurricane takes out all e-mail for every person, no matter where they're located.
I'd personally be happy if someone could get this *@#!# exchange server that the agency I work for to put appropriate timestamps on messages. If someone down the hall e-mails me, it should use *his* timezone or *my* timezone... not the one where the server's based.
(and being able to send e-mail to all his staff... I wish fewer people had access to that... or that they'd at least mention which building they're in when they send the 'someone found a pair of glasses in the parking lot').
But even with consolidation, our group still runs our own mail server, because we have operational stuff running through it, and we can't let some remote outage or a misbehaving spam filter result in something detrimental, like the loss of millions of dollars of hardware. We all have 'official' accounts on the main system that we're required to use on business cards and such, but it's not the only system in use at our agency.
There are a few Android apps that get SDO and other space weather data, but I don't know which ones of those will generate alerts rather than you have to go and actively look at them.
(disclaimer : I work for the Solar Data Analysis Center)
Set up a cron job that calls it at whatever period, and mails it to you
I use the following script, and run it from cron for some monitoring purposes. (note, this *will* light up the little green 'camera is on' indicator) You then just need to e-mail 'em.
Agreed on the bigger... but I want even larger than that. I absolutely *loathe* the LED message signs that it seems every church / school / bank / shopping center has these days.
But I want to put something in front of our Town Hall that we can change the messages on easily, and looks a little classier than the old school swap out the letters ones... An indoor large sign was actually one of their first products (mentioned in a Economist article from 2000)
And even if you collect it yourself, if you're at an educational institution, you likely have to comply with IRB (institutional review board) rules if it involves people.
They often don't like you looking for certain types of patterns, or using the data in a way that might harm the people you're studying.
There's medical privacy rules, general privacy rules, etc. And even when not dealing with people, there's lots of moral issues in how you use the data. (and there's moral issues in sharing data -- some groups don't want to reveal info about endangered special location in too much detail, as it helps poachers.... but if you have a dataset that resulted in the loss of lives to collect (maybe not intentionally), if you share it, it means people don't have to repeat the process to collect it.)
Of course we're still coping with the issues of providing proper credit & attribution for data, and standards for publishing data so that it can be re-used. I've been to lots of meetings in the last year that covered those sorts of issues -- DCC, BRDI, RDAP, DataCite, etc.
Of course, they just managed to link to *someone*... did they then ask the person to confirm if they were correct?
I have a LinkedIn page, but without a picture. My twin brother on the other hand, uses Facebook, while I don't. (I'm rather sensitive about my info being out there, after having a stalker during undergrad) So, it's entirely possible that they would've gotten information from my face... but unlikely that it'd have been my information
In this case, the error might still lead them to me, as my brother would recognize me if they showed him the picture... but how many other incorrect matches might there have been? Just getting *a* match is not the same as getting the *correct* match.
I remember failing spelling tests in the 5th grade in Montgomery, Alabama, as I couldn't understand what the teacher was actually saying.
(Because she had an Alabama accent, and I had only spent time up 'til then from DC and northward on the east coast, or in Europe on military bases.)
Now, by the time you get to college, you need to start dealing with learning accents (although, I admit again, that there was a teacher whose class made much more sense once I figured out that 'mayored' was 'measured' and I was able to decode his accent), but there were some TAs (in engineering for the most part) that had difficulty understanding what the students were asking, and in teaching us as we couldn't understand them.
Please do not *ever* recommend ND for anything of this nature again.
Think about it -- research builds upon other research. That's the whole point of publishing research.
We *want* people to build on the work. ND *specifically* tells people 'you're not allowed to do *anything* with my research'. SA's another messy one, as it sets a restriction on derivatives.
The best thing authors should do is to make sure that they don't lose their rights to the document, so that they can re-distribute the paper, no matter what stupidity the journal publishers do. And for that, see Creative Common's Scholar's Copyright Project: http://sciencecommons.org/projects/publishing/
Personally, I don't open up attachments unless I've had some sort of out-of-band confirmation from the sender, or it's someone that I communicate regularly with.
With a fax to e-mail service, I can be relatively certain that there's no chance of it being some sort of infected file attachment, although there's still a chance of it being a spoofed e-mail from the service should there be an exploit in the file format they use. With boring old faxes, I have *no* concern about viruses... spam, yes, but not viruses.
And for those who haven't seen the email messages that network connected fax machines generate... you'll be amazed that anyone would open them at all. They scream 'this is spam or a virus'... I'd be more likely to open an attachment sent with no email body, and the subject 'Fw: Open this word document/there is no virus' or 'Kindly see attached file of POWER BALL AWARD and contact us for your claim thank you'.
Thanks... it keeps me from having to look at the coondoggie / NetworkWorld blog spam with lots of self-referrential links, and rarely actually links to their source.
I got to the second page, when I saw they made a claim:
Cisco's website, www.ciso.com, acted as a gateway to both publicly available information...
Did they even bother proof-reading it if they can't get the name of the company's domain name correct? This sort of sloppy work makes me wonder if the lawyers are incompetent, or if this is a joke.
It's friday, so I get into work early, before lunch even. The phone rings. Shit!
I turn the page on the excuse sheet. "SOLAR FLARES" stares out at me. I'd better read up on that. Two minutes later I'm ready to answer the phone.
"Hello?" I say.
"WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN, I'VE BEEN TRYING TO GET YOU ALL MORNING?!"
I hate it when they shout at me early in the morning. It always puts me in a bad mood. You know what I mean.
"Ah, yes. Well, there's been some solar activity this morning, it always disrupts electronics..." I say, sweet as a sugar pie.
"Huh? But I could get through to my friends?!"
"Yes, that's entirely possible, solar activity is very unpredictable in it's effects. Why last week, we had some files just dissappear from a guys account while he was working on it!"
"Really?"
"Straight Up! Hey, do you want me to check your account?"
"Yes please, I've got some important stuff in there!"
"Ok, what's your username..."
He tells me. Honestly, it's like shooting a fish in a barrel. Twice. With an Elephant Gun. At point blank range. In the head.
Unfortunately, the excuse doesn't work when your boss also reads BOFH, is a solar physicist, and the project scientist for three the satellites mentioned in these articles.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't help with the fog lights ... but my standard procedure for high beams behind me is to simply "adjust" my center rear-view mirror.
After you shine the light back at them a few times, they tend to drop their brights.
Now, if only I could do something about those people who insist on driving with their hazard lights on when it's pouring down raining at night, not realizing that it (1) means that either their turn signals or brake lights are effectively disabled and (2) screws up your night vision even worse so you can't see the difficult to see lane striping (3) gives people massive headaches which can slow down their reaction time driving. If you feel unsafe driving in the rain ... pull over and stop. (but make sure you pull really far over, as some other idiot might have his hazard lights off, and the person behind him won't see you pulled over, or the lane markings)
So I was at a data.gov meeting in the spring, and got to talking to someone from NARA ... he said their digital archive was um ... I can't remember the exact size, but I want to say it could all fit on a single disk, so given the time, 2TB or less.
Some of the government agencies have PB of storage already ... we'd love to turn it over to NARA for long term archiving, but there's no procedures in place, and I don't think they currently have the infrastructure or personnel to deal with it.
(note, I'm taking a broad definition of 'record' here; I help to manage an archive of solar physics images; our discipline's data is growing at a raw, compressed rate of ~1.5TB/day due to SDO ... some of the earth science groups have multiple satellites with those sorts of rates).
I'd say bring in the group from PDS (planetary data system) who built OODT, which is now an Apache project, the iRODS folks from UNC, the folks who did LOCKSS, and all of the other large-scale distributed data networks, and have them discuss the benefits / flaws in each one, and come up with a good solution. If they pass this off to yet another standard government IT vendor, it's going to blow up on them again.
You mean like OODT ( ) ? or something more like iRODS ? Both are used by various 'big data' groups (NASA, NIH, NOAA, NOAO, super computing centers) to share data across multiple sites.
As for the indexes .... well, if science.gov and data.gov are any example, they could use some work. Although, hopefully in this case, you're describing bibliographic records, so the necessary metadata is a little more standardized.
In some cases, I'd be better to just put the records out there under standardized open APIs, and let interested parties make interfaces to the stuff they're interested.
If you don't mind driving up long, windy roads and turning off your cell phone, the National Optical Astronomy Observatory has a visitor center at Kitt Peak -- they have a bunch of telescopes there, including a solar telescope, so it's possible that they might be observing if it's not too windy. (it was too windy when I went there).
http://www.noao.edu/outreach/kpoutreach.html
My guess is that they signed some deal with the content providers that they'd pay them for streaming their movies based on the number of Netflix customers ...
So, you unload the DVD customers to a separate company, and suddenly, they don't have to pay for the people who never would've been able to stream in the first place.
Of course, if this were the case, they should've said something ... telling the customers that it was a move to screw over the distributors might've given them some goodwill rather than just piss people off.
Oh, sure, discriminate against the Italians.
um ... I'd make a hand gesture now, but it's hard to do while typing. It's much easier over video conferences.
Agreed ... odds are, they're not running homebrewed circulation software and someone in the library community has tried to extract metrics from whatever they're using.
It's possible that the 'starter pistol' trick might work:
Reused thousands of times?
If it's quiet, it could be silent velcro!
A few posible reasons:
That last might be done better in the teacher's own classroom; at least as an initial survey, and then see how they change to deal with a more normalized environment.
Yes, in theory -- anyone else who has the GPL'd source can fork it.
Unfortunately, I can think of another case where this wasn't quite true -- ExtJS 3. For those who don't know the story, basically, they released ExtJS as LGPL, but then switched to GPLv3 ... and started making claims that no one else had ever heard (that you'd have to release all source code to your backend services for using their javascript toolkit, and there were questions of if users downloaded the javascript files, was that 'distribution') Due the the Sencha "interpretation" of LGPL, they then claimed the fork wasn't legal.
For more background:
... and after all of that badmouthing, it seems like they might've wised up, as they now list an 'Open Source License Exemption', so those of us using BSD, artistic, or GPL2 can use it. I guess I'll have to look to see if they're still claiming you have to release your server code:
It may be less efficient than it could be, but as it's not all in one place, it doesn't mean that everyone's email breaks because their centralization efforts didn't include redundancy, so a hurricane takes out all e-mail for every person, no matter where they're located.
I'd personally be happy if someone could get this *@#!# exchange server that the agency I work for to put appropriate timestamps on messages. If someone down the hall e-mails me, it should use *his* timezone or *my* timezone ... not the one where the server's based.
(and being able to send e-mail to all his staff ... I wish fewer people had access to that ... or that they'd at least mention which building they're in when they send the 'someone found a pair of glasses in the parking lot').
But even with consolidation, our group still runs our own mail server, because we have operational stuff running through it, and we can't let some remote outage or a misbehaving spam filter result in something detrimental, like the loss of millions of dollars of hardware. We all have 'official' accounts on the main system that we're required to use on business cards and such, but it's not the only system in use at our agency.
The free NASA "3D Sun" iphone app will give notices of CMEs if you allow it:
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2010/17feb_3dsun/
There are a few Android apps that get SDO and other space weather data, but I don't know which ones of those will generate alerts rather than you have to go and actively look at them.
(disclaimer : I work for the Solar Data Analysis Center)
I assume that would be WWV :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWV_(radio_station)
And The Onion was sure they'd have all merged to just form one giant corporation by now:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/just-six-corporations-remain,551/
As it'd be less obvious to someone that you're putting on something to snap pictures:
I use the following script, and run it from cron for some monitoring purposes. (note, this *will* light up the little green 'camera is on' indicator) You then just need to e-mail 'em.
Agreed on the bigger ... but I want even larger than that. I absolutely *loathe* the LED message signs that it seems every church / school / bank / shopping center has these days.
But I want to put something in front of our Town Hall that we can change the messages on easily, and looks a little classier than the old school swap out the letters ones ... An indoor large sign was actually one of their first products (mentioned in a Economist article from 2000)
And even if you collect it yourself, if you're at an educational institution, you likely have to comply with IRB (institutional review board) rules if it involves people.
They often don't like you looking for certain types of patterns, or using the data in a way that might harm the people you're studying.
There's medical privacy rules, general privacy rules, etc. And even when not dealing with people, there's lots of moral issues in how you use the data. (and there's moral issues in sharing data -- some groups don't want to reveal info about endangered special location in too much detail, as it helps poachers. ... but if you have a dataset that resulted in the loss of lives to collect (maybe not intentionally), if you share it, it means people don't have to repeat the process to collect it.)
Of course we're still coping with the issues of providing proper credit & attribution for data, and standards for publishing data so that it can be re-used. I've been to lots of meetings in the last year that covered those sorts of issues -- DCC, BRDI, RDAP, DataCite, etc.
Of course, they just managed to link to *someone* ... did they then ask the person to confirm if they were correct?
I have a LinkedIn page, but without a picture. My twin brother on the other hand, uses Facebook, while I don't. (I'm rather sensitive about my info being out there, after having a stalker during undergrad) So, it's entirely possible that they would've gotten information from my face ... but unlikely that it'd have been my information
In this case, the error might still lead them to me, as my brother would recognize me if they showed him the picture ... but how many other incorrect matches might there have been? Just getting *a* match is not the same as getting the *correct* match.
I'm all for it.
I remember failing spelling tests in the 5th grade in Montgomery, Alabama, as I couldn't understand what the teacher was actually saying.
(Because she had an Alabama accent, and I had only spent time up 'til then from DC and northward on the east coast, or in Europe on military bases.)
Now, by the time you get to college, you need to start dealing with learning accents (although, I admit again, that there was a teacher whose class made much more sense once I figured out that 'mayored' was 'measured' and I was able to decode his accent), but there were some TAs (in engineering for the most part) that had difficulty understanding what the students were asking, and in teaching us as we couldn't understand them.
Please do not *ever* recommend ND for anything of this nature again.
Think about it -- research builds upon other research. That's the whole point of publishing research.
We *want* people to build on the work. ND *specifically* tells people 'you're not allowed to do *anything* with my research'. SA's another messy one, as it sets a restriction on derivatives.
The best thing authors should do is to make sure that they don't lose their rights to the document, so that they can re-distribute the paper, no matter what stupidity the journal publishers do. And for that, see Creative Common's Scholar's Copyright Project:
http://sciencecommons.org/projects/publishing/
Personally, I don't open up attachments unless I've had some sort of out-of-band confirmation from the sender, or it's someone that I communicate regularly with.
With a fax to e-mail service, I can be relatively certain that there's no chance of it being some sort of infected file attachment, although there's still a chance of it being a spoofed e-mail from the service should there be an exploit in the file format they use. With boring old faxes, I have *no* concern about viruses ... spam, yes, but not viruses.
And for those who haven't seen the email messages that network connected fax machines generate ... you'll be amazed that anyone would open them at all. They scream 'this is spam or a virus' ... I'd be more likely to open an attachment sent with no email body, and the subject 'Fw: Open this word document/there is no virus' or 'Kindly see attached file of POWER BALL AWARD and contact us for your claim thank you'.
Thanks ... it keeps me from having to look at the coondoggie / NetworkWorld blog spam with lots of self-referrential links, and rarely actually links to their source.
I got to the second page, when I saw they made a claim:
Did they even bother proof-reading it if they can't get the name of the company's domain name correct? This sort of sloppy work makes me wonder if the lawyers are incompetent, or if this is a joke.
Technically, yes, it was:
Unfortunately, the excuse doesn't work when your boss also reads BOFH, is a solar physicist, and the project scientist for three the satellites mentioned in these articles.