The idea is to develop a digital identity system where it is your community that continuously re-validates your identity. Your identity needs to be regularly revalidated by other members of the community holding valid identities. If your digital identity is not revalidated following an acceptable pattern, it quickly expires, in a matter of days. The revalidation pattern is not random: for example, it is not acceptable that you get validated that you get constantly revalidated by the same…

Context Matters When Text Mining

For a number of months, I have been generating codified narrative from films, fairytales, paintings, court cases, and news events. Codified narrative might be described as a tokenized rendition of the underlying content. There are many ways to do a rendering. Imagine asking 100,000 people to write a story based on the same general details such as scenery, major events, and specific outcomes. To the extent there are commonalities in the resulting storylines, I would say that "social…

Open data is a thing, an idea, and an ideal. Open data is one of those "superhero words" alongside its cousins the Cloud and Big Data. I like to call them superhero words because they are supernatural forces that seemingly defy definition and can't be seen. Yet…

I rarely get to use a walkie-talkie during a course in school. As the snapshot of my desktop shows on the image below, I had both a multi-line telephone and portable radio. Just before the exam, I participated in a simulation. Our tabletop exercise contained an emergency scenario: a train derailment involving the evacuation of residents. I served as the Social Services Director. Although I didn't choose this role for myself, I thought it made sense given my graduate degree in the area of…

Like many students about to finish their undergraduate degree, I decided to artificially inflate my grades by taking some "bird courses." These are not courses about birds. Other students assured me that the courses were designed to bolster my marks and to help me complete my program requirements. Considering the many bird courses available, I decided to take introductory music, which was essentially a history course focused on music. It required a lot of…