# An ever changing background

Yesterday I did a saturday hack project. What I wanted to have is a background in the computer that each time I open it would give me a different picture.

First I made a folder on dropbox for all the backgrounds.
Then I added the folder to the list of backgrounds the computer would look into. So (1) Change folderÂ background.

set it up to change picture when waking from sleep, random order.

(2) add the folder. And while I was here I also

Now we need to make sure that we have a constant stream of new pictures in the folder. For this we will use Google API + Yahoo! pipes + an IFTTT recipe. I started with an existing Yahoo! pipe. Something which would pick a word and return 4 images from google images in RSS format. This I modified so that the images were always in jpg or png format (chose jpg if you want photo, and png if you want drawings), and always of huge size. I then needed to pick up the result with IFTTT (IF This Then That). In theory IFTTT can pick up the first image in the Description, by using {{EntryImageUrl}}Â . But the image URL would not go in the description. So instead I modified the Yahoo Pipe so that the whole description was the URL. Then I picked the Description and told IFTTT to take the image at that address and store it in my dropbox background folder. You can see the result here.

And the now as google indexes new images, they appear as my desktop. I chose as images sunset OR forest OR mountains. Â Which gave me a mixture of the three.

So how do you set up a similar system, without going through all of this? AfterÂ register in dropbox; installing the dropbox application (by now most people already have this); setting up theÂ background folder inside dropbox;Â telling your computer to use the backgrounds from this folder. Then:

Go to this Yahoo Pipe, and add the words of the search you want to have as background. Copy the rss address (we will need that later).

Open an IFTTT account. Activate this recipeÂ and paste the address as the rss from where to pick the data. Then add the folder where you store the background. The one you did before. And you are ready to go. By the way, every now and then you might have to delete some of the pictures in that folder. Just do it, don’t worry. You’ll have new ones pretty soon

Let me know if you use this. And what google image search do you use.

# Delegating in eDemocracy, my Way!

The suggested function v(x)=(M-1)x/(x+(M-1)+k)+1, for k=0 and M=100. Has an Asymptote at 100, and near the origin it is tangent to the function y=x+1. It represents how should the weight of the vote change, as more people mandates a person to represent them.

Recently I wrote a very long post in which I tried, as exhaustively as possible to discuss if it was the case to let people delegate their vote in eDemocracy. The conclusion was that it would be better not to introduce it. Which is a bitter conclusion, because it halts the conversation before it starts. I also suggested that IF we wanted to allow delegated voting, it should be done in a “non linear” way. In other words, it should be possible to delegate someone, but it’s not a good deal. The vote of a person who is present should weight more than the vote of a person absent, which is asking someone to vote for him. Also no one, independently to the number of votes, should have a vote higher than a certain value M. How much is M? I was suggesting that we should start with 1/630-ith of the number of participating people. So no one person should have more power than a parliamentary in the [Italian] House of Parliament today. WithoutÂ explicitlyÂ listing them I was suggesting that the characteristicsÂ that we should use to decide the weight of a delegated vote were:

• v(0)=1 Â (the weight of who does not receive any mandate should still be 1)
• v(1)< 2 (the weight of who receive a single mandate should be lower than the weight of two people that vote directly).
• $\lim_{x\rightarrow\infty}(v(x))=M$Â (If the number of mandates that a person receives grow, the weight must tend to M)
• $\dot{v}(x)\geq0$ per $x\geq0$ (as the number of mandates grows, so does the weight of the vote of the person receiving them)
• $lim_{x\rightarrow\infty}(\dot{v}(x))=0$Â (Each extra mandate grows the weight a bit less each time)

I even went as far as to say that there were an infinity of functions that satisfied those requirements. And in factâ€¦

Few days later my friend Daniele Gewurz wrote meâ€¦ Daniele is a great mathematician, very precise in his work; His blog is calledÂ L’Accademia dei PignuoliÂ (con la u!) [Hard to translate, maybe: Academy of Nitpickers?]. So I contacted Daniele, and after I wrote the blog post he came back to me with the answer.

[pauseâ€¦ silenceâ€¦Â suspenseâ€¦Â ]

The function, in fact the functions that we are looking for exist. In particular, each function of the form:

$v(x) = \frac{(M-1)x}{(x+(M-1)+k)}+1$ per $k\geq 0$

will satisfy those requirements.

As k grows the weight of the delegated person will go down. For K=0 the single mandate will give an extra 0.99, that is v(1)=1.99 (if I receive the mandate from one single person, my vote will then weight Â 1.99, we lose 1% mandating your vote toÂ someoneÂ that does not receive other mandates). If we assume that no person should have a weight higher than 100, and we take the fastest growing function (K=0) we obtain $v(x) = \frac{99x}{(x+99)}+1$. That you can see here on the side.

Notice how the function has an asymptote equal to aÂ 100 (that is equal to M), and passes through the points (0,1) and (1,1.99). It is also monotonically growing (which means, it always grows), but, as it grows, it grows slower and slower. So it is better not to delegate to the same person that others ate also mandating, when possible. And instead distribute your mandate to other people. It is a function that fights against the creation of an elite!

In the second image you can see how the function effectively approaches 100 (actually M, with Â M=100, in the example) as x grows.

And finally in the last image you can see how for low values the function approximates very well the function y=x+1. Which is the function that is (implicitly) used when people delegate their vote. In other words who mandates someone which no one else delegated,, will see his vote transmitted nearly fully. While who mandates a very popular person will only change slightly the weight of their vote.

We still need to decide if we should let people delegate to someone else the mandate they received. The famous proxy voting. Also in this case the same reasoning holds: it would be better not, as each passage between the person mandating, and the person actually casting it increases the imprecisionÂ (the person voting, ending up voting something different from what he should have voted to correctly represent the person asking him to vote for them), but if we really cannot avoid it, we can use another function. At the end the principle is the same, so the simplest thing is to just use the same functionÂ v. So if x people delegate another person (who’s vote will then have a weight of v(x), and this person delegates another person, this second person vote will now weight v(v(x)). It should be noted that if a person sums the mandates from two people ($x_1$ e $x_2$) the result will not be v($x_1$)+v($x_2$), but v($x_1$+$x_2$).

Let’s see some examples:

5 people delegate Anthony. Anthony’s vote, at this point, will have a weight of v(5)=5.76. So about 5 and 3/4. Anthony votes with Carl, and together have a weight of v(5)+v(0)=6.76.

Later Anthony needs to leave, and mandates Carl. Carl’s vote will then have a weight of v(v(5))=6.44.

Notice that if all have delegated directly carl, his vote would have had a weight of v(6)=6.66.

At the end of the day, passing through Anthony costed to the group v(6)-v(v(5))=0.21 (Note, 6.66-6.44=0.22, but 0.21 is the result of better approximations). Not exactly a full vote, but a fifth of a vote. On the other side, society, all together, will pay the price of a lower precision on the result. Who knows if Anthony, delegating Carl, is really doing what those 5 people wants?

What would be a better strategy for this group?Â Obviously if they could all participate, they would have a combined weight of 7. But if, instead, they knew that only 2 people would participate, the best thing to do would have been to split the mandates between the participants, and obtain v(3)+v(2)=6.87; having lost only 0.13 points respect to the fact of having voted all together. (There is also the option to split your mandate among different people, but this we shall discuss in another article).

Considering all I think that permitting delegation using the function $v_{M,k}(x)$ expressed with an M well chosen, and maybe also with a K=0 would permit to everyone to participate, without going toward those excess that we have seen in the various liquid democracy systems, where few participants will obtain enough votes to dominate the decision. And not let anyone else decide. Note that M is defined at aÂ 1/630-ith of the total number of participants, and if the number of participants, is equal to 630, M will be equal to 1. And the result will be

$v(x) = \frac{(M-1)x}{(x+(1-1)+k)}+1=\frac{0x}{(x+0+k)}+1=1$

In other words, if M=1 it is not possible anymore to delegate anyone.

And if M<1. In this case the function decreases as the number of the people delegating a person. In other words, if you are part of such a small group of people, do not mandate your vote, but participate directly!

# Should we allow delegated voting in e-Democracy?

This post is the english translation of an italian post.

My dear readers, we must speak. We need to speak of the concept of delegating votes in eDemocracy. It will be long, maybe boring, but necessary.

What do we want from an eDemocracy system? I know what I want. It took me a long time to find out, but now I know. I want, actually I would like, a system that permits to everybody to participate, and that magically extracts from people’s interactions the best proposal. But what does best mean? In other moments (linkÂ to an example from a talk I gave in Italian) I left this quite vague. Now I think I can be more precise. Let us supposed that all the people would vote, and let us suppose that all people voted having a deep understanding of the issue. Then the result would be the best proposalâ€¦ by definition. What everybody wants, assuming everybody has a complete understanding of the problem. Or at least complete within the limites that we, as human beings, understand it.

This brings us to two problems. The first is that not everybody votes, and the second is that not all, in fact no one, has a full understanding of the problem. Even experts, in general, only see one side of it. But we know that the solution is out there, somewhere. And we know that any proposal we make, and any vote we take (with any system) will approximate this answer. Sometimes the approximation will be better, sometime will be worse.

Asking experts (a sort ofÂ technicians’ government)Â does not work. They do not represent the general population and have a too limited point of view. Even if they had a complete vision (if they spoke among them, for example), they still would not representÂ el pueblo.

Asking people to vote directly (also known as Direct Democracy) also does not work. First of all not everybody votes, and then people are not prepared on the topic. Even less than technicians, much less than technicians (which at least do understand the problem).

Let’s consider further this point, as it is important. Why asking people to vote does not lead to the best answer (as previously defined)? Who is to judge when has a persone voted well or not? But, of course, only himself can. Each person can judge his own vote, after he has done it, when he learns more on the topic. In other words a good vote does not lead to regrets, later. In other words it is an informed and well thought out vote. People that vote, statistically speaking, in the great majority of cases, do not vote in an informed way. For example, if you ask to a 100 people if they are in favour of against death penalty, mostly people will be in favour. Often death penalty is seen as a deterrent for criminality. If, on the other side, people are informed about the effects of death penalty, for example on the fact that it does not work as a deterrent (nation that introduced it did not see their crime level decrease), and the always present risk of killing an innocent, at this point the number of people that support death penalty diminishes. We can suppose that if those people voted a first time (without being informed), after they would regret their vote. That’s a bad vote! And it does not help, and in fact it hinders, in looking for the best answer.

So, simply asking people to vote does not work. By the way, another reason why it does not work is that often voters cannot understand the consequences of their vote. In other word we vote for the sicilian fishermen to keep their job, and to make the sea around Sicily a natural reserve. For all human beings to have equal rights, and that mentally deranged human beings that have committed violent crimes should not be freed after serving their sentence. And so on, and so forth. In this context it is important how do we organise the vote. What are the options, how it is worded, and so onÂ â€¦

At this point people usually get up, declare the problem unsolvable, and focus on something else. But not finding the solution does not mean the solution does not exist.

A great approximation to the answer we are looking for is given by James Fishkin‘sÂ Deliberative Opinion Polling. How doesÂ Deliberative Opinion Polling work?

A random, representative sample is first polled on the targeted issues. After this baseline poll, members of the sample are invited to gather at a single place for a weekend in order to discuss the issues. Carefully balanced briefing materials are sent to the participants and are also made publicly available. The participants engage in dialogue with competing experts and political leaders based on questions they develop in small group discussions with trained moderators. Parts of the weekend events are broadcast on television, either live or in taped and edited form. After the deliberations, the sample is again asked the original questions. The resulting changes in opinion represent the conclusions the public would reach, if people had opportunity to become more informed and more engaged by the issues. [source]

You understand the result from this process is a much better approximation of all the ones presented until now (technicians government, direct democracy). At least the method tries to consider both elements (population, and information) integrating them in a statistically representative group.

We can consider under this light also Representative Democracy. The one we hold. We elect representatives, they are divided into working groups (in Italian: commissioni parlamentari). Each working group, for each law, interviews the experts, and proposes the laws to the parliament. It should be noted that the representatives are not thought to be statistically representative of the population. They should be the cream of the population. This also because Representative Democracy is a 19th century system. At the time only a minority of people knew how to read and write. Thus we now have two problems: the first is that by not being statistically representative of the population they tend to vote for laws that will favour people like them (same education, income, social class). The second is that since the same people are in power for a long time, they can be corrupted. It should also be noted that while the laws are developed in the working groups, they are then voted in parliament, that did not hear the experts. And here the member of the parliament vote, usually, how they are told by the party (so much for article 67Â of the Italian Constitution). AndÂ this last passage eliminates completely the idea that the result should, somehow, mirror what an informed population would vote for. While making it a simple power struggle.

All this is a long preamble to speak about Delegation. Because, since not everybody votes (for many reasons: time, interests), considering that very few are preapared enough to vote, considering all this â€¦ does it have any sense to ask those people to elect someone that votes on their behalf? And how much should the delegated vote weight?

In other words, if I vote, and you delegate your vote to me, how much should my vote weight now? One? Two? Between one and two? More than two? Let’s take an example: John, Anthony and Sam are having a discussion. They decide to vote, and John looses against Anthony and Sam. No delegations, no problems. But now Sam needs to go, and leaves to Anthony his vote. Now John finds himself fighting against Anthony and Sam delegation. We can assume Anthony will win.

But now we add Joseph, and Joseph agrees with John. If they meet in four, John and Joseph, vote on one side (2 votes), Anthony and Sam vote on the other side (2 votes), the result is even. Â Now let us suppose Sam cannot participate. So now we have John and Joseph on the one side, and Anthony and Sam’s delegation on the other. If before we had a problem with information, because John, Joseph, Anthony and Sam might have been misinformed on the issue, now the problem is even bigger. Sam’s absence raises the doubt that if he was present he might change idea. Or he might discover that Anthony does not represent him correctly. Everybody else is, instead, present. They could change their mind, but they do not do it. In other words, the situation is no longer symmetric. If Anthony, plus Sam’s delegation weight more than Giovanni’s vote; it is also reasonable to assume that, if we are looking for the best approximation to the best vote, mentioned above, that Anthony plus Sam’s delegation will weight less than John’s and Joseph vote.Â Â We are thus supposing the best answer will, with more probability be on the side of two people that are present, than on the side of one persone present and one person delegated. So if we were to introduce delegation, it should weight more than zero, but less than one. You delegate, but in doing so your vote looses some of its power, for the legitimate suspect that you might have delegated the wrong person. This has also the effect of making delegationÂ inconvenient.

If I am a mob leader, and it is possible to delegate, it is convenient for me that you do not participate, but delegate me. In this way I am sure that we all vote as one. But the option is more risky. The delegated becomes the weak link in the chain. You just need to corrupt that person to gain all the votes (at least for one time). But if, by delegating, we lose some power, the result is that it is no longer convenient for us, as a group, to have a single representative. In fact, the more we are, the better it is. But this brings us to another risk, the risk that some of us vote differently. Â But, let us remember, our aim is not to win. Our aim is to approximate the best answer. So, if a person votes differently, because he is convinced that that is the best answer, he should do so. So also for this it is better if delegate voting is worth less than non-delegated voting; it induces participation.

But how much could someone’s vote weight? At the maximum? because if the vote of a person, thanks to all the delegations received, weights more than all the other votes connected, he has, essentially received absolute power. And he can do whatever he wants. So it is important, even here, that there is a maximum, M. And the lower is M, more the system will avoid centralisation of power. Even if two people together, could have an absolute majority we would have a centralisation of power. At the moment, in Italy, we have 2 Houses (Camera and Senato). Each law must go through both Houses. The Camera has 630 deputies. So there is a need for 316 people to have a majority. This is like asking to have an M such that: Â 316 * M = (Number of people voting/2)+1. At the last elections 50’449’979 people could vote. This brings us toÂ an M=((50’449’979 / 2)+1) / 316) =Â 79’826. In other words, keeping the power division as it is right now, no one’s vote should weight more than 79’826 (Of course having two houses increases security, because each law must be approved twice). Of course assuming that all who can vote, will vote. Â In reality an M of 80’000 is absolutely too high. At least because, as we said, not all will participate in the vote. While considering that no one should have more than 1/630th of the total weight of the people participating, is plausible.

NOTE: This part in blue does not need to be read to understand the article.Â

In other words we could consider a function v(x) that represents the weight of the vote of a person that is delegated by x people (for x > 0). Even when no one delegates a person, his vote will still be worth 1, so v(0)=1. If the power was transfered completely we would have that v(x)=x+1. If it was not possible delegating v(x)=1 for any x. But we said that we wanted 1 < v(1) < 2 so that the vote of a person receiving a vote should weight more than the weight of the vote of a person that no one delegates, and less than the weight of the vote of two person voting, togetherÂ (to be pedantic we would have to write v(0) < v(1) < v(0)+v(0), but v(0) = 1Â ). Then we want the function to be monotonically increasing, so that the more a person is delegated, the higher his vote must weight (or at least it should not diminish!), and we want a maximum of M. So v(x)Â â‰¤ v(x+1)Â â‰¤ M. We could even require the function to keep on increasing, as x increases, without ever reaching M. So v(x) < v(x+1) < M. WithÂ lim (for xâ†’Â +âˆž) v(x)=M. The fact that the function should be strictly monotonically increasing would be expressed by requiring the first derivative to be higher than zero: v’(x) > 0. With lim (per xâ†’Â +âˆž) v’(x) = 0. In other words, summing up:

• v(0) = 1
• v(1) < 2
• lim v(x) = M (for xâ†’Â +âˆž)
• v’(x) > 0 Â  Â  Â  for x > 0
• lim v’(x) = 0 (for xâ†’Â +âˆž)

Is there a function like this? Sure, there are infinite many! In a follow up post I will discuss a family of them (in Italian is already available here).

From all this we can desume that if we want to let people delegate their votes, a function like the one described above would be optimal. Who receives n votes will have a weight of v(n), with n described above.

But at this point we need to discuss on the real sense of those mandates. There are several reasons why a person delegates another. Maybe he is too busy, has already decided what to vote and delegates someone to give that specific vote. But this is not the most common mandate. Especially on the Internet, where voting takes little time, but deciding and informing one self takes more time. More common are mandates because a person does not feel proficient on a topic. Let’s go back to our definition of best answer. If I do not understand a topic, and I find myself facing a proposal that I do not understand I have few options. I can vote randomly, maybe intuitively, I can get informed, I can delegates someone, or I can decline the vote. Of those options, getting informed, or asking for help are surely the best (but they require more time). Voting randomly is terrible. Not only will I probably not guess right, but I risk voting for a different answer than what I would have voted if I were informed. So, basically, damaging my real position. Â From the studies of Fishkin (see above) we know that people that vote intuitively, don’t have a great intuition. So even this option is not ok. And mandating someone else?

Delegating someone gives a sense of security. I don’t understand the topic, but this friend of mine understands it more than me. We have many values in common, I let him decide for me. This is ok in aÂ conspirationistÂ view of the world, that divides the world into good and bad. Bad people are in power, the good (we, of course) resist. And surely you will even find some cases where this is true. But in the great majority of cases the real difficulty is not choosing between good and bad, but which principle should prevail. And in this scenario (much more common!), mandating becomes harder, because the choice is less clear.

In this post I am presenting a series of ideas on how delegation works or does not in e-Democratic systems. Who does not agree with me, is not evil. Simply he does not agree. And if we have to vote, if we should introduce it, how can you mandate someone to vote for you? Surely you will not have spoken with your friend about those ideas. By the way what possibilities do I have of convincing a person that does not even make the effort of reading the article? Delegating your vote, like asking friendsÂ what should I vote?Â transforms a process of mass discernment, where all together we try to find what is the best course of action, into a simple power struggle. If you need to ask your friend, don’t askÂ what should I vote?Â askÂ what do the proposals say?Â which makes a world of difference.

And if I am really new to the topic? I can’t, in few hours on the internet, have a degree in Economy, Medicine and Physics. But you do not need a degree to understand most concepts. The most prepared people, instead of receiving a mandate to do what they feel is right, they should help others understanding. I am not speaking about an Utopia, but of a crowdsourced system to rewrite proposals.

And, what if the system, beside expressing how much do they agree or disagree on each proposal could also vote how much did they understood the proposal? And could, maybe, ask for clarifications? What if the system would put in touch people that ask a question with people that understood it? Maybe asking people who did understand it, clarifications. Or maybe it could invite who understood the proposal to rewrite it, in a clearer way. All doable things. The result would be a system where proposals are not only understood but also explained to the less prepared people. It wouldn’t be aÂ perfectÂ Democracy (i.e. the one that always let theÂ bestÂ proposal emerge), but it would be a good approximation. I am going to speak about this model in a more detailed way in a future post. (The post in Italian isÂ here)

And we still need to speak aboutÂ proxy voting. If I can delegate you, can you then delegate another person? And what weight should my mandate has? The idea that I can delegate anyone, and he can delegate anyone, passing on my vote unchanged, leads to a system called Liquid Democracy. Since everybody can participate, it is democratic. Since the mandate can be taken back, and re assigned to someone else, it is liquid. Reality is that this system tend to create an elite of superusers, which receive the votes from everybody, centralising power. At this point fans of liquid democracy (or of liquid feedback, the only -or at least the most famous- system that implements it) will answer you, that you can always change your vote. Truly, try it, they will always tell you. And you must answer: “who cares?!”. Because, if you are going to lose time to follow who votes for what, and check that that is in fact what you would have voted, you can as well vote directly. And, finally, for a person that does check, and corrects, his vote there are many others that will not do it. Making those superusers, into a true elite into which you are not invited. In which your ideas might be discussed as an act of kindness and generosity. But not as a due act, among peers.

The next point is: “how long should a mandate last for?”. I would say that we do not even need to lose time on this. The longer it lasts, the lower correlation there will be between what the delegated person votes, and what the delegating person would have voted. We are soon going to move into the realm of random voting, except the people that receive the mandate, will concentrate power, and vote for a well defined direction. As I described before, on how proxy voting tend to create elites of superusers, is especially true for long mandates. In fact, the longer the mandates are, the bigger will the difference be between the people who have the power, and people who do not have it. I understand that some people claim that this is natural, this is how things always have been. Effectively there is not much difference between a person that is delegated through an online series of mandates (from people that forgot about it), and someone who is elected because his name is in the top list of one of the major parties. A party people by now vote for force of habit.Â This is the system we set up to change, and substituting it with another gerarchical structure is not the solution. Not even if some of us end up sitting in some of the high position of that structure.

But then, would a system where people delegate, and then ri-delegate each time work better? It would have other defects. For example, if people need to delegate each time, they can, as well, vote directly. Also, because of what we said before, delegations are always imprecise to understand what people want.

To all this we need to add that many people do not even try to delegate who, according to them, can represent them well. Instead they delegate some well known figure. An actor, a comedian, someone from the show business. Let’s remember howÂ Bud SpencerÂ tried to be elected forÂ PDL (Berlusconi’s party), andÂ Giorgio GaberÂ came back to vote, for his wife who was also in Berlusconi’s party lists.Â If those two examples haven’t convinced you that you cannot trust anyone with your mandate, just because he was a good actor or singer, I really don’t know what could.

And then there are those that delegate for convenience, to exchange favours, for promises made, because it is my wife, my husband, my son, my father, the cousin of my electrician, I can’t refuse his my mandate!

And the worse is that those people, mandate, and then they go away. Leaving to future generations the responsibility to handle a person whose vote now weights more.

Summing up, according to me if we want to build a system that let what people want emerge if everybody has studied the question, we should not use permit delegated voting. If we must use it, use it sparingly, use it for short time, more focused than more general. Better not to permit proxy voting than permitting it.

And let instead try to build systems in which everybody can participate; who has the time does not dominate the discussion (we shall speak about this in another post); who does not understand, can ask forÂ explanationsÂ (and in this gets educated, which is never bad), and such that it does not let elite, club, groups, circles form that decide for other people.

I will add that in the systems I am developing (Vilfredo,Â BubblingAround, recently I am offering some free consulting forÂ Airesis) I tend to follow (or suggest) those rules:

• no one is allowed to delegate anyone else;
• proposals are presented in an anonymous format, for those that vote them. So people vote the proposal, and not the author;
• â€¦ [keep following me, and you will know the others, as I am writing]

# No more Ivory Towers

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.Â Now that ivory towers are starting to crumble, we should do our best to really tear them down completely.Â 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 aÂ colleagueÂ 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!
Name:
Availability:
Skype name:
Field of expertise:
Other interests:
For me:
Scientists, tear down the wall!

# 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 part. It includes only what is really known inside out from our society. What has been fully digested. FOr something to be in W|A it needs to be known, semantically known, beyond doubt. And notice that I am here speaking about a deeper Wolfram|Alpha than what you have seen here. The Wolfram|Alpha as it should be, once we learned hot to interrogate it proprtly, and once it has epanded with the rest of the knowledge we have.

At a higher level we have wikipedia. Wikipedia permits much more stuff to be present. You have actors, and theories, and stories, and a lot of other stuff.Â  You also have discussions and point of views. In short you have a lot of stuff that is not being digested anymore, but is also not the bones of our society. It is more like the muscles. The limit of Wikipedia is that since it does not allow for new research, by definition it is limited to what has already been discovered. Although not in a definite way as in Wolfram|Alpha.

And then we have Google. Google is really part of the digestive process. It has new stuff coming in every few days. But is is also less clear. You need to work to get to the results using google. But you can also find new threads. Things that are still not known. There is real food here, waiting to be digested.

And Twitter is the more superficial tool. Twitter has second to second update. It has multiple links in different forms that point to the same resource. Information is not organised in any way, shape or form. But it is information nevertheless. It represents the edge of the knowledge wave of our civilization. It is deeply alive, unpredictable, full of possibilities. You never know how it will react. It is the most alive part of the constant discussion that is going on in our civilisation. It is the civilisation equivalent to the constant chit chat that is going on in our head. Although it has memory, it is not really good with it. Anything that is in Twitter can be true, can be false, can be anything in the middle, neither or both at the same time.

If you are an alive and creative mind that wants to participate in the constant flow of creation of this society you will probably end up interacting in twitter in some ways. But if you want your creation to be grounded in reality you need to use the other levels as well. They are really not competing.

And Blogs? Blogs are ways with which we store personal longer stories. The untwittable (as Chris Anderson from TED called his). They work between the google level and the Twitter level. Letting information move between those levels, and letting complex information be churned before is ready to go deeper. Similarly you have journal articles (and books) working to bring the information to the wikipedia level.

# 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 spiritual prerequisite. It is not school, it is preschool. Until you are one you cannot really get involved with spirituality. It is like if in your family you decide to build a house, but not everybody agrees on that. Then one part of you builds it in the morning, and someone else of the family will destroy it in the evening. Maybe using the bricks for something else.

The idea that we are many, that each of us is many, is quite common. In psychology is common, Junghian Psychology, if I recall well. Again, in Taoism it even reaches the point of believing that this is true in a litteral point of view. Each of us, is seen as a patchwork of different spirits (shen). And when you die each spirit will then go its way. As such in Taoism until you have reached a real integration between your parts of yourselves (your spirits), you cannot even have reincarnation unless you have developed a unit which is integrated enough to go through the trauma of death without shattering in a 1000 little pieces.

And another idea that is very common (you have it in Taoism, but also in Christianity, for example), is the idea that one day, one time, at some point we will all get together. Christian say “sit by the father”. In Taoism the idea is that any person who have showed a spark of interest for spiritual work will eventually join together in some place beyong space and time, a sort of heaven. And the joke then is if people are following the 1 lifetime program, the 10 lifetime program, the 100 or 1000 lifetime program, to reach it. And the faster it is, the rougher it is.

I have to say I am amazed by how well is Facebook helping in this integration work, for me. I have many friends, on facebook. But more importantÃ²y I have friends from different groups. Each friend knew a different Pietro. Some were from my spiritual life (taoism, tai chi, meditation, …), some from my academic world (artificial life, mathematics), some are Go-brothers, others people I knew from childhood, or from high school, or middle school. And with each of them I was a different person. And now they are all together. All in the same place. And the internet does indeed feel a little bit like this place beyond space and time. And I read of many of them. But what is more important, is that, as I write about my life, I am forced to write in a way that is acceptable for both my academic side and my spiritual side. I can only write in an integrated way, because I know that friends from both worlds will read me. In this sense facebook is catalysing an integration in me. Is helping me to become one.

I know many people are having problems with facebook. I think a lot of the problem is that they are not ready or willing to have this integration. For me Fb is pretty easy: to become my friend you need to know me. With very few exceptions I do not add anyone who is not someone I personally know. But if I have met you, and you want to befriend me, then you are in. I don’t keep people that I know out of the door. Because that would be equivalent to keeping some part of myself out of the door, the part of me that interacted with them. You are all invited to the party. I sometime even go back in time, and look for people I once knew. People that were important in my life. Or people I wished I had the time to know better. Maybe now we have another occasion. But then on my status, in my notes, in the caption of my photo, I try not to speak thinking about one in particular (I might have done it, but mostly I try to avoid it). I speak to all my friends at the same time. And if anyone comments, I answer that person, personally. The answer is personal, but anybody can see it, and thus the integration goes deeper. I write in English and in Italian, because those are the languages with which I live, work, chat, play and love. My inner dialogue is sometimes in Italian and sometimes in English, depending where I am, what I am thinking of doing. And my facebook reflects that.

Most of you know that I use facebook pretty frequently. I update the status often, sometimes more than once a day. But what some of you have not realised is that I do not do much less on facebook. I avoid facebook applications. I only use the ones that are truly useful, that add functionalities that were not there, and are truly helpful. If I want to wish to my friend Happy Chinese New Year, I will do it in person, or through the status. Not through an application. In this way the integration proceeds. I very rarely invite people to use applications. I only do so when I think an application is very very good. (The “skip this” button is my friend). I invited my friends for the geo tagging application. I would do it for the “cause” application. Maybe the iRead could be another one, and the application to play Go online. Here you go, this makes it 4. And when I invite people I only invite people I think will appreciate it (or should, they know it or not ). I consider the other applications to be equivalent to spam. I try not to spam my friends. When a new application arrives (elves, and pirates, etc…) , I usually just block it. If an application is requiring me to send invitation to let you proceed, I report it (because it is breaking the TOS, and ruining the party for everybody), delete it and block it. With absolutely no pity, whatsoever.

I see often people who get tired of facebook. But very often those are people who are not using facebook as a tool to interact with friends that are far away (in space or time), but as a game. Those are the friends that use more of those facebook useless applications. They get tired, but what they are really getting tired are those useless applications. They are right in getting tired. They just need to use facebook, instead of be used by it. And then fb will stop being a toy, and become an instrument. You will forget about facebook, and think about your friend.

Keeping the application to the minimum necessary.
Speaking to everybody. Inviting all your (real life) friends.

# 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 process, and now it is too late.

What follows is a brief intro to polyphasic sleep for the general bear audience. Continue reading

# wikitags

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.

# Cloudalicious suggestions

Terrell Russell asked for some suggestion on how to improve his tool, Cloudalicious. He asked for it 3 times, one on the del.icio.us mailing list, and one on a comment on my previous entry, and one on his site (link missing as he wisely took this one off). Now I really think three times are too much, and Terrell should be heavily chastised for this. So I will write him a loong list of things that I think his tool should do, and maybe next time he will think better before asking people how should he employ his time as a programmer. I am always happy to give ideas to people, provided a) they remember me when the idea makes them incredibly rich b) they do the coding. Continue reading

# BBC backstage and News in Folksonomy form

Some things are bound to happen. And they tend to happen at the right time. We have been using tags from years now, but the momentum have builded up, day after day. Always seeing more and more computer programs using them. Starting from deli.icio.us and flickr. Then 43 things.com, consumating.com, tagsurf.com and all the clones of the above (BTW if anybody can find me a small open source server program that emulates Flickr for personal use,I would be grateful). And of course technorati tags, and GutenTag that give rss feeds to technorati tag.
But something was missing. Somthing that some people might have noticed. The news were not playing with tags. News were still presented in the old top down way: politics, economics, international…
On Google News, as well as CNN. On Yahoo News, as on BBC.

But finally something is starting to move over there too.
Two services, pretty much at the same time were presented: Yahoo News with tags and BBC with tags.

But there are some serios differences between the two services. Yahoo content is being automatically indexed by a program, who imposes the tags according to what keywords are found in the text. As such Yahoo tags is a Top Down keyword classification of stories.

Instead (and here you can see the revolutionary spirit blowing through English news services), BBC program is a truly down up grassroot program. A program where everybody can add any tag to any article.
The difference is not a minor one, as in the first case it is the user that have to adapt to the world view of Yahoo, while in the second it is BBC that includes in his wider world view the user one. In a sense it is a case of Tagsonomy vs. Folksonomy, or

Of course both the program are still in their first days. Full of bugs, and of suggestion from us on how to make it better, smoother, and nearer to our personal desires.

Of course having anybody being able to add any tag to a copy of the BBC content is full of political dangers. What is stories about important politicians start to be tagged as ‘dictator’ or ‘wanker’. This is in fact inevitable, but politicians showld well use this as an indication of their popularity, than something to be changed.

At the moment anybody can add a tag in the BBC news page by login in as ‘guest’/'guest’. And already we have some people who have tagged some stories as ‘wanker. But if we go to delicious we see that nearly no one have used such epitome.

Why is that? My personal position is that people are more careful when tagging something for their own personal use. On delicious everybody have an account. And although you could have as many account you like, they cost. They cost time and memory to set it up. So we all tend to have just the minimum amount of acount needed. But on BBC, at the moment, only BBC person are allowed to have their own account. We normal human being, can just be guest. Ans as such we might feel deresponsabilized respect to what we wrote. So I think that, although the experiment is great, it will only work properly when everybody can set up his own account, and serch his account, or the account of another, well defined person.

Of course this also open up all sort of extra possibilities. After all, if anybody can tag any article with his own tags. Then to each article a set of tag will be defined. What is I want to receive (maybe on my mobile) all the articles tagged with a certain keyword. The possibilities are really endless.

And to look at those possibilities BBC had started a whole new project, called BBC Backstage where geeks are invited to collaborate with the staff of BBC to develop the API to permit to everybody to reuse the BBC material. Cross this with the fact tha much of this material is copyrighted with a copyleft copyright (copygotit?), and you see how the whole situation can positively explode.
Imagine, much of the material from BBC, offered for free, in the way wanted by the best geeks and hackers, to produce information in any noncommercial way they please.

Already many ideas are flowing? An RSS for the results from sport match. Crossing google maps with BBC News.

Possibility to have BBC news accepting trackbacks.

And many many others.

All this would mingle BBC with the common people. Think, all the news, mixed and remixed. Commented, trackbacked. Until you can read an article from BBC news from any device (through rss), in any format you want (through your rss reader). Filtered anyway you want (through folksonomy), and seeing the world response to that article(through trackback and comments).

Thank you BBC
(and no, I am not paid by BBC)

Thanks also Wired for some inspiration.

# Technorati rss 2: Guten Tag

As I predicted a service on the net that offers an rss feed of blogs with a certain keyword / tag has appeared. It is It’s a Tag world from Stephane Lee.

The system seems still in its infancy (the name needs to be shorter, for start, to be used as a tag itself) , but by offering the rss feeds of blog entries they give a really valuable tool to the blogphere.
Now, either Technorati starts offering the rss feed itself, or sues Creative Mobs (enstranging a big part of the blogsphere), or accepts to coexist with another, potentially aggressive, competitor.

And indeed, it’s a tag world,
worse than that:
it’s a tag eat tag world!

Pietro

P.S. The system has also a certain humor and pragmaticity, the general tag page is called: ‘Guten Tag’ (german for ‘Good Day’). And each tag, has, in its header, a link to the equivalent Wikipedia entry (which works fine only in English, unfortunately, but still…).

# Visualizing the double hierarchical nature of entries.

I keep on being hunted by a nightmare:

Now think about a discussion group. In a discussion group each post is part of a tree. Each post can be answered by many posts, but it has only one father. One post it is itself answering to. And because of this structure it is possible, and actually easy to generate the classical hierarchical structure, that you can see pretty much everywhere in discussion group. (i.e. the Healing Dao discussion group)

But if you look closely you will notice that discussion groups are actually not having really a tree structure. Posts do yes have one father, but they refer to many other posts. They might not explicitly link to all the posts they refer to, but they surely refer to many posts. This is because in discussion groups there isn’t usually the need to link to all the relevant posts. After all the readers are generally a filtered group of people. Also often a person will use one post to answer a whole bunch of other posts, especially inside a closed community, where everybody reads everything.

Yet the hierarchical way in which posts are written in a discussion group is really useful. You can in an instant perceive how many people answered, what where the thread departing from that post, etc.

Now look at a post in the blogging world. It refers to many other posts. It explicitly links to them. And if it is succesful it will have many posts linking to it themselves. Now forget a moment about the upward link. Each post posts that link to it. In a sense they are replies to it. The link to those posts is saved in the trackback list. And each of those posts itself will have certain posts that refer to it.

Are you starting to see it?
Each post is in a sense the root of a tree, whose branches are the posts that refer to it, and whose sub-branches are all the posts that refer to the branch posts. In a sense nothing new. But now, if you see your posts in this way, you can also wish not to display just the immediate trackbacks, the posts that refer to your posts. But also their trackback too.

And here is the first part of my dea. Since each post is available in feed format, it should be possible to fetch, for each post, not just the trackbacks, but the trackbacks trackback. The post that refer to the post that refer to your post. Which means seeing the tree starting from your post up to depth 2. And in theory it should be possible to reiterate the process, and go deeper and deeper.

Why is this important? Well, when you read a discussion group, it is often useful to see the hierarchical view.

Example
Title of the post 0:
BLAH
Content of the post 0:
blah, blah, blah, blah,
blah, blah, blah, blah,
blah, blah, blah, blah,

blah
Blah.
… and so on.

It might seem an expensive research, but when we read a post, and it has a certain number of trackbacks, it is quite important to see which of those lead to other posts and which didn’t.

And now we go to the second part of the idea.
In a sense there is no reason why the whole tree view structure should only work one way. I mean, each post links to many other posts. Each of those posts link themselves to other posts. And here we have another tree. This time a tree that goes backward in time.

So I think that for each post it should be possible to see both those views.

• All the entries that are linked from it, and the entries that are linked to those entries, up to a specific depth.
• All the entries that link to it, and the entries that link to those entries, up to a specific depth.
• And maybe combine the two view having the first entries, in the format of one entry per line, above it. The later, again in the format of one entry per line, below.

I think this view would greatly increase the ability to see the local structure of the blogsphere. Of course the brothers of a particular entry (the entries that share the same parents) should also be available on the side. As well as the entries that are generally linked from the same offspring. But this is making it unnecessarily complicated. So let’s forget it for the time being.

So, we have reached the conclusion that each post uniquely defines two tree of other posts. The tree generated by it, and the tree that generates it. And I claim that we should work to be able to visualize those trees.

Doing it on Tagsurf
So, where did the idea came to me? Essentially working on tagsurf. Because, you see, tagsurf is maybe the first place where it would be really easy to visualize all this. You have many posts. There is the possibility (although I am not sure if it works right now) to send trackbacks from post to post. So each post does not need to have only one parent, but many. Many. It is true that, as it is now, trackbacks are not used inside the system. The reply is a different thing than the trackback. And each post only belongs to one thread which started with the first post that was not written as a reply to something. So there are quite some changes to be done, to let this vision ground in that system. But is is possible, and comparably easier to do than more generally in the blogsphere.

Those are the changes that I see have to be made to make it possible:

• Make sure that it is possible to send trackbacks between different posts.
• Organize all the reply so that they also send a trackback
• Make sure that each time a post A sends a trackback to another post B, this is also stored inside A
• Add a view down in time page, that from each post gives you that post, and all the posts that reply (that is trackback) to that post, and so on
• Hack this page so that the post appear in a hierarchical way, where it is very clear who is answering to what. Generally the way in which livejournal handles comments is a good way
• Since you stored all the trackback in both directions, organize a page view up in time, that from that post shows you all the posts that entry was answering to. And since they were themselves sending trackback to other posts, add those other posts as subbranches.
• Make it very easy, given a certain post to use those two views, and try taking away the usual thread view. All the information should still be there.

Once the idea is in place you can then cross the idea with the idea of the tag, you could, for example, investigate one tagsurf entry (blog entry), and one tag. Then only the entries that contain that tag will appear in the two tress. And if an entry does not have that tag, then all its subbranches would be excluded, even if they have the tag. (Thanks Andy for this idea)

Doing it on Technorati
Another one that has all the information to generate those views would be Technorati. Of course I would rather see it in a decentralised way. But it would be so easy for them to do it, while to do it in a decentralised way might be such a nightmare, that I am absolutely hopeful that they might make it before. Think about it. A Technorati page: investigate blogsphere local structure. You pass an url to this page, and the said structure appears. Up to depth… say 3.

Update: BN (in the comments) points out to BlogPulse‘s Conversation Tracker, as a limited solution to what I was suggesting. It still has many limits, but it is surely a step in the right direction. Beside is good to be reminded that Technorati isn’t the only service to observe the blogsphere.

Rss is somehow one of the best ideas. You can have your content, stripped of form BS being redirected all around. This gives a one to many structure. Now we need the opposite. We need to be able to pull the content from many sites in the same place, and check it. A many to one structure.
Most of you will say, “But we already have that, it’s called an aggregator. Just look at bloglines.

Yes, and no, that’s part of it, but it’s not the whole story. We need to have a page that posts all the content from everywhere in a single page.

And again I can hear: “but we have that too: it’s called a technorati tag“.

Again I will repeat: Yes, and no, that’s part of it, but it’s not the whole story. We need to pull the information from the technorati pages to our aggregator.

This is the idea: we need an rss feed of a technorati tag. As we can get the rss feed of a del.icio.us tag, we need to have it for all the blogs. The time have passed to add to your friend list ALL the blogs that might have information of interest. We need to be able to add that rss to our bloglines.

So, either technorati will start releasing the rss, or I predict that:

• a) other services will start competing with technorati offering that info
• b) anonymous hackers will start scrapping the info from technorati to offer the very valuable information.

# Tagsurf first review

This is going to be big. It’s called tagsurf. When we were setting up the taoist discussion board, at Tao Bums, I was looking for a board that permitted me to tag individual messages with different tags. The reason is that over there we are now a group of friendly people and every thread start with a topic, but often touches many separate ones. The board had to be in PhP for reasons only knew to the web master, but that we all were happy to follow. So we started looking around, but no board with tagging facility went up. Nothing. I had to admit that the idea was quite new, and I have not seen any such board around in any case. And then we decided for phpBB which being open source would have had new versions with any new cool geeky thing appearing every so often. Well. Now I finally found the first tag based discussion board. It’s called tagsurf. And is very cool. You get to write messages and tag them. As tag you can use any word up to any size. Now, the result of this is that you can tag thing with the url of something. So immediatly a series of utilities started appearing:
People (first one I saw doing it was Russell Beattie) added a tagsurf button. In short if you click on that button you get all the comments on tagsurf that uses your permalink as a tag. In a sense it is outsourcing the discussion board.
Yes, I added it too, is down near the little technoraty bubble, and I just needed to add:
<a href="http://tagsurf.com/post?tag=<?php the_permalink() ?>">Tagsurf this</a> 
in the template.

I also went back to see how was tagsurf behaving in del.icio.us. It seem that, as it often appear in other cases, the meme is 6 days old. At the beginning few people noticed it, and now is starting to explode. I too found out because of the delicious discussion board, which I would suggest anybody who is interested to anybody who is interested in delicious OR folksonomy

I think this tagsurf will and can have great impact. They already have some API defined.

I also got an eye to their privacy policy. It seemed simple and clear. Yet now I cannot find it anymore. I suspect that they might be working on it right now.

I also made a small bookmarklet to post an entry on tagsurf about a specific page. Just drag the word bookmarklet on the bar and it should work. Of course for it to work you have to be logged in in tagsurf.

Great points:
• trackback: every post gets is an entry point for trackback. In other words anything you say can receive trackback from anything else. You say something here, and it get people in the blogsphere chatting. And you can follow their conversation. This is something very important that was missing in all the bullettin board I have been using. In a sense many discussion board are only looking in. This is also looking out.
• trackback 2: Every post that you make can send trackback to anything you want. The software to do this automagically respect to the other posts inside tagsurf is still missing, but I can’t imagine it not appearing very soon.
• possibility to mix different threads: since each post gets as many tags as the poster want it is quite easy for people to join different threads of discussion.
Problems I might see coming.
• Spam, spam, spam: I recieve about 30 spam trackbacks a day. And they get filtered by cool programs and finally deleted by me. Yet those programs need me to make the final judgement. Who will make the judgement for all the trackbacks in all those posts? Will the user have to? Can someone close the trackback from his own posts? I see many problem and much discussion over here.
• copyright: This is another big one. Let’s say that I post a cool entry in tagsurf, who gets the copyright of it? It might be important. Imagine that someone takes it, and wants to add some extra tags. But adding tags is not allowed at the moment. So he copies the post and just reposts it with the extra tags. Do I have a say on it?

All together I think this is a wonderful piece of new technology. When tachnoraty started his tag page I wasn’t very impressed, but this, I think, will make some huge effects. And still I can’t see all the implications.

ADDENDUM: just as I ended this post I read fully the great and very interesting post from Russell Beattie. And I found that he had made exactly the same bookmarklet. Oops. Well, I hope he will not sue me, I haven’t copied his code. I just reinvented the wheel.

ADDENDUM to the ADDENDUM: As I was looking at all the people who were commenting on the thread on Russell post I noticed another post with the same bookmarklet. And I thought I would have been the first ;). At least I get to see if the trackback to posts over there actually works.

# Third Map Maked Debugging session

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!)

# A house divided

As the price of houses rises, more and more people find that the best solution is to divide a house among friends. Usually each person gets a room. The problem then is: who gets what room and how much should he pay. Usually the total rent is fixed, and usually the rooms are not exactly all the same. Some might be bigger, some smaller. Some might have a better view, more privacy, closeness to the toilet, more silence, and so on. And what’s also important is that different people might value the various elements in different ways.

I present here two ways of splitting the rent and dividing a house. I personally favour (and has designed) the second, but while I was presenting this method to some friends to get some
feedback, I was told the other, it seemed simpler, yet interesting enough to add it. They both assume that:
a) the rent is fixed,
b) there are no favoritism among the will-be-housemate on
who gets to choose first.

The ‘find the objective value first’ method.

Before the rooms are assigned, get together and agree on what are the objective value of each room (i.e. 20% of the rent for this, 50% of the rent for this). The total value must of course be the whole rent. Then randomly select who gets what room (at the agreed price), and as a final action people are allowed to exchange rooms if they want to.
Positive element: it is simple and quite straightforward.
Negative element: it assumes that people can easily agree on the actual relative value of the rooms, and that such value does not change respectively to the persons.

The ‘each person gets the best room’ method.

As I said this is the method that I love most. First of all let each person inspect all the room. Then each person, writes, secretly, the relative value of each room in a piece of paper. The sum of the values must be equal to the requested rent. The idea is to divide the house so that each person gets a room, and pays for that room the value THEY wrote on the piece of paper, while the sum of the valued paid by each person totally covers the requested rent.

Obviously, very often, the collected money would then be higher than the rent. Let’s call the collected money minus the monthly rent, the ‘extra money’.

Often there is more than one solution, that permit to have a some extra money each month. When this happens, the solution that permits to maximize the extra money is chosen. The extra money is then used to pay for the light, any extra expenses, or whatever is needed for the house.

Sometimes there are more than one optimal solution, that is some solutions generate the same extra money, everybody is paying the requested cost for each room, and all other solutions are less optimal. In that case the adopted solution will be one of the optimal one, randomly chosen.

Examples, examples:
Let’s suppose we have a house with 3 rooms (a, b, and c) and 3 persons (A, B, and C). Let’s suppose the total rent being 100.

Person A might find the three rooms equivalent, so he might just write (a: 33.3, b: 33.3, c: 33.3). Person B might instead favour room B, because is more sunny, and she likes to paint, and then she thinks that room ‘a’ is slightly better than room ‘c’, infact she would prefer not to be in room c at all, so she would write: (a: 35, b: 40, c: 25). Person C instead does not care about the sun, but has noticed that room A has more privacy, plus is near the toilet, and since he likes to have his gf as a guest, thinks that having room A would be a better deal. So he votes (a: 40, b: 30, c: 30).

Then the papers are revealed.

Generally when a room has a person that values it more than all the others, and he values that room more than all other ooms, then that room gets taken by that person at the price he has choose.

In our example we have:
A: (a: 33.3, b: 33.3, c: 33.3)
B: (a: 35, b: 40, c: 25)
C: (a: 40, b: 30, c: 30)
which would give us that A would get room ‘c’ paying one third of the rent. B would get room ‘b’ paying 40% of the rent, and C would get room ‘a’ for 40% of the rent… and the collected money each month would be 33.3+40+40=113.3 . The extra money would be 113.3-100=13.3 and would be used to pay for the electricity, water, gas, or whatever.

It is also possible to rinormalise the prices, by lowering them so that the total sum becomes exactly the cost of the rent, while the relative ratio remains the same. In our example
A: (33.3/113.3)*100=29.4
B: (40/113.3)*100=35.3
C: (40/113.3)*100=35.3
and person A would pay 29.4 of the rent (since he took the room nobody wanted)
person B would pay 35.3 of the rent (and took the sunny room)
person C would pays 35.3 of the rent (and took the room with more privacy)

So, what if the situation is not that easy. There isn’t a person that prefers each room? For example you could be in a situation like:
A: (a: 45, b: 45, c: 10)
B: (a: 40, b: 40, c: 20)
C: (a: 40, b: 30, c: 30)
well in this case it is obvious that person A will get either room a or room b. But it is also obvious that room c will go to person C. So C get’s c at 30% of the rent. Both A and B value the room a and b equivalently. But once the room will be assigned person A will pay more than person B, so it seem fair to me that person A chooses a or b and pays 45, and person B gets the remaining room, but pays less (40).

But things can get even more complicated if some people
value some rooms exactly the same:
A: (a: 45, b: 45, c: 10)
B: (a: 45, b: 45, c: 10)
C: (a: 40, b: 40, c: 20)
in which case A and B have obviously to randomly choose who gets what.

Or if the situation is symmethric among the rooms:
A: (a: 40, b: 30, c: 40)
B: (a: 40, b: 40, c: 30)
C: (a: 30, b: 40, c: 40)
In which case you randomly choose if A gets a or c, and then the other follow obviously.

So here we have the first mehtod, where everybody chooses the value together, this is equivalent on the second method if everybody agrees on the relative value:
A: (a: 35, b: 40, c: 25)
B: (a: 35, b: 40, c: 25)
C: (a: 35, b: 40, c: 25)
After which, also in this method, you would randomly pick who gets which room.

Please, let me know if you have tried it and if it was succesful.

# wikipedia fast search

I added an extra bookmarklet. I was in this room with 25 great minds discussing molecular dynamics inquantum fields. I couldn’t understand a iota. Luckily new talks are given in places with wifi connection. So to try to get up to speed with what was going on I wrote a small wikipedia fast search.

Now I could just type “w molecule” in the link bar and the browser would automatically go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molecule.

So how do you do it?
Just copy the link in your bookmarks. Copy it in the “Quick Search” directory, then edit the properties and add keyword “w”. And voilÃ .
Following a talk with it is much faster.

# More than del.icio.us: org.asm.ic

You know, maybe because my father has been a journalist for so many years I have always been raised to appreciate the complexity of life. And yet I still can’t understand why do we need all this complex machinery.

I totally agree on the importance of the semantic web. And, boy, am I thrilled on the possibility that we might be generating the the internet operating system. I am also aware of the cutting edge problem of who owns your data.

But what I just can’t get is why do we need to make things that can actually be quite simple, into this amazing complexity. I might not be getting the whole picture, and I admit ignorance, above stupidity. But still, why do we need to build this whole house all at once? Example del.icio.us has been amazing, and trivial at the same time. And amazing also because it was so trivial.

Now let’s expand the concept:
Instead of storing one single link let’s store two links, and a set of tags in the middle. Two links with their two titles and maybe their two descriptions. And one set of tags between them.

And people will naturally start using interesting tags.

Like:
‘explains’, ‘terrorises’, ‘defines’, ‘is’, ‘IsTerrorisedBy’, ‘embedds’, ‘uses’, …

It will also be fun.

And then get a page for all the links that uses a certain URI as it’s first link(…/subj/…), and another for those that uses another as their second URI (…/obj/…).

Then you can use delicious to store those pages.

The bookmarks manager was del.icio.us? I can assure you that this will be at least org.asm.ic! And it will not cost the programmer more than 200 lines of code. LAMP, PHP, MySQL, keep it simple. And we will all use it.

# Partial translations

Have you ever tried google translate service? I know, if you did you wish you didn’t, unless you were bored, and were looking for some ways to amuse yourself. But you know, translating text is a really daunting task. Generations of PhD’s have been spent in progressing the state of the art just a little bit every time. I know what I am speaking about, I lived with some of them in COGS, at Sussex University. I remember reading somewhere that new, better automatic translators will soon be available. Good! We are waiting for them.

In the meantime…

Have you ever tried to translate a page from a language you don’t know… quite well. But you are not also totally ignorant about. Something in between. Here in Europe is quite common. And the same is true when I read posts in Portuogese, or in American from people on the other side of the ocean.

Yes, I can try to use Google translate mechanism, but it doesn’t give me something easyto chew. Look at this post, for example:

Depois do high vem o low. Ã‰ uma lei do universo.
E no low todo mundo Ã© feio e o mundo Ã© triste e Ã© tudo um saco.

E eu jÃ¡ nem sei o que me move.
From here

es low.? a law of the universe. E in low everybody? ugly and the world? sad e? everything a bag.

E I j? nor I know what it moves me.

From my darling Alenahra.

I suppose a better translation would be:

After a high comes a low. It is a law of the universe. And in a low everybody is ugly and the world is sad and everything is empty.

And I still don’t know what is that moves me.

And Ale’ will tell me if I got it right.

My idea is that Google, instead of providing for a tentative answer should provide for all the possible translations for each word. Those translated words should appear when we point to a word with the mouse. I know it is a slow way of reading a document, one word at a time, but soon the reader will catch up the most common words, and will speed up.

What follow is an example. Move on the words to see the title appear. I used some simple translation that I could find. Obviously the tool I envision would have to be more professional.

Depois do high vem o low. Ã‰ uma lei do universo. E no low todo mundo Ã© feio e o mundo Ã© triste e Ã© tudo um saco.

E eu jÃ¡ nem sei o que me move.

In Italy right now more and more people are getting confortable with english. If you werte to come here only 10 years ago most people would refuse to even try to speak engliish, even if they studied it in school. Now, I believe thanks to internet, people are reading english pages daily, the dictionary often ina corner of the desk, ready to be used. It would be helpful for them to have sucha system.

And I would finally learn Portuogese!

Porto Alegre, aspettami!

Special thanks to travlang.com for providing part of the translations.

# Clustering Delicious Tags

I went on programming at my favourite Python program: Delimind.

In short: Made a new release of the Deli Mind program. Here is the source code (just remember to change it from a .txt to a .py). Now similar tags are clustered together.

1. Here is how it looks like.
2. Here is how the previous version looked like.
3. The original from Brownhen (may he live long and prosper) used to be here, although now it is missing.

All on the same data. Mine, now.
Go and enjoy.
(Later addition: while the program works well for small databases of links, like mine at the time in which I wrote this entry, it doesn’t scale well on size. For this reason it crashes for most of the people who try to use it with more than 1000 bookmarks. For this reason I was forced to change the link on the cluster example to a database with fewer nodes.)

Now the tecnical stuff for those that have a bit more patience.

Tags are not all the same, some are more similar than others. So, for example, the tag “September11″ and “GeorgeBush” have more links in common than “GeorgeBush” and “intelligence”. The idea behind this version of DeliMind was to cluster tags that had links in common. Since distance is generally not a transitive property (if I am near to you, and you are near to Jim, I am not necessarily that near to Jim), while clustering is (if I and you are in the same cluster, and you and Jim are in the same cluster, then me and Jim have to be in the same cluster… unless people belong to different clusters, but that’s a complication).

So I started by making a matrix of relations among tags (all_dict). Each tag, respect to each other tag could either be

1. Once contained in the other
2. Identical
3. Disjointed
4. With # bookmarks in common

Then according to the number of links each of the two tags, and the number of links in common I invented a measure of similarity. If #A is the number of links in tag A, and #B is the number of links in tag B, and #AB is the number of links in common.
The the relative similarity (SAB) will be:
SAB= sqrt((#AB/#A)*(#AB/#B))

I actually played with various measures:
SAB= ((#AB/#A)+(#AB/#B))/2
SAB= Max(#AB/#A,#AB/#B)
They all went from 0 to 1, and were quite similar… (I am not going to discuss the relative properties)
But the first one just seemed the one that made more sense, and at the end, the resulting map was the one more close to my personal intuition of what should be in what cluster.

Once the similarity matrix was done I started studying the clusters. Generally for each triplet of tags A, B, C I would modify
SAC:=min (previous SAC, max (SAB, SBC))
And I would continue going through all possible triplets, and then starting again from the beginning until no new change were happening.

Why? The idea is that the similarity between two tags measure how easy it is to jump from one to the other. Visualise each tag as an island, and then you have an animal who can jump from one island to the other. But it can only jump up to a certain distance. So if he can find a succession of tags between two tags, A and B, where the similarity (the similarity is the inverse of the distance) is always above its jumping ability (that is, the distance is below its jumping ability), then the animal can move from A to B. If not A and B are in different clusters. Effectively unreachable.

But we don’t know how far can our beast jump. So in this way we end up having a similarity number that sais: somwhere, between A and B is possible to find a succession of tags, such that the distance is never above x, so SAB is equal to the minimum between the original SAB and x.

If it does feel complicated don’t worry. I got confused a few (hundred) times programming it. And just could not understand why those damn tags were not clustering… until I got it right.

So, now you have this nice matrix, only between your main tags (the one that are not contained in another tag, cfr previous version), and you (or actually I) need to cluster the tags.

Not also that you don’t need to cluster the tags only one time. Once you made a clustering (for animal which can jump d), you can still partition inside the clustering for animals that can jump less than d.
The first time I just asked him to cluster each possible number. That is, if a number was present assume that someone was able to jump exactly that distance. In this way I got a heavily clustered map. It was a mess, but a promising mess. I then saw that most of the interestign things were happening between distances of 0.333333 and 0.6666.

That is, it made quite sense to ask for the clusters generated by putting together tags that had one third of the links in common, and tags that had up to two third of the links in common.

This is how I got clusters:

• porno, sex and eros
• GeorgeBush, September11, politics, economy, historical, terrorism, usa
• green, sustainability

Then I just applied the same process in the subtags of each tag.

Ok, I can be satisfied, I can go and have something to eat.

As always, if you find it useful drop me a line, I appreciate.

Pietro