Tag Archives: povo

Random hacks of kindness (RHOK) in Trento

Trento is a small Italian city but it is a great city from many perspectives. The quality of life of very good and the cultural offering is really good. Some posts from my blog show a talk by Larry Wall and one by PhdComics creator, a visit of Dalai Lama, Microsoft opening a research center in Trento and a great annual Festival of Economics but there it actually much more in this little city.

Today I announce that on June 4th and 5th, Random Hacks of Kindness (RHOK) is coming to Trento too (precisely in the research center where I work).
The goal is to put together hackers, coders, designers, engineers, programmers and geeks of every variety to tackle some real-world problems (disaster risk and climate change) and hack for humanity.
RHOK is going to take place in 15 locations around the globe and among them there is Trento, the smallest of the participating cities in fact. Below the list of cities where RHOK will take place simultaneously with the number of inhabitants (data from Wikipedia).

Jakarta, Indonesia	9,580,000
Santiago, Chile	6,676,745
Bangalore, India	5,438,065
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.	5,325,000
Toronto, Canada	4,753,120
Melbourne, Australia	4,077,036
Berlin, Germany	3,450,889
Nairobi, Kenya	3,138,295
Buenos Aires, Argentina	2,891,082
Seattle, Washington, U.S.A.	2,712,205
Lusaka, Zambia	1,742,979
Aarhus, Denmark	249,709
Basel, Switzerland	169,019
Hartford, Connecticut, U.S.A.	124,512
Trento, Italy	115,243

PhD Comics creator in Povo

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I work in Povo (Trento) and on April 28, 2001, at 4.00 pm, for the ICT International Doctoral School Welcome day, there will be Jorge Cham – Writer and artist of Piled Higher and Deeper (PhD Comics) “The power of procrastination”.
Below a comic made for the occasion. Translation for non-locals: “Pergine” is a small city close to Trento, “Teroldego” is a good local wine, “Spritz” is a local aperitif prepared with white or Prosecco wine, some Aperol or Campari, and sparkling mineral water. Actually there will be a free aperitif after the event, so what are you waiting?

… for your information, I since long reached the final state “hope they have a glass of Teroldego” ;)

Larry Wall talk in Povo

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On February 17, 2011 at 11:00, Larry Wall, creator of the Perl programming language, will give a talk in Povo (where I work), organized by CoSBI (The Microsoft Research – University of Trento Centre for Computational and Systems Biology).
The title is “That Goes Without Saying (or Does It)” and the abstract is:
Linguist Roman Jakobson famously said, ‘Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey’ Contrary to the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis, your language of choice does not generally prevent you from thinking certain thoughts, but your language can certainly make it easier or harder to express those thoughts. Lately I’ve enjoyed playing with various Perl examples on rosettacode.org, and have noticed this principle in action. In this talk we’ll look at some of the ways a language can make your life more miserable than it needs to be.
The seminar is free of charge but for logistics reasons you need to confirm your attendance on CoSBI site.