Memetica

Moving post to davidorban.com

2005-06-04T13:15:00.000+02:00

I am moving the posts from Blogger to http://www.davidorban.com/blog. If you have been following my posts, please update your links, or feed reader settings.

Opinion radars?

2005-02-17T15:02:00.000+01:00

I am always gald to see how a meme could spread... Let's see if opinion radar is a good one. Opinion radar has been proposed by Marco Montemagno to better contextualize the Technorati tag searches. The link I added to the previous sentence is the example of its use, and actually at this time it will be the first Technorati tag to use opinion radar.

Will it be fit?

Bootstrapping humans

2004-12-30T01:02:00.000+01:00

Memes made sure they had an environment to thrive on by accelerating the evolution of humans. Research covered in the Guardian describes how the evolution of the human brain has been very quick in confront of that of other species, and attributes it to the pressures of the social environment.

The new replicator takes control of the medium in which it lives: how quick in terms of geological change was the emergence of a life-sustaining environment, once life appeared?

New replicator found?

2004-12-29T01:53:00.000+01:00

In an understandably vague article, that tries to explain in layman's terms the meaning of a new theorem about the interactions of quantum states with the environment, Nature announces the results of a team of US physicists, that aims to explain the objective shared reality we observe, through the involvement of a new replicator. This new replicator, multiplying, with variation, exposed to the selective pressure of a limited environment or resource, is what they call the imprint of the pointer state.

After biological genes, memes from Dawkins, and universes (as in Smolin's interpretation of the meaning of the black-hole singularity), we seem to have the idea of a new replicator to play with.

Googling Google through Netcraft

2004-12-27T14:43:00.000+01:00

Looking up the Netcraft records for *.google.com brings up a lot that deafaults to www.google.com or its equivalents. There are a few gems, like console.google.com, that make you feel you could control the Google Universe if only you had the right password, or if someone gave one to you (as there is an email link to ask for the password to be reset!). Also interesting there is gsademo1.google.com, which seems to be a demo site for the Google Search Appliance. It doesn't look like anybody reported on it yet, as the Google query "link:http://gsademo1.google.com" does not bring back any result. As you play with the search dialog, the query for "public content", on "search appliance" for example, brings back results that are similar to that of the regular Google search, only on a smaller subset, and with no advertising or sponsored links. The "public and secure content" option timed out each time I tried. Anybody with more luck or fantasy?

Great mix of mapping and photos: Mappr!

2004-12-21T14:52:00.000+01:00

The release of the Flickr API has proved to be very fertile, and now has produced a gem: Mappr tries to interpret the tags of photos, to place them on the map of the US. Of course this should be immediately extended worldwide! Since you can look up other tags that are not geography related to create collections, and you should also be able and select the date of the photos, I can already see how you could follow the seasons of blossoming through the continents by looking at the right tags the right time.

Dissent Is Not Un-American

2004-12-18T14:40:00.000+01:00

Geof Stone is guest-blogging on Lessig.org about dissent, and how politicized media or strong-arming politics can suppress it, or try tint it with shades implied guilt.

One of the most commovent views at a trip I took to the US in November 2001 was a poster the width of the entire building, at the second storey of Citylights Bookstore, in San Francisco. It had about a dozen black and white faces, with a flag of the US in color covering their mouths. The slogan was "Dissent Is Not Un-American".

Creative Commons Italy Launched!

2004-12-17T01:08:00.000+01:00

I just came back from the launch event of Creative Commons Italy, and shot some (amazingly bad) photos of Lessig's speech, which was very eloquent. Larry was a little late, as he just came in from his flight, and after he spoke, he had to endure three - four Italian language presentations! I couldn't be at the party after the launch, but the conference in the afternoon was very interesting. I found especially illuminating the presentation by Alessandro Rubini of Free Software Europe who compared the GPL license with the CC licenses, and which CC variant the Free Software Foundation considers compatible with theirs: the ones that don't exclude commercial use, and which don't impose share-alike.

2004-10-30T01:16:00.000+02:00

The New York Times covers the signing ceremony of the European Constitution. 450 million people joined voluntarily to create the largest peacful social experiment.

Memetics experiments around the elections

2004-10-29T19:35:00.000+02:00

The enblogment by Lessig of Kerry is becoming a full blown applied memetics experiment, in both establishing the power of weblogs in spreading a neologism, and in establishing their influence. Winer's page tracking the enblogments of the various candidates, and the Google tracker he posted will measure the spreading in the blogosphere, and on the web.

I wrote a Wikipedia entry for the verb "to enblog", and recorded the birth process of the meme.

A disenfranchised view of past feelings

2004-10-29T17:26:00.000+02:00

I remember when Gorbachev would talk about a connected world around 1987. It felt new, as his policies, and his hope of progressive reform.

What a difference now! Anybody seeing today that the US unilateral policies and interventionist stances are a danger to the world, feel that while only US citizens are going to vote in their elections, what all the world thinks does matter. Anybody sees this, but "You don't have the permission to access" Bush.

As Lessig writes, "so that the reality of November 3 doesn’t distort the views of where we are today", I want to record my endorsement for John Kerry. (Which is also my enblogment, as invented by Lessig, and pressed ahead by Dave Winer.)

Universal identity service with Identity Commons

2004-10-28T10:02:00.000+02:00

You can contact me now, and apparently for the next 50 years (based on the assumption that the service, the world, and I will all be there), at the universal handle =David.Orban, which is my i-name. (A recently introduced global system by Identity Commons, and the 2idi, an i-broker, based on open data sharing standards respectful of privacy.)

I-names aim to represent a contact point by all means, email, phone, fax, etc. , and to enable location management, single sign-on to websites, trusted social networking, and more.

I know the first thing I want from it: to become the foundation of portable , transparent, and open reputation systems.

Lexical analysis of debates lets the memes shine through

2004-10-25T15:18:00.000+02:00

The Osservatorio of Pavia publishes the report of a lexical analysis of the US Presidential debates (pdf), that represents the words used on a very clear graph of Simple-Complex and Rational-Emotional axes.

The frequency of the words used, and their grouping into clusters of meaning let the authors of the report show the main themes covered, and ethical and moral values expressed in an objective and scientific manner. The report is based on an algorithmic lexical analysis called Alceste 4.0, which can be applied to any text.

Is this a reproducible approach to semantic classification of non-structured human discourse? What could the linking of this analysis to Google's APIs bring us to? Could a thorough system of memetic classification emerge?

Soon a Creative Commons based broadcast content in the Netherlands?

2004-10-23T22:04:00.000+02:00

Coverage by Alex Steffen at WorldChanging of an article by Figueiredo in DMeurope.com of a conference involving Creative Commons, and future proposals by Dutch parlamentarians for the release under CC licenses of all publicly financed broadcast content in The Netherlands.

Public creativity leveraging content produced with publicly financed projects is appropriate, and overdue. Will joint media projects with companies opposing this kind of approach suffer once CC is going to be seen as "tainting " the content? A good comparison should be the requirement of publicly financed scientific research being freely available in the US.

Italy's more than half corrupt?

2004-10-21T10:06:00.000+02:00

Ok. That sounds pretty provocative. But how should one interpret the results of the latest Corruption Perceptions Index published by Transparency International? Italy, where I live, is at the 42nd place with a score of 4.8 on a scale of 10. It is humbling to see the world's sixth biggest economy achieve its position with the hindrance of public sector more corrupt than that of, to take a few examples, Botswana, Chile, or Uruguay. Imagine what Italy could do if it had a system working smoothly and cleanly!

Charming side of Italian anarchy as seen from the outside

2004-10-13T23:29:00.000+02:00

We were in my car with Joi Ito tonight driving to have a few drinks after his panel at IBTS (yes, that was the name of the conference even if he didn't seem to know :-), and he remarked how amusing it was to find Italy as he expected: creative, flexible, and pretty anarchic in finding its solutions without sticking too much to the rules.

I told him when I was in Naples teaching Prolog to people from a lab at an aerospace company there. This was at the end of the '80s. If Italy is different, well, Naples is from an other planet! Rules often don't apply in Italy, and in that city is worse: they might apply in the reverse. I was in a car being driven around the city as we were talking about how difficult it was to change people's behaviour (a common symptom in Italy when you are touching a nerve, retracting into fatalism), and the example was traffic, and stoplights. Since people don't at all respect the traffic lights, when you drive in Naples you are bound to pay a lot of attention when you are crossing with green, since you know any moment someboy could shoot through on red. As my host was commenting while driving on this paradoxical reversal of rules arising from universal disrespect for rules, he came to a stoplight on red, and without realizing he actually stopped the car. Immediately the car behind us started honking: "Come on, go on, it is only a red light!"

This is a first hand experience: post some comments, if you have more. There is also a wonderful book about Naples, its loveable people, and their philosophy of life: "Thus Spake Bellavista" (out of print on Amazon), "Così parlò Bellavista" (in Italian).

Trust relationships need breathing space

2004-10-09T11:12:00.000+02:00

Ebay is a great closed garden. So great a lot of people don't have a feeling of enclosure. However, trust relationships need breathing space (as John Battelle writes on Ebay before drifting to sleep), and other companies, for example Google, good be well positioned achieving this with implementations of the Semantic Web, as analyses by an article on Ftrain.

Unbounded memetic landscape

2004-09-09T13:56:00.000+02:00

John Battelle is asking for comments on his vision of a world with Perfect Search.

Well, the world of the Perfect Search would not be interesting. Asimov was great in exploring in his "I Robot" short stories the shortcomings and unintended consequences of his own laws. I can much more easily imagine someone building a vision of the future where the Perfect Search has been promised but underdelivers, then the utopistic version.

Mathematicians are well equipped in exploring the theoretical limits of their models, and Godel did so very well with his Theorem: we now know thanks to him that scientific exploration is an endless adventure. The memetic field of intensely interacting intentional agents (pardon my cacophony) must be similarly unbounded.

Fiction is not science

2004-07-16T10:11:00.000+02:00

I would be surpised if Asimov thought his laws could become the basis of the real science of AI or sentient robots. The fun of his short stories, and probably of writing them as well must have been been also coming from the quirks of the interactions of the laws with the real world, and how their vagueness permitted paradoxes, interpretations, and doubts in the minds of both humans, and robots. The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SingInst) has been studying the ethics of AI and now published a new site, www.asimovlaws.com, devoted to the popular discussion of the three laws of robotics, and their fallacies. Hosting a blog (should it be a wiki?), it will foster the right kind of public debate.

Playing with wikis

2004-07-15T16:01:00.000+02:00

I was waiting for an opportunity to start playing with wikis, and Joi Ito's blog gave me the start with his public Socialtext wiki, where I quickly created a page of my own. So far so good...

For the record

2004-07-13T10:37:00.000+02:00

I like Archive.org a lot, but their choice of what to save sometimes differs from mine: I'd rather take a snapshot of what the homepage of robocup.org looks like right now...

robocup-homepage
Originally uploaded by david.orban.

Playing with Flickr

2004-07-13T10:34:00.000+02:00

"This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing." says the test post generated by Flickr itself. Maybe they are a bit too sticky, requiring registration for the most basic display of photos, too? The flash based photo roll thay I inserted in the right hand column of the blog is really fancy, though.

Staying power of important images

2004-06-18T01:12:00.000+02:00

I wonder if sometime this could be seen as the zeitgeist of these years: the home page of the RoboCup organization has Cosimo's penalty kick picture after a year of the event. There is a lot of symbolism it in actually.

New ways out of information overload?

2004-06-17T09:55:00.000+02:00

Probably not. I've started using Bloglines to look at the news sites I frequently visit. Bloglines aggregates syndicated content on a single web page, and is an alternative to newsreader client software that you would install on your computer. I was never convinced of those, but I like the streamlined interface of Bloglines, and its ubiquitous availability. Now that doesn't mean that I spend less time for my daily dose of infojunk.

The Three Domains of Unknown

2004-06-15T15:25:00.000+02:00

I always used to try and distinguish when attacking a problem between what I call "The Three Domains of Unknown":

1. questions for which the answers are obvious (70%)
2. questions for which I can find the answers (20%)
3. questions that I am not even aware I'd need to be asking (10%).

These latter ones are the dangerous ones that can kill you. I think that group knowledge should always be applied to this third domain, as it is best attached with out of the box thinking approaches, which reinforce each other in a loosely organized, provocative meeting.

The first group is of course subjective, what is obvious to one person could be baffling to an other. The point is that when you attack a problem you will recognize this domain right away.

Maybe the second is the most intriguing: you can find the answers as long as you know where to look for them. You ask collegues, friends, relatives. Or you can ask Google. Maybe you should ask Google first, and if you don't, collegues, and friends, and relatives might send you to some specific site to understand why.

Robot vs Human Penalty Kick Movie

2003-07-12T11:21:00.000+02:00

There is a new 28MB movie clip of the penalty kick between Hits Dream and Cosimo on the Fraunhofer Institute's site covering the humanoid robot league of RoboCup 2003.

First ever humanoid Robot vs Human competition at RoboCup2003?

2003-07-09T17:14:00.000+02:00

I visited RoboCup 2003 in Padua, Italy today, and my son Cosimo was chosen from the public as goalkeeper, to defend against Hits Dream's penalty kicks. Hits Dream is a fully autonomous humanoid robot built by the Honda International Technical School's team led by Shuji Imura. (I am not sure, if actually the name of the robot is Firstep...)

RoboCup is an international research and educational initiative, in the spirit of other fun, and stimulating technological challenges of the past, the ones won by the Write brothers, or Lindbergh: its aim is to build a team of robots that can beat the human world champion soccer team, by the year 2050.

Way to go, naturally... It was humanly heartening to see how easily Cosimo defended his goal against the robot's kicks. Actually I told him that he should let at least one goal in, but he couldn't relent, and at the end the referee awarded a goal to the robot because my son moved out of his line of defense, and the rules apparently didn't allow for this.

I took a lot of photos, and I sure wasn't alone!

The event was commented for the public by Thomas Christaller, the head of the Fraunhofer Institut for Autonomous Intelligent Systems, one of the organisers of RoboCup 2003. I was stunned when Christaller confirmed that probably this was the first ever public competition between a robot, and a human!