Monthly Archives: July 2008

Religions symbols in Unicode characters

I was testing a chat system we’re creating with Extjs (amazin Javascript framework!) and I wanted to test issues with “strange” characters. So I quickly found the page of special characters on Italian wikipedia and I was very surprised to see that there are religious (and political) symbols in Unicode standard characters. What you see in the following are normal chars you can copy and paste, just as a normal “a”. I think the classification under “religious As bru was saying in chat: “wow, lots of crosses” … ;)

☥ ☥ ☦ ☦ ☧ ☧ ☨ ☨ ☩ ☩ ☪ ☪ ☫ ☫ ☬ ☬ ☭ ☭ ☮ ☮ ☯ ☯ ♰ â™° ♱ â™± ✝ ✝ ✞ ✞ ✟ ✟

A search on Google for “☭” did not return any result. A search for the swastica symbol instead returns results and actually it was once one of the hot terms in Google Trends. I wonder what Unicode characters does Google include and exclude.

By the way, what is the strangest Unicode character you are able to find (for some definition of “strange”)?

Links for 2008 07 30

The consequences of opensourcing Facebook code

Some weeks ago Facebook released its source code as Free and Open Source Software.
I’m very curious about the consequences of this action. Initially I was to suppose this choice would have been a tsunami in the social networking sites world, but I haven’t found many mentions of this around. So I tried to look around and to answer the question “Which were the consequences of Facebook making its code opensource?”.
I don’t have a clear idea, but it seems very small consequences.
How many clones of facebook popped up? Are they used? I haven’t found any facebook clone worth mentioning.

How many people downloaded the code? How many code patches were provided to Facebook? I guess one of the biggest intended consequences was this one: Facebook getting bug fixes, and chunks of code or suggestions on how to improve performances. Also, it is now easier, I think, for Facebook hiring new developers because they can know them in advance from the commits and suggestions they write about Facebook code. But for example there have been any exploit from people reading the code and finding weaknesses? Probably not, it is much more meaningful, if you discover a glitch to send an email just to Facebook to explain it, there is a chance Facebook might want to hire you as security expert.
Overall, Facebook is better off or worst off after the decision to release the code as Free Software? I was not able to get too much information about this and I’m a bit surprised. Actually I haven’t yet downloaded the code in order to test it. I was about to do it but then for Webvalley we decided to use BuddyPress so “check Facebook code” is still in the todo list.

Some interesting links which might be worth checking in more detail: open source projects on facebook wiki, the portal for developers on Facebook code (interesting!), Project Cassandra: Facebook’s Open Source Alternative to Google BigTable, the fact Google recently released its Protocol Buffers as open source, Facebook did it much earlier with Thrift.

So, did I miss something? What do you think were the consequences of Facebook opensourcing its code?

Pirate Bay in Trentino for Manifesta7

Pirate bay manifesta
The next days Manifesta7, the European Biennials of Contemporary Art, will start in Bolzano, Fortezza, Rovereto and Trento.
The pirates of piratebay will be here as well, and there will be another pirate event at palazzopippi as well. Wow, lots of pirates!
I’m hosting two artists from Amsterdam via Couchsurfing so today I’ll join them for the Manifesta7 aperitif, see you there!

Papers about relationships between social networks and physical distance

From an email by Barry Wellman to the INSNA (International Network for Social Network Analysis) mailing list (reposted here because email is where knowledge goes to die)

Juan-Antonio Carrasco, Barry Wellman and Eric Miller. 2008. “How Far – and With Whom – Do People Socialize? Empirical Evidence about Distance between Social Network Members.” Transportation Research Record: forthcoming.

Juan-Antonio Carrasco, Bernie Hogan, Barry Wellman and Eric Miller. 2008. “Collecting Social Network Data to Study Social Activity-Travel Behavior: An Egocentric Approach.” Environment and Planning B: in press. http://www.envplan.com/abstract.cgi?id=b3317t {doi:10.1068/b3317t}

Juan-Antonio Carrasco, Bernie Hogan, Barry Wellman, and Eric J. Miller, “Agency in Social Activity and ICT Interactions: The Role of Social Networks in Time and Space.” Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie [Journal of Economic and Social Geography]: forthcoming

Diana Mok and Barry Wellman with Ranu Basu. 2007. “How Much Did Distance Matter Before the Internet?” Social Networks 29, 3 (July): 430-61

“Does Distance Matter in the Age of the Internet?” (Diana Mok, Juan-Antonio Carrasco and Barry Wellman).This is the first study that systematically and explicitly compares the role of distance in social networks pre- and post-Internet. As part of the Connected Lives project, we analyze the effects of distance on the frequency of email, phone, face-to-face and overall contact in personal networks. We also compare the findings with its pre-Internet counterpart whose data were collected in 1978 in the same East York, Toronto locality. We use multilevel models with spline specification to examine the nonlinear effects of distance on the frequency of contact. The results show that email contact is generally
insensitive to distance, but tends to increase for transoceanic relationships greater than 3,000 miles apart. Face-to-face contact remains strongly related to short distances, while distance has little impact on how often people phone each other at the regional level. The study concludes that email has only somewhat altered the way people maintain their relationships. The frequencies of face-to-face and phone contact among socially-close friends and relatives have hardly changed between the 1970s and the 2000s. Moreover, the sensitivity of these relationships to
distance has remained similar, despite the communication affordances of the Internet and of low-cost telephony.
[Presented to the International Sunbelt Social Network Conference, St. Petersburg, FL in January 2008; Probably in a journal in 2009; now on my website.

“Connected Lives: The Project” (Barry Wellman and Bernie Hogan and Kristen Berg, Jeffrey Boase, Juan-Antonio Carrasco, Rochelle Côté, Jennifer Kayahara, Tracy L. M. Kennedy and Phuoc Tran).This first paper from the Connected Lives project provides a preliminary view of the many linked paths that our research is following. The Connected Lives project is our third study of East York and the first to take the Internet (and other ICTs) into account.
[Chapter 8 in Networked Neighbourhoods, edited by Patrick Purcell. London: Springer, 2006.]