[peirce-l] Sonetto CG-based rule and search engine wins awards for Retail Affiliate Management
List, In connection with the First International Pragmatic Web Conference call for papers I recently mentioned that Nathan Houser (in a piece titled "Peirce in the 21st Century" in a recent Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society" volume) noted John Sowa's work in Conceptual Graphs (CG) based on Peirce's Existential Graphs (EG) as having "begun to show great promise in the competitive marketplace of ideas" and was queried off-list as to an example of CGs being employed in this way. The following announcement was posted to the CG list a few days ago by Gerard Ellis, the Chief Scientist of the group which developed the Sonetto product based on CGs and CG search and rule engines. There are, of course, other applications of CGs in the "marketplace of ideas" (mainly European), but this appears to be the latest and most promising one. Gary Richmond Please check out the attached press releases that were published yesterday. The first is Microsofts release and the second is our own press release. It is worth mentioning that there were several Microsoft clients and partners who made the finals but did not win awards despite having higher profile relationships with Microsoft than we do. Sonetto not only won both the Multi-Channel Retail Award and the Special Award for Innovation, but beat competitors with cutting edge solutions in promotions management, RFID, point of sale and customer loyalty. This validates both the Sonetto product strategy and our vision for its place at the heart of multi-channel retailing. Microsofts release is at http://www.microsoft.com/emea/presscentre/pressreleases/rad2006winnerspr_1522006.mspx Our press release: IVIS GROUP SECURES TWO WINS AT THE MICROSOFT EMEA RETAIL APPLICATION DEVELOPER AWARDS IN DUSSELDORF Sonetto Affiliate Channel Management Wins Multi-Channel Retailing Award and Special Award for Innovation London, 15th February 2006 - IVIS Group, the UK's most innovative e-business solution provider today announced that it won two out of the eight Microsoft EMEA Retail Application Developer (RAD) Awards at last nights awards ceremony in Dsseldorf, Germany. IVIS Group scooped both the Multi-Channel Retailing Award and the Special Award for Innovation with the implementation of its Sonetto Affiliate Channel Management solution at Tesco.com. The application is part of IVIS Groups Sonetto Multi-Channel Product Information Management (PIM) suite. The Multi-Channel Retailing Award category rewards solutions that enhance retailers ability to offer a better, more integrated customer experience across multiple channels such as stores, online, kiosks, catalogues, telephone, TV and collaborative partnerships with search engines, shopping comparison sites and affiliate marketing networks. The Special Award for Innovation is a discretionary award given by the judges that recognises the most creative, comprehensive, integrated use of Microsoft technology and products to deliver tangible business value to retailers. Qusai Sarraf, CEO, IVIS Group, said, "We are extremely proud to win these two awards. This endorsement from Microsoft and the RAD Award judges validates our vision of business driven PIM applications that enable true multi-channel retailing. It is a clear acknowledgement of the years of product development that have gone into our Sonetto solutions working closely with clients including Tesco.com. Sonetto Affiliate Channel Management enables retailers to manage multiple dynamic relationships with shopping comparison websites, affiliate networks and search engines and align these collaborative channels with their direct sales efforts. Sonetto gives product, category and marketing managers the agility to control the supply of large product data feeds to affiliates on the fly and without the need for IT support. It optimises marketing campaigns and the promotion of products to consumers through affiliate channels, thereby increasing sales, optimising affiliate marketing ROI and minimising the IT cots of managing multiple partners. The Microsoft EMEA RAD Awards are in their 6th year and have become one of the leading events on the retail technology calendar. Since its inception, the RAD Awards programme has recognised and celebrated the independent software vendors (ISVs) and retailer IT departments that make the best use of Microsoft technology to provide business value to retail organisations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). This years RAD winners are focused on helping retailers achieve greater customer intimacy irrespective of channel, with a more integrated and collaborative business approach, said Dilip Popat, managing director, EMEA Retail Industry Unit, Microsoft. The winning companies demonstrate that a connected environment can maximise the potential of existing systems and link with those of external partners to help deliver the optimum shopping experience. Microsoft believes that honouring innovative software developers is good
[peirce-l] Re: What's going on here?
Frances to listers... This curiosity of mine is about the term intermediate as used by Peirce in the passage quoted below. It is a thread however that seems related to the topic. The use of the term intermediate by Peirce may of course have been merely a casual one, rather than strictly a categorical one. It is tempting however to align it categorically and thus tridentially as mediate and intermediate and mediate, where the intermediate might embrace the dynamic and energetic and clearly the indexic. Nevertheless, the intent by Peirce might have been to broadly include both indexes and symbols under the raw intermediate umbrella. There is also a clear distinction here in the passage between the immediate and the direct, which presumably are not to be identified as similar, because the term immediate is not used. My access to digital versions of Peircean writings is limited, but it would be interesting to seek and find out how many occasions the term intermediate appears in his texts, if indeed it has not already been done and posted to the list archive. The necessity for a sign directly monstrative of the connection of premiss and conclusion is susceptible of proof. The proof is as follows. When we contemplate the premiss, we mentally perceive that that being true the conclusion is true. I say we perceive it, because clear knowledge follows contemplation without any intermediate process. Since the conclusion becomes certain, there is some state at which it becomes directly certain. Now this no symbol can show; for a symbol is an indirect sign depending on the association of ideas. Hence, a sign directly exhibiting the mode of relation is required. This promised proof presents this difficulty: namely, it requires the reader actually to think in order to see the force of it. That is to say, he must represent the state of things considered in a direct imaginative way. (Charles Peirce, Collected Papers, CP 4.75) --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] Re: Are there authorities on authority?
Joe, I think you raise some very important points in this post. I'm not going to address any of them myself at the moment, but I do look forward to hearing Larry's response to your question about the basis for determining authorities. I would, however, like to give an example of the kind of misrepresentation of authority that goes on these days, and which perhaps that the WWW is especially vulnerable to. Although not precisely about the issues you've raised, Joe, it is related to your comment that: . . . the supposed authorities will sometimes not in fact be worthy of such recognition, whether because they are frauds or are simply incompetents, who happened to be successful in persuading others that they are something which they are not. I recently received an email from what looked to be a legitimate source (a Prof.Nagib Callaos, KCC 2006 General Chair) inviting me to participate in activities relating to the conference (I've copied the message below my signature). It turns out that this is bogus. See the Wikipedia article on Callaos: http://wiki.fakeconferences.org/index.php/Nagib_Callaos_conferences which includes the comment that: If you're working in academia and on computer scientific subjects, you've probably been spammed by these guys. In 2005, their WMSCI conference accepted a randomly generated paper, which brought these conference organizers a lot of international critique, both from the scientific community, as from the mainstream news media. The article goes on to list about 20 bogus conferences created by Callaos in the past two years. Also an article describing this spam can be found at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4449651.stm I had heard of this a while back, although I didn't associate Callaos name with it immediately. I had earlier thought it was mainly an issue concerning standards for acceptance of conference papers, but it's really much more about spam and fake conferences. Gary Dear Gary Richmond: Based on your participation in conferences, we would like to consult your opinion and your possible contribution regarding the idea of collecting, in a multiple-author book or symposium proceedings, reflections and knowledge regarding conferences organization and quality standards/means. It will only take you about 30 seconds to give us your opinion and your potential support as a reviewer and/or paper contributor. To do so please visit the web page: www.iiis.org/kcc/a.asp?t=a11[EMAIL PROTECTED] As you know, an increasing number of books and papers have been written regarding knowledge communication via journals, but very few have been written regarding knowledge communication via conferences, workshops, etc. Consequently, we would like to invite you to share your ideas/research in this area by submitting a paper and/or organizing an invited session in KCC 2006 to be held in Orlando, FL on July 16-19, 2006. Please visit KCC's web site for further information: http://www.iiisci.org/KCC2006 Organizers of the invited sessions with the best performance will be co-editors of the proceedings volume where their sessions' papers are to be included and of the CD electronic proceedings. You can find information about the suggested steps to organize an invited session in the Call for Participation and in the conference web page. If the deadlines are tight and you need more time, let me know about a suitable time for you and I will inform you if it is feasible for us. Best Regards, Prof.Nagib Callaos KCC 2006 General Chair --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com
[peirce-l] RE: Are there authorities on authority?
Joseph, This question--who authorizes the authorities--really lies at the heart of social epistemology, and reminds me of an essay I read in grad school, Egoism in Epistemology by Richard Foley (in *Socializing Epistemology*--I just pulled the book off the shelf). Among other things Foley distinguishes derivative and fundamental authority, which is roughly the difference between authority for which I have reasons to believe a person is a reliable source of knowledge, and authority for which I have no such reasons. A central issue in social epistemology is whether--at some point--we must simply take what others say on trust, or whether it is always possible in some deep way ultimately to justify our reliance on testimony. Epistemic egoists (Foley's term) say it is possible. Wikipedia illustrated this issue beautifully--I've long wanted to write about this, but just never got around to it. Under current rules, one can never really know whether an editor on Wikipedia is who is says he is, or whether he has the qualifications he says he does. Therefore (or so we can say as a rule of thumb), if you want to trust Wikipedia at all, either you trust any given piece of information based on its coherence with your own knowledge, or you take it on trust simply because people are more likely to say true things than not. It's impractical (difficult and time-consuming) to try to confirm the reliability of the specific sources that write for Wikipedia. Now, personally, I tend to agree with Foley (if I remember right, but with Thomas Reid in any case), that we *must* ultimately rely on what others say without having any *specific* reason for thinking they are telling the truth. (A lot is packed into ultimately there.) But we can certainly try to *improve our odds*. That is something I think the social epistemologists who take raw testimony as a basic source of justification sometimes forget. Wikipedians also seem to forget this. We can bootstrap our way up to greater levels of confidence. And, of course, society has already done the bootstrapping. Observe that long study of a subject tends to increase the reliability of one's opinions about the subject. After studying a subject a long time, a person is given a degree in the subject. Somebody with a degree in or significant experience with a subject can be *presumed*, everything else being equal, to be more *likely* to get something right on the subject than someone without a degree in or significant experience with the subject. Furthermore, the higher the degree, study, training, background, etc., the greater the presumption of reliability (and even if it's never a very strong presumption, it's a *greater* presumption). Some such bootstrapping process no doubt led to the modern conventions on who is and is not an expert. But, as everybody knows and as non-experts endlessly delight in observing, there are some alleged experts who have all the credentials but who are actually quacks, ignoramuses, whack-jobs, or otherwise unreliable despite their credentials. Never mind that this obvious fact does not undermine the *general* claim, that modern conventions of expertise *tends to increase the credibility* of a source. There are bound to be statistical outliers. More interesting for practical purposes, such as those of the Digital Universe, is the fact that experts, when gathered together, can actually (in time) identify the outliers. Prof. X is really just a whack-job, even though, outside the community of experts in the field, he might appear to be just as expert and just as reliable as anyone else in the field. So (I hope) the Information Coalitions (as they are and will be called) that make decisions about who is and who is not an expert will be well-positioned to exclude the Prof. Xs. (The Environmental information Coalition already exists; see earthportal.net/about. Others under active development are a Health Information Coalition and a Cosmos Information Coalition. A full complement of coalitions will be kick-started hopefully sometime this spring--which will be very exciting, and we think big news.) The trouble, however, comes when the whole field is unreliable. You'll forgive me for not citing any examples, but you might wonder how the Digital Universe will handle this problem in general. Ultimately, and pragmatically speaking, I imagine it will come down to academic respectability, or consistency with the scientific method and other very widely-endorsed epistemic methods (which vary from field to field). Basically, if the Digital Universe aims to cast its net as widely as possible, and to include the bulk of academe, the most it can hope to do is to represent the state of the art in each field. It cannot, in addition, hope to be selective about persons or fields or institutions (etc.) in a way that is identifiably contrary to the already-existing standards of credibility in various fields. It can at best hope to be fair to all
