Throughts on Branding and Joining or Creating a Crowd

People are driven by branding. Most people do not understand what you are doing. In the present distracted society with high levels of information but low levels of focus most people will not take the time to understand what you are doing. You can only get through a snippet. Education manifests itself as a brand, and it is a product that can be sold. Most other people who saw you bought the product get excited, not really knowing what it is, but that it was brought to you by people said to be experts in their field. 

Some people know the people who are said to be experts in the field. They are happy to know other people who are learning from them. They would like to get to know the people who are learning from them and perhaps plug them into what they are doing. Some of these people have the focus to understand what you are doing.

People who are not learning from said experts behind a said brand face a challenge. There is not a standard way of dealing with them by most beyond perhaps losing them in the noise. Others may be not distracted, but focused on something else. Others may be afraid to support you. They have to blaze their own path and make their own brand. Most will not understand what they are doing, but it must be impressive. The skepticism of those that are seen as understanding must not be so loud that it drowns out the impression (if they are fortunate enough to get it). A core group must be formed and sustained that people are drawn to. First it will be the true believers, then it will be those who understand less but are drawn to the brand. The idea should be workable for it to be financed by outsiders, and this is difficult when not working with an established brand. The said experts behind the said education brand will probably not be paying close attention at first, because they will be focusing on themselves and those learning from them.

If you choose to build a brand, you must remain focused. That is what you can control. Hopefully you get a following as well.

Musings about ISU

To put this on the Open web means it can be found.

I looked at International Space University in France and realized I have found avenues to pursue a lot of this stuff already. The big issue is dealing with the mental weeblies. I am still thinking about it however. As usual, I get haunted
by the up front cost. They like people with higher level degrees, which I have. Being knowledgeable about computers probably does not hurt.

In parallel to their curriculum - 

Potato Gun Construction and Being my Usual Eccentric Self Led to:
[1] Sutton and Bilbarz, Rocket Propulsion Elements
[2] NASA Systems Engineering Handbook
[3] Aerospace Maker - OSHW Spaceflight (tech and legalese)
[4] AlphaCubeSat -- cubesat design and deployment & familiarity with the space business (tech, procedure, and legalese)

Computer interest and space interest in conjunction with the Semantic web and LD led to:
[5] Integrated Space Plan / ISA . . (familiarity with the space business)

Interest in Open Source, the Hacker Philosophy, and want for a dev server led to:
[6] Various OKC Hacker / Makerspaces ...(places projects can be built)

The positive thing I see here is a buy in from a dedicated group of people with a legal backing as well as the focus that comes when you burn all of your ships. Also freedom because you're comfortable b/c you paid someone to put up with you :). I'm uncertain at the moment about how open the buyers in this market would be to radical ideas that to the more informed might involve a lot. I have habit of introducing them to unsuspecting recruiters. I try to normalize myself: sometimes unsuccessfully. (Edit: This would be less of an issue to me if I had the capital up front)

I am a bit past the deadlines on January and April, but I inquired anyways.


For reference:

{1} http://www.isunet.edu/images/ISU/News/brochures/ISU_Admission2015_Brochure.pdf

Loading Libraries into Drupal

Using Libraries API 2.x (as a module-developer)

 https://www.drupal.org/node/1342238

 

Installing an external library that is required by a contributed module

https://www.drupal.org/node/1440066

 

Loading PHP Libraries and Using Classes using Drupal Libraries module

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19053676/loading-php-libraries-and-using-classes-using-drupal-libraries-module

  

Autoloading Classes

http://php.net/manual/en/language.oop5.autoload.php

 

3 Tips For Using External Libraries With Drupal

 http://engineeredweb.com/blog/10/5/3-tips-using-external-libraries-drupal/

 

 

 

 

Linked Data / RDF at Dataverse 2016

The following involves mention of Linked Data and RDF at the meeting:

Dr. David Ruvolo of the University of Pittsburgh was doing some stuff with linked data with CHIA (http://www.chia.pitt.edu/).

CHIA has been developing something called Col*Fusion which is described as  "Col*Fusion (Collaborative Data Fusion) is an advanced infrastructure for systematic accumulation, integration and utilization of historical data. It aims to support large-scale interdisciplinary research, where a comprehensive picture of the subject requires large amounts of historical data from disparate data sources from a variety of disciplines." (http://colfusion.exp.sis.pitt.edu/colfusion/) . This reminds me of LIMES and the  SILK Framework with Christian Bizer as it seems to have a aim in its data integration attempts.

Datacite offers permanent DOIs which might be useful in RDF work. Trisha Cruse said they would like to work in more of the vein of semantic web / LD but they are buried at the moment (http://projects.iq.harvard.edu/dcm2016/people/trisha-cruse).

Robert Day  with Lab-Ally has done some stuff with RDF (http://elnsoftware.blogspot.com/2011/07/its-all-just-semantics.html).