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Clifford Stool’s talk at TED is an absolutely awesome and brilliant learning experience. This talk reveals all the energy, the passion, the hope that lie in scientific inquiry and in an agile mind. As a side effect this should also make you wonder at the propulsive push to the development of a society/country this sort of attitude brings…

“The first time you do something it’s science, the second time it’s engineering, the third time it’s technology, it’s just being a technician. I’m a scientist: Once I do something, I want do something more.”

“I think if you want to really know what the future is gonna be… If you really want to know what society is gonna be in twenty years, ask a kindergarten teacher. In fact don’t just ask any kindergarten teacher, ask an experienced one.
[…]
“I think locally and I act locally, I feel the best way I can help out anything is to help out very very locally… I teach eight-grade science four days a week… I said to my science students: we are going to do seriuos experiments, none of this “open the chapter seven and do all the problems sets”, we are going to be doing genuine physics.

Joel wrote, as usual, a thoughtful and witty article on the web, standards, interoperability and the upcoming mother of all flame wars; this is a must-read for everyone concerned with web-related software development (web designers, web programmers, information architects, marketeers…) .

As usual, the idealists are 100% right in principle and, as usual, the pragmatists are right in practice. The flames will continue for years.

Joel goes into a lengthy explanation, driven by an extra-terrestrial catchy case study, of what are the possible “cardinalities” of “market standards” (One-to-One - all is fine and simple, One-to-Many - yet fine, Sequence-to-Many - a story of pain and backward compatibility, Many-to-Many - you know, PurePain ™), why a standard without a reference implementation it’s not that standard, and why in the long run being conservative in what you do, and being liberal in what you accept from the others potentially ends in deployment issues kicking your conservative yet liberal butt. In the meanwhile you get also acquainted with some real-world compatibility issues between rabbis from different ultra-orthodox communities:

If you’ve ever visited the ultra-orthodox Jewish communities of Jerusalem, all of whom agree in complete and utter adherence to every iota of Jewish law, you will discover that despite general agreement on what constitutes kosher food, that you will not find a rabbi from one ultra-orthodox community who is willing to eat at the home of a rabbi from a different ultra-orthodox community. And the web designers are discovering what the Jews of Mea Shearim have known for decades: just because you all agree to follow one book doesn’t ensure compatibility[…]

As a very brief personal memorandum: Real Standards must have Real Reference Implementations (because “reality siphons off excess complexity“¹) and although Postel’s Robustness Principle is (imho) still much valuable for the wide spread of the internet/web it has been able to sustain so far, it should be carefully balanced - “in medium stat virtus” - with having very, very strict standards and “components” positively obnoxious about pointing them all out to you; maybe we (as developers/engineers) should resort to some sort of “carrot and stick” principle.

NOTE ¹: The full citation from David H. Gelernter’s Mirror Worlds (a wonderful and fascinating book narrating a vision of computing and information of extraordinary elegance - that is by other words a good combination of simplicity and power) is:

“Information structures are, potentially, the most complicated structures known to man. Precisely because software is so easy to build, complexity is a deadly software killer.
The same problem exists for hardware machines, but it lacks comparable significance. Physical reality is the overflow valve that siphons off excess complexity before the whole system blows.[…]”.

Happy Π Day.

When you say “network on the go”…

it happens sometimes you really mean it.

From MIT Technology Review “Local Area Network Droids“:

The robots, called LANdroids, are being funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as part of a $3 million three-year research program. The aim is to create expendable robots that will be able to overcome the communications problems that soldiers currently face in built-up areas. […]

Existing radio communications networks used by the military work well when there is line of sight, but urban environments can hinder this. Obstacles and structures can reflect, refract, diffract, or absorb the radio signals, leading to signal loss and attenuation. The overall effect is that soldiers often have to work with poor and unreliable radio communications.

The LANdroids will be designed to overcome this problem using an autonomous positioning system that will help the robots adapt the communications networks as needed. To do so, the bots will use the 802.11g Wi-Fi standard to form mobile ad hoc networks that can repair and reroute themselves if, for example, the enemy destroys a robot.

XKCD published a wonderful strip in memory of the recently departed D&D Co-Creator Gary Gygax.

RIP, Gary.

(I play dungeons and dragons/ I got a 13th level halfling fighter thief/ got seven hit die on my backstab/ sometimes you know it’s good to be a geek.)

Introduction: velocity is a beautiful templating language… (easily turnable into a not-so-general-purpose programming language); #macro is the syntax to call the macro named macro.

via My Mood Swings - Highway to #hell

• Tizio #1: this xwiki thing has all the potential to quickly turn into…
• Tizio #2: Soylent Green?
• Tizio #1: a macro #hell
• Tizio #2: Highway to #hell… http://youtube.com/watch?v=erJc4dzZ3IA

Interesting initiative by Il Sole 24 ORE (Luca De Biase) in collaboration with Elastic (Nicola Mattina): 10domande | ai candidati premier alle elezioni politiche 2008, that is 10 questions to candidates to the 2008 political (italian) elections. From the site:

10domande è un progetto di giornalismo partecipativo: è una video-intervista di dieci domande formulate e scelte direttamente dagli elettori.

Round I (dal 3 al 23 marzo). Tu proponi una domanda che viene votata da tutti gli utenti del sito. Le dieci domande più votate diventano un’intervista ai candidati premier.

Round II (dal 24 marzo al 13 aprile). I candidati rispondono alle domande. Tu puoi votare le risposte e dire se ti piacciono o meno.

This is a really nice example of what participative media in the internet age are all about (also what means providing a smooth implementation and making a good use of them).

A twit (which I read via facebook) by Gianluca remembered me of an ancient and deep philosophical question about the nature and meaning of wrapped oranges. The distributed conversation has gone so far like this (begging other participants’ pardon for the poor translation):

gluca: I’ll never understand why some oranges are paper wrapped and some others not.

dottorgioia @gluca it is based on a deep and thorough marketing research

Marco (that is me): This question got me passionated since my early years right now I’m experiencing a sort of dummy epiphany; wrapping all the oranges would be too much expensive, however by wrapping only a few you are able to reach a satisfying “brand visibility” (there should be a paper wrapped orange per “buy” on average).

image by only alice on flickr

The converstaion has been followed by some insights by Gianluca on a bleeding edge marketing technique, which I’d name AdRance, or AdWraps (NOTE - for the imaginary native english readers - “arance” it’s the Italian translation of “oranges”). From “Arancia misterious marketing“:

Yes, paper wrapped oranges will be without any doubt the new frontier of ambient and co-marketing: they have a great reach (who doesn’t eat oranges?), a good GRP (no way you can eat the orange without taking a look at the ad - and it is known that the wrapped ones are the first to get eaten, as if it would be unconsciously possible to find a hidden surprise), ridicolous CPM, vareity of sensorial experiences by changing paper features or colors, opportunity for prize games (e.g “if the number of seeds is equal to the one on the paper wrap, send the proof of purchase et cetera…), in brief, it’s all there.

Don’t say you haven’t been warned.

Now only a slick and simple web front-end to let advertisers bid for placement on the basis of orange type, fruit shop/market location, paper features, and plan their own prize games, remains to be developed to accomplish world domination by means of AdRance (or AdWraps).

The weather today has been awesone (extraordinary warm for these days of the year - about 26 degrees Celsius at about 1 PM, it felt quite like summer) so I took the chance to get back to running (having been kind of lazy during the last months). I chose a pretty usual route: the esplanade from Cesenatico to Gatteo Mare (with a little tour across Gatteo Mare “docks” to Savignano Mare esplanade); the run went pretty well about 11 Kms in about 1 hour and 6 minutes. It has been a while since I thought to give MapMyRun a try, so I took this chance for a real test-driverun. The service (built on top of Google Maps service) is very nicely accomplished: it provides simple and effective tools to draw your route (an handy “Out and Back” function to automatically draw the way back, and also a loop function), it lets you easily export your route to KML or GPX (this really comes handy for the bikers out there who go for longer and more complex routes) and the user interface is responsive nonetheless the heavy javascript-ing going on under the hood (quite impressive). As a last note (big point for blogger’s big ego gratification) the service lets you easily embed the map into a blog post (to be fair, it uses an evil(tm) iframe).

Runners Note: on this route there are two part “under construction” (works should end in three weeks); one (about 500 mt) between the end of Valverde and the beginning of Villmarina, another at Gatteo Mare docks (Savignano Mare side).

Kluster is a platform aimed at helping people to develop their idea into real products by providing a system to support virtually any decision making activity (e.g. product development, marketing/advertising initiatives, and event planning). In other words:

kluster is a place to harness the power of community collaboration to get stuff done. everyone has ideas, we provide a platform to get them out of heads and into the world…where they belong.

The platforms is based around some neat concepts (phases - to structure the project -, sparks - to make proposals in a phase -, amps - to refine sparks - , watts - gained through participation and sound investments on successful sparks) that provide (IMHO) a “serendipitous” quantification (and reward) of the participation/activity/idea soundness and a game-like engaging and “flowing” experience. The decision making algorithm is quite sophisticated and more important it is open to change based on the activity of the whole system:

All the activity and participation on kluster is stored and analyzed. The data is used in the decision-making process. Each user’s successes, failures, reputation, areas of expertise, and overall history are considered. This encourages users to earn respect, to act positively, and most importantly, enables extremely educated decisions to be made using real world logic.

The recursiveness of having future developments (e.g. Collaboration Tools) of Kluster modeled as a Kluster project is also nice.

Kluster officialy launches at TED by the unveiling of the TED Kluster project. Project 72 aims to develop a real product in no more than 72 hours (identity / branding, tagline /ad campaing and packaging included).
From project 72 page:

over the next 72 hours we will harness the collective power of TED attendees, and our online community to develop a totally new, tangible product.

we can make anything that fits within our guidelines, but we would love to see something that has a global impact.

rapid prototyping machines, and a team of modelers are standing by…

things will move quick, so you’ll want to check back often.

Doubts may be on the effectiveness and the scalability of the decision making algorithm and the commenting/refining process: project 72 will provide a quick testbed. Time will tell in what decision-making processes (what about a political agenda? what about the planning of a research project?) and if the system will prove successful; from my first impressions I would definitely invest “my watts” on this project.