archives

A couple MIT students have found their way to the #dig channel and asked about UROPs during IAP. I'm still learning about student rhythms at MIT; I was never a student here; I got my degree at U.T. Austin. My ten years with W3C has exposed me to the terms UROP and IAP before, but I have paged most of it out. Let's refresh our cache, shall we?

The Independent Activities Period (IAP) is a special four week term at MIT that runs from the first week of January until the end of the month. IAP 2006 takes place from January 9 through February 3.

IAP overview

In UROP info for supervisors, I see there's a form for listing projects. Hey... it would be cool if the student projects category here in this blog were automatically syndicated via that form. A meta-student-project?

Meanwhile, we do have a few notes on student projects among our DIG info for MIT students.

I'm not sure how items syndicated from Danny/Eric via the WordPress plug-in can get categorized; I suppose we can do it manually, after-the-fact?

I see a bunch of UROP openings for this time of year. The Building Games to Acquire Commonsense Knowledge project looks cool.

NOTE: It is expected that UROP students are supervised in the laboratory at all times, per the Institute's "no working alone" policy .

UROP safety isses

Sounds a bit like a "no coding alone" policy that I've been pushing around W3C and DIG, since discovering the value of pair programming, or a variant of it.

The original appearance of this entry was in Danny Weitzner - Open Internet Policy

Last week the Washington DC Court of Appeals ruled (Case no. 05-CO-333, 15 December 2005, Washington, CJ) that it is permissible for the prosecution to use DNA evidence matching DNA collected from a crime scene against a database of DNA samples collected from a large population (in this case, 100,000+ criminal offenders in Virginia). The legal issue in the case on appeal was limited to the question of whether there was sufficient scientific consensus as to method of assessing the statistical reliability of this procedure to justify the introduction of this evidence in court. In particular, the court asked whether there was agreement among experts on how to assess the ‘random match probabiliy,’ the probability that the DNA match identified could have picked out the wrong person. However, the implications of the holding are far reaching in that the path appears to be more clear for matching unidentified DNA found at a crime scene against large database of DNA data.

The underlying case giving rise to the appeal involves the murder of a man in Washington, DC. Initial investigation of the crime yielded a suspect in a related robbery, but failed generate sufficient evidence to charge anyone with murder. In the course of investigating the scene, the police collected blood from the scene and then matched the DNA found in the blood against a database of Virginia criminal offenders. This profiling yielded a ‘cold hit,’ identifying a man named Raymond Jenkins. The trial court, however, refused to allow the prosecution to introduce this match in evidence so the goverment appealed, bringing the case to the Washington, DC Court of Appeals, DC’s highest court. The Court of Appeals determined that the trial court made a mistake in blocking the introduction of the ‘cold hit’ evidence so the case will now go back to the trial court with the government being able to introduce that match against the defendant. As I wrote above, there was no basis for the appeals court to address the larger policy implications of this sort of DNA matching, but this case does mark and important expansion on DNA profililng powers both in DC and likely in the rest of the country.

Oops! Thanks for all the wonderful welcoming comments. We've had rather a lot, and had to turn the comments off on the first blog. I can't answer them all, but I would point out one thing. I just played my part. I built on the work of others -- the Internet, invented 20 years before the web, by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn and colleagues, for example, and hypertext, a word coined by Ted Nelson for an idea of links which was already implemented in many non-networked systems. I just put these technologies together. And then, it all took off because of this amazing community of enthusiasts, who have done such incredible things with the technology, and are still advancing it in so many ways.

By the way, this blog is at DIG, the Decentralised Information group at MIT's CSAIL. I intend it to be geeky semantic web stuff mostly. For example, it won't be for W3C questions which should really be addressed to working groups.

So thanks for all the support, no need for more general 'thank you' comments! Thank *you* all.

Managing passwords via email callback is hampered by anti-spam mechanisms. I just helped a breadcrumbs user whose password message from drupal was classified as Junk by Mac OS X Mail.

Meanwhile, I did enough research on the Mac OS X keychain to trust it. Support for OpenID in drupal is already in the OpenID wish list and I've see some progress.

It's not obvious to me how to connect the keychain to OpenID, but I'm sure there's a way. Any suggestions?