I just had a glance at Nature News and could find the interesting article about R&D investment in the world where apparently Israel comes in first position with 4.71% of gross domestic product (GDP). 

To read the original article please go to: http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080123/full/451378a.html

Fig. R&D investment in the world 2005

I left a comment talking about the current situation in Spain:

Sphere: Related Content

TAGS:[ 2005, I+D+i, R&D, Uncategorized, world]

Related posts

• No related posts.

 Print This Post

There Are No BibTex Entries For This Post

Hits for this Post:1711 | Posted in UncategorizedPosted by VirgoBrain | No Comments »

My wife Carmen and I, we wish to all blog readers a…. 

WONDERFUL, EXCITING, PRODUCTIVE, CHALLENGING, …

PROSPEROUS, LOVELY AND OF COURSE…

A VERY HAPPY new year 2008

With lots of Sense of Humour…to overcome in an elegant way the daily difficulties in life…   

From Sydney (Australia), Lima (Peru) and Valencia (Spain)  

PD My dream is to become in 2008 the New Internet Hero super-blogger…

 

Carlos F. Enguix-Cervera

Sphere: Related Content

TAGS:[ 2008, jokes, new year, Personal, super-blogger]

Related posts

• No related posts.

 Print This Post

There Are No BibTex Entries For This Post

Hits for this Post:1819 | Posted in PersonalPosted by VirgoBrain | No Comments »

In this post I shall talk about IPV4 and IPV6 addresses and the respective hostnames for both standards.

 

IPV4

The current IPV4 standard allows the allocation of a total of 2³²= 4,294,967,296 billion addresses.

According to the latest internet census study peformed by the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute ISI, a total of 2.8 billion addresses have been probed with ICMP ping messages. In this study it is stated that from a total of 4.29 billion IPV4 addresses, a total of 73% has been allocated and 1.16 billion addresses are reserved for future use. On the other hand the unallocated IPV4 address pool is predicted to be exhausted by the year 2010/2011 (IPV4 Address Report).

 

IPV6

Nevertheless the new IPV6 standard will allow 2¹²⁸ addresses or 5.0788×10²⁸ addresses for each of the 6.7 billion Earth inhabitants.

Future IPV6 addresses will have the following format:

• instead of having 4 groups of 4 decimal digit addresses as in IPV4 (i.e www.wordpress.org 72.233.56.138) they have 8 groups of four hexadecimal digits (i.e. 2010:0db8:85a3:08d3:1319:8a2e:0370:7344 )

 

Internet hostnames

Regarding internet hostnames we do not have the exhaustion problem as compared to the total IPV4 address pool.

hostnames can contain up-to a maximum of 255 characters. hostnames are ASCII based, not being UNICODE compliant although some anecdotical exceptions are allowed such as the Spanish ñ character for Spanish speaking domains.

Each character can be either:

• A plain ASCII letter: ‘a’ to ‘z’ (case insensitive), that is 26 letters and/or

• ‘0′ to ‘9′ decimal digits, that is 10 digits and

• the ‘-’ hyphen character

Therefore it adds up a total of 37 ASCII-based options for each of the 255 characters:

255³⁷=1.1 e⁸⁹ combinations or almost infinite possibilities (although from a semantic or language perspective a lot of them will be non-sensical for the human being)

In other words we do not have a problem regarding availibility of hostnames according to the current standard mapped to the almost unlimited future IPV6 address pool.

hostnames can be divided by periods, for instance we can specify a fully qualified domain name such as:

• myHost.myDomain.myTopLevelDomain (i.e virgobrain.carlosfenguix.org) or

• subdomain.myDomain.myTopLevelDomain (i.e. wordpress.carlosfenguix.org)

 

Future hostnames

So Why not individuals in the future have their own personal hostnames and/or personal IPV6 addresses?

Probably we can suggest several straight-forward possibilities for referencing the hostnames of single individuals:

• alias.myHost.myDomain.myTld:

  • Example: cenguix.virgobrain.carlosfenguix.org or

• role.alias.myHost.myDomain.myTld:

  •  

    • Examples: research.cenguix.virgobrain.carlosfenguix.org or

    • personal.cenguix.virgobrain.carlosfenguix.org

What would be interesting is to have somehow UNICODE compliant hostnames for international languages in the future and alias for translated hostnames. For instance a chinese speaking person could have a personal hostname defined in chinese and a series of multiple alias representing the respective translations in different languages.

Sphere: Related Content

TAGS:[ hostnames, IPV4, IPV6, unicode hostnames, WWW]

Related posts

• No related posts.

 Print This Post

There Are No BibTex Entries For This Post

Hits for this Post:2114 | Posted in WWWPosted by VirgoBrain | No Comments »

Dear Reader: Just acknowledging that the earthquake not only had impact on lives but also on Touristic Icons such as the  Paracas cathedral which was one of the most famous natural monuments of Paracas. I took this photo in 2003 when I toured central and south Peru with my wife Carmen when she was my girlfriend.    

Paracas cathedral in August 2003

Paracas cathedral After Earthquake August 2007

Sphere: Related Content

TAGS:[ catedral, cathedral, Earthquake August 2007, Paracas, Personal, Peru]

Related posts

• Finally She Got Me! I just Married (0)

 Print This Post

There Are No BibTex Entries For This Post

Hits for this Post:3494 | Posted in PersonalPosted by VirgoBrain | No Comments »

Dear Reader:

It has been quite some time since I have not submitted any post to this specialized blog. Any how I plan to submit several posts soon, so please be aware.

Yeah! Finally my beautiful Peruvian Girlfriend Got Me! I was very happy to say Yes I Want…in the wedding.

 So Carmen and I, we would like to say we are happily married in Lima and had a nice honeymoon in Mancora.

Cheers

Carlos 

Sphere: Related Content

TAGS:[ Carmen y Carlos, July 2007, Lima, marriage, Personal, Peru]

Related posts

• Welcome to VirgoBrain’s Blog (4)
• Paracas Cathedral (Peru): a farewell departure after the August 2007 EarthQuake (0)

 Print This Post

There Are No BibTex Entries For This Post

Hits for this Post:3829 | Posted in PersonalPosted by VirgoBrain | No Comments »

After moving from Valencia, Spain to Sydney, Australia where I was born, Greetings to all the people who reads my specialized Web Blog.

In my Firestats statistics I have people from around the world:

JAPAN 20.76%

UNITED STATES 14.88%

REPUBLIC OF KOREA 13.84%

SPAIN 10.10%

CHINA 8.17%

INDIA 4.29%

BRAZIL 3.53%

RUSSIAN FEDERATION 2.77%

POLAND 2.21%

GERMANY 2.15%

AUSTRALIA 1.52%

FRANCE 1.45%

TAIWAN 1.38%

UNITED KINGDOM 1.04% 

and 40 countries more

Although we belong to very different cultural backgrounds there is something that unites Computer Scientists: knowledge and the communication of new ideas and thoughts! I hope you enjoy reading my Web Blog. Please feel free to leave comments and second thoughts. This time I am including one of my latest reviews at ACM Computing Reviews, a review about a very complex paper:

Shao, F., Novak, A., and Shanmugasundaram, J. 2006. Triggers over nested views of relational data. ACM Trans. Database Syst. 31, 3 (Sep. 2006), 921-967. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1166074.1166080

Available at: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1166080&dl=acm&coll=&CFID=15151515&CFTOKEN=6184618#

This article is all about triggers and nothing but a special kind of triggers: triggers over nested virtual (non-materialized) xml Views that represent nested relational views on top of object-relational DBMS’s. According to both the SQL99 and SQL2003 specifications, triggers as schema objects, are only specified on base tables. Therefore both specifications do not contemplate the existence of triggers on views. More over the SQL2003 ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 32 draft standard on xml-Related Specifications SQL/XML does not include a single reference to trigger inclusion.

We might have to wait till the ISO’s Work Group for database languages (WG3) schedules in 2007 the development of the next ISO SQL 2007 standard which might include triggers on top of views as presented in this paper in the framework and foundations parts of the specification and in the xml-Related Specifications SQL/XML part, the inclusion of triggers in xml views.

In summary the paper describes the entire round-trip of a middleware active triggering system of virtual xml views expressed on top of object-relational base tables. The round trip can be described as follows:

1. An update occurs on base tables

2. The system detects how updates on base tables affect triggers expressed on top of virtual xml views

3. Activated triggers expressed on top of nested virtual xml views representing nested-relational unmaterialized views are translated into plain SQL triggers on top of object-relational base tables

4. Base table triggers are executed and results are re-converted into nested relations passing as parameters to the affected virtual xml View triggers.

Several important contributions are indicated by the authors in this large 47 pages journal article, among them we may cite the following:

1. A systematic technique for the translation of triggers on top of NON-1NF nested-relational views into SQL triggers of flat tables

2. An algorithm for detecting changes in nested views

3. The definition and use of a special type of views entitled as “injective views” capable of detecting in an optimized way old values and new values in triggers with regard to transition tables and trigger execution context.

4. The use and adaptation of trigger grouping optimization techniques used in publish-subscribe systems for the definition of triggers on top of virtual xml views.

In their experimental evaluation with syntethic data sets we conclude that their techniques do not scale well for materialized views and for non-grouping techniques whereas using the adapted trigger grouping techniques in virtual views scales efficiently in standard commodity harware (an already outdated 933Mhz PIII 1GB RAM Computer).

I’d rather say that the work of the authors have been presented in several VLDB conferences and that their contribution to the field is important which might be taken into account for the definition of the next ISO SQL 2007 standards, especially with regard to views. According to some slides from Jim Melton, the next SQL 2007 standard will discuss the inclusion of materalized views but apparently there is no prior agenda containing virtual xml views, triggers on top of relational views and triggers on top of xml views.

I only have to confess one negative criticism to the authors work with regard to the definition of a continuum of examples to prove the versality and universality of their techniques and more importantly decidability of trigger execution, which is a non-trivial very complex problem.

Sphere: Related Content

TAGS:[ ACM, Computing Reviews, nested relational views, SQL 2003, SQL 2007, WWW, xml triggers, xml views]

Related posts

• No related posts.

 Print This Post

There Are No BibTex Entries For This Post

Hits for this Post:6820 | Posted in WWWPosted by VirgoBrain | No Comments »

It has been a while since I posted an article in my Web blog, due to the fact I did not want to contaminate the specialized Web blog with superficial and non-trascendental content. Nevertheless I will incude some of my thoughts during my staying at the hospital taking care of my mother.

I have been staying about 14/15 hours per day taking care of my mother who is a kind of special demanding patient. Meanwhile “killing” the idle hours spent in the hospital I thought it will be interesting to share my thoughts. I grabbed my laptop and start talking about the complexity involved in the maintenance and set up of duties in a typical more or less important provincial hospital.

At night my hours were not disturbed much but only by my beloved patient, my mother and routine tasks performed by auxiliary night shift nurses. But in the morning the ecological system takes part in its climax. A majority of personnel are auxiliary nurses and cleaning personnel, then nurses and very few doctors. It is a typical hierarchical ecological society.

The early morning starts with personnel checking body temperture, blood pressure, then breathing aids and so on. Then the catering personnel brings the welcomed breakfast. Then later the humble and very important cleaning personnel proceeds to clean the room and clean the non-mobile patients. Later the top layer of the hierarchy, the doctors will check the current progress of patients by examing vital signs and data available from patients.

So what has to do this with regard to the WWW? Obviously there are major differences in that the WWW will be populated by automated software artifacts and that the hospital (by now) is populated by organic creatures. But we are able to determine analogies from a consumer/producer perspective in the ecology where consumers/producers are organic creatures (human beings) and automated software/hardware artifacts.

In the WWW arena, who will be the consumers? Human beings and automated software process such as B2B processes and software agents. And producers? Information created and pushed into the WWW ecological system by billions of users and systems and automated processes that harvest, gather, retrieve, index and re-organize into compact repositories such as search engine databases, subject directories and so on.

By now this is a very simple ecological system formed mainly by producers/consumers. When it will compare to a complex and dynamic system such as a provincial hospital? Well we may forecast that both successive web X.0 generations and the Semantic Web will provide a minimal infrastructure capable of generating complex dynamic systems such as the aforementioned hospital scenario.

Both of these require the population of very specialized software components such as automated Web services, workflow engines, service match-makers, dynamic on-the-fly and static versatile repositories, event-oriented rule-based/trigger-based active distributed components, optimized push and pull replicated components, intelligent information aggregators and summarizers, ontologies and automated ontology constructors and so on.

All these components should be configured to cope with uncertainty, to provide partial decidability and incomplete information, to provide probablistic hypothesis or ranking of decisions. This future web X.0 will require of many Web efforts such as the rdf/OWL-based Semantic Web, the Fuzzy/Data mining intelligent web, web 2.0, the push and pull dynamic Web, the rule-based Web, the Web Services Web, the post-relational xml-based Web and so on.

Sphere: Related Content

TAGS:[ ecological web, intelligent web, Semantic Web, web 2.0, web X.0, wisdom web, WWW]

Related posts

• No related posts.

 Print This Post

There Are No BibTex Entries For This Post

Hits for this Post:8303 | Posted in Semantic Web, WWWPosted by VirgoBrain | No Comments »