leaving aside the obvious question as to why exactly you would want ‘intelligent’ appliances [since of course, the appliances will at best be ‘competent’ and at worst ‘moronic’] – thalia [‘thinking and linking intelligent appliances’] looks, ummm, well-designed [although ‘flash’ sites rub me the wrong way].
this reminds me that it would probably be cheaper to revisit the linux home automation site and order a few firecrackers [hint: the special ’24-hour only’ deal has been running continuously for at least a year]
“These images, generated with M.R.I. and PET scans, show the way different thoughts affect the flow of blood to the brains of research subjects. Each of the four groups above represents one averaged, composite brain from different views. The upper left corner shows a brain thinking pleasant thoughts and the upper right brain is thinking depressing thoughts; the lower left, anxiety-inducing thoughts; the lower right, irritating thoughts. Areas in red indicate intense brain activity; areas in purple, reduced brain
activity. (Images from Dr. Hanna Damasio, University of Iowa College of Medicine.) ”
but i’d really like to know howthese people were thinking:
“Some brain-injury victims who lose the ability to understand speech develop a talent that could come in handy during an election year: an uncanny ability to tell when someone is lying.”
“”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
