It seems Joi Ito is having some problems with Italian (giggling) translators. Ah, those Italians, always joking and laughing and giggling … ;-)
[yes, I had to check the meaning of to giggle, that is “To laugh quietly in short bursts or in a nervous or silly way.”]
Citeseer is less useful today than how it was 2 years ago. It seems they stop the crawling looking for papers. [I have a project about adding “web of trust” to citeseer so that every user can express a degree of interest in another users’ kept bibliography) but it seems I never have the time to seriously start it.] Anyway this post is to cite 2 interesting related projects: LionShare and Eprints … (read below for links and details)
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Google print, Google SMS, Google helps China censorships.
The Google Italian version is now offering: maps (just search for an Italian city, such as Bologna), trains timetables (just search for two Italian cities, such as bologna roma), UPS packets monitoring (just enter an UPS code, such as 1Z1234567891234567). [found via Pandemia]
For the train timetable, Google.it doesn’t use the Italian Trenitalia but the German reiseauskunft. Well, I guess they are more reliable (both as train service and Internet site).
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I’ve spent the past week (21-24/10/2004) in Fribourg (Switzerland) working and discussing with Hassan Masum. I was guest of the Theoretical Physics Department of the University of Fribourg, precisely of the Interdisciplinary group leaded by Prof. Zhang. They apply methods and tools of Theoretical Physics (Statistical Mechanics, Probability Calculus ecc.) to other fields of research, namely economics, game theory, sociology or biology.
Hassan and Prof. Zhang are writing a book on Reputation Society. To get an idea of the topics you might want to have a look at their Manifesto for the Reputation Society.
We had 4 days of very interesting discussions. Perhaps they were not very focused (this is typical of me, I must admit) but we were free to jump from future economics systems to copyright and intellectual property issues, from emergent democracy to computation trust systems, from collaborative filtering to religion, from recommender systems to privacy, from … We were annotating issues in this wiki page and from it you can have an idea of the scope of our discussions.
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I updated my FOAF file based on the new <foaf:knows> relationships I collected at the FOAF workshop. I took as an example the perfect Morten’s FOAF file.
Want to know if you are one of my friends? Check my FOAF file or analyze it via Semaview applet or via Foafspace (Foafspace graph applet does not work in my Firefox) or via FoafExplorer or via eikeon web view. Are there other tools that render a FOAF file?
I have encoded in it also some trust relationships and submitted to Trust and Reputation in Web Based Social Networks project. Why don’t you do the same?
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.
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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.