Paolo blog: Ramblings on Web2.0, Trust, Reputation, Recommender Systems, Social Software, Free Software, ICT4D and much more

Excellent tutorial by Lada A. Adamic: Zipf, Power-laws, and Pareto - a ranking tutorial.
All three terms are used to describe phenomena where large events are rare, but small ones quite common.
They refer to the same phenomena, just with different exponents. Read the tutorial for a very short and very clear explanation.

I spent the entire afternoon looking at the chess match between DeepJunior (a program) and Michele Godena (better Italian human at chess) organized in my institute. The computer played white, was in a better position throught the all game and eventually won. I had some hate feelings against the computer and I think I’d define these feelings as irrational but still I was hating the computer. Anyway, the scary thought that arised to my mind was: “how long before computers (robots) will beat humans in the world football championship?” (the real one, the one of Ronaldo and Zidane).

In the FOAF workshop (Galway, 1-2 September 2004) (see previous entry), almost half of the time was devoted to Breakout sessions, sessions where everyone was free to propose a topic of discussion posting it on a wall and everyone was free to subscribe to any group. The rules of the breakout sessions were so cool I decided to report them verbatim below:

Principles of the Agenda Forming and Birds of a Feather (BOF) Discussion:
1. Whoever comes are the right people.
2. Whatever happens is the only right thing that could have happened.
3. Whenever it starts is the right time.
4. When it is over, it is over.

The Law of the Two Feet:
If you find yourself in a place where you are neither learning nor contributing, it is your responsability to leave and go to wherever there is greater potential for learning and contributing.

The FOAF workshop in Galway was almost 20 days ago, so the following report is a little bit late. Hope it can be useful at least as an historical memory.
It was fantastic to meet in flesh many people I just learnt to appreciate through their blogs. Many of the papers were very interesting. I especially like the idea of “Semantic cookies” (you keep your profile [as FOAF file] in a cookie and, with some trick, you give access to every site to it, sites can read it and give you a personalized experience) and “Bootstrapping the FOAF-Web: An Experiment in Social Network Mining” by Peter Mika (the idea is to use Google to infer social relationships among people). And there was also my paper of course. The presentation was so and so, I think I try to put too many concepts for a 15 minutes presentation. The only stuff I liked was the subtitle I wrote at the last second on the first slide: “Moleskiing: Climbing the peaks of FOAF”.
Almost half of the workshop was devoted to very interesting Breakout sessions.
Continue Reading

The funniest thing I’ve heard in a while: Sunday Bloody Sunday (mp3) sung by George W Bush. I created a Webjay compilation with this song, the original one by U2 (for comparison) and the other songs by thepartyparty.com. I literally freezed when I started hearing “This is not a rebel song …” by the well-known scary voice.

Right after the Foaf Workshop in Galway, I was at another one, incredibly with no internet connection. So it took me until now to upload some FOAF galway pictures. Other photos of the FOAF workshop can be found on del.icio.us tagged as foaf-galway. [In the picture above you can see MarcCanter and other guys “moving data” (as he said)]