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Showing posts from December, 2008

Web (marketing) controlled experiments == No informed consent?

Kohavi et al [ 1 ] is an extremely useful survey and guide to controlled experiments on/using the web, told primarily from a marketing perspective. It introduces and describes various experimental methods, examines the technical and organization challenges of running controlled experiments, and delves into various issues of experimental design. It is - for the most part - an excellent resource for anyone wanting to do these kinds of web-based controlled experiments. While I know this article is marketing-oriented, it is clear that some of the results from these experiments will be/have been published in peer-reviewed journals. Yet the authors make no mention of informed consent - even as an aside - in the entire article (and no mention of privacy or privacy issues either). Some of the experiments described or cited are not too different from those that might be done in social sciences or IT user interface research, where researchers are usually required to go through an ethics review

Open Standards and standards organizations

This report - from January 2008 - examines 10 "open" standard s organizations and evaluates how "open" they are. It uses a methodology that maps directly into Krechmer's open standards requirements. The organizations reviewed are: CEN (European Committee for Standardization) Ecma (European association for standardizing information and communication systems ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) ISO (International Organization for Standardization) ITU (International Telecommunication Union) NIST (National Institute of Technology and Standards) OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) OMG (Object Management Group) W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) Evaluation of Ten Standard Setting Orgizanizations with Regard to Open Standards Abstract: On 2 June 2006, the Danish parliament (the Folketing) unanimously adopted Parliamentary Resolution B103 on the use of open standard

Article: Canadian Federal Support for University Research Commercialization

Rasmussen [ 1 ] does a thorough examination of Canadian federal government programs and organizations supporting the commercialization of university research. This work is based on background research and interviews in January 2006 with 28 " ...policy makers, program managers, policy researchers, university administrators, and program users. .", including " A case description was written based on the collected material and later verified by several key people at Canadian agencies ". For those following federal university commercialization activities, this work is an excellent review of the recent state of these programs, activities and organizations. It should be noted that this research is part of a larger and broader research effort [ 2 ] benchmarking commercialization of research in Canada, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Scotland, and Sweden. The list of the Canadian interviewees can be found in this larger work (p.52). Programs: " Compared to most co

Uncertainty Reasoning for the Semantic Web I

Uncertainty Reasoning for the Semantic Web I, ISWC International Workshops, URSW 2005-2007, Revised Selected and Invited Papers. DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-89765-1 , Lecture Notes in Computer Science . Of note: Towards Machine Learning on the Semantic Web. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-89765-1_17 Author copy: http://www.cs.ubc.ca/spider/poole/papers/SemSciChapter2008.pdf Semantic Science: Ontologies, Data and Probabilistic Theories. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-89765-1_2 Analogical Reasoning in Description Logics . http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-89765-1_19 Table of Contents: Fernando Bobillo, Miguel Delgado, Juan Gómez-Romero. 2008. A Crisp Representation for Fuzzy with Fuzzy Nominals and General Concept Inclusions. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-89765-1_11 Mauro Mazzieri, Aldo Franco Dragoni. 2008. A Fuzzy Semantics for the Resource Description Framework . http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-89765-1_15 Matthias Nickles, Ruth Cobos. 2008. An Approa