Blog Notes-May 2011

If you follow someone else’s way, you are not going to realize your potential.

1. Data Visualization - great example Hans Rosling and his T200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes from The Joy of Stats by BBC Four. http://www.gapminder.org/ is Hans Rosling's website with more videos, data, and tools for digging into data with statistics and visualization. Very creative!
2. Overcommitted? Purge Your Schedule Like a Dirty Fridge - nothing like the end of a semester to feel overcommitted! Great concept to purge your schedule, but also consider your key values and and long-term committments!
3. Passwords are the topic of the day!
   • Password guessing
   • Weak passwords from Dec 2010
4. One Mans Blog Security category
5. File conversion hasn't been a problem for a long, long time. But recently, I've received several MAC numbers files. The easiest conversion is to have the creator export an XLS file. An online alternative is Zamzar, conversion types listed in a table: documents, images, music, video, e-book, compressed, and CAD. I tested .numbers to .xls -- worked great. http://www.zamzar.com/
6. What is a DOI? The Digital Object Identifier System is used to identify digital content objects. DOI names are used to provide current information to locate where the object can be found on the Internet. The DOI is a persistent identification mechanism. Although the location, name, information, metadata, etc may change over time, the DOI name will not change and can be used to find the object. The DOI System is an ISO International Standard.
   • I think that this could be quite useful for class materials and data.
   • Clip from April 2011 DOI News DOI System and Linked Data
     • Digital Object Identifiers assigned by CrossRef (http://www.crossref.org) are now enabled for use in linked data applications. The term "linked data" describes a set of best practices for exposing data in machine-readable form using the standard HTTP web protocol. These best practices support the development of tools to link and make use of data from multiple web sources without the need to deal with many different proprietary and incompatible application programming interfaces (APIs).
     • A significant advantage of applying Linked Data principles and technologies to DOI-registered material is that it is 'data worth linking to': it is curated, value-added, data, which is managed, corrected, updated and consistently maintained by Registration Agencies. It is also persistent, so avoiding 'bit-rot'. The DOI web proxy (http://dx.doi.org) is now enabled to support content negotiation for DOI names. In the early days of the web, human beings were following most URLs, and it made sense that the DOI web proxy only resolved CrossRef DOI names to human-readable web pages.
     • This announcement by CrossRef is part of improvements the International DOI Foundation is continuing to make to facilitate more sophisticated uses of a DOI name beyond single redirection to a human-readable landing page, including Linked Data (machine-readable metadata in the form of RDF); delivery of information in other formats (XML, etc.); and multiple typing (multiple URLs, other non-URL types to express semantic relationships, etc. using mapping technologies of the Vocabulary Mapping Framework (VMF). We will be making further announcements on some of these later this year.
7. Scientific research published online http://www.scirp.org/Index.aspx Academic publisher of open access journals
8. The Dead Grandmother-Exam Syndrome and the Potential Downfall Of American Society by Mike Adams of Eastern Connecticut State University. The title explains the premise, but the article include data and statistics! The basic problem can be stated very simply: A student's grandmother is far more likely to die suddenly just before the student takes an exam, than at any other time of year.
9. Great security/password cartoon at Unisys Security
10. Unisys Security Index reports on big jump in Americans concern with online and offline security.

• Details from the Security Index survey follow and although not unexpected, it is interesting to observe the why be concerned? notes.