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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 of my post. I didn’t enter more into details. And then there was silence, and in the silence I decided it was easier to just ignore the whole discussion. But a few days ago Nicholas Carr from Rough Type wrote a post on how the long tail permits to the service the puts in touch people to make massive amount of money, but to the people who produce the actual content not much money. Absolutely true, and this is why you don’t see google advertisments in my blog. But this is a very different problem from what I was discussing when I was speaking about the long tail of the Ruling Class. Mainly because I was not speaking about the ruling class but about the ‘classe dirigente’. Which is not exactly the ruling class, although I still can’t find a better translation. Ruling class smells a bit too much of kings and queens and prime ministers. And I was actually speaking about ‘classe dirigente’ as people who have authority over a certain field.

So when Phil commented on Nick post:

I blogged on this last year, in response to Pietro Speroni:

I felt I had to answer. Because my post was all about a multidimensional space (all our interests), which gets mistreated as a unidimensional space (money). Poor chap! For a multidimensional space to be treated as a unidimensional one is fairly common, but never fair. And the general excuse is ‘to understand better’, or ‘to simplify a bit’. But I suspect that multidimensional spaces might take it personally, bacause if you treat them bad, they can become quite convoluted, if you know what I mean. Maybe I should write a long post on the importance of not making models (even mental ones) with too few dimensions. But I think I shall leave it for some time next year. And then I can say that it was long due.

In any case I decided to copy my comment to Nick post here. Continue reading Where life is and money isn’t

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 the office, when we want to find the correct way to spell a word we just look it in google. Along side with its more probable variations.

Much was my surprise when looking for perturbed
google gave me as third fourth and fifth hit:


See results for: dictionary

Dictionary.com
Free online dictionary search, translator, word of the day, crossword puzzles
and word games, and vocabulary learning resources for many languages.
dictionary.reference.com/

Merriam-Webster Online
Merriam-Webster provides a free online dictionary, thesaurus, audio pronunciations,
Word of the Day, word games, and other English language resources.
www.m-w.com/

OneLook Dictionary Search
Type in a word and search many dictionaries at once. Also has a reverse dictionary.
www.onelook.com/


Which sounded pretty much like saying: I am not a bloody dictionary. I hope you do realise that you are using the most powerful engine in the world to find how to spell.

I am sorry, I won’t do it again ;) .

Small China

We have all heard the news that do-no-evil Google has accepted to comply with Chinese laws and ban some words from the search results (Google testimony here). More than that China is censoring media, editors, journalist, blogs, and practically any form of free expression. According to this article this censorship is not having the desired effect from the government. The only reason they give is that there are simply too many blogs.

Well, I have a different idea, I think that censorship is not useless as a strategy for China’s government. It is counterproductive. It is making the the chinese blogsphere stronger. Let me explain why do I think it is so. Continue reading Small China

Ruling Class translation

A fast note to point out that Phil Edwards took the ball and translated the previous post. The post was an answer to a post from my father, and as such in Italian.

Phil uses the post as his launch pad for a very interesting one on how he sees the long tail having effect on the society and how he sees this not happening. I don’t think I agree fully on what Phil writes, but I need some time to gather my ideas, and answer properly.

What follows is Phil translation of my post. The translation is incomplete, but correct and faithful to the original spirit (although I am not convinced I would translate classe dirigente as ruling class), as such I am happy to copy it here. Continue reading Ruling Class translation

Google uses synonymes when searching

Interesting.
I was making a search on process algebra, and still I am new to the field I was also looking for a tutorial.
So I searched Google for “process algebra” tutorial
And look at the result. In some tutorial is not even present (for example here).
Instead Google used the words how to, as a synonym for tutorial. You can see it by the fact that it had even bolded how to in some of the excerpt that it gives in the search page.
I wonder:

  • How general is it?
  • In what cases will it use a synonyme?
  • How could I turn it off, or on, or even ask for a broader range of synonims to be accepted?