“”You have your ‘isa’ hierarchy all thought out – let’s say you have a “mammals” class and a “reptiles” class and so on – and you start to implement it, and along comes a platypus, a fur-bearing, egg-laying, duck-billed creature, which doesn’t appear to fit in any of the classifications you’ve created. So what you often end up having to do is rethink your entire hierarchy, refactoring into a different set of basic categories, or maintaining several categorizations along different axes. A lot of your thinking ends up getting thrown out, as well as any implementation you’ve done up to that point.””
i guess this is just another way to describe what i think peterme is getting at when he talks about the ‘calculus of information’ [ e.g. – see april 13th post] – but from a completely different domain:
“The dynamism of our information spaces are what makes megalithic hierarchies so fundamentally limiting. Not only does information change, but my relationship to that information changes, and trying to
catalog it typically forces it into a lowest-common-denominator structure that serves no one by trying to serve everyone. This is why I go on about basic-level categories and heaps of metadata–by reducing information to its most basic level, we can build it back up on-the-fly depending on the user’s context.”
with the completion of the rough draft of the human genome we’ll be inundated with fairly meaningless correlations of gene ‘x’ with personality trait ‘y’ [although they reports will only remain meaningless if the difference between correlation and causation is forgotten] – but you’ll also see more of this:
“They may have their differences but Jews and Arabs share a common genetic heritage that stretches back thousands of years.”
“Everyone in Europe is descended from just seven women.
Arriving at different times during the last 45,000 years, they survived wolves, bears and ice ages to form different clans that eventually became today’s population.”
this type of activity brings modern genetics back to its eugenic roots. any technology that allows groups to define other groups with a high degree of resolution brings similarities – and differences – into sharp contrast.
zope.org has discovered a new client-side security issue that should read by anyone who uses web applications ( including blogger ):
“Imagine you have some kind of system that you administer through a web GUI, such as HotMail, your Netscape Admin server or a site like Zope.org. You get in to work and use this service for a while (check your mail, manage your servers, whatever). For our example, lets say you were using the netscape admin
server.
Later in the day someone sends you an email asking you to look at a web page. You go the page using the browser session where earlier you had logged in to the admin server. However, the page does a redirect to a url of your admin server that causes your main web server to be deleted! The redirect will succeed, as you’ve already logged in to the admin server earlier with sufficient privileges to delete your server.
There are a few variations on this theme, involving JavaScript that can silently submit a hidden form to do the same sort of thing. It appears that most web applications involving authentication are vulnerable to this sort of attack.
Web clients will cache your credentials and send them automatically to a realm that you have visited earlier in the session, which in a stateless system is a reasonable behavior. The problem is that the client is also willing to let almost any page on the Web take actions automatically on your behalf through the use of things like redirects or javascript code. ”
unfortunately, as the article points out, there is no easy ‘solution’. i suppose while i’m standing on the security soapbox, i might as well point out yet another reason to be wary of hotmail
as someone who was born 3 months premature this article is interesting. i often forget just how fortunate i was, considering the fact that i was born in the dark ages of neonatal care (1972) and weighed-in at slightly under 2 pounds. so far, i’ve been lucky enough to not notice any effects:
“In one recent study of 150 teenagers who weighed 2 pounds or less at birth, nearly one-third had significant physical disorders, including cerebral palsy, blindness and deafness. Nearly half were receiving special education assistance, compared with 10 percent in a control group. But the study, February in the journal Pediatrics, also found that even those children with minor physical problems scored significantly lower on achievement tests than those in the control group.”
o.k. i’ll get it out of the way: <cheap joke>are you sure i didn’t see you on the short bus?</cheap joke>. anyway, this makes me want to try to make the most of life and remember to enjoy all those perfect moments. something tells me that i’ll forget all about it in the morning. hi. ho.