Author Archives: paolo

Links for 2007 04 11

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Surprise: here who, how and when decided in Vatican to take away from justice the pedophile priests. You will never guess it …

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From the Independent article Pope ‘did not help girls abused by Florence priest’ (in Italian you can read Espresso’s article from which I translated the title for this post or Repubblica’s Sesso e violenze, scandalo in parrocchia).

“How much suffering there is in the world!” Pope Benedict XVI lamented in his Easter sermon yesterday, naming Darfur, Iraq, Somalia, the Congo, Lebanon and other trouble spots around the globe.
But there was no space in his list for the abused women of the parish of Regina della Pace (“Queen of Peace”) on the outskirts of Florence. For more than three years, these women have been trying to persuade the Church to take vigorous action against a parish priest whom they say persuaded them to have sex with him when they were minors, and continued to do so regularly for years.
Confronted by their testimony, the church authorities first transferred the priest to another parish, and then out of the diocese. But he remains a priest,
(…)
The victims kept their memories to themselves until chance reunions prompted them to share their stories and take them to the curia of Florence, the governing body of the church in the city, in January 2004.
They made written and oral submissions to the Archbishop of Florence and others – with the sole result that, in September 2005, Fr Cantini was transferred to another parish “for reasons of health”.
Disgusted by the failure to take their complaints seriously, the victims wrote to Pope Benedict in March 2006 demanding more serious action. In response, Cardinal Camillo Ruini, then head of the Italian Bishops’ Conference, informed them that Fr Cantini had left the diocese.
Further pressure led to disciplinary measures: Fr Cantini was banned from hearing confession or celebrating Mass for five years, “and every day for one year he must recite Psalm 51” – the one that begins, “Have mercy upon me, O God … Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity.” The victims say they regard the disciplinary measures “with astonishment and pain”.

This is ridicolous! There are women (below some recordings of their experiences with the alleged pedophile priest, Fr Lelio Cantini) who claim they have been abused by a priest. And what does the priest gets? After more than 3 years? That the alleged pedophile priest was banned from hearing confession or celebrating Mass for five years, “and every day for one year he must recite Psalm 51” – the one that begins, “Have mercy upon me, O God … Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity.”?!? Please tell me that this is a joke. Please tell me that the Pope is giving us a great late April 1st joke. Please!
But I know this is the truth. And wait there is more. The article of Espresso (in Italian) also reports that Arcibishop Ennio Antonelli added in the letter to the victim (dated 17 january, I guess 2007):

Since “the happened evil cannot be undone“, the invitation is “to rethink in a perspective of faith the sad vicissitude in which you have been been involved”, and to invoke from God “the healing of the memory”.

(the original in Italian from the newspaper article) l’invito, visto che “il male una volta compiuto non può essere annullato”, è a “rielaborare in una prospettiva di fede la triste vicenda in cui siete stati coinvolti”, e a invocare da Dio “la guarigione della memoria”.

Now are we joking? Is this a bad nightmare? This church is turning dangerously toward evil, very evil.
And if you are still with me and what to know the answer to the question in the title “here who, how and when decided in Vatican to take away from justice the pedophile priests. You will never guess it …”. Well, the answer is, as you might have already guessed, the pope.
Of course it is not me claiming so but some newspapers, among which:

Pope ‘obstructed’ sex abuse inquiry. Confidential letter (sent to every Catholic bishop in May 2001) reveals Ratzinger ordered bishops to keep allegations secret, an April 2005 article of the Guardian.
Obstruction of justice? In a confidential 2001 letter, the new pope ordered bishops to keep allegations of pedophilia secret: an April 2005 news on Salon from which you can appreciate the arrogance of another evil-doer at the top of the church pyramid: The Ratzinger letter was co-signed by Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone, who gave an interview two years ago in which he hinted at the church’s opposition to allowing outside agencies to investigate abuse claims. “In my opinion, the demand that a bishop be obligated to contact the police in order to denounce a priest who has admitted the offence of pedophilia is unfounded,” Bertone said.
And in Italian you can find the complete 2001 letter of Ratzinger published in the Espresso article. The letter basically says that the church can claim jurisdiction in cases where sexual abuse has been “perpetrated with a minor by a cleric.” It orders that “preliminary investigations” into any claims of abuse should be sent to Ratzinger’s office, which has the option of referring them back to private tribunals (church tribunals, not state tribunals!) in which the “functions of judge, promoter of justice, notary and legal representative can validly be performed for these cases only by priests.” “Cases of this kind are subject to the pontifical secret,” Ratzinger’s letter concludes.

Now I’m not arguing about self-justice or media pillory for this alleged pedophile priest, but something very normal. According to the newspapers articles there are women who affirm that a certain priest had abused of them, shall this priest receive a fair trial in a legitimate court in the state where these abuses might have occured? I’m not arguing anything stronger than that: a public trial in which the priest can be judged like it happens for all the people in Italy.

I leave you with the recordings of the possible victims. After this recordings, do you think it is too much to ask an indepentend and fair court trial?

Fr Lelio Cantini, now in his eighties, became the parish priest of Regina della Pace in the mid-Seventies. A self-styled “charismatic”, he was accompanied by a clairvoyant woman who had visions of Jesus and drew up lists of those parishioners whom she said were the “elect of God”.

Don Lelio ruled the parish with an iron hand, banishing dissidents from Mass and forbidding them absolution. But, in private, he showed a different side: in the church’s presbytery he induced girls as young as 10 to have sex with him, explaining that this was a way of attaining “total unity with God”.

A woman of 45, married with two children, said she had suppressed all memory of the abuse the priest inflicted on her until a couple of years ago. It started, she explained, when she was aged 10. “The Prior [as Cantini insisted on being called] would call me into his office or his bedroom, get me to undress and explain that, by doing what he asked, I would realise the most complete eucharistic communion,” she said.

“He told me to think of the Madonna, who bore Jesus when she was only 12. He said I was the Beloved of the Song of Songs and that what happened between us was the same as what happened in the Garden of Eden.” She said the relationship continued for 15 years, and that remembering it even now caused her vomiting attacks. “I was absolutely incapable,” she said, “of making a free and aware choice.”

Another woman, identified by the initials D A, now in her forties, said her sexual liaison with Fr Cantini “began when I was 17 and continued until I got married. He said I was in need of affection and that he would give it to me. Then he embraced me in the name of Jesus.”

I’m a PC, I’m a Mac, I’m Linux … it is called GNU/Linux

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Maybe you have seen the clever Apple campaign “get a Mac”. There are two characters playing “the PC” and “the Mac” and of course the Mac is cooler. Below you can find 6 ads in 1 video, but there are more videos.

But of course the question “Hey where is Linux?” didn’t take time to appear. And Novell (owner of Linux distribution Suse) created 3 PC, Mac … meet Linux ads, in which Linux is played by a woman, a clever move. By the way, say NO to NOvell, choose UbuntuLinux instead. Below you can find 2 of the 3 funny videos.
This video ad suggests that Linux can wear different interfaces and people share new apparels with Linux all the time, while PC and Mac are tied to their single interface for ages. Priceless the moment in which the PC says “I’ll probably wear this for another six or seven years” (referring to Vista interface).

In this video ad, PC and Mac are caught running Linux, but they don’t like to admit it, especially Mac.

Now we all know that the correct name is not Linux (just the kernel) but GNU/Linux (the entire operating system). I mulled over making one more spoof video in which Richard Stallman enters the video after the woman/Linux says “I’m Linux” for stating “The correct name is GNU/Linux!” (credit for the idea) but my video editing abilities are zero. What about yours?

Money as Debt

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Money is money only because people think it is money, and hence accept it as money. In reality money does not exist, it is just a piece of paper or some bits stored somewhere. So, are there better systems to regulate humans social interactions? You bet there are!
For now just start thinking about the questions that emerge from the following video, would you?
Paul Grignon’s 47-minute animated presentation of “Money as Debt” tells in very simple and effective graphic terms what money is and how it is being created.

Links for 2007 04 06

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More about the eBay feedback model and trust metrics attacks

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My last post reminded myself of some paragraphs I wrote in a paper some time ago. I know my writing ability is not comparable to Shakespeare’s one but maybe you find some interesting information in this passage from A Survey of Trust Use and Modeling in Current Real Systems reported below:

EBay’s feedback ecology is a large and realistic example of a technology mediated market. The advantage of this is that a large amount of data about users’ interactions and behaviors can be recorded in a digital format and can be studied. In fact, there have been many studies on eBay and in particular on how the feedback system influences the market, see for example (Resnick and Zeckhauser, 2002). A very interesting observation is related to the distribution of feedback values: “Of feedback provided by buyers, 0.6% of comments were negative, 0.3% were neutral, and 99.1% were positive” (Resnick and Zeckhauser, 2002). This disproportion of positive feedbacks suggests two considerations: the first is actually a challenge and consists of verifying if these opinions are to be considered realistic or distorted by the interaction with the media and the interface. We will discuss this point later in Section 3. The second is about possible weaknesses of the eBay model. The main weakness of this approach is that it considers the feedback of every user with the same weight, and this could be exploited by the malicious user. Since on eBay there are so few negative feedbacks, a user with just few negative feedbacks is seen as highly suspicious and it is very likely nobody will risk into engaging in a commercial transaction with her. Moreover, having an established and reputable identity helps a lot the business activity. A controlled experiment on eBay (Resnick et al., 2003) found that an high reputation identity is able to get a selling price 7.6% higher than a newcomer identity with little reputation. For this reason, there are users who threaten to leave a negative feedback (and therefore destroy the other user’s reputation) unless they get a discount on their purchase.
This activity is called “feedback extortion” on eBay’s help pages (“EBay help: Feedback extortion”, n.d.) and in a November 2004 survey (Steiner, 2004) 38% of the total respondents stated that they had “received retaliatory feedback within the prior 6 months, had been victimized by feedback extortion, or both“.
These users are “attacking” the system: as eBay’s help page puts it “Feedback is the foundation of trust on eBay. Using eBay feedback to attempt to extort goods or services from another member undermines the integrity of the feedback system” (“EBay help: Feedback extortion”, n.d.). The system could defend itself by weighting in different ways the feedback of different users. For example, if Alice has been directly threatened by CoolJohn12 and thinks the feedback provided by him is not reliable, his feedback about other users should not be taken into account when
computing the trust Alice could place in the other users. In fact, a possible way to overcome this problem is to use Local Trust Metric (Massa and Avesani, 2005, Ziegler and Lausen, 2004), that considers only (or mainly) trust statements given by users trusted by the active user and not all the trust statements with the same, undifferentiated weight. In this way, receiving negative feedback from CoolJohn12 does not influence reputations as seen by the active user if the active user does not trust explicitly CoolJohn12. For a short discussion of Global and Local Trust Metrics, see Section 3. However, eBay at the moment uses the Global Trust Metric we described before, which is very simple. This simplicity is surely an advantage because it is easy for users to understand it and the big success of eBay is also due to the fact users easily understand how the system works and hence trust it (note that the meaning of “to trust” here means “to consider reliable and predictable an artifact” and not, as elsewhere on this chapter, “to put some degree of trust in another user”). Nevertheless, in November 2004, a survey on eBay’s feedback system (Steiner, 2004) found that only 3% of the respondents found it excellent, 19% felt the system was very good, 39% thought it was adequate and 39% thought eBay’s feedback system was fair or poor. These results are even more interesting when compared with numbers from a January 2003 identical survey. The portion of “excellent” went from 7% to 3%, the “very good” from 29% to 19%, the “adequate” from 35% to 39%, the “fair or poor” from 29% to 39%. Moreover, the portion of total respondents who stated that they had received retaliatory feedback within the prior 6 months passed from 27% of 2003 survey to 38% of 2004 survey. These shifts seem to suggest that the time might have come for more sophisticated (and, as a consequence, more complicated to understand) Trust Metrics.

Bibliography for this portion:
– Resnick, P., & Zeckhauser, R. (2002). Trust Among Strangers in Internet Transactions: Empirical Analysis of eBay’s Reputation System. The Economics of the Internet and Ecommerce. Advances in Applied Microeconomics, 11.
– Resnick, P., & Zeckhauser, R., & Swanson, J., & Lockwood, K. (2003). The value of reputation on eBay: A controlled experiment.
– eBay help: Feedback extortion. (n.d.) Retrieved December 28, 2005, from http://pages.ebay.co.uk/help/policies/feedback-extortion.html
– Steiner, D. (2004). Auctionbytes survey results: Your feedback on eBay’s feedback system. Retrieved December 28, 2005, from http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abu/y204/m11/abu0131/s02
– Massa, P., & Avesani, P. (2005). Controversial users demand local Trust Metrics: an experimental study on Epinions.com community. In Proceedings of 25th AAAI Conference.
– Ziegler, C., & Lausen, G. (2004). Spreading activation models for trust propagation. In IEEE International Conference on e-Technology, e-Commerce, and e-Service (EEE’04).

Links for 2007 04 04

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You can buy a positive feedback on eBay for 29 cents, so how much is it worth?

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There is an interesting paper from John Morgan and Jennifer Brown of Berkeley which analyzes the Illicit “market for trust” on eBay. They onserved how on eBay there are a lot of listings with a Buy-It-Now option and a price of 1 penny. A Buy-It-Now sale for 1 cent automatically results in the seller losing 29 cents because eBay charges a 25-cent listing fee and 5 cents for the Buy-It-Now option. So, why should I sell something for 1 cent if this means I’m going to lose 29 cents? Well, basically I’m buying a positive feedback and paying it 29 cents. It is very interesting to note that the item being sold is actually a 1-cent “Free positive feedback ebook and recipe no shipping” which advised buying 100 different items on eBay that cost almost nothing in order to “get your feedback score up to 100 in just a few days.”
Free positive feedback ebook and recipe no shipping image.
(the image is from the same authors paper “Reputation in Online Markets: Some Negative Feedback”).
Does such a listing make sense? Well, it depends. The article goes on saying that the sellers, after getting a wonderful reputation, are probably going to move in very profitable markets such as selling cars or lands. For example, the authors found one particular seller, whom they dubbed the landseller, who had accumulated hundreds of feedback points by posting 304 offers for feedback enhancement on eBay (and losing $87.64). Then, after his feedback rating reached 598, the landseller went on to try to sell several parcels of undeveloped land in the southern U.S. on eBay.
This is one more example of a trust metric attack: every time someone provide a system based on reputation, some people will try to fool and attack it. No system is totally attack resistant. And this is uber interesting.

Links for 2007 04 03

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On the impossible BarCampization (*) of Universities and other lessons learned from rItaliaCamp

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I’ve been at RitaliaCamp at University Bicocca in Milan Saturday. I surely want to thank the organizers who spent countless hours in the permanent SkypeSwarm, dealing with all the details. RitaliaCamp was an interesting event, not interesting because of the topics that emerged but because of the social dynamics involved. In fact I must admit I’m not satisfied with how RitaliaCamp developed. This is not a criticism of whom organized because, as usual, in a doacracy I could have just helped more. What I hope to contribute here is a description of what I perceived as problematic and possibly some lessons we can learn from the suboptimal development of rItaliaCamp, for future events.

The first, simplest and most important is: Never ever organize a BarCamp in a University.
Spaces shape social interactions and Universities are not designed to enable conversations between peers. The “No spectator, only participants” BarCamp rule is precisely the opposite of the default Universities rule (at least Italian Universities) “There is only one actor, the professor; all the others are spectators, don’t even try to be an active participant for one second, you know nothing.” I might say that Universities are not barcampizables (*). I created a page on the bzaar wiki Luoghi ideali per Barcamp (in Italian) in order to collectively discuss what are the ideal characteristics of a Barcamp location. Add your opinions there, if you like (strangely enough, I didn’t find a similar page in English in barcamp.org).
Moreover the WiFi connection didn’t work: in this case the problem was an error in communication with the responsible of the network: there is an antiterrorism law in Italy (idiotic law!) that requires you to make a copy of the identity document of everyone you give Internet connection to and provide an individual login/password. One more reason to avoid in future Universities which are sinking in their mad burocratization.

The second lesson learned can be: When there are many noobies, rules and goals have to be precisely conveyed the days before the Barcamp and at the beginning of the Barcamp.
There were around 150 (or 200) people at RitaliaCamp and for half of them it was the first barcamp. I think they received a bunch of contradicting messages.
1) the organizers correctly explained that “barcamp is a conversation among peers” but the model and size of the room in which we started suggested quite the opposite. It was a 450-seats frontal university room with a huge projecting screen and the organizers had to introduce the day using a microphone. And in fact the first social dynamics were all centralized around the speaker standing in front of all the others and holding the microphone: quite the opposite of a barcamp.
2) after an introduction, we were told we were going to start a collective brainstorming session but what followed was not a brainstorming at all. We received a predigested mind map explained verbosely and in all the details, and with the microphone. This was not a brainstorming session and it is actually quite impossible to brainstorm in this kind of frontal rooms and if you need to ask the microphone in order to throw your idea. Ideas should fly in the air at the velocity at which they occur in the mind of anyone. Second contradictory message.
3) then the brainstorming was ended quite abruptly (someone also complained about this) because we were in fact already at least 90 minutes late and we were going nowhere anyway, and people were invited to go in the corridor and to propose a talk attaching a post-it with the title in the preferred time slot in one of the 3 available rooms. Because for many it was the first Barcamp, because of the contradictory messages we earlier received, and because it was not clear what we should have spoken about, there were few proposed talks and everyone seemed in a “let’s see what is going to happen” mode. Eventually the first 3 slots were filled, but there were still some problems. One talk was about exchanging turistic information via proximity hot spots (by Stefano Vitta) and was scheduled in the 450-seats room, and basically the speaker was so down and far away from the entrance that everybody was perceiving the room as empty and the talk as not starting and hence keeping wandering in the corridor. At the end Stefano had to start the talk with around 5 people in this 450-seats room. Another talk was very technical about a 3D engine and so the people interested were not too many too. The third and last talk in the first time frame was from Marco Ottolini, the ex-director of italia.it (!) so you can easily imagine how basically all the 150 people wanted to attend his talk and listen what he has to say, expecting a sort of insider view I guess. I didn’t attend that talk (I wanted to move some people in other rooms) so I might be wrong but I’ve heard comments stating that he presented his complete vision for the Web promotion of Italy as turistic destination and that the talk was very long (almost one hour?) while the time slot should have been 15 minutes talk and 10 minutes discussion. This situation (all the people in one room listening the ex director of italia.it speaking in detail about his vision) led some people to think that this first talk was in fact the official position of RitaliaCamp organizers and that all the people (as “spectators”) had just to say yes and contribute. Of course this was not the reality, of course there was no official position of organizers but this was one additional contradictory message people (especially noobies at their first barcamp) received.
4) in general, it was not perceived as clear if this event was just for sharing ideas for future, or for starting working around something already predefined by the organizers. Some of the comments in the corridors and during talks were precisely about this. Again, I lurked the organizational SkypeSwarm the weeks before the event and I have to reckon it is not easy to define a clear goal and get everyone agree on it, while also dealing with thousands of other strategic and low-level but urgent things, such as “where shall the sponsor send the shirts?” So the lesson here might be define a one-line-goal and write it down as first sentence in the wiki and in the blog, separated from the rest of the text. Could I have suggested this myself before the event? Sure, and in fact, one more, these are not criticisms to the organizers.

Another point I heard (from Roberta if I’m not wrong) is that the conversation was led by geeks and hence turist marketers who were present didn’t understand their possible role and didn’t feel the barcamp inclusive for them and for their opinions and ideas.
There were also some people from IBM, the company who got from Italians some of the millions of euros for the highly criticized italia.it Web portal and so probably some people perceived the “money/power” aspect as well. I’m not sure about this, surely IBM presence didn’t affect me, besides the fact it was odd to see people with ties at a barcamp.

Going back to the barcamp as an instrument, I’m not sure how much a barcamp modality can be used for events with a focus (such as rethinking Italian turism strategy on the Web in our case, or improving Toronto transportation system in the Toronto TransitCamp case), I need to see more evidence.
Something that seemed to have been approciated was the add-your-idea post-it wall (that is currently going to be organized into an online mind map).
Speaking of things that were great, how not to mention the gorgeous products offered by San Lorenzo? Barolo-drunk cheese (?!?) was simply great! Actually my only proposal of the day was “let’s italia.it be just a redirect to www.san-lorenzo.com”. Not too much I reckon but if you taste San Lorenzo products you will agree with me, I think ;-)

Summary. There are some lessons we can learn from RitaliaCamp, the simplest one is “never ever organize a barcamp in an University, and surely not in frontal rooms with non-movable chairs”. In fact, best conversations happened in the corridor or on the back of the huge 450-seats rooms where we move some of the free chairs and had presentations there.

Anyway, besides these problems, 90% of which caused by the University setting I think, the event was worth the long trip from Trento to Milan because I had a chance to meet friends and know some new great people. It was great to meet again my friends Bru, Folletto (great presentation “ask the way” mashing up also on CouchSurfing) and Jtheo and to meet for the first time my other Bzaar pals Gianandrea e Simbul. It was a chance for meeting again Bonaria, and for meeting for the first time some of the people I spoke with in the permanent organizational SkypeSwarm such as Tara Kelly and David Orban.
It was also very interesting to discuss with Frieda Brioschi, President of Wikipedia Italy which offered some interesting points about the possible role Wikipedia content and model can play in Ritalia. Later we took the train together and discussed a bit also about what does it mean to be a girl on the Internet and why there are so few women at barcamp and similar events and of language and culture facets on wikipedia. It was also great to meet for the first time some blogger I’m following since some time: Orientalia4all, Luca Conti, Robin Good, Lele Dainesi and Nicola Mattina.

Again, let me be clear, it would have been possible to better organize this RitaliaCamp (it is always possible!) but I totally and deeply appreciate the organizational work of all the volunteers. I could have helped more myself and I didn’t. I could have forecasted some of the problems days earlier and warn about them and suggest something and I didn’t. So the intention of this critiques is to learn from the development of this event in order to possibly organize future events in a better way.
I really want to thank all the organizers for donating efforts and ideas for what they believe in. It is now time for everyone of us to make ritalia a success.
Contribute on the blog, the wiki and in the Bzaar Swarm. This evening there is going to be a SkypeCast.

(*) Barcampization (verb: to barcampize) is constructed in the same way as balcanization and finlandization. I like to propose new words, I would have loved to be the proposer of the word “podcast” and don’t worry I’m sure this one is not going to make it in Wikipedia too ;-)