Monthly Archives: May 2008

Help translate the video “Mandela describes the concept of Ubuntu”

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I’m going to speak about Ubuntu this afternoon, so I thought I might show the 1 minute, 37 seconds video in which Nelson Mandela describes the concept of Ubuntu. In order to make it easier to understand it I added English subtitles using dotsub.com, a great Web site in which anyone can help translating a video in his own language. Please help in translating the video in your language and spread the concept of Ubuntu! It is easy and fun!

UPDATE: I added the subtitles in Italian as well.
I hope I didn’t violate the license. I was not able to find the license in the Ubuntu site. According to wikipedia, the video is copyright of Canonical, Ltd. released under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 and I uploaded the video on dotsub under this license. Let me know if the license is different. Note that the video file is in the Ubuntu CD which you are allowed to make copies of and share it, but I’m not that good with licenses to understand what this means.
Anyway, help in translating the video in your language and spread the concept of Ubuntu!

Amazing talk by Bernardo Huberman: attention, opinions, wikipedia, sell your friends, cooperation, SlimVirgin, recommendations, Paris Hilton, tags, sex, wow, wow, wow!

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Today I attended an amazing presentation by Bernardo Huberman, director of the Information Dynamics Laboratory at HP Labs, titled “Social Dynamics in the Age of the Web”. Below the roughly editing notes I took during the amazing presentation. They are not intended to represent what Bernardo said but just to give you (me!) some pointers.

His first slide was just a painting by Bruegel “Village Feast” and discussed about “how sociologists would try to understand the situation, the relationships in the village” and how this would take a lot of time! He also cited some research about 4 widows in a village in Norway who were “studied” by a researcher for 5 years.
The alternative we have now is called Web/Internet and allows to collect tons of social information very easily, but beware, you lose a lot of details!

Then he brought up the issue of “attention” (You put things there (Youtube, Flickr, …) because you think someone is going to read it…)
Cited his paper “Assessing the Value of Coooperation in Wikipedia”. Question: “How good is Wikipedia (on average)?” Not interested in controversial articles. Predicting the number of edits a wikipedia page would get. Log-log distribution of edits on wikipedia pages.
Question: “the articles with lots of edits are the best ones?” “How to measure quality?” First approach: pagerank of page URL but not too representative of quality. Then got the Wikipedia featured articles.

Story about one of the most active editors SlimVirgin, there was even a “hunt” for understanding who SlimVergin is.

Attention: the economics of attention. Information is now plenty available. Information has now no value. Some time ago “give me information about a hotel in New York”, and you paid for this info. Now go on the web and find lots of info about hotels in New York. You cannot ask to be paid for this information now, but few years ago yes!
Instead attention has a lot of value now! Attention is what is scarse (at least online).
“Economics is actually the science of distribution of scarse resources.”
“All this scientific citation game is an attention game”.

“How do people compete for attention? Imagine if now there are other 3 people giving talk, then things becomes interesting!!!”
“Spam is a phenomena of trying to get attention.”

He studied Viral marketing on Amazon.com and showed us two very different recommendations networks. For a medical book, recommendations network very spread (almost random graph). For a Japanese graphic novel (manga), recommendations network very power-law (4 people (hubs!) recommended this book to everybody!!!)

Temporal dimension: How long it takes for recommendations to propagate in the social network?

Stimulation: novel stimula fades (if you get a spike in the finger after some time you feel a sort of basic pain but not the pain you felt in the beginning. You get used to it. When novelty fades we search for novel experiences. Paper: “Novelty and collective attention” (2007)
Hypo: attention decays in time as a strecthed exponential
There is a phase transition (Bernardo is a physicist): a critical value in which prioritizing by novelty is ok but then prioritizing by number of diggs (he studied novelty and ranking on digg.com)

The second part was about opinions. Q: How epinions form and evolve?
Salomon Ash: group polarization. The basic idea at that time was “discussion in the agora will bring toward the middle, not towards the extremes”. But his experiment invalidated this common perception.
And then Cass Sunstein (which I love!), read Republic.com!

Is there group polarization online or not? It depends … on cost of providing your opinion.
On Jyte.com it is just a yes or no: costless! –> extremes! group polarization!
Amazon reviews are costly (take time to write them!) –> no group polarization.

Why? Possible explanation: over time, you give reviews only if you have a possibility of impacting the average, only if you disagree with the consensus already reached! He studied Amazon and IMDB.
Suggestion he gave to Amazon: “Want to produce good reviews for a book? Start putting bad reviews for that book and people will flock to give their (opposite) opinion!!!”
He is staudying right now ratings on Youtube over time.

Comparing ratings with reviews and ratings without reviews on Amazon!!!
If you write reviews (costly), you tend to disagree with the average (low ratings for movies with high average, and viceversa)

Question: people behave differently in online environments?
Yes but the new media is sucking in a lot of people, especially young people … we’re moving there, wikipedia is a phenomena you cannot deny.

“We are going back to the village, but the village is not defined by physicality” (tribes).

He told us that now you can selling your friends on facebook, on ebay!!!! You can go on Ebay and sell there your Facebook friends!!!
My personal comment: “this is what I call Social capital!!!” ;)
A quick search gave me sellyourfriends.com, the Facebook application which I added to my Facebook profile or read what blonde2.0 has to say about (blonde2.0, great! ;-)

“Most people in myspace don’t even know about wikipedia”

“Quality and attention are not correlated”. Paris Hilton is an attention genius, she nows what is novel in people’s mind. The only reason for which paris is famous is that she is famous. So attention is not correlated with quality.

I asked him how he does see science in 30 years. There will be no more scientists by profession because everybody will be a scientists (blogger baiscally)? He said he believes there will be even more need for scientists because specialized knowledge is hard.
Well, persoanlly I think that, since before we were saying people compete for attention and you are more likely to get attention for short, catchy, bursty sentences (possibly with the word “sex” in it), a stupid idea just flashed into my mind so why not writing it in this chaotic post? “Is there space for a sciencetwitter?!? Divulgate your research in less tha 150 characters!” At least it could be fun! ;) Spreading it to my sci.bzaar.net pals.

Somehow Orkut became a trash site for brazilians (not his words), Google woould have liked to make it a facebook of course, so, if google was not able to control the eveolution of a social network, well, this means it is not easy at all!!!

Last note, I think I overexxagerated with the tags in the title, would “sex”, “virgin”, “Paris” make this post the most accessed? We’ll see …

WebValley: young minds of Trentino for a summer of collaboration and investigation

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WebValley is the FBK-IRST summer school for dissemination of interdisciplinary scientific research. The selection is now open so, if you are a student, you can apply for WebValley 2008.
The WebValley formula is to create a team of enthusiast and motivated high school students (18 y) tutored by IRST researchers. The team accepts a challenge by a scientist collaborator from Ecology, Biology or Social Sciences, and develops in 3 weeks a new web-based prototype for data analysis and management. Also characteristic of the WebValley formula is that the project activities are developed mostly by group work, and that they are located in a high-tech lab but in a small size Alpine village, to show that web access may support new types of innovative actions also in the periphery. The project is run by about 20 students and 3 resident tutors, supported by junior researchers and expert programmers from IRST and other experts in the field.
I’ve the honour to be one of the tutors and I’m really looking forward for this experience.
This year, we accepted the challenge from OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) and from June 23th to July 12th 2008 we will study how new Web technologies can be used in order to measure and pursue the progress of societies, with the goal of allowing people to make sense of social indicators and pushing a well-informed use of statistics in evaluation of public decisions. WebValley 2008 is a pilot project in the Global Project on Measuring the Progress of Societies. We look forward for the challenge and the opportunity!

Did I mention that the selection is now open and you can apply?

Below a video from a 2-days meeting we recently had at Centrale Fies, a terribly cool ex hydroelectric plant now used for events and performances, with all the past students (the project is ongoing since some years) but there are more videos. as well.

Festival of Economics (May 29 – June 2, 2008) in Trento

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The program is very interesting! One more chance to plan some days to visit Trento!
The topic of the third edition (from 29 May to 2 June) is “Market and Democracy”. Check the program.

From festivaleconomia.it:
Paul Krugman, Lecturer in Economics and International Relations at the University of Princeton and the London School of Economics, leader writer for the “New York Times”, will reflect on how ideologies can condition the functioning of the markets; Paul Collier, Professor of Economics at the University of Oxford, will explain to us why African countries with a low income are failing to jump on the development bandwagon; Benjamin Friedman, Lecturer in Political Economics at the University of Harvard, will challenge the long tradition of thinking which suggests that economic wellbeing leads to serious moral consequences: from individualism to exploitation of the work of others and the disintegration of traditional social bonds; Luisa Diogo, currently Prime Minister of Mozambique, will illustrate her experience of government, whose efficacy has excited the interest of observers from all over the world; Egor Gaidar, Prime Minister of Russia in 1992 under Boris Yeltsin’s government and one of the first to lead Russia towards the free market, will explain the difficulties in the passage from the Soviet to the capitalist system; John Lloyd, journalist and leader writer for the “Financial Times”, will analyse the information scenario, in the face of a growing concentration of ownership of newspapers and television stations, both in Europe and in the USA.
These and many others will be joined by important figures in the Italian public debate, including among others Mario Monti, Guido Rossi, Francesco Giavazzi, Luciano Gallino, Sergio Marchionne and Piercamillo Davigo.

Continue reading →

Science2.0 and the Scientific Bzaar: collective brainstorming for better research

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Saturday I participated in Sci(Bzaar)Net, an event organized by Gianandrea Giacoma (thanks Gian!) for discussing about how we can (in Italy) make use of the Internet for a better spreading, production and management of scientific knowledge.


(photo from Luca Mascaro, released under CC-BY-SA)

There were around 40 people and 15 presentations of 10 minutes each plus 10 minutes discussion and, at the end, the global brainstorming.

My presentation was titled “Science2.0 or How happy is a researcher discovering the existence of Yet Another Social Network for Science?” and I was playing the devil’s advocate on why researchers didn’t embrace in mass Web2.0 tools for their daily activity. Actually I understood I had to speak for 20 minutes so I prepared the slides accordingly but then I was told it was only 10 minutes so I had to run a lot (speaking at double pace!), the alternative could have been just to present one slide every two but I choose the “speak very very fast” strategy. You can find my presentation on slideshare or embedded here below, I would be very happy to receive feedback! It is released under CC-BY-SA so feel free to reuse it.

I got many interesting points which I try to briefly summarize in the following. But first photos from Flickr tagged as sci(bzaar)net and slides from Slideshare tagged as sci(bzaar)net.

One thing I noticed is that there were no professors and, since we like to think big, no University rectors! So I launch a contest: the first one who convinces a rector of an Italian University to open a blog gets a weekend in Trento, hosted by me, everything included! Can you handle that? Come on, go and find the blogging rector!

I didn’t follow too much the first presentations because I was finishing mine (my bad!). The first one I was able to follow was by Federico Bo and it was a very interesting survey about how Italian universities are using Web2.0 tools: touchscreens, webtv, blog aggregators, second life, e-catalunya, moodle, podcasting, social bookmarking, … Check the presentation by Federico.

Another interesting presentation was by Paolo Guglielmoni: “Culture as a virus” claiming that viral marketing and culture are not enemies, they never were in history and they are not now. He cited Booktrailers as a creative example of this. Still, how can I make my research into a viral meme is not an easy question.
The most amazing presentation was by Folletto who is a master in making visually impressive and semantically profound presentations, this one was titled “Paralipomeni dell’Oggettivazione Sociale” (Paralipomeni of Social Objectivism) and you can see it on slideshare.

It was great to meet again Bonaria, who is becoming an expert on library2.0 and Matteo Brunati who is trying to import the innocentive model in Italy with fullout and to meet a lot of interesting people I didn’t know yet. I also met David Orban, of openspime fame, which I managed to invite for a talk in Trento, probably on June 6th.

The final brainstorming was very interesting as well. Overall I think that, at least in Italy, for changing how researchers approach Web2.0 tools some push from the top is needed. It is not enough to have a push from the bottom (normal people like me and the other ones who met in Milan for sci.bzaar.net). Of course from the bottom we can try to show the light to people on top. For example I think the European Union now asks that every funded project must have a public Web page with its own domain, possibly a blog and surely a repository of produced documents and reports. It also somehow encourages to release the software as Free Software. This is a push from the top which, I think, is going to have a much higher impact than anything the sci.bzaarers can never achieve from the bottom.

Idea I see in my notes that I need to write down somewhere: write something about “the long tail of trust”.

Last thing I want to mention is the use of a human counter for signaling the passing by of time. On the back of the room, just in front of the speaker it was projected a previously recorded very big image of one of the guy (forgot the name!) Dario Violi with a red ball on top of it for every minute already passed. When the time limit was approaching, the face was becoming more and more sclerotic and when the 10 minutes were over, it was going totally mad and it was impossible for the speaker to keep speaking, it was too funny and disturbing. A very clever way to keep speaker in their time slot! I need to use it if/when I organize a conference!

Thanks to Flickr I also discovered that I move a lot the hands while speaking ;)

And thanks again Gian for organizing a great event!

Setting expiry time to infinite by default in Mediawiki

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If you follow a mediawiki powered wiki and have to block users who spam the wiki, this trick might save you precious seconds. When you go to http://www.example.com/wiki/Special:Blockip/xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx you get a form in which the expiry field is set to “other” by default, then you have to change into “infinite” (if this is what you like) and then to click “Block this user”.
It would save seconds to have the expiry field already set by default to “infinite”, but how we do it? The way I found is the following. Edit the file includes/SpecialBlockip.php and around line 101 insert $this->BlockExpiry = "infinite";. There could be a variable you can set in the config but I haven’t found it.
If you didn’t understand what I was writing, this is good! This means you don’t have to unspam a wiki! ;-)

Claerbout’s Principle at Free Software Conference

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This weekend Trento hosted the Italian Free Software Conference
. I could attend only friday because then I went to Milano for sci.bzaar.net (report in next post).
There was a very interesting presentation by Emanuele Somma about Bank of Italy and their internal use and infiltration of Free Software.
He cited the paper “Reproducible Econometric Research (A Critical Review of the State of the Art)” in which the authors, Roger Koenker, Achim Zeileis, cite Buckheit and Donoho (2005) citing what de Leeuw (2001) has called Claerbout’s Principle:

An article about computational science in a scientific publication is not the scholarship itself, it is merely advertising of the scholarship. The actual scholarship is the complete software development environment and the complete set of instructions which generated the figures.

Koenker and Zeileis go on reporting about scholars in economics have somehow turned into programmers:

The transition of econometrics from a handicraft industry (Wilson, 1973, Goldberger, 2004) to the modern sweatshop of globally interconnected computers has been a boon to productivity and innovation, but sometimes seems to be a curse. Who among us expected to be in the “software development” business? And yet many of us find ourselves precisely in this position, and those who are not, probably should be. As we will argue below, software development is no longer something that should be left to specialized commercial developers, but instead should be an integral part of the artisanal research process. Effective communication of research depends crucially on documentation and distribution of related software and data.

So their contribution:

Our main contention is that recent software developments, notably in the open-source community, make it much easier to achieve and distribute reproducible
research.

Free course about GNU Linux in Trento

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I helped Engineering With Borders to organized the course “Linux per tutti, tutti per GNU/Linux” (“Linux for all, and all for GNU/Linux”) (see page on TrentoWiki).
The available places were 25 (we were reserving place for students of non-scientific faculties) but we receive more requests so there will probably be another course in October.
Today there is first meeting which is open to everyone: at 18:30 Alberto Gistri of Golem Empoli will speak about “Software Libero” – Conoscere il Software Libero e le sue potenzialita’ sociali, culturali, economiche e tecniche.”.
Join in!

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