I passed by two different attitudes towards defining trust and reputation on virtual environment:
(1)- having someone accredited to certify my identity, namely a CA;
(2)- having a group of peers to collaboratively define my level of trust.
Both approaches presents some limitations and advantages:
~ pros: (1) easy of instantiation, coordination of standards; (2) democracy of definition, granularity of trust.
~ cons: (1) corporate power; (2) holes of the system.

Nice site with a fantastic collection of comic stripes on PhD life. I laugh all day…

Nicolas told me that this funny numbers were put there to make it aesthetically more acceptable … bof!

It was hard to realise today that my previous lab is closing down. Media Lab Europe failed in applying its financial model and to achieve its self sustainability. What are the causes that brought it to this point are difficult to say. Even for a person like me, an ex-employee, it is difficult to analyse all the variables. However it is (and it was) possible to see something on the surface of the project that was kind of shaky: the idea of implementing an american business model into a different continent.

I read already lots of comments on this story. Some of them were kind of rude against ML culture. Well, I can be sincere with you and say that is true that some work is vapour-ware, that some is brochure-ware and all is demo-ware BUT it just happens like that that Media Lab is one of the only place on earth where cool things gets invented just for the sake of re-thinking media and technology with different eyes.

This is far from most old, acquitted, stable, and standing academic institution and it is difficult to understand if you did not live the feeling in being in one of the most eccentric, energetic and COOL laboratory ever. The tone on which people sometimes speak about things they do not know makes me think they are envious!

However, I wont forget MLE! Even if in a difficult shape, tiring, surviving and fighting to stay there … that was one of the best periods of my life! I will miss MLE.

Other comments: RTE news; David Reitter; Antoin O Lachtnain; Michael Cunningham; Jonah B. Cohen; Jamie Lawrence; Karlin Lillington has a short opinion piece in the Guardian about MLE.

The official press relase, dated 14th of January 05.

Nice and calm city of Switzerland mainland …

Nice meeting with Stefano Mastrogiacomo and Francesco Cara on our research activities. Some interesting ideas emerged from the interaction: trying to find the relevance of joint actions. In the activity theory, a joint action is a task that can exist only if 2 persons or more do it togheter (what we call collaboration). To be distinguished from participatory actions where people split and then they join the single parts (what we call cooperation).

Stefano argued that at activity level the processes acted by agents follows a problem solving strategy (according to activity theory). I am not sure that this is true in all cases but anyway I found this supporting our claims that we cannot looking into this level of abstraction with the markers used to describe the language level (action level in the activity theory).

The conclusion was that we need to look for different markers that can take into account of a more complex interaction, if it is possible …

What I need to enquiry further is that if there are some mechanisms pre defined for the problem solving activity and how these relate to the lower level interaction (speech, action).

While driving to reach EPFL I couldn’t resist to take a picture …

An interesting project and approach towards technology that reflects very well the spirit of my previous post on recycling consumed technological artifacts. This researcher at IDII designed a disposable mobile phone that once finished its life-cycle can be buried in the soil. At that point, the materials that constitute the object are ecologically assimilated.

The Bakedbits objects are intentionally ambiguous. Using food as the design material for the electronic devices (body, shell, buttons), they intend to create a tension in our stereotyped assumptions of the properties of an electronic object (use of plastic, water resistant, toxic, very defined shape, throwaway), and in how food should be presented (hygienic, packaged, ephemeral validate, organic). This ambiguity stimulates thinking about these assumptions by offering the possibility of skepticism or belief in the object without constraining it to a specific answer. At the same time, it makes more evident some aspects of the relationship between the user and the object that didn’t become contradictory despite the different contexts.

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KisMac is a nice wifi stumbler for Mac OS X that also incorporate a mapping function that helps in visualising the coverage of certain network in a certain area.

KisMAC is a free stumbler application for MacOS X, that puts your card into the monitor mode. Unlike most other applications for OS X it has the ability to run completely invisible and send no probe requests.

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Patrick’s definition of “Congruence” is pretty similar to our definition of co-referenced actions. His explanation had to deal with the problem solving strategies:

“Congruence is the degree of adherence, by an individual, to a shared solution strategy and its implementation“