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I am right now at the FET 11 conference. There I was attending a session from my old friend Josh Bongard on Crowdsourcing Science . There I commented that it would be already a good thing if scientists started to make themselves available to the wider public. This by giving a timetable when they are available to whoever wants to chat with them about science.
 There was a time when scientists lived in ivory towers. Now that ivory towers are starting to crumble, we should do our best to really tear them down completely. So I am here suggesting, and promoting a new project. An open science project. The idea is that I, and every scientist who is willing to participate in this, will donate some time to society for science.
I will be available one hour a week on Skype to discuss about science with anyone who is interested.
My Skype name is “pietrosperoni” and I will be available every tuesday from 13 GMT to 14 GMT. You must be able to speak in English or Italian. I speak a bit of French so that might work too, but it’s very poor. And I cannot write it.
In this time we can discuss about science. If you have an idea about my field of expertise you can come and talk to me about that. Maybe we can collaborate on developing it, and maybe making it into a publication.
Before any collaboration I expect you to know about the scientific method and how do peer-reviewed journals work. But I am willing to tell you about it. Those are some sort of basic things that needs to be known when you want to do science. A bit like you need to know the rules of the road when you start driving. If you are a colleague and you want to chat you are also of course very welcome. In fact you should start joining me, and start to offer 1 hour a week to help people discover about your field of expertise.
You can find my interests as a scientist here. But I am willing and interested to discuss on many other topics. You also can come to me and ask about any idea you might have found on my blog. If you are a colleague of course you can come and Skype, but you can do much more: I invite you to join me!
You can do this from your blog, or from the comment section over here. If you have a blog and you write about this, please remember to advertise about it here. And (either here or in your blog) please remember to write:
Name:
Availability:
Skype name:
Field of expertise:
Other interests:
For me:
- Name: Pietro Speroni di Fenizio
- Availability: Skype. Tuesday, from 2 pm to 3 pm GMT.
- Skype name: pietrosperoni
- Field of expertise: folksonomy, tags, organization theory, artificial life, artificial chemistries, voting theory, power index, the vilfredo project, e-government, e-democracy, e-participation, the open science project
- Other interests: global warming, robotics,permaculture, using quantum effect to have non local effect in different time, diy biology, the hormonal system and making models of it, the future, everything in the universe.
Scientists, tear down the wall!
I think it’s the time to present what have I been doing in the last days. A number of improvement have beed added to this web site. In short I have upgraded to wordpress 2.0. I also moved to the next version of wikka. Some of you might remember that I offered some money to whoever could write some code to get the tag plugin to generate an rss list. I didn’t, at the time, explained why. I will now.
WordPress 2.0 gives the possibility to start categories on the fly. Just adding them, by listing them. Essentially this makes the category in wordpress work like tags (or keywords, for academics). But categories in wordpress also have an rss feed connected to them. Albeit with some bugs, like linking to the whole blog and not to the particular category. So I passed most of the first of January adding to the entries the relative tags as categories. So now I have no need of an rss feed for the tag page, as the tag page has been substituted with the category pages.
You also will rememer that I installed Wikka. The wiki engine. Now wikka is not only open source but also easy source. It is so simple that even I could hack the code. That is very simple! So I changed the code and inserted the possibility to have default pages. In short if before if you were to look for the url http://wiki.pietrosperoni.it/someunexistingpage and there is no page in the wiki called “someunexistingpage” the result would be that the wiki would ask you to edit the page, and you would be redirected to http://wiki.pietrosperoni.it/someunexistingpage/edit.
Now he would create on the fly the page someunexistingpage with the default content. And the default content I chose was the 4 rss feeds:
- the feed from my blog from the category: someunexistingpage
- the feed from my technorati from the tag: someunexistingpage
- the feed from my delicious bookmarks from the tag…
- and the feed from the popular pages in delicious, always from that tag
So for each tag I now have a wiki page with the most relevant rss appearing there. But being a wiki page I also can add other rss feeds, write definitions, comments, todo lists. In short modify it as I see fit.
Still it is not perfect. As it writes the page the first time, from that moment the page is set. I can delete it, but I cannot, for example, change the default content for all the pages that only contain the default content. I tried to write a plugin to do that, but I failed when I confronted the fact that I needed to write a plugin {{defaultpage}} who should have activated other plugins:{{rrs}}, for example. Something that I ignored how to do.
Also having the same string to work for delicious (as tag), wordpress (as category name) and wikka (as pagename) puts some heavy constraints on what the string might contain. For example I am already running ashore for all the tags that contain a dot inside (aaargh, del.icio.us!) or an accented letter (aargh, dear italian).
If you want to see how the pages look like just see the idea page. But any link from the right column (provided they have no dots inside or accents) will work fine.
I suddenly relised I don’t have the time to do all the things I was interested in (and keep what remains of my mental sanity). So out of need I decided to make the following offer.
The technorati tag plug in gives the possibility to have technorati tags, and for each tag a different page. What instead it does not offer is the possibility to have also an rss feed for each tag. So I offer 20 € for whoever makes the necessary changes to the plugin so that side by side to the tag page (here available at http://blog.pietrosperoni.it/tag/… ) I can have an rss feed of the entries in my blog with each tag (possibly at http://blog.pietrosperoni.it/rsstag/…).
The changes will have to be open source, so that they can then join the mainstream wp program. And be on that plugin. I know 20€ is not a lot, but I reason that for the right person this is a simple hack that might take half an hour. For me it would take ages (mainly because I need to understand how wp is working, and it’s not that trivial).
Oh, yes, I can pay via paypal. Or buy you something via Amazon, LJ, Flickr. Whatever.
And now to comment the above:
It’s interesting how the spreading of open source software also means the opening of a whole new market of people helping each other. I could never have made the above offer if I was using blogger, or lj.
Addendum: Since the new release of wordpress 2.0 includes the possibility to use categories as tags, the above offer is no longer valid. Sorry.
Some of you know that I left ProtoLife. I hope in the future to keep on colaborating with the P.A.C.E. project, but for now that’s it. I want to go back to Germany, and finish my Ph.D. .
Somehow this seem to have a higher priority. Beside is getting clearer for me each day that I am hardly a ‘company’ type of person. I’d rather make research inside the university, or nowhere at all. While I was in Venice I met with the local group of Go players. Sandro, one of those made a big impression on me, being a person of great knowledge, whose only excuse was: “I don’t look at television, I read.”.
I decided that it made sense to read more… that it made sense to read ‘cum grano salis‘. With intelligence, choosing carefully what to read,
When I came back to Rome I decided that it made sense to read more. More than this, that it made sense to read ‘cum grano salis‘. With intelligence, choosing carefully what to read, and not reading any bullshit the latest friend suggested me. I remember telling a friend, “you know, I decided to stop just following my nose, on what books to read…”
His answer was quite funny: “If you don’t follow your nose, what do you follow? Other people’s nose”. And then he added: “This is actually a serious question, you might for example, find some people that you really don’t like, ask their suggestion, and then took off the book they suggest you from your reading list”. As you will see by the end of this entry, this ended up being very near the mark.
So I started asking around what where the books (or document) they felt where more important to understand the world we are living in
So I started asking around what where the books (or document) they felt where more important to understand the world we are living in. As an example I often gave where the acts of the Second Vatican Council (in particular Dignitatis Humanae). Since I am not catholic (nor even Christian), by suggesting something that was not traditionally seen as a classical text, I was implicitly suggesting: the documents that are behind the world we are living in, the documents that most people refer too, but few really read.
I did not receive many lists, but here and there someone would suggest a book or two, that I would dutifully add to my note. I then started keeping track of this list in a separate page on my blog. Since I did not publicize the page no one would read it. The list is nowhere ended, and I feel its inadeguateness knowing all the wonderful books that should be there, but I preferred to keep it small, and add new books slowly.
While I was keeping the list in the back burnere, and slowly going through some of those books, I found another list a much better one from which I am about to fatten my list. And the story of how I found it, and how it relates to my list is very funny, so let me tell it to you.
The list have it all, it’s the most complete list of texts I found that were really important to understand the world we are living in. Each of those book inspired millions of people.
A right winged newspaper: Human Events online, asked
a panel of 15 conservative scholars and public policy leaders to help us compile a list of the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th enturies.
They crossed the information between the various people and came to a list of 10 really dangerous books, and 21 ‘honorable mentions’. The list have it all, it’s the most complete list of texts I found that were really important to understand the world we are living in. Each of those book inspired millions of people. Just to understand where those people come from the book is important. Fundamental I would say. You have it all: Freud, Darwin, Gramsci, Marx, Engels, Mao, the Kinsey report (the Kinsey Report! That I wanted to read from so long). Dewey, that I have been told set the foundation for modern relativism thinking (so dear to our new pope). There is also Mein Kampf, which I am not sure if I’ll have the guts to read, but I probably should. And many others, Betty Friedan (don’t you want to understand Feminism? Read it, too), Keynes, Adorno… Is a wonderful list.
Interesting enough I was not the only one to see this as my next reading list. On the delicious page of the people who bookmarked the article the most common comment is “my next reading list”, ” A very interesting list of powerful books that have changed history.”, “some good reading”, “…some of these would make my required reading list…”, “…would make an excellent library booklist.” and so on.
Buy ‘The Kinsley report in the human male’, and help sustain the neocons battle.
One of the things that you should not fail to notice is that each book in the top ten most dangerous book is presented with a link. The link to Amazon. But is not just a normal link to Amazon. Amazon let you sign an agreement so that you can advertise some books from your website, and if people buy your book, they get a discount, and you get a percentage. So, yes you got it, each of those book is presented in that format. If you click on those links to go to Amazon, and you buy the book, the right winged journal will get a percentage. Will get a percentage out of you buying Mein Kampf, and The Communist Manifesto. “Buy ‘The Kinsley report in the human male’, and help sustain the neocons battle.”. Ah, the irony of all this.
no I don’t ask people I don’t like which books to read and cross them out. I ask them which books not to read, and add them to my reading list. Way more efficient!
So, to answer my friend, “no I don’t ask people I don’t like which books to read and cross them out. I ask them which books not to read, and add them to my reading list. Way more efficient!”
And if you read all this, and want to add something to my reading list, feel free to suggest:
“what books or document would you suggest to understand the world we are living in”. And tell us why, in what way was this book so unique that reading it is a must. Now the line is yours.
I did some spring cleaning on the delicious mind map maker. I deleted some of the oldest maps, also from the period when the program was not working fine. If your map got deleted, please don’t be too angry, and just make it again. Unfortunately the only way I had to find the old maps was according to when the directory was created. This meant that if you kept on using the utility, and recreated the map more recently, your map could still be among the unlucky ones.
I am finally having a bit of free time (although is rapidly filling up, as I take from my box the list of all the things I wanted to do and did not have the time to do it). There is quite a list of things I wish to do on this program, to make it more efficient. If any of you have special requirement, now would be the right time to ask.
Pietro
As I posted the previous entry, I went to technorati to check if it was being pulled. And what I discovered was that technorati was only pulling the first tag in the list.
I make quite an effort to add all the tags that I think might be relevant. This both to improve visibility, and to better categorise the content. I like to make a copy of the same tags in my p.s.blog delicious account. And then see the whole thing as a mindmap. But for the mindmap to really work it is necessary to that if two entries share some content they should also shar at least a tag. So I use many tags. And the mindmap comes out really nice.
Not only this, but I feel that each post belongs to multiple tags, and should be present in multiple pages. For example this entry belongs to both the tag ‘technorati’, and the tag ‘mindmap’, ‘delicious’ etc.
Investigating a bit further I discovered this post, where a similar problem was presented. In that case technorati was pulling the information from the list of categories in the rss feed. Now the problem is that, in wordpress (other tag!), the list of categories is defined before, while the tags are defined after. And although this might seem like a minor problem, it actually means that often we don’t add all the categories that we need. In a sense it should be possible to just ask that wordpress uses tags as categories.
And then post the tags as:
<category>firsttagname</category>
<category>secondtagname</category>
So the end result of this is:
my posts are not appearing in the technorati page where they should: tag, technorati…;
my posts are appeariung in the technorati page where the shouldn’t :General, English…;
And I haven’t got a clue how to fix it.
Pietro
UPDATE:
I did send a mail to teachnorati, and I got this answer:
Hi Pietro,
Your tags must occur within the boundaries of a post, a div of class of storycontent in your case. Technorati should treat your Dublin Core subjects in your Atom feed as tags.
SECOND UPDATE:
After various tests, I realized that technorati does not parse the html, and I usderstood what the mail meant with Technorati should treat your Dublin Core subjects in your Atom feed as tags.. Since the author of the plugin explained that for a couple of more month he is not going to be able to fix it, in the meantime I downloaded another plugin: Technotag. That gives me the possibility to add <tag>tagname</teg> And that’s makes a tag automagically. Let’s hope that this works!
THIRD UPDATE: it works. And as I keep on making small hacks to the plugins that I use, I slowly learn how they work
FOURTH UPDATE:correction, it only worked for the first tag. But I hacked a bit the code and now it works fine on all. I shall send an email to the author, to pass him the change.
Before it would make a tag on every <tag>tagname</teg>, but all the tags would all point to the same address: The one generated by the first tag. Corrected. The new code is available here.
Since my Windows crashed, and I am now running on an old linux Suse 8.0, on a small partition, I was looking forward to reinstall linux as the only OS, with a newer version: Suse 9.2.
After a day of work, the system administrator of the company I work for was not able to install linux on my weird computer (ACER 340). The first problem we had to face was that having an external CDROM (and Floppy) it would never boot from there. Ever. Period. So we had to move all the files to the HD. Even then it was not trivial to convince him (male and bastard) to load from the HD. And when we managed we got an “EBDA too big” error. He tried changing the ‘magic’, but then concluded that my ‘magic’ was of the wrong kind  .
Then we tried to start it under windows and we got a:
“WARNING not enough free memory (load buffer size)”
Which was a similar error: something is too big and the memory is too small. In any case he was able to fix my windows system so for the next months I will keep on using windows and asap I will switch to linux.
Linux don’t run away, our union is just postponed.
I feel the duty to make a short comunication.
My windows system finally crashed under the weight of virus, worms, and similar. I had to recover under linux, but for some weeks I will be unable to have an OS of any kind working properly and completely. Eventually I will install a Suse 9.2. For now I am working with an old Suse 8.0 and many thnks do not work. For this reason, for now, I am unable to make any of the wonderful hacks I planned to do. (I cannot even look at the maps myself right now  )
But I keep on studying Python, so eventually everything will turn out well.
I am happy that some users have actually started to use the site on a regular basis, and I would appreciate if they were to make a link to the map maker if they link to their own map. This since the map maker is not that easy to find, from an individual map.
Did some more debugging. Now any unicode the user used in the tags should be ok. Still there is a big brick wall in terms of memory usage. And some users are not having any luck just out of the fact that their map is taking so much resources that it goes beyond the ISP limit. I could work hard and distribute the whole calculation so that all variables are stored on disk, so the memory would never be hit, but honestly, it is not my top priority at the moment. I am here to help those users run the program on their own machine. And eventually we might solve that problem too. So, what are my top priorities:
- Add an rss feed.I would like to add an rss feed that every time a new map is done, the feed gets updated. It wouldn’t just tell the name but all sorts of data, like the list of the Main Tags. So the users could see if they might be interested in checking the new buddy’s map
- Insert a way for user to delete their own maps. If I am going to go into hosting business, I am not going to be one of those hosts where you can add info, but you cannot delete it. I am aware that users info ultimately is adding value to my site, as such I want users to be happy in having their map here. Not forced.
- Insert a general log of all the maps that are being started, and ended. Right now such a log is absent, and there are about 200 maps completed, and more than twice maps that have been started. So about 300 have been dropped. I bet many of those users would have success, if they tried right now, after those 3 deubugging session. Still I want something that tells me: Warning warning warning, map dropped. Bug? OutOfMemoryError?
- Add the number of posts inside a tag. Just obvious
- Probably add some of the MainTags as keywords to each single map. The problem is: which? All is too much. All the ones that contain more than x posts, y subtags is not flexible enough. The solution should be: if a MainTag is part of a ParetoFront of Delicious than the keyword should be there. The fact that this means writing a whole program that stores in a database the latest ParetoFront is just a small detail . And before you ask: no, I will not need anybody’s password to do that, and the data will all be public.
- Add a bookmarklet to save a map in your own delicious, with the keywords as tags
- Change the map, so that it can run on a single tag. Useful for big complex maps like mine, and others.
- Make it change the Title of the Map Page, to show the owner of the map. Useful if people want to add the maps to their delicious pages.
And then there are some tests I would like to make, like:
- Check if it would make sense to show all the tags that appear with a single tag, and not the subtags.
There is more? If you can think of other modifications , please drop a line in the comment section. Also if you tried to run the map maker and it is not giving you satisfaction let me know. I’ll whip it appropriatly. HarHarHar. (I’ve always wanted to say that!)
Some people (few) were in the unfortunate situation that the tool would calculate their map, and would correctly add it to the make map page, but then the map could not be open. If you were one of those people, I have good news. I tracked down the bug (this time only derived by my stupidity) and nailed it. So, please try again. Insert again your data, calculate it again, and then open it. With this I ended debugging the obvious big errors. If you try now and the tool does not work, please drop me a line with your username, maybe send me by email (available via my homepage) your complete list of all the posts. And I will see what I can do for you. If you don’t contact me I have no way to know that the tool failed, and I will not be able to help you.
Things are progressing, more and more people are using the tool. Unfortunately not for all was a succesful experience. I could spot two separate bugs. In the first case the map would not be created at all, and the program would stop just after making the poststotag dictionary. In the second the map would be created but it was unreadable from the user. Yesterday evening (in my camper van!) I debugged the first issue. Essentially the program was downloading from delicious two different files, the (don’t click on it) list of all posts, and the list of all tags. Well, the two files were not coherent one with the other, and the list of all tags would in some rare cases list tags that had no post associated with them. Of course as soon as the dictionary would start being created the program would protest, and quite correctly so. I think the problem has something to do with how del.icio.us is at the moment handling the change tag name function. Maybe the problem has been solved by now, and what I got into were some users that had used the function while it was still not completely bug free.
In any case I circumvented the problem by not downloading the tag list file at all, but recovering the list of tags directly from the posts/all page. It is obviously slower (by big map moved from 377 sec to 460 sec.) but more secure.
So, if you tried to use the map before, and you did not had luch luck. If it did not create the map at all, then try again, and now it should work. And if it doesn’t please contact me, and maybe send me an email with your all.xml file.
If instead the map was created, your name was added but the map wan unopenable, then keep having patience, and this evening I hopefully will kill that bug too.
And thanks to all who are using the tool, is such an interesting project for me!
Pietro
The good news is that finally the Mind Map Maker is being used and tested. The bad news is that it does not always work. Somehow it would have been easier if it never worked. I think there are two problems: one problem is that it requires some heavy download from del.icio.us. No matter if the download are for different account, they are all coming from the same IP, so I would not be surprised to discover that del.icio.us have bashed the program on the head more than once. I can somehow half the request by making the program calculate the whole list of tags, instead of downloading it as a separate file. I had it already on my todo list, and I think I will do it tomorrow. So, if you have requested for a password and it did not appear, than fear not, just try again in some half an hour. (Alenahra, I’m speaking to you for example!)
But this is not the only reason why the map maker is failing. There have also been cases where the map maker made some ‘perfectly acceptable’ maps from my point of view, but that for some reason are unreadable from the mind map. What am I refering to: but to niels77 for example, for whom the program made what seem as a perfectly acceptable .mm file but that for some reason neither the java program, nor the free mindmap in my computer seem able to read. This is the kind of mistery that are more easily unraveled in the morning.
But for few maps who don’t make it many did. Just go to the Make Map page and choose one, any one. And each will tell you a story, a point of view, a set of interests, and a suggestion on how that person sees the world. The more I use them the more I like them.
BTW the Make Map has also made it to the popular page. I feel so unprofessional in noting it
Update I checked how many directories have been created respect to how many maps have been completed. The ratio is about 110:70 That’s not that good. It means that if you ask for a map you have about 1/3 of probability that it will not make it. For now just wait some time than try again.
I am getting really annoyed. I use Firefox, and at the moment it is quite useless on a number of sites. As they never stop reloading.
In particular (it seem to me) on all the sites that have a reload. Two among all: bloglines (the left bar). And the home page of La Repubblica. In the first page, according to its source code, it should reload every 3600 seconds. That is every hour. Quite an honest command for a feed reader. On the second every 300 seconds, 5 minutes. Right for a news site.
Instead they download, then the first waits 7 seconds (I checked it) and start download again in a loop. And since blogline is quite slow, this makes everything slow down. The second downloads the page, and then does it again and again without ever stopping.
It is as if he counts the tenth of second instead of the seconds. Then 5 minutes would be 1 second, and 3600 would be 6 seconds.
Now, if I open IE all this does not happen.
Strangely enough this ‘bug’ does not happen only with firefox. I remember a cd burner software that use to reload the page on and on. SO much that I had to disinstal it and find a new one.
I am using Microsoft windows 2000 with service pack 4. I installed every possible service pack and extension available from microsoft.
Any suggestion on what could it be?
I would like not to have to reinstall everything (windows), although I suspect if I do I would solve the problem.
Addendum, June 2005, 6 month later: I showed my problem to my friend who is visiting, he adressed me to adSubtract, which in the PRO version gives the possibility of stripping html code of incoming pages from the reload command. Now everything works fine, and is quite funny to see those commercial pages, reduced to their bare essential. Thanks to both.
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There was a time when scientists lived in ivory towers. Now that ivory towers are starting to crumble, we should do our best to really tear them down completely. So I am here suggesting, and promoting a new project. An open science project.
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