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1. Database Truth of the Week

“If the data sub-language ... has the power of second order predicate logic (SOPL), expressions are possible that cannot be evaluated (for example, self-referencing expressions) and the formal language is then undecidable, an algorithm to implement a declarative query language is impossible and all hope of physical independence is lost." --David McGoveran

2. What's Wrong With This Database Picture?

"Our terminology is broken beyond repair. [Let me] point out some problems with Date's use of terminology, specifically in two cases.

"type" = "domain": I fully understand why one might equate "type" and "domain", but ... in today's programming practice, "type" and "domain" are quite different. The word "type" is largely tied to system-level (or "physical"-level) definitions of data, while a "domain" is thought of as an abstract set of acceptable values.

"class" != "relvar": In simple terms, the word "class" applies to a collection of values allowed by a predicate, regardless of whether such a collection could actually exist. Every set has a corresponding class, although a class may have no corresponding set ... in mathematical logic, a "relation" is a "class" (and trivially also a "set"), which contributes to confusion.

In modern programming parlance "class" is generally distinguished from "type" only in that "type" refers to "primitive" (system-defined) data definitions while "class" refers to higher-level (user-defined) data definitions. This distinction is almost arbitrary, and in some contexts, "type" and "class" are actually synonymous."

3. To Laugh or Cry?

"From the get go, relational databases have been one of the biggest challenges in the usage of Agile software practices. They’re laborious to use in automated testing, often expensive in time or money to install or deploy, the change management is a bit harder because you can’t just replace the existing database objects the way we can with other code, and I absolutely think it’s reduces reversibility in your system architecture compared to other options. That being said, there are some practices and processes I think you should adopt so that your Agile development process doesn’t crash and burn when a relational database is involved." --Jeremy Miller, Thoughts on Agile Database Development

4. Publications

• Paper #2 in the new UNDERSTANDING OF THE REAL RDM series, Logical Symmetric Access, Data Sub-language, Kinds of Relations, Database Redundancy and Consistency, is available for ordering here.
• Paper #1 in the new UNDERSTANDING OF THE REAL RDM series, Interpretation and Representation of Database Relations, is available for ordering here.
• My book, THE DBDEBUNK GUIDE TO MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT DATA FUNDAMENTALS, is available to order here.

Reviews

• Craig Mullins
• Todd Everett
• Toon Koppelaars
• Davide Mauri

5. Oldies but Goodies

• The Data Exchange Tail Part 1
• Much Ado About Nothing (particularly comments)

6. Elsewhere

• The fate of surrogate keys: Identity crisis -- How Social Security numbers became our insecure national ID
• Why do big hacks happen? Blame Big Data
• Haunted by Data (video)
• Some Thoughts on Dataism

7. Interesting

• E.W.Dijkstra: On hygiene, intellectual and otherwise
• The Mathematical World
• How a polymath transformed our understanding of information
• Misleadingness in the algorithm society: Misinformation and disinformation
• Can An Individual Still Resist The Spread of Technology
• AI Research Is in Desperate Need of an Ethical Watchdog
• Neural Networks Can Auto-Generate Reviews That Fool Humans
• You Are Already Living Inside a Computer

8. The Sillicon Valley State: Technology as Mechanism of Tyranny and the Inhuman Destruction of Free Civilized Society

• Franklin Foer's WORLD WITHOUT MIND: Silicon Valley will lead us to our doom
• Be afraid, be scared shitless: Peter Thiel Up for Key Intelligence Position, The Political Awakening of Silicon Valley
• A Serf on Google’s Farm
• Are Facebook and Google the New Colonial Powers
• Facebook and Google’s advertising platforms are out of control
• In the Store of the Future, the Product Is You
• The Facebook Patent License Punishes You For Suing Facebook, But Lets Them Sue You
• THE GOOGLIZATION OF EVERYTHING -- Has Google turned evil
  Facebook’s war on free will 
• Pathetic: Cities Are Competing to Give Amazon the ‘Mother of All Civic Giveaways’
• Google Effectively Thumbs Its Nose at Compliance
• The next GFC will start in Silicon Valley, not Wall Street
• Facebook’s Frankenstein Moment

And Now for Something Completely Different -- The PostWest: Indicators of Western Civilization Collapse

"Looking back this week on Sept. 11, it’s hard not to conclude that Osama bin Laden won a significant victory. With relatively little money and a small band of suicidal fanatics, he reconfigured the policy of a superpower in a region of vital interest for 16 years, at a high cost in American treasure and lives and global influence that may never be recaptured. From the Iraq war to Afghanistan, and from the Iran nuclear deal to the anti-ISIS campaign, our foreign policy is a bipartisan train wreck endangering passengers and bystanders alike. Bin Laden didn’t destroy America like he set out to do, he did something much worse: He set America on a path to self-destruction. The way I see it, Sept. 11 is how we got Donald Trump. --Lee Smith, Democratic and Republican Elites Are Using Trump to Whitewash 16 Years of Foreign-Policy Disasters

"We deserve Trump, though. God, do we deserve him. We Americans have some good qualities, too, don't get me wrong. But we're also a bloodthirsty Mr. Hyde nation that subsists on massacres and slave labor and leaves victims half-alive and crawling over deserts and jungles, while we sit stuffing ourselves on couches and blathering about our "American exceptionalism." ... This is who we've always been, a nation of madmen and sociopaths, for whom murder is a line item, kept hidden via a long list of semantic self-deceptions, from "manifest destiny" to "collateral damage." We're used to presidents being the soul of probity, kind Dads and struggling Atlases, humbled by the terrible responsibility, proof to ourselves of our goodness. Now, the mask of respectability is gone, and we feel sorry for ourselves, because the sickness is showing." --Matt Taibbi, The Madness of Donald Trump

"Coalitions of health professionals that have spoken publicly against the measure so far include the American Medical Association (“Provisions violate longstanding AMA policy”), the American Psychiatric Association (“This bill harms our most vulnerable patients”), the American Public Health Association (“Graham-Cassidy would devastate the Medicaid program, increase out-of-pocket costs, and weaken or eliminate protections for people living with preexisting conditions”), the National Institute for Reproductive Health (“the Graham-Cassidy bill preys on underserved communities ... a clear and present danger”), and Federation of American Hospitals (“It could disrupt access to health care for millions of the more than 70 million Americans”). This is in addition to the American Academy of Pediatrics, Association of American Medical Colleges, American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and many others." --Doctors: Do No Harm

"If the first figure is his fee, as it reportedly is for the Cantor Fitzgerald speech as well, he’ll pocket $1.2 million from three Wall Street speeches in about a month’s time. The issue is not just the cashing in on career-long, eager service to mega-wealthy Wall Street bankers — including especially his failure to prosecute not one of them for massive and systemic fraud, let’s remember. That’s the smallest of the problems with this story. A larger issue is its effect on the desperate attempt of the Democratic Party to distance its current self-presentation, “The Party That Speaks For The People,” from its most recent self, “The Party Of The Top Ten Percent.” Or at least, its attempt to appear to create that distance." --Gaius Publius, Obama Follows Clinton, Boards the Millionaire Speech Train to Wall Street

Insanities of the Week

• How US Regulators Created the Equifax Mess
• Equifax Data Breach is a 10 out of 10 Scandal
• Equifax Breach Enough to make your blood boil
• The learned helplessness of Equifax
• Equifax advertising on the radio for credit monitoring services
• Equifax Lobbied for Easier Regulation Before Data Breach
• Lifelock offers to protect you from the Equifax breach — by selling you services provided by Equifax
• Experian Site Can Give Anyone Your Credit Freeze PIN

More Self-destruction

• Enough is Enough: The man in the White House is reckless and unmanageable, a danger to the Constitution, a threat to our democratic institutions
• Wealth Inequality and Signs of a Broken Economy
• The corruption of education: Insanely Concentrated Wealth Is Strangling Our Prosperity
  How Harvard helps its richest and most arrogant students get ahead 
• The corruption of medicine: A $200 million gift promotes alternative therapies at a California medical school — and critics recoil

Book of the Week (Order via this link to support this site)

• Edward J. Balleisen, FRAUD: AN AMERICAN HISTORY FROM BARNUM TO MADOFF
• Review: Americans are fools, led to economic ruin by their own credulity, again and again and again

Video of the Week

State of Surveillance

Pinch Me of the Week

• Steven Mnuchin Requested $25,000-an-Hour Government Jet for European Honeymoon
• With a $1,000 Price Tag, Apple's iPhone Crosses a Threshold, but The iPhone Is Guaranteed To Last Only One Year, Apple Argues In Court 
• Obama: The most Jewish president ever

Upside Down and Backwards this Week

• UN rights head accuses Israel of ‘serious violations’ of international law
• Turkey Shows Contempt for Peaceful Protest Even in the US, Trump says 'friend' Erdogan getting 'high marks'

Anti-Semitism, Hypocrisy, the Myth of a "Palestinian Nation" and the "Peace Process" Delusion

• Deborah Lipstadt: Truth Under Assault -- Behind the lies of Holocaust denial (video)
• Israel and the American Jewish crisis
• Palestinian Activist: Flotillas are for propaganda, not humanitarian goals
• Britain’s alarming antisemitism problem
• Germany Free to hate Jews again
• Why Legal Avenues to Mideast Peace Are Misguided
• American Habit: Do your worst, then apologize -- Ex-CIA agent tweets article blaming Jews for US wars, then apologizes
• Plus ca change: In Belarus, Jewish community can claim prosperity and lack of anti-Semitism -- as long as they keep their heads down

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