From Higgins to Societal Rules

• Higgins recently announced support for SAML.


• Liberty Alliance ID-WSF builds on SAML assertions and protocols in a number of ways.


• A unique privacy-enabling piece of ID-WSF is the "Interaction Service", a set of related mechanisms whereby a user's Attribute Provider can, if the user is not currently visiting the Attribute Provider, reach out to pose queries to that user.


• "Society", said the German sociologist Georg Simmel in 1908, "is merely the name for a number of individuals, connected by interaction."


• 'Social Physics' was the term invented by August Comte to refer to the possibility of using scientific methods to analyze people and society.


• Paul Trevithick now appears to spend less time on Social Physics than Higgins.
  

Ideally there would exist somewhere a university research study of the eponymous Tasmanian long-tailed mouse that used Shibboleth SSO to enable cross-school collaboration. Alas .....