Brains working towards machine consciousness

We are pleased to announce the new workbook, which is again released under a Creative Commons Share-Alike licence so that you can take it, re-work it, and re-publish for your own use (either institutionally or personally) as long as you provide suitable attribution.

Like many other thousands of parents, I have been stuck at home with my children for the past few days thanks to slippery roads and school closures. And whilst building snowmen, sledging, and leaving huge piles of cold, wet clothes on the hallway floor for mum to trip over/tidy up/drape resignedly over an unhelpfully small number of working radiators is all good fun, after about the first 48 hours it all started to wear a bit thin for my kids (except the wet clothes thing, which never seems to get old) - and I do believe they were actually starting to miss being at school!

Naturally enough, we've heard a lot about how inconvenient school closures are for working parents, but apart from those youngsters due to sit exams this week, we hear little about how disruptive it can be for children. Which got me thinking about how the issue might be resolved without desperate parents having to risk life and limb attempting to do the school run in treacherous driving conditions. Is there not, perhaps, some scope here for digital classrooms to be set up in such circumstances; closed social networks where pupils can receive lessons, interact with fellow classmates they may have been cut off from for days on end, thus spending at least some of their snowbound days thinking about something more taxing than whether Spongebob Squarepants has the edge over Ben 10?

If the sort of severe weather we've experienced in the past few weeks is likely to become the norm in winters to come, I think it could be worth a go...

Especially an apology to our Student Ambassadors!  At the moment, for some reason I have yet to fathom, when I click on Write a new post to try and write a blog post, it is failing.  This is because it is missing out my user ID from the link it is creating.  I will try to get it fixed but in the meantime, if you are trying to blog and are not able to try adding your username on the address bar between the blog/ and the /new (e.g. mine ends with pg/blog/PatParslow/new/)

I wonder about technology sometimes :-)

We have a server, on the research network, which I am used to addressing just by its machine name in my URL bar - I don't bother with all that .reading.ac.uk stuff on the end, which is good, as it happens, because it doesn't answer to the full version, only to the machine name or the machine name + .rdg.ac.uk

This made me wonder about the addressing mechanisms, and try a couple of experiments.  Much to my surprise, if I type UCL into the address bar, I get the www.ucl.ac.uk web page, and the address is left in the title bar as http://ucl/

However, trying soton doesn't work, because they still have this desire for people to type www at the front of their web address. f you put www.soton in the address bar, though, it works.  But ox doesn't work - that gets redirected to a Google search.

I assume that the machine which works as a DNS server has some entries in its hosts file - anyone got a better explanation?

Who do you want to be?  What sort of person do you want to be when you leave university?

I don't just mean what job you want to get, but more fundamental than that - do you want to be someone who needs to be told what to do and how to learn, or someone who sees opportunities instead of challenges and seeks out new experiences?

University is a great opportunity to change who you are.  Not just masking the old you, but actually fundamentally altering the nature of your personality to be the one you would like to be.  You may have been quiet and shy at school, or you may be coming back to university after having been in work for a while primarily to 'upskill' yourself.  But that doesn't mean you can't take the opportunity to decide who you want to be, and to put it into practice.

One thing you can do to help support any changes you want to make is to write about who you want to be.  You may not want to share this with everyone, of course, so if you want to do it online you should find somewhere (like RedGloo) which allows you to keep a post private.  On the other hand, you might find that sharing it makes it easier for other people to help with advice on how they have changed themselves.

A transition like going to university presents so many opportunities it can be hard to keep track of them all.  Now, I know I am a bit of a geek, but I find it handy to organise most of my life using online tools - making good use of email services and online calendars can help in making sure you don't miss out on things.  And using some sort of project management software can help you see what you need to do, when, in order that you can organise your time to get the best out of it.  I have to admit, one of the reasons I am starting to use this sort of technique is because I have, in the past, been particularly bad at remembering to do the social stuff when I have 'had my head in the books'.  Sad, huh?

If you are coming to the University of Reading, you get an email account (remember to check it, and use it for communicating with staff - they might not read emails from fluffypinkbunnyknickers@aol.com) and you also get a personal web space.  Check it out when you get here, and use it to create a record of the stuff you do here.  If you can point to your successes, and to how you learned through your mistakes, you will find it much easier to get a job (whether to help fund your time here, as something to fill in that terrible, awful 3 month gap we call Summer Holidays , for a year in industry or for when you leave to enter the world of work).  You will also find it easier to see how you learn best, and what you can do to match up to your aspirations.

Get involved in talking to people - obviously, you will want to chat to the people you are living with, on your course, that you meet around campus and around town - but if you want to learn as much as possible and get yourself known in your field, you probably also want to be chatting to people online.  One of the easiest ways of doing this is to use tools like Twitter - the conversation does not need to be 'synchronous' (both of you involved at the same time), which means you can get in touch with experts in all sorts of fields from across the world.

Karsten Lundqvist has posted a brief review of the JISC SemTech report.  When I read this, I, too, struggled with the classifications used of soft and hard semantic technologies, and felt there were a number of assumptions being made about machine readability.

There is a tendency to regard content as being machine readable if it contains lots of characters which make it less than readily human readable.  XML is touted as both machine and human readable, but it takes a special type of human to persist through more than a few lines of it, in my experience.  Additionally, the actual content of tags can be quite opaque (to either a human or a machine).  As Karsten points out, the same is true of RDF.

Coupled with this is the problem of using hard ontologies.  Ontologies do not allow for uncertainty (in their basic form), and this is a problem, particularly when trying to provide tools which can operate across a range of subject areas for which different ontologies exist.  Realistically, I cannot see a way of achieving the necessary goals of semantic interpretation by machine without use of fuzzy ontologies or belief networks; and whilst it is possibly to abstract out a 'most likely' hard ontology from these, I have to wonder whether that is actually advantageous at all.

People do not tend to work in terms of absolutes - most things are interpreted in shades of grey, in levels of belief.  Indeed, black and white, all or nothing thinking is widely regarded as being symptomatic of mental health issues.  In terms of educational systems,  concepts such as Topic maps are actually rather too rigid for many people (I believe - I haven't gathered specific evidence on this).  Whilst the SemTech report classifies these as being on the soft side of semantic ontology technologies, I would actually regard them as being 'hard' - they show clear relationships between entities, and can be expressed using languages such as RDF and can have inferencing performed on them.  I am keen to do some work on a 'fluffier' type of Topic map, more akin to belief networks, in order to allow for better learner self expression at the user-end of use, and for a better match through allowing for a degree of mis-match at the instructional design and tool design levels.

Alongside this, the use of formalised language (formalised English would be my preferred option!) allows for reasonable machine readability, whilst maintaining human readability.  Doing more work on this side of things, rather than trying to get people to include semantic markup, strikes me as being much more likely to succeed in producing genuine linked data quickly and reliably.

I agree that a timetable is a useful approach, although I would tend to have quibbles about some of the timings and order of things to be done. But I also think that the report has missed out on some important options which should be considered in more depth.

As part of the LinkSphere project, I am trying to use Kerberos to authenticate against the uni's servers.  Have finally tracked one of my problems down to having a dodgy keytab file, so the server was asking for an ID to be authenticated, but using a made up server name which meant the uni server was not allowing authentication.  I don't appear to be able to create a new one, so am waiting on support to provide me with a valid keytab.

In the meantime, I am intrigued to notice that I can actually programmatically test the response to discover whether the user should actually be allowed to log in or not.  If I send correct details, the error I get is about the server names.  If I send bad credentials, I get an error relating to a failed pre-authentication.  So I could, in theory, ignore the fact that I don't actually authenticate, and use the error messages to decide whether to let people log in or not.  This is not the right way to do it, and constitutes a bit of a hack, but would be possible (although, I don't think I would have enough information to create the user ID within the Drupal install I have without proper authentication - I have to look in to that).  I am a little unsure about whether this constitutes a security risk...

The first problem I encountered was due to our virtual machines not running ntpd (indeed, not having ntp installed) and thus their clocks running at different speeds to 'real time'. This causes a problem for kerberos authentication.  I was also amused (in a 'not very' way) to discover that my Mac only allows me to set its time based on three different 'Apple' time zones, all of which would appear to disagree with 'real time' in terms of the time other devices tell me it is.  Not surprisingly, Apple time is a bit behind the other time services - which might explain many things!