I watched this movie last night and I have to say that it jumped directly into my ‘Top10’ list. Besides being extremely well done, it gave me strong emotions about what those people may have lived during those terrible days.

The movies is centered on the story of five-star hotel manages Paul Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle) that, as its country descend into madness, sets out to save his family. Suddenly he realize that no international intervention will save the minority Tutsi to be massacred. In that moment, he finds the courage to open the hotel to over 1200 refugee that he strives to protect against a rabid militia at the gates, to which he can only offer his wits and words.

G. Venolia, R. DeLine, and T. LaToza. Software development at microsoft observed: It’s about people … working together. Technical Report MSR-TR-2005-140, Microsoft Corporation, Microsoft Research, Seattle, USA, 2005. [pdf]

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This technical report describes the results of a survey with developers in different business division at Microsoft. One of the biggest issues that emerges from the analysis is the construction and maintenance of a shared representation of the code structure and workings.

According to the authors this was achieved mainly through social networking and personal effort. Additionaly, it was often the case that a business unit elected a code historian, a person that for expertise or time of presence in the group knew more of the others the story of each component of the code.

One of the interesting closing questions of the paper is: how can we support the externalization of a mental representation of the code?

Tags: collaboration tools, Exploratory Data Analysis, interaction design, modeling tool, universal cognitive distance

Recently a popular internet game that traces the travels of dollar bills, has been used by scientists to unveil statistical laws of human travel in the United States, and develop a mathematical description that can be used to model the spread of infectious disease in this country.

… Like viruses, money is transported by people from place to place. They found that the human movements follow what are known as universal scaling laws (from local to regional to long-distance scales). Using the game data, they developed a powerful mathematical theory that describes the observed movements of travelers amazingly well over distances from just a few kilometers to a few thousand. The study represents a major breakthrough for the mathematical modeling of the spread of epidemics.

Reading this article I remembered my idea of the ThinkPill project. The analogy I saw is that, to certain extent, we can assimilate the circulation of an idea to that of a virus. So a nice project would be really to map the diffusion of an idea on the planetary geography.

Of course an idea is retained and assimilated for what the carrier perceives and understand of that idea. The context where the carrier lives is also very important to determine how the idea is slightly modified and adapted by the culture or personal situations.

Moreover, this mapping platform would be a terrific tool for tackling this issues from an ethnographical and multi-cultural perspective.

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Tags: context, ecology, education, ethnography, learning technology, map algorithms, mobile learning, modeling tool, pedagogy, politics, psychogeography, inter-culturalism, society, ubiquitous computing, ubiquitous game

Yeah, the big news of this week is that Nokia released the code of its port of Python for the series 60 [see also]. The port is now hosted at sourceforge and the latest version has been updated to 1.3.1 which improves stability, audio support, SMS parsing and a lot more.

What can you do with Python on a phone? A lot! You should have a look at Jürgen Scheible generous tutorials on how to access the basic functionalities of the phone and use these small bricks to build very sophisticated applications. Amazing!

Jürgen, used Python in his project MobileLenin and interactive art exhibition where visitors could vote and interact with a piece using the mobile phone.

On a side I am hoping to use Python into my PhD thesis. I am planning to have a Google Map client that allow the user to annotate the maps adding small messages that can shared with friends. At the moment the script I have is very basic but I am planning to improve it and to post some more about it in the next days.

Tags: open source, series60, Python

These are my running notes of Day 2 here at LIFT06. A full resume is going to follow shortly.

The quote of the day is:

Easyjet made Europe much more than what the EU did.

Tags: lift06

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X. Comtesse pushed today these two concepts on the role of people in the new economy:

1. TransformActors: people who by using new algorithm are able to transform what has been previously done by machines or organizations. Example. Marc Bürki who started a bank after his engineering degree at EPFL but had never worked in a bank. The same goes for Amazon: Jeff Bezos had never worked in a book shop.
2. ConsumActors: as said earlier, it’s when the users are empowered by the company/platforms and clients have to do part of the job, as with low-cost airline companies such as easyjet.

I like this idea of being able of transform old practices into new digital/practices. Now what I am not sure is whether this belongs only to people professionally involved with this. I am pretty sure that this revolution pertains to the people. So actually people that transform will be the same people that will consume. What I think, is that the whole consumer model is getting questioned here.

Tags: lift06

lift06 – Lift06 – LIFT06

LIFT is about teaming talented observers, explorers, and builders with people whose work depends on understanding current challenges and creative solutions presented by emerging technologies. Attendees will face cutting edge business models, bold predictions, radical thinking — ideas to inject into their own part of the planet.

LIFT has a simple goal: connect people who are passionate about new applications of technology and propel their conversations into the broader world to improve life and work.

These are my running notes of Day 1. Enjoy!

Tags: blogs, citizen journalism, collaboration tools, context, education, environment, information visualization, interaction design, mobile learning, p2p, pedagogy, politics, lift06, search engine, society, tagging, tangible interface, usability, wierd

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This is just a short note with which I want to summarize some interesting facts about Italian economics that are quite shocking to me, as a native Italian. This post was prompted by two amazing articles about the Italian economical situation: the first, is a report of The Economist on Italy, titled in Italian “Addio, Dolce Vita” (26th November, 2005). The second is an article on Time titled “Twilight in Italy” (5th of December, 2005). We can say that the two articles describe the Italian from a macro view to a micro focus.

1st fact: Italy weak point is the huge number of SMEs that compose almost the totality of the economic system.

For ages the internal political campaign was the motto: “small is beautiful!” And at some point this was also working (cfr. the gold age of ‘il sorpasso’ of 1987). But nowadays that the european barriers are down, most of the SMEs have not the scale, the founding, or the commercial know-how to become global players. What these small companies produce is beautiful but not so technological sophisticated that can prevent an industrial replication. Therefore, the economic structure of Italy is almost perfectly shaped for an attach by China.

2nd fact: the Italian share market is too small for the dimension of the national economy.

The number of companies that have shares on the market is less that 300. This reflects on how the companies understand the current trends of globalization and international markets. It is clear that to be competitive in this new era, a company has to grow to a certain size that allows exports in every part of the world and to be able to produce the products away from Italy (where the production costs are prohibitive).

3rd fact: entering in the euro zone was a complete disaster for the Italian economy.

It is clear that in the past with the devaluation of the currency we could stay competitive against the neighbors. Now that we cannot do the trick any more we are suffering. It is also clear to me that if we were to continue like that for the next 10 years, we could have found ourselves in the same conditions of Argentina.

Tags: Italy, politics

HyperSuper is an ‘intelligent’ news aggregator. There is no clear explanation on the site of the inner clustering mechanisms. However, Mikkom, the author, wrote me that he is going to use CNG (Context Network Graph) to cluster the news. Supa Cool!

Tags: clustering, google, information retrieval, spreading activation, text data mining

This is a simple list-like visualization that present the user a map of related keywords for one given keyword. On the site there is no description of how the map is constructed.

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Tags: google, information visualization, spatial clustering