Screamfeeder Videos

Continuing the Screamfeeder posts of late, I just found a collection of videos. Very nice indeed!

Biblical Literalists

Only about a third of Americans believe that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution is a scientific theory that has been well supported by the evidence, while just as many say that it is just one of many theories and has not been supported by the evidence. The rest say they don't know enough to say. Forty-five percent of Americans also believe that God created human beings pretty much in their present form about 10,000 years ago. A third of Americans are biblical literalists who believe that the Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word.

Source: Third of Americans Say Evidence Has Supported Darwin's Evolution Theory.

Introducing Screamfeeder

The new Screamfeeder album "INTRODUCING: SCREAMFEEDER | Singles and More 1992 - 2004" just arrived as a birthday gift from Janelle's parents. It's great to get a handwritten note from the band to accompany it. Now this doesn't surprise me as they are a Brissie band! Screamfeeder are an interesting band, they've been a favourite ever since I saw them with Pete at a Big Day Out on the Gold Coast in the mid nineties. I also have some bazaar connections to them. A good friend of mine Kent tells me he used to hang out with them in the early nineties (along with Powderfinger et al.) and my buddy Keith is good friends with Tim's (singer/guitarist) brother. It's very refreshing to know that you can support a "local" band (not that local to me anymore) from half a world away. Actually, listening to the songs makes me quite homesick...

Kowari Paper for WWW2005

David Wood, Paul Gearon and I have just completed a paper on Kowari entitled "Kowari: A Platform for Semantic Web Storage and Analysis" for the 14th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2005) next year in Japan.

Large-scale Semantic Web applications require large-scale storage of Resource Description Framework (RDF) information and a means to analyze that information via the Web Ontology Language (OWL) in near real time. The Kowari Metastore was designed as a purpose-built RDF database to fulfill this requirement. Kowari provides a scalable, transaction-safe storage infrastructure for RDF statements and an expressive query language for their analysis, with or without the use of a subset of the RDF Schema and/or OWL languages. OWL Lite plus the full cardinality constraints from OWL Full are currently supported via the interactive Tucana Query Language (iTQL) or the Simple Ontology Framework API (SOFA). Kowari’s native quad-store indexing scheme has been shown to scale to hundreds of millions of RDF statements on a single machine. Kowari is an Open Source project sponsored by Tucana Technologies and is licensed under the Mozilla Public License, version 1.1.

It's basically an overview paper containing an explanation of the components that make up the system focusing on the query engine, the resolver framework and the XA statement store. So it's very much like similar papers on Sesame and the 3store. We're pretty hopeful it'll be accepted, we think we needed to provide a good overview of this important piece of Semantic Web infrastructure. (Update... The paper wasn't accepted to the stream we submitted it to at www2005, but was accepted to xtech 2005).

Systems

The recent election here in the US had me thinking about some of the problems that I've observed with the systems that operate here. The electoral process is my first target here. It amazes me that a country as wealthy as the US, still struggles with things that I would have thought were solved problems. The electoral process here is really screwed up, a fact that I'm starting to see highlighted more and more in the news media. For a start, there's the antiquated electoral college system. I'm not 100% sure of its origins, but I imagine that it would have made sense a couple of hundred years ago, but seems a bit silly to an outsider in this day and age. Personally, I find the Westminster system of the party that wins the most seats winning government the easiest to understand. The voting system here is also weird. The person who gets the most votes wins, regardless of whether they have a majority. In Oz, we have preferential voting, which basically means that people vote in order for who they like, and the candidate who gets the least votes, gets their second preference re-allocated. This goes on until someone gts a majority. Our system appears very similar to what is know here as Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) (a much sexier name than "optional preferential"). My second target is the general law enforcement system. Back home in Oz we basically have two police forces. Each state has a police department that looks after all matters of policing and there's also a federal police force, that takes care of cross-state issues, drug running, border enforcement and lots of stuff I probably have no idea of. Contrast that with the US. In the Northern Virginia area, we have lots of different police forces, seemingly unable to cooperate. We have park police, state police, town police, highway police, airport police, tollway police and I'm sure there's at least 14 more that I've missed. So when I got my car insurance card in the mail the other day and I read that the first step in reporting an accident was to call the police, I thought "which one?". Given the number of separate agencies, is it no wonder that the events that lead to 9/11 happened here. America is full of minor bureaucracies that all compete for power at the expense of the people they purport to represent. Surely this is a solved problem too.