Edwin Wenink

I joined the IndieWeb! What does that mean? For the long version, I recommend reading An Introduction to the IndieWeb. Here is a super short version: 1) This web domain now is my main online identity, and I can use my domain as a way of authentication with a) “rel=me” links b) and my domain name via IndieAuth Examples: 1a: I was invited to the Mastodon instance of @arjen and verified my identity as “Edwin Wenink” by linking from Mastodon to my domain, and then from my …

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BigData Republic organized a small hackathon for the Big Data course I currently follow at university. The challenge was to build a job recommendation system using real data from one of their clients, RandStad, which is a big employment agency. To my surprise, I ended up with the highest score and went home with a nice book as a prize. I was fully convinced that the score I achieved was very low, and I know for a fact that the road to victory had way less to do with intelligence than with …

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Joran started a programmer traineeship after graduating from a theater education. I asked him to write something about how he experiences this transition - Edwin I’ve been dabbling in programming for a while now, on account of the fact that I have recently started working in it full-time. I reckoned I could be able to write an article for this website because of that, so I tried to come up with something clever to discuss until I came to my senses and realised I’m a total newb.

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For a working group I give at the Radboud University, students were asked to read “The Coders Programming Themselves Out of a Job”. This article discusses the ethical considerations of people automating their own jobs, either partly or completely. What are these considerations, and how do they relate to common work ethic? On the one hand, these people fulfill their job description to perfection through the scripts they wrote. One could applaud this clever increase in efficiency and …

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I largely quit social media because it transformed from being something that helps me keep in touch with people and that stimulates social interaction, to an endless stream of promoted clickbait content. The little “real” personal content that made it to my feed, was usually dull and did not facilitate any interesting conversations. With the creation of this website I’m trying to take control of my online identity, making this domain a main hub for various dispersed identities, …

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When one starts studying logic one is likely to be surprised by the workings of the so-called material implication, p –> q (if p, then q). Unlike the implication used in natural language, which can for example indicate causation, the material implication has a more restricted meaning. The material implication is true unless p is true and q is false. This is ultimately a matter of definition to resolve ambiguities present in natural language.

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This is a short commentary I wrote in 2017, on Patrick Lin’s “Why Ethics Matters for Autonomous Cars”. The book Autonomous Driving formulates a set of use cases that serve as a reference point for discussing the technical, legal and social aspects of autonomous driving (Wachenfeld et al. 2016). In addition, Lin sketches scenarios that require ethical choices to be made by autonomous vehicles (AVs). An advantage of this approach is that these scenarios can take the form of …

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This CSO article reports on a massive ransomware attack with NonPetya that is estimated by CyberReason research to have costs businesses globally around 1.2 billion dollar. One paragraph in particular caught my eye: To complicate matters, having cyber insurance might not cover everyone’s losses. Zurich American Insurance Company refused to pay out a $100 million claim from Mondelez, saying that since the U.S. and other governments labeled the NotPetya attack as an action by the Russian military …

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My friend Rits did me a big favor by making some digital portraits of me. His website is currently in quarantine because he was too late with re-registering his domain name, but if you read this post after sunday 17 March you can check out his web site. While doing me a favour, Rits made sure that he enjoyed himself. See right for a first proof of concept. After seeing this sketch, I had complete faith in the end result.

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A few days ago Djoerd Hiemstra gave a guest lecture on estimating the size of big data problems, within the context of a Big Data course I am currently following. As a preparation, we read the paper of Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page from 1998 (read it here) where they introduced the anatomy of their search engine called “Google”. We did so in particular because it is interesting to compare their estimations on the size and scalability of Google with the colossus it has become today.

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