Caesar at the Rubicon

Crossing the Rubicon.

The Rubicon of Smart Data

Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon River in 49 B.C., thereby irrevocably committing the Roman Empire to war. We, as researchers have repeatedly promised that soon, individuals will be able to easily locate web data according to precise semantic specifications, retrieve that data, have it automatically integrated, and then have it presented to us or our programs in a compact, highly usable format...

The Rubicon Theory of War

halted his army on the banks of the Rubicon River in northern Italy. According to Suetonius, he paused in momentary hesitation, before sweeping across the waters toward Rome with the immortal phrase Alae iacta est (The die has been cast).1 By violating an ancient Roman law forbidding any general to cross the Rubicon with an army, Caesar’s decision made war inevitable. Ever since, “crossing the ...

The Rubicon workload characterization tool

We describe the design, implementation and usage of Rubicon, a tool for the characterization of I/O workloads. Rubicon provides a rich set of operations on I/O traces, and was designed to be easily extended through the addition of new analysis functions and reporting methods. The design of Rubicon makes it simple to adapt to multiple types of workload characterization, and allows the user to fo...

Analyzing the Caesar Model

Shall We Kill or Enslave Caesar? Analyzing the Caesar Model When a society overthrows a ruler – call the ruler Caesar – what determines whether Caesar is killed or enslaved? This paper presents a model of killing versus enslaving Caesar, based on a new theory which unifies justice, status, and power. The model pertains to societies which value ordinal goods like bravery, yielding predictions fo...