Life & Research Notes

For my Comparative Media Studies final paper and presentation I focused on the design of social, programmable contract objects that I’ve touched on in a few previous entries. This paper covers all the ideas, and I think it satisfies my overall goal of nailing down an outline of the topics. Yet I’m slightly disappointed in how it reads. it feels slightly stiff and analytic. It is a bad style habit I unfortunately picked up writing analytic papers for undergrad philosophy classes, and that I still inadvertently fall back on occasionally. My goal for my next writing is to tone down the analysis and find more rhythm.

remixing_contracts.pdf

Last week Ben Wagner and I finished our work on an RDF toolkit for crawling, searching and querying RDF graphs. It’s in scheme, and uses a simple s-expression based query language that is inspired in part by SPARQL.

Download about_triplemint.pdf (120K) & triplemint.tgz (180K). Requires the 2006/04/14 snapshot of MIT Scheme as well as a copy of the W3C’s cwm.

The last problem set is finished, and I’m now turning my attention to the final projects. What a huge relief. I managed to get the constraint propagation working pretty well, good enough at least to apply to the father-daughter-yacht puzzle in SICP. After printing out all the code I realized that it really wasn’t all that large of a program.

6891 Problem Set 7