Harold Boley (of RuleML fame) has published some Python slides. Python is a wonderful language and I’m very happy to see that Harold is jumping on it!

Harold Boley (of RuleML fame) has published some Python slides. Python is a wonderful language and I’m very happy to see that Harold is jumping on it!

Here’s an interesting conference on Web Technologies, applications and services, in Calgary (horses anyone?).

Thanks to geomblog I found out there is such a thing as daily comics about working on a Ph.D. It is pretty funny though I was so among the lucky ones when I wrote my Ph.D.: I was very naïve.

What I want to see is a follow-up where the Ph.D. student actually gets a job!

I read somewhere last night that according to a study, only 15% of Ph.D.s in science working in Québec (Canada) are on a professorship (Canada). It can be either a good or a bad thing. As for myself, after a got my Ph.D., I never could find a decent job offer in Québec that wasn’t a professorship. I know few jobs that are quite good outside academia, but I certainly don’t know many. Where are all those Ph.D.s and are they happy?

Here’s a beautiful paper on Semantic Web Ontologies. The author makes very well the point that most people have gotten by now: ontologies can only have a very limited appeal outside laboratories. If you can include marriage or terrorist in an ontology, then you can’t really do very much outside a very limited scope.

In fact, getting to write ontologies for other people is very much similar to controlling language as in the famous novel 1984 because unlike natural language, ontologies are very limited semantically.

Are the people I’m talking about terrorists or freedom fighters? What’s the definition of patriot? What’s the definition of marriage? Just defining these kinds of ontologies when you’re talking about these kinds of political questions rather than about part numbers; this becomes a political statement. People get killed over less than this. These are places where ontologies are not going to work.

NSERC is the main funding body for research in science and engineering in Canada. It has an interesting policy on IP:

NSERC expects that any IP resulting from research it funds wholly or in part will be owned by the university or the inventor, according to university policy. Access to IP should be accorded to other sponsors in recognition of, and in proportion to, the sponsor’s contribution to the collaboration.

Alas, I must say that I violated this rule, against my will, in the past, but I will try harder to stick by it from now on.

The interesting question here is whether things like assigning copyright to a publisher are in violation of the funding body’s rules? Probably.

Academia really needs to get its act together with respect to IP as I’m not the only one who plays with grey areas…

Michael has some advice for travellers, it is worth checking it out!

Make sure you can carry all luggage onboard, especially on long flights. It makes it less likely that you’ll miss connections, you won’t lose your luggage, and you’re not lugging huge quantities of stuff around.