Holidays are the best period for “wasting some time” learning some CSS programming. Here I found some nice tutorials: [1], [2], [3].

Nice idea to move into a portable profile that can be used to identify yourself into different weblogs. It allows to store your profile remotely and link it to each contribution you do in weblogs that support it. We should really get a gravatar. Besides this can raise some discussions on private contributions and reliability of such information.

A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an 80×80 pixel avatar image that follows you from weblog to weblog appearing beside your name when you comment on gravatar enabled sites. Avatars help identify your posts on web forums, so why not on weblogs?

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Today I implemented a new hack on my WordPress install to show related posts to each new entry. It is a plug-in for showing related entries which I modified to fit in my Kubric installation. Now under each individual entry there is a list of connected arguments which is automagically computed with keywords matching.

Python for Symbian phones, codename “Amaretto” was released recently on the Nokia forum. It is already available for download.

Python for Series 60 allows developers to execute Python commands and run Python scripts and applications in devices based on Series 60 Platform. In addition, developers can execute Python commands and scripts in the emulators of Series 60 Developer Platform SDK’s

Recently I have been working with Jakko, to write down a couple of ideas that we have been brainstorming recently. The central idea is that we have to distinguish grounding at utterance level from grounding at knowledge level. For the latter, we need to rethink the primal mechanisms and the evidences of grounding we are used to in linguistic models.

Borovoy, R., Martin, F., and Resnick, M. (1999). Revealing common ground: Augmentation on the edges of interpretive communities. In Hoadley, C. and Roschelle, J., editors, Proceedings of the Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL), Palo Alto, California, USA. Stanford University, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Available from: http://llk.media.mit.edu/papers/archive/A05.HTM.
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This paper present a new approch to computationally augment the interaction people have in an on-line community to jumpstart the search for common ground.

They distinguish between common knowledge and mutual knowledge. The former is defined as the knowledge that is shared but not known to be shared. The latter is the knowledge that is shared and known to be shared (Krauss & Fussell, 1990).

They define m-cue as artifacts that augment the edge of interpretative community by transforming an existing pattern of common knowledge into mutual knowledge.

After this morning discussion with Fab and Zeno, about what journalism will be like in 2014, I found this interesting on-line community portal where members are required to be explicit and systematic on their opinions in the form of bets made on a standardised form of predictions.

The Foresight Exchange is a new form of entertainment. It combines the real-time interactive potential of the World Wide Web with a game of predictive skill. The basic idea behind the Foresight Exchange(FX) is making bets. The purpose in FX is to bet wisely on future events and place your bets to achieve the highest score. At the Foresight Exchange you bet against the other players.

For more details about this play-money futures market, see:
Hanson, R. (1990). Could gambling save science: Encouraging an honest consensus. Eighth International Conference on Risk and Gambling, London.

Amazing internet site which aggregates worldwide articles on Italian culture and politics. I like it because you can find in there some points of view that depicts your country better than what an Italian would have done.

[italieni.it]
 

Appropiation, the special kind of learning that concerns cultural objects, takes sign-mediated assistance from other members of the culture, who scaffold children’s first attempt with the cultural object in such a way that they gradually move from being able to use tools underguidance to being able to use them on their own way (Leontjev, 1981; Tolmanm, 1988).

This definition was taken from: Baker, M., Hansen, T., Joiner, R., and Traum, D. (1999). Collaborative Learning: Cognitive and Computational Approaches, chapter The role of grounding in collaborative learning tasks, pages 31–63. Pergamon / Elsevier Science, Amsterdam. Available from: http://gric.univ-lyon2.fr/gric5/home/mbaker/webpublications/GG-99.PDF.

Abduction, which refers back to Aristotelean’s philosophy, consists in studying facts and devising a theory to explain them: C is observed; if A were true, C would be a matter of course; hence, there is a reason to suspect that A is true. Abduction is ‘argument to best explanation’.