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COP15 Needs an e-Government System

This morning I received a mail from Copenhagen. It was very moving, and describing a situation of chaos, strong commitment, and braveness. It told the story of people fighting with non violence, and shouting that they want change.
And I am afraid all this is useless. I feel once again what I felt looking at Iran [...]

In memory of David Carradine, what would Master Po say?

I wonder how Caine would have commented David Carradine’s death. Especially the modus operandi.
I can see it. The light dissolves, and a new scene is in front of our eyes:
Master Po walks. Young Caine is thoughtful…
-What’s the matter, Grasshopper?

How Twitter, Google, Wolfram|Alpha and WIkipedia are not competing at all

It seems to me that Twitter, Google, and Wolfram|Alpha, are really not competing at all, but are instead providing complementary services. I would go farther by adding wikipedia (and blogs?), and suggest that the 4 services really represent the digestive process of our information society. From the first Churning to the Backbone
Wolfram|Alpha represents the deeper [...]

Mindmanager for Mac is a joke

I have been using mindmaps for quite some time. Wherever I go I am known as the mindmap person. My whole website was build using MindManager’s export-to-HTML function. But those where the times of Windows. Now I have moved to Mac and I have left behind MindManager. Now I use Freemind, and iMindMap.
I recently expressed [...]

Facebook as a spiritual tool

[crossposted on the moblog, and the facebook notes.]
One of the leit motif in spirituality is to reach an integration among the various parts of oneself. There are many important reasons for this, which I am not going to enter right now. Becoming One is not seen in Taoism as a spiritual goal, but as a [...]

How to use social networks in emergencies.

In the article:
Tweeting the terror: How social media reacted to Mumbai
it is explained how twitter, blogs and social networks gave mixed results in during the Mumbai massacre.
I particular it is said:
As Twitter user “naomieve” wrote: “Mumbai is not a city under attack as much as it is a social media experiment in action.”
But then,
as [...]

Ebooks, the next revolution. But this time is BIG!

Another revolution is about to happen.
A revolution that is many times in size and importance bigger than the music revolution. I call it the e-book revolution.
In this moment a number of technologies are coming together:
On the one side OCR technologies are reaching a level of sophistication, where it is nearly as easy to photocopy a [...]

My first 2 talks available online: Tags & 21st Century Democracy

The two talks I gave at the: International Workshop on Challenges and Visions in the Social Sciences, this summer, are now available at videolectures.net.
Not the best talks of my career, and hopefully not the last either. But the guys at VL did a great job in recording them.
One of the talk was about Tags, and [...]

Would you rather have sex or know about it?

This is quite interesting. According to this very unscientific statistics, with way too few data, but enough to start showing some trends, we discover that people who just completed elementary school has way more sex than everybody else.
Elementary school [...]

Dublin, Friday 13th of June, 2008

The problem is not that there are too many elections for Europe, but too few. And the people feel they are not controlling a process that is bigger than them.
When people vote No at the battlecry: when in doubt vote No, how else would You interprete it?
Now, it can be that the United States have [...]

A bug on the E90 comunicator

I think I found a bug in the E 90 comunicator.
I don’t really know where should I tell, and who should I ask for support, so please if this is not the correct place, just adress me to the correct place. In any case I will copy my post in my blog to be a [...]

Ryanair Sucks

I am just back from the airoport.
I bought some time ago a return ticket with Rayanair to Rome, going on the 4th August, and return on the 19th of August. Well, long story short I needed to change my going there ticket. I am no longer going with Ryanair to Rome, but to Athens, passing [...]

Moving to Dublin

I know I haven’t written anything in ages. And maybe it is a good thing. Part of it is due to the fact that this blog has become so serious, so high level, that I felt I did not have anything worth enough to write on it. On the side my other small blog, the [...]

Education 2.0. The fully decentralized university

Some time ago I remember reading a comment.
La Repubblica, one of the first italian newspaper, holds a big internet website. As part of their initiative they have La Repubblica TV, which is a sort of television, just recorded for the net. You can download it when you want, and see it at your leisure. It [...]

transition done

We seem to have made it.
The website is now hosted on different servers, at dreamhost.com.
Of course what could not be done was to resurrect the wiki, which now should instead be recreated from scratch. And, much worse, the mindmapping tool. The page from which it was possible to make a mind map of a delicious [...]

Fixing the website

I just came back from the vacations to discover that my website is now a mess.
All the delicious mindmap data have been deleted, and so did the MySQL data of the wiki.
I am not really sure how it could happen, but I am just not going to investigate.
I am, more pragmatically, moving my website to [...]

Book Review: The Way of the Superior Man

The way of the superior man
Rating: 4 out of 5
Author: David Deida
Year: 1997
Publisher: Sounds True
Price: $17.95
ISBN: 1591792576

Lately I have been reading the way of the superior man. Forget about Nietsche, here the reference, although never made explicit, is to the superior man in the I-Ching. “this is the situation, so the superior man does so [...]

Here in Athens we do like this

Paolo Rossi, an italian comedian, made a wonderful job, in taking an old discourse from Pericles, and presenting it to the modern public as part of his personal show: Il Signor Rossi e la costituzione (mr. Rossi and the constitution- but, as Rossi is the most common italian name, could be translated as mr. [...]

Where life is and money isn’t

Some of you might remember that I wrote a post about the long tail of the ruling class. The post was in Italian and got translated in English by blogger Phil Edward. I took the translation copied it in my blog (with a link), but said that I did not fully agree with Phil understanding [...]

Google is not a dictionary

And gets offended when it’s treated as such.
Let’s face it, google is such a mighty search engine. Can you imagine the spiders going around the world, the results gathered and indexed. And every time you make a search those data are confronted and pages of results are returned. Well, maybe you don’t, but here in [...]

Polyphasic Easter

It is 2.30 am and I just woke up. I went to bed at 2.05 am.
I am not crazy. Not yet, not anymore, at least not more than usual. I am just trying a new sleeping technique. It is called polyphasic sleep. I actually wanted to become polyamorouse, but I got confused during the googling [...]

The new project: TagBay. Tagging e-Bay

It is now the time to present the next project we have been working to: TagBay. And I say ‘we’, because is this project I am not alone. I did it with a friend of mine, Derek, who accepted, very patiently to code, some of the idea I have been tinkering around in the last [...]

Sleeping patterns: when is it better to sleep

In the last weeks I have been interested in polyphasic sleep. Polyphasic sleep is a sleeping pattern where the person does not sleep in one big chunck, but in many roughly equivalent pieces throughout the whole day. The first time I heard about it was from my father, some twenty years ago. The pattern is [...]

Reading your mate passwords in Firefox

So, here is the quest. You need to discover the password of your best friend. Although this might seem morally reprehensible you are moved by nobel and deep reasons. You need to check in his email and discover if he is having an affair with your wife. You can’t just confront him if you are [...]

Review: Smarking

Some of you might remember my rant, once del.icio.us was bought. And some others, who where with me from before might remember the entries I wrote on tag clouds. Some time later I was contacted from an Italian developer, Fabio Vescarelli, who asked me some help in developing some algorithms to find the distance between [...]