DOYLC

Cleveland Abbe Profile Cleveland Abbe inaugurated a public weather service that served as a model for the national weather service, which was organized shortly thereafter as a branch of the U.S. Army Signal Service. In 1871 he was appointed chief meteorologist of the branch, which in 1891 was reorganized as the U.S. Weather Bureau (later the National Weather Service), and he served in that capacity more than 45 years. NAME: Cleveland Abbe OCCUPATION: Inventor, Astronomer, Meteorologist BIRTH DATE: December 03, 1838 DEATH DATE: October 28, 1916 EDUCATION: Free Academy PLACE OF BIRTH:

Mahmoud Abbas Profile Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas helped found Fatah in the 1950s, which spearheaded the Palestinian armed struggle and dominated the Palestine Liberation Organization. In the 1990s Abbas stepped into the international spotlight when he led Palestine's peace talks with Israel, resulting in the 1993 Oslo Accords. He was chosen as the unofficial president of the "State of Palestine" in 2008 NAME: Mahmoud Abbas OCCUPATION: Political Leader BIRTH DATE: 1935 EDUCATION: University of Damascus, Moscow State University PLACE OF BIRTH: Zefat, Palestine [now Israel] AKA: Abu Mazen 

Frank Abagnale Synopsis Frank Abagnale became notorious for impersonating a pilot, a doctor, and a laywer while in his early 20s. He was arrested at 21 by the French police, and later hired by the FBI to teach them his fradulent tricks. He started his own consultating agency, educating corporations, financial institutions and government agencies Early Life Frank Abagnale Jr. was born on April 27, 1948, in Bronxville, New York. He was one of four children born to parents Frank Abagnale Sr. and Paulette Abagnale. The couple met in Algiers during World War II, while Frank Sr. was stationed in Oran. After the war, they moved to New York, where Frank started a stationery business on Madison Avenue. Frank Jr. had a happy childhood, and was especially close to his father. When his mother decided unexpectedly to leave his father, however, the young Frank's life was turned upside-down. Not only were his siblings devastated, but so was his father, who was still very much in lov

Synopsis Brooklyn-born Aaliyah Dana Haughton (born January 16, 1979) started voice lessons shortly after she learned to talk. Determined to be a star, she signed a contract with Jive Records at the age of 12 and came to popular acclaim in 1994. On her way home from a music video shoot in 2001, a plane crash killed Aaliyah and eight members of her film crew. She was 22 years old at the time of her death NAME: Aaliyah Dana Haughton OCCUPATION: Film Actress, Singer BIRTH DATE: January 16, 1979 DEATH DATE: August 25, 2001 EDUCATION: Detroit High School for the Fine and Performing Arts PLACE OF BIRTH: Brooklyn,

Just a brief note on something that has been bothering me for a while. In reading Prof. Campbell Harvey's Hypertextual Finance Glossary ( http://www.duke.edu/~charvey/Classes/wpg/glossary.htm ) I noticed that it contains the ISO 4217 Currency Codes, e.g. there is an entry for "USD" with the definition "The ISO 4217 currency code for the USA Dollar".   However, the ISO 4217 Currency Codes are sprinkled though the glossary, because all terms are arranged in alphabetical order (actually, lexicographical order since numbers and symbols have to be taken into account). This means that there is no single list of ISO 4217 Currency Codes in the Glossary.  To extract them would require searching on a piece of text, such as "4217" which is hopefully in every definition.  Figure 1: Concept System of Customer Type It also requires the searcher to know in advance that there is such a concept system as Currency Code.  But how is this always possible?  Consider what

In the previous posts I had the idea of a person or group that creates a definition.  This was a rough draft of a part of another concept system that I am calling Definition Reference.  Figure 1 shows this concept system.  The unquoted terms are the official terms in this concept system.  The quoted terms are shortened versions of the official terms, which are univocal (have only one meaning) within the concept system, but are generally equivocal (have more than one meaning) if you increase scope to beyond the system shown here, and must be used with care. Figure 1: Definition Reference Concept System The Concepts in The System The concepts in this system are as follows: Definition Reference: a source of a definition Informal Definition Source: a Definition Reference that cannot be relied upon. There is no guarantee that it is correct. Definition Authority: a Definition Reference that can be relied on. There is some kind of guarantee that it is correct. Definition Authoritative R

Having taken care - for the moment - of the core conceptual model for concepts, terms, and definitions, I returned to where I began, which was to try to show how Stipulative Definitions and Legislative Definitions differ, and to do so visually as shown in Figure 1 Figure 1: Conceptual Model of Stipulative and Legislative Definitions Basic Definitions The concepts shown in Figure 1 are defined as follows: Stipulative Definition: a definition that a Definition Creator creates to describe a concept and which the Definition Creator assigns to a term.  In performing the latter, the Definition Creator acts as a Terminologist.  Legislative Definition: a Stipulative Definition whose Definition Creator is an Authority, and whose acceptance is obligatory for Legislative Definition Users. Authority: an individual person or organization who has legitimacy sufficient to make any Legislative Definition they create binding upon one or more Legislative Definition Users Definition User: an individ

Well, I had another day or so of thinking about the conceptual model I was developing - originally for stipulative and legislative definitions.  Actually, a few minutes rather than a whole day was what I had, but such is life when you have a job.  But even in that limited time I realized that I had not got the idea of communities in the model.  So I went back to the conceptual model and put in communities as shown in Figure 1. Figure 1: Relations of Concept and Term Speech Community: a group of individuals who share a vocabulary that describes a concept system.  [See Wikipedia for more - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_community - although it seems you have to belong to the Speech Community Speech Community to understand this entry.] Semantic Community: a group of individuals who share a common understanding of a set of concepts and relationships (a concept system), irrespective of the terms used to describe them. I understand that both of these definitions are preliminary and n

I was noodling around with stipulative and legislative definitions, and started to diagram out what I was finding.   It occurred to me that I have not really had a rethink about diagramming the relationships between the concepts involved in definition work for a while.    Pretty soon I found that I lacked some of the fundamentals, and had to get them sorted out before I could deal with stipulative and legislative definitions. The result of that effort is the cartoon shown in Figure 1.  I am calling it a "cartoon" because I have not had time yet to work it up in some formal notation, such as conceptual graph.  I also realize it is incomplete.  For instance, I have not had time to figure out where to put Nominal Definition. Figure 1: Relations of Concept and Term In Figure 1 all supertype-subtype relations are indicated by solid lines, with the label "is genus of", indicating how the superordinate genus is related to the subordinate genus.  This is to distinguish the

A few days ago my son was getting same day surgery and I was forced to sit in a waiting room for longer than I wanted.  The usual trash TV was being shown to keep the nervous relatives quiet, and there was a typical "self-help" show on which featured some bizarre members of the general public, each of whom had issues that apparently had some entertainment value. A phrase that kept coming up was various variations of "define yourself", as in "How do you define yourself?", or "Don't let your [whatever problem the person had] define you".  It occurred to me that the purveyors of these phrases must have had only a fuzzy idea of what they were saying.  They were probably repeating a cliché they had heard before, to save themselves the difficulty of thinking and finding a way to express their thoughts. Definitions for Concepts, Identities for Individuals So what was wrong with asking "How Do You Define Yourself?" The answer is that defin

It is a well-known fact that the financial services industry - and their regulators - often use bizarre language.  For instance, Alan Greenspan, during his tenure as Chairman of the Federal Reserve System, was famous for achieving a level of incomprehension that spawned a generation of "Fed Watchers" needed to interpret him.  However, the problem goes far beyond Mr. Greenspan, and one of the worst offenses committed by financial services is scientism. Scientism is the application of the language and methods of the natural sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, etc.) to problem domains that are completely outside of the realm of natural science.  For instance, the term "financial engineering" has been used to describe a large set of practices which contributed significantly to the great financial crisis we are still living in.  Having worked in asset securitization myself, I can assure anyone that whatever these practices were, they were certainly no form of "en

The previous post looked at analogies, which often are unrecognized as such in information management.  It posited that analogical terms are applied to new and poorly understood concepts, which go undefined or poorly defined.   As a result attributes of the concept to which the analogical term originally signified are transferred to the new concept.  Of course, this transfer also tends to go unrecognized.  The result is a bad definition of the new concept, which can have severe negative practical effects. I came across a discussion of analogies by Robert B. Stewart in the book Come Let Us Reason (2012, Copan and Craig, editors, ISBN 978-1-4336-7220-0).  Stewart points out that analogies "are not evidence that something is so , but rather illustrations of how   something could be so " (Stewart's italics).  Here I think Stewart is discussing analogies in controversy - how they can be used to support a point, or in the search for an explanation.  The passage made me realize

A while back I blogged on Univocal, Equivocal, and Analogous terms.   Thomas Aquinas wrote about these in Summa Theologica , so it is not really a new topic.   That said, I think that how we deal with these three classes of term in information management is a fairly murky area, and requires the development of practical guidance.   Let’s start with analogous terms.   What is an analogy?   The Free Dictionary provides the following definition: similarity in some respects between things that are otherwise dissimilar. [http://www.thefreedictionary.com/analogy, accessed 2012-06-29]   This is a reasonable start, but I think that we need to understand a lot more about analogous terms in information management.   I would suggest that an analogous term is: a term used to signify a concept that uses all or part of a term which signifies a second concept that is better understood.   There are supposed to be attributes in common between the two concepts (often only one or a very few), or some othe

After I posted the blog on "Common vs. Technical Terms in Definitions and Some New Definition Rules" I was contacted by Suzanne DalBon, who had a different view on this topic.  Suzanne kindly put it that my view might apply in certain situations, but that handing primacy to common terms might cause chaos in other situations.   The first point that Suzanne raised is that the emphasis on common terms in definitions will lead to inconsistency.  There are simply too many common terms (words and expressions) to choose from. A major issue in collaborative environments where any kind of content is produced is the need to achieve consistency.  Consistency in outputs is needed for users (readers) of the content to be able to reliably use it.  Such consistency is remarkably difficult to achieve.  Heavy editorial control is one way, but such control can poison any collaborative environment where contributors are providing their time and effort on voluntary basis.  Of course, a collabora