P. S.: Post Scriptum

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 Polyphasic Easter

It is now the time to present the next project we have been working to: TagBay. And I say ‘we’, because is this project I am not alone. I did it with a friend of mine, Derek, who accepted, very patiently to code, some of the idea I have been tinkering around in the last year or so. I am speaking about how tags, and tag clouds, and distance between tags, and so on.
So, in brief we made a web site to tag material that is being sold on e-Bay. Anybody can tag any object that is being sold. Not only can any object be tagged but you can tag sellers, too (oh, we are not responsible for offensive tags, eh!).
Tags on objects can be made private or public, and you can also search among your tags, among everybody else tags, and eventually (when we code it) it will be possible to search among the tags of another user, like in del.icio.us.

Now that the summary for the people who have no time has been done, let’s try to explain the idea in the details for those who have a bit more time.

Pages:
On TagBay, right now, there are 3 type of pages: e-Bay Search Pages, TagBay Tag Search Page, TagBayUser Tag Search Page, Item Page, and Seller Page.

• Search Page: It is possible from inside Tag Bay to make searches on e-Bay on specific keywords. The user can then add tags to each object that came out, store the tags added all at once, or store the tags of a single object. The same thing can be done in the Tag Search Page
• TagBay Tag Search Page: In this page the user gets all the results for a single tag that someone have used. Nothing fancy (for now). Items where the tag only appears as a private tag will not appear here.
• TagBayUser Tag Search Page: In this page the user gets all the results for a single tag that he have used. If the user is logged in and is looking at his own tags, also the items tagged in a private way will appear.
• Item Page: Each object has its specific page. From such page any user can see what are the public tags that other users have used for that page. Also they can define their personal tags for that object, if their tags are going to be private, and the tags of the seller.
• Seller Page: And then there is the seller page, and in the seller page any user can tag any seller. The use of tag for sellers is still limited, but will be increased in the future.

The natural use of the site

• For a seller or for a shop A seller might want to use the site to tag all the objects that he is selling, giving for each object all the tags related. Thus increasing the possibility for it to be found. We suggest to list the tag in the order of importance, as soon we are going to use the order consider the importance in the search page.
  Also, if a person wants to make a cool list of objects, they can tag exactly those objects, with a tag they never used, and then link to the page in their directory of this tag. Thus creating on the spot, their lists. Also sellers will want to tag their objects, and people making searches will tag objects to make lists of objects they want to follow, before jumping on a transaction. We think there is more than enough material to generate interesting behaviour. It doesn’t have to be exactly the same emergent behaviour that we are used to see. After all we are just exploring the possibilities of social folksonomy.
• A shop To the possibilities before, a shop who is selling on ebay might be interested to make sure that the shop itself (remember that you can tag sellers, and not only shops) have all the tags related to the merchandise that they are selling
• Someone buying Our suggestion for someone who wishes to buy, on e-Bay, would be to first look under the tag search, to see if there is anybody who has already tagged any object that they are interested in. This does not necessarily be someone else who is buying, but also someone who is selling. Then tag the objects they are interested themselves, to have it in their own list of objects. Then they could go to the search e-Bay page with the necessary keywords, and add the chosen tag to all the objects interesting. At that point a first selection have been made, and all the possible objects have been tagged. At this point, he could choose one or those objects, change the tags to private, and start betting on it.
• Someone suggesting And finally if someone is just trying to suggest some possible objects, he could search e-Bay for those objects, tag them with a unique tag and present the url of the list to whoever is interested.

There are many other ways to use TagBay. In a sense TagBay is a toy, and not a game. And as every good toy it can be used for many different games. We suggest here only some of them. Also TagBay itself is rapidly evolving. We have tons of stuff we are interested in including, and if you have been reading my blog, you know how my problem is always to find people to code my ideas, more than to find them. And this is why I am so happy for Derek work!

Difficulties that we found:
There were a number of issues that came out when we started developing this program.

1. Public vs private tags:
   Why would someone tag an object if they are interested to buy it? After all aren’t they making it easier to others to find it, by adding those tags?
   This was a serious doubt that we had, and finally we decided to give the possibility to users to tag objects privately. Yet there have to be a balance between private tags and public tags, as public tags are necessary to generate the emerging folksonomy that we wish to use. So we decided for a compromise: public tags can be done from the search page, but private tags requite you to go to the specific object page. In our view (but we are ready to be proven wrong) someone would go to the search page, tag all the entries where he might be interested. Then chose one, and tag that one in a private way.
2. Limitations due to the temporary nature of the objects
   Considering that most object exist on ebay only for few weeks before being sold, wouldn’t this be not enough time to make a tag cloud and let all cool emergent properties that folksonomy induces, appear?
   Maybe, but sellers also can tag the objects they are selling, thus giving a fresh start to all the objects. Also side by side to tagging object we are giving the possibility to tag sellers. Which eventually should survive each transaction and build up an interesting tag cloud.
3. I spoke about sellers tagging their own objects, but wouldn’t this invite people to spam your site? After all, wouldn’t it be much better for a seller to add many tags to be present in many searches?
   Ah ha! You think tag clouds can be spammed. This is false. Tag clouds cannot be spammed, and no one understand this. And we shall use this site to prove it. We have nothing against spammers, they are absolutely welcome in our site and spam it as much as they feel. Add all the tags they want to each object they sell. It will make ABSOLUTELY NO DIFFERENCE in the search page. Tag clouds are unspammable. And our engine will use tag clouds as its base. Everybody else uses tag sets. And this makes them easily spammable. So, no we don’t fear spammers. In fact we hope that spammers will come to our TagBay site. They are just people trying to sell their stuff, we are trying to make sellers meet with buyers. Wouldn’t be bad to single out spammers just because they are spammers.

TagBay is obviously still in beta, and there are many things that need to be coded. If you have any idea on how to make it better please do not hesitate to contact me. If you want to make a difference on what the final product will be now is the time to do it. Also all new suggestion implemented should be listed in a special page with links to the original suggester home page.

In the last weeks I have been interested in polyphasic sleep. Polyphasic sleep is a sleeping pattern where the person does not sleep in one big chunck, but in many roughly equivalent pieces throughout the whole day. The first time I heard about it was from my father, some twenty years ago. The pattern is sometimes used by solo sailors, who travel through long oceanic trips. My father has always loved to sail, and read many books on the subject; so that’s how he knew about it. According to thos books Leonardo Da Vinci was a polyphasic sleeper, sleeping some 15 minuites every 2 hours.

But I don’t want to discuss in this post about polyphasic sleep. I want to describe everything else I know about sleep, so that at a later post I can say: “And this has totally blown off everything I knew about sleep” (with a link!). It’s like when in go you play a stone, that is not that important, but such that later you can link to it. You build your framework.

And if all I said in the rest of this post will sound like pseudoscience, is because mostly is. It comes out of personal observations, some lessons explained, learned, and integrated, but no scientific work that I know off (or that I searched for).

My knowledge about sleep originate from a lesson I received some sixteen years ago. At the first yoga class I went to. The teacher explained to me that not every hour is equally important to sleep. There are some moments that are definitly more important, and others less. Some time between Continue reading Sleeping patterns: when is it better to sleep

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.