The Longest Now

[http://exp.lore.com/post/45209117742/an-analysis-of-a-rock-sample-collected-by-nasas Summary via exp.lore]

[http://cosmiclog.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/01/15/16527936-mars-curiosity-rover-team-looks-back-at-flower-looks-ahead-to-drilling?lite Coverage by NBC]

a periodic print-spool ur-manifesto

A year after its announcement as the first new Wikimedia project since 2006, Wikidata has now begun to serve the over 280 language versions of Wikipedia as a common source of structured data that can be used in more than 25 million articles of the free encyclopedia.

By providing Wikipedia editors with a central venue for their efforts to collect and vet such data, Wikidata leads to a higher level of consistency and quality in Wikipedia articles across the many language editions of the encyclopedia. Beyond Wikipedia, Wikidata’s universal, machine-readable knowledge database will be freely reusable by anyone, enabling numerous external applications.

”Wikidata is a powerful tool for keeping information in Wikipedia current across all language versions. Before Wikidata, Wikipedians needed to manually update hundreds of Wikipedia language versions every time a famous person died or a country’s leader changed. With Wikidata, such new information, entered once, will automatically appear across all Wikipedia language versions. That makes life easier for editors and makes it easier for Wikipedia to stay current.” – Sue Gardner

The development of Wikidata began in March 2012, led by Wikimedia Deutschland, the German chapter of the Wikimedia movement. Since Wikidata.org went live on October 30, a growing community of around 3,000 active contributors started building its database of ‘items’ (e.g. things, people or concepts), first by collecting topics that are already the subject of Wikipedia articles in several languages. An item’s central page on Wikidata replaces the complex web of language links which previously connected these articles about the same topic in different Wikipedia versions. Wikidata’s collection of these items now numbers over 10 million. The community also began to enrich Wikidata’s database with factual statements about these topics (data like the mayor of a city, the ISBN of a book, the languages spoken in a country, etc.). This information has now become available for use on Wikipedia itself.

“It is the goal of Wikidata to collect the world’s complex knowledge in a structured manner so that anybody can benefit from it.  Whether that’s readers of Wikipedia who are able to be up to date about certain facts or engineers who can use this data to create new products that improve the way we access knowledge.” – Denny Vrandečić, Wikidata project lead

The next phase of Wikidata will allow for the automatic creation of lists and charts based on the data in Wikidata. Wikimedia Deutschland will continue to support the project with an engineering team that is dedicated to Wikidata’s second year of development and maintenance.

Wikidata is operated by the Wikimedia Foundation and its fact database is published under a Creative Commons 0 public domain dedication. Funding of Wikidata’s initial development was provided by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence [AI]², the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and Google, Inc.

More information available here:

• Project homepage
• Example of an “item” page
• Description of the project
• 
  

Volunteers can get involved with Wikidata in many ways.  Some of the first applications demonstrating the potential of Wikidata applications, and as a platform:

• The simia “tree of life” drawn from relations among biological species in Wikidata’s database
• “GeneaWiki” generates a graph showing a person’s family relations as recorded in Wikidata.  See for example: the Bach family

With a beautiful backstory.

ᔥᔥ FAFP

See John Baez’s Open Questions in Physics.

We haven’t resolved systemic biases yet, but this is one sign of the value of focusing on neutrality and a common goal:

Being ‘Wikipedian’ trumps party affiliation, study finds

The study results were discussed among researchers back in November.
ᔥ the L.A.Times

The various threads around Hypothes.is, the Open Annotation spec, and the campus-wide annotation projects at MIT, Yale, and Harvard are starting to converge. It’s nice to see a future pillar of the global web take shape – with no less friction but a more diverse audience than gathered to create the early Internet specs.

I’m at the Convergence Workshop at Harvard on the topic today, and will be at the iAnnotate workshop in San Francisco in 3 weeks. Consolidating notes on a “Hypothesis XXX” hackpad. [Btw: We dearly need a fully open hackpad equivalent with more reliable uptime than piratepad et al.! I default to HP when I have a doc that needs to sustain heavy editing and be guaranteed available during a narrow window of time at a conference… but I would much rather use a Wikimedia or similarly hosted service, with a more explicit guarantee of ongoing availability, at no cost ever.]

Sue Gardner, the Wikimedia Foundation’s amazing Executive Director, recently announced plans to step down later this year, and has launched a search for her successor. She is one of the most insightful and collaborative voices in the movement, and a good friend. And she has led some of our most ambitious organizational and financial shifts: our focus on individual fundraising, the transition to a community-led funds dissemination process, and a growing attention to grantmaking. It is hard to imagine the Foundation without her…!!

We have been discussing this internally among the Board for a month now; and the transition planned is gradual: the search is expected to take til the end of this year. But I am still getting used to the idea; it has been a long and wonderful road we have travelled during her tenure. We are also reaching the end of our first round of long-term planning, so this year and next will be a good time for a new ED to help shape the Foundation’s future and how we frame our work.

A rundown of outside news coverage:

SinIdentidades Tumblr.

↬ sebastian ᔥ M. Popova

There’s a certain quality to discovery, exploration, and discussion of priceless things.
(more…)

try and grok science
try and make a gun
try Sheldrake’s homing dove thought experiments

For dessert, some fraud:
listed, retracted, pharmed, 11-jigen (x6),
chilled(snapshot, comments).

Mystery Hunt 2013 pitted teams against Enigma Valley to rescue the Hunt coins from a vault.

As usual, it was full of some of the best puzzle ideas in the world.   (more…)

The National Criminal Justice Commission Act (NCJCA) Spearheaded by Jim Webb (D-VA) is a first step towards high-level reform of our benchmarks for criminal justice – what is considerd acceptable, and what our justice system should be for in the first place. Most observers agree the system is broken in fundamental ways. It’s not clear to me why a review is controversial; but this act got only 57/100 votes in the Senate in 2011 and was filibustered. (The bill was Tracked over its history by the BulletPath Legislation Channel.)

Max Kennerly, one of the more level-headed critics of Aaron’s legal prosecution last year and this, suggests supporting the NCJCA this term. It was already very close to being passed.

Want to do something right now? Call up your Senators and Representative and tell them you’d like them to start moving again on the National Criminal Justice Commission Act. It failed in the Senate in late 2011, but it’s still bouncing around. Get it on Congress’ radar again.

ᔥ Max’s Blog

Remembering his own past correspondence with Aaron:

On hearing of his death Babbage (G.F.) reviewed a number of e-mails he exchanged with Mr Swartz in 2000-01. The boy was in his mid-teens but his prose, taut and to the point, was as mature as his precocious mind. He wanted to know where your correspondent obtained book data for a price-comparison site. He even suggested a collaboration, regretfully unconsummated, that later became the nucleus of the Open Library.

This is the project with which Aaron became a finalist in the ArsDigita Prize contest when he was 13:

Swartz’s contending creation was The Info Network (www.theinfo.org), an ever-growing encyclopedia-like site filled with “a vast repository of human knowledge” focused on content — real information for people to use, as he calls it.

The site works like this: Anyone can submit information about what they know in a totally open environment, which means they can add to the information freely.

“In the style of the popular GNU/Linux operating system,”Swartz added.

Users are allowed to edit another’s submission, but the program will always copy any original material so as not to permanently overwrite any copy.

Swartz’ online encyclopedia include sections on art, with subsections on rubber stamping and square dancing; a section on science, with subsections on treating burns and finding out what a palindrome is; and a chapter on life, with subsections on genealogy and religion.

It was two summers ago that Swartz starting toying with the idea of building such a site.

“I spent my days typing away at the keyboard, bringing my ideas into action,” he said.

Swartz said the kicker was when he realized (although it may have been easy for him) that it was really hard for people to post information online. “You have to set up a server, find a place to host it, learn HTML, or learn to use a Web editing program,” he said.

from the Chicago Tribune, June 23, 2000

Of all of the encyclopedia projects covered in Mako’s recent overview (there were almost a dozen in the years just before and after Wikipedia’s founding), this was closest in spirit and inspiration.

Kepler, writing back to Galileo after having read his newly published work on the discoveries made using his new telescopes [after noting the problems of spherical aberration facing Galileo’s new telescopes, suggesting a hyperbolic curvature to prevent it]:

“I cannot help wondering about the meaning of that large circular cavity in what I usually call the left corner of the mouth [of the face in the Moon]. Is it a work of nature, or of a trained hand? Suppose there are living beings on the moon . . [?] It surely stands to reason that the inhabitants express the character of their dwelling place, which as much bigger mountains and valleys than our earth has. consequently, being endowed with very massive bodies, they also construct gigantic projects. Their day is as long as 15 of our days, and the feel insufferable heat. Perhaps they lack stone for erecting shelters against the sun. On the other hand, maybe they have a soil as sticky as clay. their usual building plan, accordingly, is as follows. digging up huge fields, they carry out the earth and heap it in a circle, perhaps for the purpose of drawing out the moisture down below. In this way they may hide in the deep shade behind their excavated mounds and, in keeping with the sun’s motion, shift about inside, clinging to the shadow. They have, as it were, a sort of underground city. They make their homes in numerous caves hewn out of that circular embankment. They place their fields and pastures in the middle, to avoid being forced to go too far away from their farms in their flight from the sun.“

Later in the same letter:

“What other conclusion shall we draw from this difference [in appearance between fixed stars and planets] than that the fixed stars generate their light from within, whereas the planets, being opaque, are illuminated from without; that is, to use [Giordano] Bruno‘s terms, the former are suns, the latter, moons or earths?“