I wrote a post recently about the Faustian bargains we must make when offered something price-free but with contingencies. In this case I was talking about our choice in operating systems and browsers. Specifically I wrote about my own struggle balancing privacy against the attractions in Google’s new Chrome operating system and browser.
Pitifully few people actually read the post. I’ll take the blame for that. It had a weak title (Playing with Google Chromium OS) and an even weaker hook in the excerpt.
I’d like a second try. Except for a new title and this excerpt, the current post is identical to the one I published last week.
I thought that George Siemens used an appropriate degree of alarm when he said recently in his post Privacy that “it looks like we are just at the beginning stages of privacy obliteration.”
Privacy is a right, regardless of whether people are willing to pawn it off. In these early days of the Internet, companies should not be permitted to finese the right to privacy toward obliteration.
Today’s theme is one of design. Is there a way to use data analysis and visualization to engage people enough that they follow their curiosity into exploration of complex issues?
After testing the open source version of Google’s Chrome OS operating system, the question becomes: Am I likely to use it when it’s released in late 2010?
HTML5 and SVG may open new opportunities for deeper understanding of complex policy issues.
With the conclusion of this project, I no longer feel the need to equivocate about xquery. I will definitely use it.
In this XQuery use case, I consider whether higher education in the U.S. is countercyclical to recessions.
Recently I installed an XML database and duplicated one of the performance tests I’d done earlier with the Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED). Response time dropped from 195 seconds to 2 seconds. Read more.
Recently I asked folks on an XQuery listserv if XQuery might play a role in a p2p web anticipated by such recent announcements as Google’s Wave and Opera’s Unite. Below is an edited version of that conversation. Read more.
In a continued search for a worthy web query tool, I spent a fair amount of time playing with Zorba’s XQuery and the 20,000 time series from the Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED) database. I continue to be impressed. Read more.
There’s huge interest in harnessing the web as a giant database, and the motivations for this are easily as diverse as the interest is large. I’m just looking for a precursor. Read more.
Commentary, Query Tools | Gary Lewis, February 1, 2010 9:46 am | 
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