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(Via &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.vecosys.com&quot;&gt;Sam Sethi&lt;/a&gt;)" created="Sat, 19 May 2007 08:08:29 GMT"/>		<outline text="Another thing that we will be working on at GetSemantic is &lt;a href=&quot;http://semwebdev.keithalexander.co.uk/blog/posts/twfy-rdf-mapping&quot;&gt;mapping TheyWorkForYou data into RDF&lt;/a&gt;." created="Sat, 19 May 2007 08:06:39 GMT"/>		<outline text="&lt;a href=&quot;http://torrez.us/archives/2007/05/17/531/&quot;&gt;Elias Torres&lt;/a&gt; is working on getting Operator to work with embedded RDF (in the form of RDFa). eRDF, RDFa and non-microformats-based GRDDL using Operator are things that we ought to work on at &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.getsemantic.com&quot;&gt;GetSemantic&lt;/a&gt;." created="Sat, 19 May 2007 08:03:22 GMT"/>		<outline text="&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2007/05/what_are_you_doingdoing_more_t.html&quot;&gt;Jennifer Woodard Maderazo&lt;/a&gt; at PBS' MediaShift blog has a post on Twitter that mentions &lt;a href=&quot;http://tommorris.org/blog/2007/02/22#When:12:43:46&quot;&gt;the Tube Tracker&lt;/a&gt; among other cool uses for Twitter (including businesses that are using Twtitter along with first-aid and emergency response). &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.twittown.com/blogs/twitter-services/get-updates-londons-tube-and-san-franciscos-bart-twitter&quot;&gt;TwitTown&lt;/a&gt; has also picked up on it." created="Sat, 19 May 2007 07:39:57 GMT"/>		<outline text="Austin also has some excellent articles on existentialism - &lt;a href=&quot;http://atheism.about.com/od/typesofexistentialism/a/literary.htm&quot;&gt;literary existentialism&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://atheism.about.com/od/existentialistphilosophers/a/jaspers.htm&quot;&gt;Karl Jaspers&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;http://atheism.about.com/od/existentialistphilosophers/a/beauvoir.htm&quot;&gt;Simone de Beauvoir&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;http://atheism.about.com/od/existentialistthemes/Topical_History_of_Existentialism_Themes_Ideas_of_Existentialists.htm&quot;&gt;more&lt;/a&gt;. I intend to write some longer, philosophical articles and publish them on my site. Watch this space." created="Sat, 19 May 2007 07:45:18 GMT"/>		<outline text="&lt;a href=&quot;http://aloadofbright.wordpress.com/2007/05/03/book-review-the-dawkins-delusion-by-alister-mcgrath/&quot;&gt;Tobe38&lt;/a&gt; has a review of Alister McGrath's &lt;i&gt;The Dawkins Delusion&lt;/i&gt;. Summary: it's a bit crap. Well, what did you excpect? Academic work that goes beyond mischaracterisation and argumentum ad hominem is too &lt;i&gt;strenuous&lt;/i&gt; for Oxford's theological troll. Further reading at &lt;a href=&quot;http://skeptico.blogs.com/skeptico/2007/01/the_alister_mcg.html&quot;&gt;Skeptico&lt;/a&gt;." created="Sat, 19 May 2007 08:15:38 GMT"/>		<outline text="In other sanity-related news, &lt;a href=&quot;http://atheism.about.com/b/a/259030.htm&quot;&gt;people are accusing Dawkins&lt;/a&gt; of being &quot;the closest [thing] atheists have [...] to a suicide bomber&quot;. I have met Professor Dawkins and he seems quite the opposite of a suicide bomber. In fact, if his subject was economics or education policy rather than religion, he would be thought of as no such thing. But, of course, lazy equivalences are a tried and true part of contemporary journalism." created="Sat, 19 May 2007 07:36:34 GMT"/>		<outline text="&lt;a href=&quot;http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2007/05/the_irony.html&quot;&gt;Andrew Sullivan&lt;/a&gt;: &quot;Has anyone else noticed the bizarre spectacle of many Bush-backing blogs demonizing Ron Paul for not saying that we deserved 9/11, at the same time eulogizing a man who absolutely and explicitly said that we &lt;i&gt;did&lt;/i&gt; deserve 9/11: Jerry Falwell.&quot;" created="Sat, 19 May 2007 11:47:10 GMT"/>		<outline text="&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/notesarchive.php?id=1915&quot;&gt;Ophelia Benson&lt;/a&gt; has a nice snarky take on the Iranian bicycle redesign. What's that, you say? Well, the Iranians are building a new type of bicycle specifically for women, so that they do not move their body in any 'provoking' manner. Ophelia had an excellent post &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/notesarchive.php?id=1884&quot;&gt;last month&lt;/a&gt; which I was a little too busy to link to on more Iranian 'treat-women-as-less-than-spat-out-chewing-gum' news." created="Sat, 19 May 2007 07:31:46 GMT"/>		<outline text="Against 'ethics'" created="Sat, 19 May 2007 08:45:02 GMT">			<outline text="Good news. The government &lt;a href=&quot;http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/6661717.stm&quot;&gt;are going to allow human-animal hybrid embryos&lt;/a&gt; in scientific research. Cool!" created="Sat, 19 May 2007 08:45:05 GMT"/>			<outline text="The ethics behind this seem pretty simple. If you agree that an embryo is not a 'soul', there does not seem to be any good reason to oppose this treatment. The embryos that would be used in hybrid research are all of six days old, at which point the stem cells are isolated and then have human DNA inserted. At this point, the development process continues for a few days longer in order for cells to divide and specialise in to early stage cells from particular organs." created="Sat, 19 May 2007 08:45:47 GMT"/>			<outline text="The reason why cytoplasmic hybrid embro cells are used is simple. Donated eggs are a scarce resource, and, rightly, most donated eggs are used in IVF treatment. Instead, the plan goes something like this: the egg cell is only a 'container' for DNA and mitochondria. We remove the DNA from the source animal (rabbits and cows are the suggested animals) and replace it with DNA from a donated human cell (from an adult), and then let the cell develop for a few days." created="Sat, 19 May 2007 08:55:34 GMT"/>			<outline text="At this point, the spectre of 'horrific' human-animal clones is brought up but it is a red herring with no basis in science. It is sourced in an over-active imagination, fuelled by wonderful literature on the subject. The idea that there might be a human-rabbit hybrid created in a bioscience lab is ridiculous, because &lt;i&gt;it would not work!&lt;/i&gt; If a male human tries to reproduce with a female rabbit, there is never a pregnancy as a result." created="Sat, 19 May 2007 08:59:56 GMT"/>			<outline text="The proposal put forward would require that laboratories obtain a license from the government, and be subject to inspections and there would be criminal punishments for any researcher who did create a human-animal hybrid that goes beyond what is allowed by the government's rules (ie. a human-animal hybrid that became a baby)." created="Sat, 19 May 2007 09:03:36 GMT"/>			<outline text="There doesn't seem to be any good moral reason to forbid this research. It seems predicated on vitalistic conceptions of human life - ie. that we are somehow completely different from animals. The idea that 'special' human DNA would be mixed with 'lowly' animal egg cells. This has no basis in reality, of course. Humans are animals, and the fact that we can fly to the moon and download pornography from the Internet does not make us sufficiently different from animals to make them 'unclean'." created="Sat, 19 May 2007 09:06:07 GMT"/>			<outline text="In the BBC article, this kind of unthinking repugnance at the idea is represented by Josephine Quintavalle, who says:" created="Sat, 19 May 2007 09:09:38 GMT"/>			<outline text="&lt;blockquote&gt;This is a highly controversial and terrifying proposal, which has little justification in science and even less in ethics. Endorsement by the UK government will elicit horror in Europe and right across the wider world.&lt;/blockquote&gt;" created="Sat, 19 May 2007 09:11:25 GMT"/>			<outline text="This is perhaps one of the most vapid responses I have seen on the subject. A lot of things that are done in the world may 'elicit horror' or be 'terrifying', but the question is not whether that horror is elicited but whether there is reason for that horror. If a wild animal takes a shit in my garden, I may be horrified. But is there good reason for that horror? I would argue 'no' in both cases. The proposal to the government is restrictive enough to prevent abuse - criminal penalties for researchers and a licensing system for research labs. We have not seen abuse of the current law on embryological research, and the folks involved in scientific researchers aren't five-year olds poking at things with sticks." created="Sat, 19 May 2007 09:11:47 GMT"/>			<outline text="'Ethics' is always brought in to this debate, but the 'ethics' that people bring in is a very different kind of ethics to the sort that should be engaged in. Ethics should be a reasoned assessment of action in order to see whether it is consistent with other well-reasoned values and ideals. It should be entered in to in the spirit of reasoned analysis, not faith-based macabre horror." created="Sat, 19 May 2007 09:15:06 GMT"/>			<outline text="In the case of human/animal hybrid research, we need to see it for what it reallly is - embryos less than a week old being used to potentially understand diseases and develop treatments, not giant minotaurs, unicorns, fairies and mermaids. The former doesn't 'horrify' me, and it shouldn't horrify you either. 'Ethics', in this case, is an unreasoned opposition to something that may potentially be useful." created="Sat, 19 May 2007 09:20:20 GMT"/>			<outline text="Whether or not it will be useful has no connection to it's ethical viability - it is an empirical rather than ethical question. It may be that this research serves no purpose at all, in which case, we roll back to where we are now and say &quot;well, that was an interesting experiment - now we know not to bother&quot;. That's how science works, but unfortunately, it's not how the ethics of luddite squeamishness works." created="Sat, 19 May 2007 09:23:45 GMT"/>			<outline text="&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.haloscan.com/comments/tommorris/againstEthics33931/&quot;&gt;&lt;script type=&quot;text/javascript&quot;&gt;postCount('againstEthics33931');&lt;/script&gt;&lt;/a&gt; | &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.haloscan.com/tb/tommorris/againstEthics33931/&quot;&gt;&lt;script type=&quot;text/javascript&quot;&gt;postCountTB('againstEthics33931'); &lt;/script&gt;&lt;/a&gt;"/>			</outline>		<outline text="Uche on microformats" created="Sat, 19 May 2007 18:10:07 GMT">			<outline text="XML guru, Uche Ogbuji, has published a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-think39.html?ca=dnw-820&quot;&gt;critical article on microformats&lt;/a&gt;. I think it's quite misguided." created="Sat, 19 May 2007 18:10:12 GMT"/>			<outline text="&lt;blockquote&gt;XML was, of course, designed to express complex and specialized structures for content, and it seems a step backward to use a far less expressive construct just to embed the structure within HTML. Microformats folks do this because they feel that XML is too complex, not yet ubiquitous enough and, more importantly, doesn't allow for graceful degradation, which means that microformats look like regular HTML to user agents that do not understand more advanced technologies such as XML. This is a fairly weak argument, in part because XML is supported by most user agents these days and also because sometimes a scalable design for the Web is worth such tradeoffs and inconveniences.&lt;/blockquote&gt;" created="Sat, 19 May 2007 18:13:25 GMT"/>			<outline text="&lt;i&gt;What?&lt;/i&gt; We should use XML instead? I'm not reflexively anti-XML as some people tend to be. But XML on the Web isn't happening nearly as quickly as any of us would like. That's why people persist in keeping tag soup alive rather than moving to XHTML. The idea of microformats and other data-in-HTML approaches is to use the built-in constructs of (X)HTML (@rel, @rev, @class, profile URIs, semantic elements etc.)" created="Sat, 19 May 2007 18:13:32 GMT"/>			<outline text="Ogbuji gives an example of this:" created="Sat, 19 May 2007 18:19:09 GMT"/>			<outline text="&lt;blockquote&gt;I start with hAtom, because it has such an obvious XML alternative in Atom. There is already an XML form of Atom. It is enjoying healthy growth and support... Adding this feed link is much simpler than jumping through the various hoops of hAtom. Any Weblog software likely to support hAtom is even more likely to support pure Atom.&lt;/blockquote&gt;" created="Sat, 19 May 2007 18:19:19 GMT"/>			<outline text="But that's the thing. Take my comment areas on this blog. They now have a form of hAtom built-in, so that I can parse them to turn out RSS feeds (Atom requires titles and blog comments don't have titles!). hAtom is not meant as a replacement for an Atom feed - it's useful for situations where an Atom feed would not be possible. All tools provide HTML, which is why data-in-HTML approaches (like microformats, eRDF, RDFa, GRDDL) work in such a uniform way." created="Sat, 19 May 2007 18:19:56 GMT"/>			<outline text="Yes, you &lt;i&gt;should&lt;/i&gt; try to make data available in a wide variety of ways - XML (and flavours like RSS/Atom), JSON, Atom and so on. The point about microformats and data-in-HTML is that it's to get to places where the standard approaches &lt;i&gt;don't reach&lt;/i&gt;. That is exactly why they are useful!" created="Sat, 19 May 2007 18:25:57 GMT"/>			<outline text="&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.haloscan.com/comments/tommorris/ucheOnMicroformats95919/&quot;&gt;&lt;script type=&quot;text/javascript&quot;&gt;postCount('ucheOnMicroformats95919');&lt;/script&gt;&lt;/a&gt; | &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.haloscan.com/tb/tommorris/ucheOnMicroformats95919/&quot;&gt;&lt;script type=&quot;text/javascript&quot;&gt;postCountTB('ucheOnMicroformats95919'); &lt;/script&gt;&lt;/a&gt;"/>			</outline>		<outline text="Last.fm and podcasts" created="Sat, 19 May 2007 20:34:37 GMT">			<outline text="I've had a &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.last.fm&quot;&gt;last.fm&lt;/a&gt; account for a while, but rarely use it." created="Sat, 19 May 2007 20:34:38 GMT"/>			<outline text="This is because the default behaviour of most AudioScrobbler/last.fm tools is to scrobble podcasts I listen to. This is not behaviour that I particularly like, and there's no easy way to turn it off." created="Sat, 19 May 2007 20:35:26 GMT"/>			<outline text="I've just found that there &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; a way of turning it off if you use iScrobbler for OS X. &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.soylentred.net/2007/03/ignore-podcasts-with-iscrobbler&quot;&gt;Here are the instructions&lt;/a&gt;. You just use the 'defaults' command to set the preferences of iScrobbler to exclude podcasts." created="Sat, 19 May 2007 20:36:06 GMT"/>			<outline text="&lt;kbd&gt;defaults write org.flexistentialist.iscrobbler &quot;Track Filters&quot; '(&quot;Podcast&quot;)'&lt;/kbd&gt;" created="Sat, 19 May 2007 20:37:03 GMT"/>			<outline text="Do that and iScrobbler will submit only non-podcasts to last.fm. Which is kind of what it's intended for, see." created="Sat, 19 May 2007 20:37:15 GMT"/>			<outline text="&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.haloscan.com/comments/tommorris/lastfmAndPodcasts94434/&quot;&gt;&lt;script type=&quot;text/javascript&quot;&gt;postCount('lastfmAndPodcasts94434');&lt;/script&gt;&lt;/a&gt; | &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.haloscan.com/tb/tommorris/lastfmAndPodcasts94434/&quot;&gt;&lt;script type=&quot;text/javascript&quot;&gt;postCountTB('lastfmAndPodcasts94434'); &lt;/script&gt;&lt;/a&gt;"/>			</outline>		</body>	</opml>