Norman Gray

Norman Gray

Cryptographically signing XML, and normalizing it prior to signing, are forbiddingly intricate problems in the general case. This is largely because of the complexities of the XML Information Set. We can define a more aggressive normalization, which dispenses with distinctions and features which are unimportant in a large class of cases, and thus define a straightforwardly implementable and portable signature framework.

Brian Thomas, Tim Jenness, Frossie Economou et al.

The Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) standard has been a great boon to astronomy, allowing observatories, scientists and the public to exchange astronomical information easily. The FITS standard, however, is showing its age. Developed in the late 1970s, the FITS authors made a number of implementation choices that, while common at the time, are now seen to limit its utility with modern data. The authors of the FITS standard could not anticipate the challenges which we are facing today in astronomical computing. Difficulties we now face include, but are not limited to, addressing the need to handle an expanded range of specialized data product types (data models), being more conducive to the networked exchange and storage of data, handling very large datasets, and capturing significantly more complex metadata and data relationships. There are members of the community today who find some or all of these limitations unworkable, and have decided to move ahead with storing data in other formats. If this fragmentation continues, we risk abandoning the advantages of broad interoperability, and ready archivability, that the FITS format provides for astronomy. In this paper we detail some selected important problems which exist within the FITS standard today. These problems may provide insight into deeper underlying issues which reside in the format and we provide a discussion of some lessons learned. It is not our intention here to prescribe specific remedies to these issues; rather, it is to call attention of the FITS and greater astronomical computing communities to these problems in the hope that it will spur action to address them.

Norman Gray, Nicolas Labrosse, Sarah Honeychurch et al.

Making and distributing audio recordings of lectures is cheap and technically straightforward, and these recordings represent an underexploited teaching resource. We explore the reasons why such recordings are not more used; we believe the barriers inhibiting such use should be easily overcome. Students can listen to a lecture they missed, or re-listen to a lecture at revision time, but their interaction is limited by the affordances of the replaying technology. Listening to lecture audio is generally solitary, linear, and disjoint from other available media. In this paper, we describe a tool we are developing at the University of Glasgow, which enriches students' interactions with lecture audio. We describe our experiments with this tool in session 2012--13. Fewer students used the tool than we expected would naturally do so, and we discuss some possible explanations for this.