On Saturday, I participated in a public protest against the law which was voted on July this year which gives our prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, immunity against justice prosecution (here an article on the issue, in Spanish).

Italian political situation is in immense crisis. Opposition is inexistent and Berlusconi controls the majority of journals and broadcast channels. As a citizen I feel really depressed as I am not represented by this current government. Additionally, my options to protest are minimal.

Luckily, there are still Italians like Beppe Grillo, Marco Travaglio, and Antonio DiPietro to cheer me up. DiPietro organized a referendum against this horrible law. On Saturday I signed. Actually, many people signed: 250000 signatures in one day. This gives me hope that there are many Italians like me who do not like to be manipulated and who are able to circumvent the mainstream propaganda.

This is the democracy we have left. It is real democracy because it comes directly from people.

Language class. Once again starting from scratch, but I do agree with the following: “creo que aprender idiomas ayuda a ser m?s tolerante con gente de otras culturas”.

This week end, I was playing with a map visualization. I wanted to show the difference between the penetration of internet and mobile phones for the Mediterranean area. The easiest way to do it is to use a vector-based drawing of Europe. In my case, I started from a free shapefile of the world (ESRI standard for Geographical Information Systems). Then, I used uDIG, an open source GIS, for removing all the unwanted countries. The next step required the conversion of the ShapeFile into a vector drawing. To this end, I used ScapeToad, transforming the GIS file into a Scalable Vector Graphic (.svg). This format can be imported in most vector-based drawing program. I used CorelDraw. In the drawing, I created a color gradient with 10 different levels. I used a gray-scale palette as I felt that was simple enough for communicating the differences between the countries.

The second element that is required to build these visualizations is a good source of data. For this exercise, I used the Internet Usage World Stats, edited by the Miniwatts Marketing Group. The second source is the International Telecommunication Union, ITU.

The result can be seen in the two pictures below. While for Internet penetration we can see a huge difference between Northern Africa and Europe, the same difference is not visible in the number of mobile subscribers. In other words, while Northern African countries are still catching up to provide electricity and internet access to their populations, Cellular technology is almost available to every citizen. These two visualizations are going to be presented in the Global Information Society meeting, held in Marseille, France, next week.

“When anyone says the word ‘nature’, we should ask the question, ‘Which nature?’ Naturally fertilized cabbage? Nature as it is, industrially lacerated? Country life during the 1950s (as it is represented in retrospect today, or as it was represented in days gone by to country folk, or to those who dreamed of country life)? Mountain solitude before the publication of hikers’ guides to deserted valleys? Nature as conceived by natural science? Nature without chemicals? The polished ecological models of interconnectedness? Nature as it is depicted in gardening manuals? Such nature as one years for (peace, a mountain stream, profound contemplation)? As it is praised and priced in the supermarkets of world solitude? Nature as a sight for sore eyes? The beauty of a Tuscan landscape — in other words, a highly cultivated art of nature? Or nature in the wild? The volcano before it erupts? The nature of early cultures, invested with demonic power, subjectivity and the living gods of religion? The primeval forest? Nature conceived as a zoo without cages? As it roars and rages in the cigarette advertisements of the city’s cinemas?”

–Ulrich Beck, “Ecological Politics in an Age of Risk“

Chipchase, J., Persson, P., Piippo, P., Aarras, M., and Yamamoto, T. (2005). Mobile essentials: field study and concepting. In DUX ’05: Proceedings of the 2005 conference on Designing for User eXperience, page 57, New York, NY, USA. AIGA: American Institute of Graphic Arts. [PDF]

————

This paper dscribe a field study of Mobile essentials, which the authors define as the objects most people consider essisntial and carry most of the time whilst out and about. They conducted ‘shadowing’ observations in four different cities in different countries. The research team spent one day with each of the 17 subjects. First they followed the individual during 3-6 hours then withdrew for a couple of hours to adapt predefined questions, and finally interviewed the participant.

They found that three objects can be considered essentials irrespective of culture or genger: keys, cashm and phone. Then they identified nine categories of peripheral MEs: travel support, identification, medical, addition, emotional & spiritual, appearence, entertainement, contact & other information, and payment.

They also identified a number of general strategies people adopt to support carrying: containment, for instance, reduces the mental and physical workload of bringing and remembering multiple MEs. Also connectors cluster small-scale objects (e.g., keychains).

They observed a number of interesting phenomena, like the distance and position of ME objects in relation to the user, defined as range of distribution. E.g., in public transport MEs are kept within line of sight. They also found that MEs are usually forgot because they are not left in the immediate line of sight during the transition phase (e.g., leaving home for work). The primary strategy that people use to stay alert during a transition phase is called the point of reflection, involving the user pausing other activities in order to be able to reflect on what to bring.

I found this nice DIY tutorial on how Canon prototype their cameras.

Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful.

John Maeda

This is the terrarium currently hosting my baby turtles. It reminds me of the good old days of the Biosphera project. Anyway, it was a fun activity building this over the week end.

My friend Joachim sent me a nice tag cloud which was generated by this service: Wordle.net. It is kind of cool how limited are the keywords which describe what I do. Thanks Joachim!

Mauro

A. I. Rudnicky. Mode preference in a simple data-retrieval task. In HLT ’93: Proceedings of the workshop on Human Language Technology, pages 364–369, Morristown, NJ, USA, 1993. Association for Computational Linguistics. [PDF]

———–

The study reported in this paper indicates that users show a preference for speech input despite its inadequacies in terms of classic measures of performance, such as time-to-completion. Subjects in this study based their choice of mode on attributes other than transaction time (quite possibly input time) and were willing to use speech input even if this meant spending a longer time on the task. This preference appears to persist and even increase with continuing use, suggesting that preference for speech cannot be attributed to short-term novelty effects.

This paper also sketches an analysis technique based on FSM (Finite State Machine) representations of human-computer interaction that permits rapid automatic processing of long event streams. The statistical properties of these event streams (as characterized by Markov chains) may provide insight into the types of information that users themselves compute in the course of developing satisfactory interaction strategies.