Monthly Archives: February 2005

“Serpica naro” is “San Precario”

This is pure genius! News from Repubblica.it (in Italian).
Serpica Naro, young anglojapanese artist and fashion-maker, was supposed to close the Milano fashion week (Settimana Della Moda) today. BUT (suspence …) Serpica Naro does not exist!
The organizers were fouled by the creative Italian collective Chainworkers. Serpica Naro is in fact an acronym of San Precario (depicted in picture), the newest of a long list of saints but this time with a reason.
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Will your friend ask “Are you buzzing me?”

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Old but very interesting article The Hidden (in Plain Sight) Persuaders from NyTimes (link via NYTimes link generator).
Some companies, such as BzzAgent, sells as a service “viral social peer-to-peer marketing”, that is normal people telling you (and many other people) how cool a certain product is. The interesting point is that those people are normal people (maybe your friend) and not some superpaid supermodel and also that those people volunteer (!) for spreading good reviews about a certain product, for example, the “Al Fresco” sausages (?!?).
The article raised in me a lot of questions. For example, while I can understand why activists want to spread their ideas (for example, Greenpeace, Attac, EFF, FSF, Engineers Without Borders just to mention some of them), why on hearth would someone (without being paid!!) fight for advertising “Al Fresco” sausages to her friends? There are so many good causes you can embrace, why on earth someone chooses to embrace “Al Fresco” sausages?
I simply don’t get it, so I guess I should experiment it directly: anyone interested in setting up such a company in Italy? If yes, comment this post or send me email.
Below some excerpts from the article but I suggest you to read it all.
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M1cr0$oft 5uX

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Annoying. Someone speaks a language that you can know only if you are part of an (evolving) community and someone, as a spy, reveals the “secret” vocabulary. Annoying and arrogant. And an Hacker is not a Cracker. And try to make sense of these words that I predict will evolve s00n in somet|-|1n6 else: “w4r3z” “h4x” “pr0n” “sploitz” “pwn” “0\/\/n3d” “pwn3d,” “kewl” “m4d sk1llz” “n00b,” “noob,” “newbie,” “newb” “w00t” \o/ “roxx0rs” “d00d” “joo” “j00” “_|00.” Upset.

Trust competition testbed rules now available

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Do you know RoboCup? In the software version, you can program your own football players and then have them competing against the players of someone else. You can use whatever technique and the goal is to score more goals that the competitor. “It is an attempt to foster AI and intelligent robotics research by providing a standard problem where wide range of technologies can be integrated and examined.”.
With a similar goal, some researchers are working on a trust competition testbed. The idea? You program your player in the “social game”, have it playing against (or with?) the other players and at the end evaluate in some way her performances (how well she reasoned about trusting other players and information in order to reach her objectives). And we can also evaluate how the “society”, intended as the ecology of players, evolves (or not) based on the different, local behaviours. Anyway, if you are interested, check the Trust competition Rules (longer pdf version) and Trust competition FAQ. Want to play with the Java code? Unluckly, not yet possible but I guess you might obtain the code if you email them. Release of the testbed distribution is being withheld until July, 2005. At that time, the testbed will be publicly available for experimentation and competition practice.

Review of “Quality Control in Scholarly Publishing”

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Some weeks ago, I received an email from Stefano Mizzaro asking my opinion about his paper Quality Control in Scholarly Publishing: A New Proposal (pdf). In the meantime he came to Trento and we discussed face to face but I want to share here some quick comments I wrote on my wiki about the paper. I liked it, it is very clearly presented, it addresses a real problem and a more and more important one. The math is very clear, sound and makes sense. [Yes he found me because of the blog and not because of my papers and this keeps telling me something]. Read the comments to the paper.
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The Free Software community is women unfriendly?

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Women in Software – Open Source, Cold Shoulder (registration required, find login/password at bugmenot). Interesting article that analyzes also why “while the gender ratio in the industry as a whole is roughly five to one, the ratio in FLOSS appears to be several hundred to one”. I have to admit that reading a “female” nickname on a technical mailing list often surprises me. I’m not proud of it and I guess this is just due to the fact that, to me, this is not a frequent fact and I’m not used to. Anyway any article that allows to think about our own limits (and possibly overcome them) is good and so I think this article can help us in moving forward.
[Via my shared institute printer (I always look at pages printed in the printer and often find something interesting, I guess it is similar to a deadtree del.icio.us page ;-) )]

Capitalism-enthusiasts should go for Open Source

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The Emerging Economic Paradigm of Open Source by Bruce Perens: recommended! Open source and capitalism are really more similar than what you think.
It’s not immediately obvious how Open Source[1] works economically. Probably the worst consequence of this lack of understanding is that many people don’t understand how Open Source could be economically sustainable, and some may even feel that its potential negative effect upon the proprietary software industry is an overall economic detriment. Fortunately, if you look more deeply into the economic function of software in general, it’s easy to establish that Open Source is both sustainable and of tremendous benefit to the overall economy.
Open Source can be explained entirely within the context of conventional open-market economics. Indeed, it turns out that it has much stronger ties to the phenomenon of capitalism than you may have appreciated.

The Gates of Interoperability

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Some recent bla bla bla by billgates about interoperability (while the all history of micro$oft is all about closed formats that force you to use the buggy micro$oft software). And a good reply by Opera CEO, noting for example that the page of the billgates announcement produces 126 HTML errors (it it not interoperable since it does not conform to standards) [the printer-friendly page is even worst] and that “your server sniff out the Opera browser and send it different style sheets“.
Why did gates speak about interoperability? My guess is that more and more governments are thinking about moving away from M$Office (for the really interoperable OpenOffice) and billgates is trying the last, desperate attempt to say “ehi, governments, we are open too”. Some weeks ago, at the University of Trento there was a day devoted to “Software libero e formati aperti per la Pubblica Amministrazione” (free sofware and open formats for the Public Sector). There was Markus Spring who is in charge to migrate 14.000 computers of Munich’s City Hall from closed-gates software to gnulinux/openoffice/freesoftware. He said many times that the reason for the switch was INDEPENDENCE: they want to be independent from a single vendor and free to read citizens data with different softwares (just in case your vendor closes its activity), especially in the future and free to move to different vendor, if they wish. This is not possible with closed formats (such as .doc): about this I suggest you to read “We Can Put an End to Word Attachments” by Richard M. Stallman. I especially enjoy the presentation of Roberto Di Cosmo that was an astonishingly clear, entertaining and convincing talk about why governments should only use free software and open formats (even if they are much much much more expensing than closed software). Check his talk (PDF in Italian) and all the other talks. If you are organizing a presentation trying to convince a public administration about the reasons for switching to free software and open formats, call him, he will convince even stones (in English, French, Spanish or Italian)!

Flickr FlashGraph

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Found on FlickrBlog, a fancy Flash application that shows your social network on Flickr. For mine, type
http://www.marumushi.com/apps/flickrgraph/flickrgraph.cfm?q=phauly
for yours, just change the string “phauly” with your username on flickr. What is terribly better than the social network visualiization tools I saw before (based on TouchGraph, check del.icio.us subscription network visualizer
or these) is the fact that nodes are represented by photos. This makes me much more aware of the social network and (possibly) able to manage it and depict it in my mind.
And just to be clear, no, I don’t think this graph-based interfaces are usable for now, they are just fancy to play with for some seconds. But, as I said, “for now”….
And let me say “happy birthday Flickr” (the post also points to great pictures, Visualizing the Flickr social network)

Eclipse trust framework

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I found on SocialPhysics Wiki a very interesting proposal: Eclipse Trust Framework (ETF).
The goal of the ETF Project is to provide an open source framework to support the creation of applications on the Eclipse platform that manage a person’s online context (profile) and identity from the person’s or their agent’s perspective. (Eclipse is one of the most used tool for writing Java code, it is open source and funded mainly by IBM).
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