Yearly Archives: 2005

Nonsense: you can’t link to a candidate’s site

This is just insane! Links are “campaign contributions!” (via BoingBoing)
Seems that a US judge has ruled out that a link to the site of a political candidate is a contribution to her campaing and, since this is regulated in many ways, it may be the case that you cannot link to it! That’s weird. This is just free speech. Just as I’m free to tell my friend that I appreaciate Kucinich as US president, I must be free to express the same opinion on my blog. Otherwise, is the federal commision going to record every single conversations we do, monitor when we speak about candidates and count (monetarizing it) how much we “contributed” to a candidate campaign? … Beware, the enemy is listening. Don’t express political opinions! Even better, don’t think. Just swallow whatever bullshit they are throwing in your direction. I’m more and more scared thinking about who had the power to legislated about Internet.

Richard Stallman in Trento: photos, audio and video

Some days ago Richard Stallman was speaking at the University of Trento, Faculty of Sociology. It was a great day. Stallman spoke most of the time of freedom, of sharing, of helping your friends and neighbours. These are the reasons behind GNU. Check his biography if you don’t know who he is.
I took some photos of that day: in the photo on the left, I’m with Stallman, Napo and Arianna.
Emanuele recorded a complete video (courtesely hosted by archive.org, if you need to host videos, audios, do it on archive.org and make them available to everyone! you can also just watch the thumbnails) and there is also the audio. And if you like sounds, you might enjoy a compilation of free software songs (collected on the wonderful Webjay).
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The Corporation (movie)

Yesterday I watched the movie The Corporation. Highly recommended! The first part is incredibly cleverly designed. First there is an historic study of the born and evolution of corporations (the breaking point was when lawyers where successful in making them accepted as persons, giuridic persons but still persons with all the rights of a person, property included). Then the usual behaviours of a megacorporation are shown with paradigmatic examples and they are posed in parallel with the characteristics of the medical profile of a psycopath. Clever! The second part is more conventional and keeps presenting examples of what megacorporations have done in our world. The movie is in reality a documentary, a very well designed documentary. It is a little bit long, though, more than 2 hours I think. My suggestion is to watch it in 2 tranches. But to watch it.

“Serpica naro” is “San Precario”

san_precario.jpgThis 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?”

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

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

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”

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?

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 ;-) )]