alberto pepe

hello

2012-04-02T11:08:00.000-07:00

My name is Alberto Pepe. I am a PhD student at the Graduate School of Information of the University of California, Los Angeles. I also work within the statistics and data practices group at the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS). I work with social, scientific and scholarly data. I am interested in network theory, statistical mechanics, information flows, collaborative environments and data visualization. This is my blog and personal site.

To see my photos, visit my flickr page. You can track my reading, bookmarking and listening habits at goodreads, del.icio.us and last.fm. I am on facebook, here.

Some of my friends and collaborators:
anil bawa cavia, johan bollen, christine borgman, leila chirayath, lilly nguyen, veronica olivotto, andrew price, marko rodriguez, basil singer, ramesh srinivasan, herbert van de sompel.

Classes I am taking this quarter: (past classes)
Critical studies of architecture with Dana Cuff
Geographic thought: "belonging" with Michael Curry
Reading group: Social Studies of Science and Technology

Upcoming conferences that I plan to attend: (past conferences)
May 28-29. Salon de l'information numerique. Paris, France.
Jun 18-20. International Conference on e-Social Science. Manchester, UK.
Jun 20-21. ICT & Society. Salzburg, Austria.
Aug 20-23. Social Studies of Science (4S). Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

guess who?

2008-06-01T19:25:00.000-07:00

Here's a fun game. I collected some usage statistics (audience reports) from Quantcast for the following websites:

hillaryclinton.com
johnmccain.com
barackobama.com
(here listed in no particular order).

For each website, I present below selected demographics of the average website users for the month of April 2008. The graphs for each website are (from left to right) gender, age and ethnicity (100 = internet average).

Match each candidate to his/her web demographic group...

#1.

#2.

#3.

P.S. Quantcast collects demographic data from advertisers, publishers, ISPs and advertising networks. To find out more about their method, check the FAQs.

community structures

2008-04-28T15:46:00.000-07:00

My latest article with Marko Rodriguez to appear in the Journal of Informetrics. You can read the preprint on arXiv.

Title: On the relationship between the structural and socioacademic communities of a coauthorship network.

Abstract: This article presents a study that compares detected structural communities in a coauthorship network to the socioacademic characteristics of the scholars that compose the network. The coauthorship network was created from the bibliographic record of a multi-institution, interdisciplinary research group focused on the study of sensor networks and wireless communication. Four different community detection algorithms were employed to assign a structural community to each scholar in the network: leading eigenvector, walktrap, edge betweenness and spinglass. Socioacademic characteristics were gathered from the scholars and include such information as their academic department, academic affiliation, country of origin, and academic position. A Pearson's $\chi^2$ test, with a simulated Monte Carlo, revealed that structural communities best represent groupings of individuals working in the same academic department and at the same institution. A generalization of this result suggests that, even in interdisciplinary, multi-institutional research groups, coauthorship is primarily driven by departmental and institutional affiliation.

Venue: Journal of Informetrics (in press) ISSN: 1751-1577, Elsevier.

(im)mobility

2008-04-25T11:36:00.000-07:00

(the above spread in original size, here)

Ludwig Wittgenstein famously declared that the best places in which to conduct philosophical investigations are train stations. This declaration emerges from the very transitory and neutral nature of train stations as simultaneously places of departure and a places of arrival: “places” and “non-places”. How would his idea translate to airports?

The very first airports, or aerodromes, were more about the glamour of flying than about traveling. Air travel provided a new sense of ubiquity. For many years, flying was considered an art, rather than just a means of transportation and early airport designs reflected this, by allocating space for restaurants, swimming pools, and balconies to provide spectators with the best viewing experience [1]. With the explosion of air travel, the architecture of airports has fundamentally changed to accommodate other more compelling needs: functionality, security, and very importantly - speed. Time has become more important than place. The dichotomy of place/non-place still holds for airports, but beyond spatiality, it is very much linked to temporality. On the one hand, airports are places. Frequent travelers quickly become acquainted with their designs, their services, their standardized modus operandi. They develop familiarity out of the immobility of habits and routines [2]. On the other hand, airports are non-places. They revolve around the notion of mobility. Paradoxically, a functional airport is an airport in which planes, passengers and luggage spend as little time as possible in it. Airports have become “machines for processing people, airplanes, automobiles, cargo and luggage”, “logistical nightmares”, “depersonalized wastelands” [3].

How can we rethink airports at this intersection of place and non-place? Is it possible to redesign airports with both mobility and immobility in mind? The recently opened Terminal 3 of Beijing airport, designed by Norman Foster, reflects the need to explore this convergence. Rather than basing his design on previous airports, Foster has rethought the airport from scratch. Built in the shape of a large dragon, the largest airport building in the world accommodates 80 million passengers per year, processes 20,000 pieces of luggage per hour and transfers passengers between terminals on a high-speed “automated people mover”. The airport is aimed at mobility, functionality, and security. Yet, besides logistics and mobility, Foster’s airport is also a “place”, designed with familiarity, situatedness and sustainability in mind. Its navigation is highly intuitive and straightforward: passengers easily roam around the terminal as if the building itself “were guiding” them around [3].

The idea of “place” permeates from the description that Foster himself gives to the airport calling it “a symbol of place and togetherness, both welcoming and uplifting” [4]. Finally, Foster defines it “a celebration of the thrill and poetry of flight” [4], reminding us of the traditional nature of airports, not simply as “sites of continual fluidity, but as places to visit and spend time in” [1]

References
[1] Adey, P. (2008). Architectural geographies of the airport balcony. Human Geography 90 (1)

[2] Tuan, Yi-Fu. (1984) In place, out of place. Geoscience and Man 24:3-10.

[3] Goldberger, P. (2008) Situation terminal. New Yorker. April 21

[4] Foster and Partners Website. www.fosterandpartners.com News: 26 February 2008.

façades

2008-04-19T17:06:00.000-07:00

I am taking a seminar taught by Dana Cuff: Critical studies in Architecture and Urban Design. Topics include catastrophe theory, trauma architecture, practices and pragmatism, social construction and the "everyday".

The above is a book spread that I assembled around the topic "transformation narrative". It is about the perception of human presence in interactive media, such as the giant faces featured in the Crown Fountain in the Millenium Park of Chicago.

The above book spread, in larger size, can be found here

optimism/pessimism

2008-04-11T15:19:00.000-07:00

The Allensbach Institute, in Germany, has assessed public levels of hope, fear and skepticism since 1949. Each year in December they ask 2,000 German respondents: "is it with hopes or with fears that you enter the new year?". The image above comes from a New Year card that was circulated at the beginning of 2008. It shows the trend of hope from 1988 to 2007. More results available at their site (in German).

Somehow related to the study of conjectures and mementos.

Thanks to Dean Aimée Dorr for the card.

AAAI Spring Symposium 2008

2008-04-03T17:42:00.000-07:00

Last week I attended the AAAI Spring Symposium - a conference on Artificial Intelligence, held at Stanford University. My paper with Johan Bollen on future mood assessment was in the Emotion, Personality and Social Behavior track. For some reason, the organizers kept each track separate from all others, and made it difficult for attendees to see talks in other tracks. Still, I managed to see some posters and talks in Creative Intelligent Systems, Semantic Scientific Knowledge and Social Information Processing. This is my report on some of the most interesting things I bumped into:

Hiroshi Ishiguro presented his geminoid, a teleoperated android that resembles himself. He investigates the emotional behavior of children (including his daughter) that interact with it. Also seen on Wired.

Ian Horswill discussed ways to model emotional attachment into cognitive agent architectures. He had a demo with children playing, fighting and hugging their parents.

Antonio Camurri presented his work in musical informatics: empathy, entrainment and gesture in music performance. His current work at Infomus and Casa Paganini intersects very much with the performing arts. He is also organizing a conference on new interfaces for musical expressions.

Klara Nahrstedt (et al.): Computational Model of Human Creativity in Dance Choreography

John Barnden: Unparalleled Creativity in Metaphor

Rob Saunders: Towards a Computational Model of Creative Cultures (artificial creativity)

data loss: a modern tragedy

2008-03-25T13:17:00.000-07:00

2 days ago the hard drive on my MacBook "failed". I do not like very much the word "fail" to describe hardware breaking, but that's the word that the Genius at the Applestore's Genius Bar kept using to describe my situation. It seems to me that "failure" is just too soft for such a tragic event.

My laptop was just sitting at home, sleeping. When I tried to wake it up, it froze and a restart would give me the image above. Question mark on a folder. Where are the folders? Where are the data? My hard drive broke for no apparent reason and I lost all my data in un lampo. That's a much more genuine description of what happened. Geniuses should just say: "Sorry my friend, you just lost all your data! Bang!".

The work I do is very much data-driven. I work with datasets of all kinds, produce graphs and visuals, and, very importantly, I am writing papers all the time. Also, I often write about data: data practices, data access, data preservation and so on. I am aware of how unreliable hard drives are. Still, I am lazy and until a month ago, I would just backup my data every 3-4 months (at the best). Every PhD student knows that losing 3-4 months worth of work triggers suicidal tendencies.

Luckily a month ago I decided to start backing up my most crucial data online. I installed Mozy, a small application that automatically backs up your data every day. You get 2 Gigabytes for free and that's what I have. Yes, I lost all my music, some movies and some data that I wish I still had, but I just managed to get 1.5 Gigs of papers and datasets back. And it feels so good.

Seriously, if you are reading this and you do not back up your data everyday, you'd better act now. It takes 10 minutes to get Mozy (or an equivalent backup tool) up and running. I know that this totally sounds like an advertisement for Mozy, but it did save my last 3 months of work AND for free. I owe those guys a dinner.

redefining "community"

2008-02-28T15:53:00.000-08:00

Yesterday morning, I was sitting in traffic on the 10/405 freeway interchange, on my way to UCLA.

As usual, I was listening to KPCC - Southern California's Public Radio. KPCC is supported by the public - so, from time to time, radio hosts remind listeners that they need listener contributions in order to survive. On AirTalk, Larry Mantle had a point: listeners should support KPCC not only for the personal enjoyment they get out of listening, but also because a public radio like KPCC contributes to informing communities through a public independent media source. He made few examples of communities and (involuntarily, I think) he referred to fellow drivers stuck in traffic, in nearby sections of the freeway - as "communities". This is really pushing the concept of a "community" a little too far. But maybe not for L.A.

Being stuck in traffic on a freeway is not fun. Way too many lanes. Stop-and-go. Stop-and-go. But the freeway interchange is different. There's only two lanes. Also, when there's traffic, you go so slow (if you move at all) that you can't avoid looking at other drivers. They're so close to you. Freeway interchanges are special places. They shape new, car-centered communities. Post-urbanism meets social networks. Freeway interchanges are intimate. Probably not as intimate and interactive as this or this kind of car-centered community, but still.

Photo by veronica

more conjectures

2008-02-18T12:44:00.000-08:00

Along the lines of previous work with emails to the future, this is a visual summary of a) two specific public mood indicators towards the future: happiness and depression, b) excerpts from hand-selected conjecture- and memento-charged emails, c) future predicted and scheduled events retrieved from wikipedia. It covers a 20-year period: 2015-2035. It is part of my ongoing project with Johan Bollen.

To read the poster a little better, you might want to check this version.

The poster will be on display at UCLA (Covel Commons, Northridge Room) on Thursday next week, 28 February 2009, during the iConference.

conjectures and mementoes

2008-01-27T19:37:00.000-08:00

After the frivolous publication in TIME, here is a (somehow more) serious effort, with Johan Bollen:

Title: Between conjecture and memento: shaping a collective emotional perception of the future

Abstract: Large scale surveys of public mood are costly and often impractical to perform. However, the web is awash with material indicative of public mood such as blogs, emails, and web queries. Inexpensive content analysis on such extensive corpora can be used to assess public mood fluctuations. The work presented here is concerned with the analysis of the public mood towards the future. Using an extension of the Profile of Mood States questionnaire, we have extracted mood indicators from 10,741 emails submitted in 2006 to futureme.org, a web service that allows its users to send themselves emails to be delivered at a later date. Our results indicate long-term optimism toward the future, but medium-term apprehension and confusion.

Venue: Proceedings of the AAAI 2008 Spring Symposium on Emotion, Personality, and Social Behavior.

I will present it at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Symposium on March 28 at Stanford University. You can download the fulltext at the arXiv. This is loosely related to the balloon project that happened at UCLA a while ago.

mortadella

2008-01-24T23:45:00.000-08:00

[la classe politica] spesso spreca belle parole a proposito del bene comune, dell'interesse del paese, dei bisogni dei cittadini...ma in realta', cosa viene fatto veramente? Niente. L'unica cosa che conta e' la poltrona per la prossima legislatura. Un altro scranno dove mettere il culone. Per godere i benefici e le protezioni che ne derivano. Immunita', soldi. Passare da sinistra a destra non e' un dramma. Da destra a sinistra. Da sinistra al centro. Dal centro al basso. Da li a qui. Da qui a ..fanculo!

da oggi piove. e non c'é nemmeno un governo a cui dare la colpa!. Boris Mangano, 24 Gennaio 2008.

Pessimismo e fastidio.

why i flirt

2008-01-19T18:29:00.000-08:00

Hilarious. The full article is on TIME magazine.

Newton & Helen Mayer Harrison

2008-01-11T16:13:00.000-08:00

Newton & Helen Mayer Harrison have worked for over thirty years with biologists, ecologists and urban planners to initiate collaborative dialogues to uncover ideas and solutions which support biodiversity and community development.

They just gave a talk at UC Irvine (also broadcasted at UCLA) as part of a biweekly seminar I am part of on human complex systems. Their talk was titled "Public Culture and Sustainable Practices: Peninsula Europe from an ecodiversity perspective, posing questions to Complexity Scientists". They introduced their work on Peninsula Europe, focusing on watershed restoration and global warming, Future Garden, on endangered meadows, the Serpentine Lattice, on the reclamation and preservation of the forests of Pacific Northwest, and the the Green Heart Vision, an urban planning project that prevented construction of 650,000 houses in the Groene Hart area in Holland.

The Harrisons are artists. But they use art to drive ecological and cultural change. Their work necessarily blends urban planning, sociology, anthropology, ecology, biology, and poetry for the study of human, cultural and ecological systems and their interaction. They are historians, diplomats, ecologists, investigators, emissaries and art activists.

And their talks are fun to watch. They are old school. Yes, a bit clumsy when using digital devices. And they talk a lot at the same time, interrupting each other - it's like a talk show. But their words are beautiful.

When asked about his political views in the light of U.S. presidential elections, Newton Harrison referred to politics as the "lowest order of collective behavior". Genius.

(parts in italic are taken from here)

photoless brazil

2008-01-06T20:44:00.000-08:00

I just got back from Brazil! I carried my camera for 2 weeks across the states of Rio de Janeiro, Espiritu Santo, and Bahia: Buzios, Vitoria, Porto Seguro, Arraial d'Ajuda, Salvador da Bahia, Morro de Sao Paulo and Rio. It was great. The camera was with me all the time - on bumpy trips on planes, trains, buses, cars, catamarans, speedboats and funiculars. But I didn't feel like taking any photos - and didn't - except for this one I took right before leaving, at sunset at the Rio airport. Too bad - I was hoping to come back with a bunch of them. It's not that I felt unsafe, inappropriate or too obtrusive to take out the camera. It just didn't click. I guess Brazil is too good to be on photo.

search term narcissism

2007-12-17T19:48:00.000-08:00

the image above is from google analytics, traffic sources. it shows how people got to your site, i.e. what search terms they typed into Google.

now the top hit is my name. that's probably me, googling myself. "enrique ugarte" is a fine tango accordionist - still i was pretty surprised to find him here. "accumulating myspace friends" is also pretty cool. that's what i do after all. but hey. the last one: that's the one that makes my world spin around.

(i swear it wasn't me)

that's not right

2007-11-13T16:46:00.000-08:00

the ad above showed up in my facebook news feed the other day. NO - this ad is neither contextual nor unobtrusive. and YES - a company quoted at $15 billion should choose funding sources more responsibly (see GOOD magazine for example). Free Wendy burgers for a whole year is nowhere near responsible.

social and scholarly data mining: two events

2007-11-04T21:26:00.001-08:00

My good friend and colleague Johan Bollen is at UCLA this week. He is the organizer of a great workshop on social data mining and knowledge building hosted by IPAM, the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics at UCLA. The workshop runs Monday through Friday this week - 5-9 November, 2007 in Room 1200 of the IPAM building. Topics range from social network analysis to collective decision making and from information visualization to human complex systems. Pretty ace.

Johan will also present at the Information Studies Colloquium Series, to be held on Thursday November 8, 2007 at 3:00 p.m. in Room 111 of the GSEIS Building, UCLA. The talk will address the problems related to citation data as measures of scientific impact, and it will review newer types of impact metrics based on usage data. Come along!

P.S. I just got back from a short trip to Cambodia/Bangkok. Most of the photos I took are on my flickr page.

advice from a tree

2007-09-23T04:07:00.000-07:00

Stand Tall and Proud
Sink your roots deeply into the Earth
Reflect the light of a greater source
Think long term
Go out on a limb
Remember your place among all living beings
Embrace with joy the changing seasons
For each yields its own abundance
The Energy and Birth of Spring
The Growth and Contentment of Summer
The Wisdom to let go of leaves in the Fall
The Rest and Quiet Renewal of Winter

Feel the wind and the sun
And delight in their presence
Look up at the moon that shines down upon you
And the mystery of the stars at night.
Seek nourishment from the good things in life
Simple pleasures
Earth, fresh air, light

Be content with your natural beauty
Drink plenty of water
Let your limbs sway and dance in the breezes
Be flexible
Remember your roots

Enjoy the view!

Advice from a tree is a book by Ilan Shamir. I met him a couple of weeks ago, at the four corners bluegrass festival in Pagosa Spings, Colorado.

google hands

2007-09-14T16:16:00.000-07:00

The Google Book Library Project keeps attracting more and more academic libraries: Cornell, Harvard, NYPL, Princeton, Stanford, Ghent, the UCs... like it or not - they are gonna get everyone. Clearly, there are some issues with the information model proposed by Google. In the "web world" (cf. with Karl Popper's World III), Google gets a lot of criticism for having imposed itself as a hegemonic power and the near-unique gateway and discovery mechanism for web resources. As Google is a stock-quoted corporate company, this is not cool. The Ippolita Group has nicely summarized the ontological, epistemological and political implications of PageRank's world domination in the great book "The dark side of Google" (only available in Italian, I'm afraid - c'è qualcuno interessato a darmi una mano a tradurlo?)

The recent invasion of more scholarly domains - via Google Scholar and Google Book - raises even more concerns. However, criticism is not aiming much Google Scholar, a mere extension of the traditional Google search, using open protocols (OAI-PMH and OpenURL) to harvest and rank scholarly literature, as it is Google Book Search. Why? Google Book uses the same, user-friendly, widely-known interface of Google Web Search to offer, in reality, a different type of service. The way that traditional Web Search works is that Google indexes website contents, calculate some metrics and ranking to then provide pointers to relevant websites - content does not sit on Google servers (other than recently cached pages). In Book Search, instead, Google hosts (owns) the entire book - content sits on Google servers. This smells, because Google, though providing free access (beware, *free* not open access) becomes the owner of the book (only when the book is out-of-copyright, you're allowed to download entire content).

In the past few weeks, I have been bumping into a lot of commentary about the Google Library Project and its discontents: the overall quality of its service, the faulty metadata, the strong partnership with academic libraries and the scanning errors. This last one is, probably, the least important issue, but certainly the more fun. I downloaded two books yesterday (The trial and death of Socrates and The Integrative action of the autonomic nervous system) and I was lucky enough to find two scanned hands in each one of them. I actually don't mind this. In fact, I am quite happy that a human component is taking such a strong part in the digitization process: turning the pages. These busy hands (probably grad students?) are mimicking, in full, the act of reading a book. They make digital books smell (a bit) like real books. These hands might end up trapped in these books forever. I say keep them there. I like them.

P.S. Apparently, Google apologizes about the mistakes: they are taking every possible step to correct them. Damn. It's funny how, the scanned page above, already contains an "APOLOGY" in the page header.

elections 2008: a myspace odissey

2007-08-19T20:07:00.000-07:00

Myspace has recently launched impact, an online space for U.S. presidential candidates to show how web-savvy and socially connected they are. Most candidates (15 as of today) have created their myspace profiles and quickly started accumulating "friends". Clinton, for example, has 132,191 friends, McCain 40,890 and Obama a record 167,175. Giuliani has a private profile: you have to add him as a friend to access his page.

At first glance, this initiative might appear modern and in line with the current social networking fever: myspace can be thought of another campaigning tool that has, in a way, a more democratic and less obtrusive feel than many other media vehicles. After all, everyone is allowed to open up myspace accounts and politicians will do anything to reach voters. However, looking at things in a little more detail, you realize that nothing about myspace impact is actually fresh.

Myspace is no longer simply a service for underground bands to showcase their music or for friends to connect online. Recently, it was acquired by a media giant that performs business in a "Citizen Kane" fashion - the way of the tv, the radio and the newspapers. The profiles of these politicians thus exist in this paradigm, not in the open world of the social web. They are sad and 100 years old.

When referring to social networking sites, Danah Boyd talks of "loss of context", referring to the fact that being myspace friends does not represent any longer a meaningful connection. Therefore, a user's myspace account loses context as the user keeps adding friends with whom there exist neither a virtual nor a physical relationship. For this reason, myspace cannot be longer used to perform a relevant social network analysis: it has no context. The very popular (and lame) comment "thanks for the add" is just a result of this. If Danah laments user profiles progressively losing context, the myspace profiles of politicians go way beyond: they are born out of context. For example - Mr Giuliani: what is the rationale behind accepting my friend request? Do you really think I would vote for you? I am not even a registered voter in this country! Or, Mr Obama: did you manually accept all the 167,175 friend requests you received, or is there a grad student in the backstage clicking away "accept" for you?

Browsing these candidates' myspace profiles reveals another - even more disgusting - feature: all the comments left by users on their profiles are supportive and affectionate. Stuff like: "Hillary, you rock", "I love you Rudy, you got my vote". This is pornography. The great Zizek often refers to movies as "pornographic" when their plot and screenplay are constructed according to the conventional cinematic narrative: you know what to expect next - just like in porn movies - you may get a couple of unexpected twists, but in the end, you know where it's all going. Politicians' myspace profiles are pornographic in the same way.

Dear politicians,
you seem not to be fully using the enormous outreach potential of the web.
Please shut down your myspace profiles and open up a blog, express your ideas, document your political decisions, use social tools on the web to accept criticism from ANYONE. Be creative and push your profiles beyond the barriers of myspace's profile generators. I cannot stand your myspace banners, widgets and ringtones any more. You are not my "friends".

catching colds and missing planes

2007-07-12T09:32:00.000-07:00

do you like tragic travel stories? i've got a fresh one just for you.

it all started in charlottesville, va. i got there last saturday, to attend and present at a conference on visual media. as i flew in from europe, i landed at washington dulles airport and then rented a car to get to charlottesville, which is about 2 hours away. the conference was at UVa. it was hot and humid outside, freezing inside the conference hall. after 2 days of conference, on tuesday morning, i woke up, checked out from the hotel and at 9.30am I was ready to jump in the car i rented, drive back to the airport, to catch a 12.45pm flight from dulles to jfk. the car would not start. panic. i called some car assistance service and they managed to jump-start it and i was on the road by 10am. 35$ and maybe i could still make it to my 12.45pm flight.

i thought it was a good idea to speed up a little, to make sure that i would get there on time. and bang. woop woop that's the sound of the police. $165 and "drive safely". so i thought, now i'll take it easy. if i make it, i make it. if not, i'll take the next flight. i took the dulles airport exit at 12.05pm. check in closed at 12.15pm. i said, i'm gonna drive straight to departures, park outside the jetblue entrance and check in at the machines real quick. and then bring the car back to enterprise. i tried. but this really funky parking officer on one of those segways would not let me leave the car unattended in front of departures, not even for 20 seconds. oh, did i mention that since i jumpstarted the car, i could not switch the engine off? oh yeah. the assistance guy told me not to switch it off in no circumstance. so there i am, trying to convince this guy that i really need to get on that plane and that check in would take 20 seconds. really. just 20 seconds and i could see the automatic check-in machines from outside. they were right there. just 10 meters away. ready to produce a boarding card for me in 3 seconds. but no. he smiled, he laughed and he would say no, no way. you can't walk in. there are rules. and he would keep swinging around back and forth left and right on his segway. i should have taken a photo of him. really. he had a helmet and the biggest smile i have ever seen. genuine.

so ok. it was 12.10pm. 5 minutes left. let's take the car back to the rental office and see what happens. after all, the offices are only 2 minutes away. and jetblue are notorious for being the most laid-back airline. sometimes they managed to make me hop on impossible-to-make flights. i take the car back. i try to tell them that the car had a problem in the morning and had to be jumpstarted. they want to know more but i say come on come on take me to the airport quick. they did. they also charged me for gas. i could not fill up the tank cause i could not switch off the engine. remember? so bim! $60 extra.

i get to the jetblue check-in desks at 12.22. 7 minutes late. the jetblue guy tries to help. for what he can. he says i cannot make it to the 12.45pm flight cause it's closing already. he puts me on the next flight to ny, the 5.25pm to jfk. that's $25 changing fee and he tells me to try to catch the 12.45 flight anyway. run run run to gate b24. maybe you can catch it. i get there at 12.50pm. and i see the plane doors closing in front me at the gate. planes that should be delayed are somehow never delayed.

so i wait. i buy myself some 4 hours of wireless connectivity, i sit down and i do some work on my laptop. i get into some sort of email writing coma for 3 hours. then i decide to go check the status of my 525pm flight to nyc. cancelled. and there's people everywhere queueing up in lines with blurry endings. will they put us on the next available flight? it is at 8pm and it is also cancelled. bummer. it seems like all airlines are canceling flights to jfk.

so i say the hell with planes. i woke up at 8am. it is 5pm. and dc-ny is only 2.5 hours on a train. what am i doing here? is a plane really worth it when you end up spending extra hours getting to far away airports, checking in, showing passports, going through security and smelling like airplane seats? i left the airport and got a taxi to union station in d.c. $60. then got a train ticket to nyc's penn station. $90. in a nutshell, i should have spent $0 and gotten to nyc by 1.30pm. instead, i spent a good portion of my student salary in 10 hours and it is getting dark already. but these 90 bucks were the best-invested money of the day.

union station is for reals. it is sylish and smells like jazz. i talked to a homeless guy outside, i told him my story and he said: well done on choosing the train. you are italian. and italians are real people. and union station is for real people. he was right. train stations rock. airports suck. trains and stations are more sincere. they represent a way of traveling in which travelers savor the journey as much as the destination they are visiting. i am writing this from a comfortable window seat on a very tranquil train coach. listening to chet baker. many people around me are sleeping. lighting is osft and diffuse. travelers in a train are more beautiful.

i guess i'll go through life
catching colds and missing _planes_
everything happens to me
(Chet Baker)

on knowledge commons

2007-07-09T15:18:00.000-07:00

A book review I recently wrote for UCLA's Interactions Journal. Can be found here.

Understanding knowledge as a commons: From theory to practice edited by Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007. 320 pp. ISBN 0-262-08357-4.

In Binta y la Gran Idea(Manso, 2004), a warmhearted short film nominated at the 79th Academy Awards, the main character, Agnile, a local fisherman from a small village in Senegal, learns from a friend that most modern fishing equipment used in Europe allows you to catch in one day, "more fish than you could eat in your whole life". Puzzled by this finding, Agnile humbly writes to the local government:“if we follow the path shown to us by the First World, we risk that the children of our children will have no fish, no trees, no air...”

The preoccupation of Agnile - the dissipation of a common good due to its over-exploitation by groups and individuals pursuing their best interest - is the tragedy of the commons. This theory, memorably depicted by Garrett Hardin (1968),is the thread that conceptually ties together the chapters of Understanding knowledge as a commons: From theory to practice, a collection of essays edited by Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom. Contributors to this book include leading scholars in domains such as intellectual property, open source software, electronic publishing, digital preservation and civic engagement. Their essays present an analysis of the knowledge commons from their particular perspectives and in relation to Hardin's tragedy. The book is divided into three sections: the study of the knowledge commons, their protection, and their production.

What are knowledge commons? In the first section of the book, Hess and Ostrom provide a very thorough introduction and analysis of the concept of knowledge as a commons, appropriate for readers of all levels of familiarity with this field. Remarkably, they collocate the notion of knowledge in the context of more tangible realms, such as oceans and forests, which have traditionally been regarded as common-pool resources. Their analysis, however, tends to capture communities and their knowledge generation mechanisms in too great detail - something that risks undermining the very open-ended nature of the knowledge commons. For example, their diagnostic study tool (the Institutional Analysis and Development framework) primarily takes into account traditional scholarly communication channels, not leaving enough space for novel forms of collaborative knowledge generation and dissemination. However, with David Bollier's contribution (The Growth of the Commons Paradigm), the concept of knowledge commons is reformulated, in particular with respect to its most recent evolution. Bollier does a thorough job of presenting a new cultural form of knowledge, leveraged by the Internet and by the collaborative effort of peer communities in a collective, global, distributed information space.

The protection of the knowledge commons is the focus of the second section of the book. Is networked digital information automatically synonymous with visible, accessible and secure information? Nancy Kranich outlines ways in which technological handling of digital resources might lead to information enclosure and undermine free speech and open access. Donald Waters takes a step further along the knowledge generation chain, providing pragmatic solutions for the concrete preservation of knowledge commons. In both pieces, the authors provide feasible solutions to the tragedy of the commons, however it is with James Boyle's essay (Mertonianism Unbound?) that the reader receives a genuine, pragmatic approach to the first and foremost form of information enclosure: copyright. Identifying the success of the web to the lack of formal restraints, such as governing bodies and intellectual property rights, Boyle delivers a provocative and engaging account of the modern tragedy of knowledge commons, not from the detached perspective of an information expert, but from the intimate view of a knowledge user and producer.

The last section of the book deals with a more pragmatic aspect of the knowledge commons: how to build them. Peter Suber's jargon-free essay (Creating an Intellectual Commons through Open Access) addresses anyone involved in the scholarly publishing chain: from authors to publishers, and from faculties to repository owners. It is a concrete how-to guide on ways to make scholarly material open access, immediately. This section also includes compelling chapters by Peter Levine (Collective Action, Civic Engagement and the Knowledge Commons) and Charles Schweik (Free/Open-Source Software and a Commons in Science). Levine and Schweik enrich the concept of knowledge commons with a very fresh ingredient: collective cognition. They focus on knowledge collectively contributed by a) ordinary citizens, using participatory technological devices, and b) scientists and engineers, developing software and scientific commons using collaborative platforms. As this section is primarily concerned with concrete scenarios, the pieces by Shubha Gosh and Wendy Pradt Lougee, on the role of intellectual property rights and the changing role of scholarly communication, respectively, would have found a better collocation among the earlier chapters of the book.

Overall, the essays of this book exhaustively cover all the aspects relative to the generation, management and preservation of knowledge as commons. Despite some inconsistencies in the book's organization, the essays, altogether, offer a crisp account, demonstrating that when properly generated and used as a common-pool resource, digital knowledge can overcome the traps - the “tragedy” - regularly associated with other types of commons. One final critique: throughout the book, the terms knowledge commons and information commons, as well as open access and free access, are often used interchangeably. Although largely acceptable within the scope of this book, Information Science scholars are likely to find such amalgams a bit uncomfortable.

References

Hardin, G. (1968). The tragedy of the commons. Science 162, pp. 1243-1248
Manso, L. (Producer), & Fesser, J. (Director). (2004). Binta y la Gran Idea. [Motion picture]. Madrid, Spain: Peliculas Pendelton, Tus Ojos.

spam lovin

2007-06-25T18:08:00.000-07:00

I was recently looking for someone to sublet my room in Venice, CA for three months over the summer. I put an advert on craigslist, just like everyone else does, and I found someone very quickly. Among the tens of emails that I got in a couple of weeks, I also received about 20-30 craigspam emails that (made it through the Gmail spam filter) and I ended up keeping, for kicks.

I was reading them now and noticed that they all look pretty much the same. In particular, it looks like spammers are often girls (or uncles writing for their nephews); they are from the UK (London, especially Wood Green) or Spain, but they currently live in Africa (especially Nigeria); they also work with hiv/aids patients or network engineering; they play the piano or the organ and love hockey games. They are also obsessed with numbered lists. If you happen to be looking for a room on craigslist and fit in the description above, you better lie about yourself! Or you'll probably be mistaken for a spammer.

I made a mish-mash of the most common and hilarious sentences that I found in my inbox. It is a very good representation of the average spam email that you are likely to get if you post an ad on craigslist these days:

hello,
how are u doing? hope fine? if so, i appreciate it so much.

Here is all I can say about my self for now. I am 32 years old female and I work full time, Monday through Friday. I was born in UK. WOOD GREEN, but I was brought up in England . Am a medical practisional, a doctor to be precised but presently in West Africa (Nigeria) for a program which will be ending soon. I work in Mildmay , so we travel alot through this because am one of the perfect workers of the hospital , now i am now in Africa, what we do is to give medicine and to advice those with HIV/AIDS possitive , now our next contract is at the state , so i need to move back to the state.

If you ask people who know me they could tell you i`m laid back,easy going,clean,responsible and God fearing. I am not really a sports person, BUT I do love Hockey Games. I am a very out going person and fun to be with. I do play the organ and piano, and I do have BOTH piano and organ here at my house. I am very much single,the only child of my parent,my mother alive, i lost my father and my only brother years ago while i was still a kid in an auto accident. I do part time modeling;i call myself an amateur though,LOL,just something i take as a hobby and also i have a masters degree in network engineer which i bagged from the Huelva University on the Costa de la Luz in Spain. I will be looking to pick up network engineer jobs once i arrive in ur city, network engineer is my life and i love it. I`m not bringing any pets with me but i wouldn`t mind any,i love them when well kept but just dont have time to devote on them,i could have birds and fishes in my later age,to play with.

I really do appreciate the breakdown details of the house due to what you have on your posting but i will love to know more about the room and the neighbours expecially you.....

Please I will like to have answers to the following questions below:
1) I will like to have the description of the room, size, and the equipments in there.
2) I will like to have the rent fee per month plus the utilities.
3) Also I will like to know if there is any garage or parking space cos I will have my own car come over.
4) I will also be coming with some of my furniture, that is if it is allowed, like bed, book shelf cos I read a lot, shoe rank etc
5) I will also like to know if I can make an advance payment ahead my arrival that will be stand as a kind of commitment that I am truly coming over and for you to hold the room down for me.
6) If the #5 questions is YES, I will like to know the total cost for the initial move as in first month rent and if you accept deposit.
7) I will like to know the major intersection nearest your neighborhood. Like shopping mall, bus line e.t.c

I need answers to my 8 questions above as soon as possible so as to arrange for you to get the money prior for my arrival to retain and consider the room mine.. I will be making this advance payment ahead my arrival so that you can be rest assured that this is real since I am not in the state presently.

Please I will like to know the total move in cost, i will also want to see the picture of the house as I will not be able to check out the place until my arrival, so that I can make arrangement for payment prior to my arrival since I will be moving down from UK as soon as I am able to secure a comfortable room. I will be expecting to read answers to the above questions ASAP

Do u have a instant Massenger so that we could chat ok.

It will be most appreciated if you will mail me back to intimate me with the details of the rentage; like how much it will cost me, if there is anything more that needs to be done. I'll want you to get back to me Asap to tell me more about the place because am moving to the state very soon.Please get back to me Asap because i cant just wait to hear from you.

I await your response. My regards.

Oh, and apparently the trick is that if you fall for it, they send you a fake cashier's check for a value much higher than what you requested. You will then feel morally obliged to wire some of the money back and bang!

99 red(dish) balloons

2007-06-24T16:11:00.000-07:00

The visualization of emotional and temporal data obtained from the futureme database, a web service that allows to send an email to yourself at a later date.

The visualization was performed using data from around 7,000 emails. Emails were sorted by time lag (the time between authoring and delivery of the email) and divided in 99 batches. For each batch, the general "mood" was computed based on the recurrence of selected keywords. Color was used to represent mood: four shades of air balloons, from light pink (sadder) to dark red (happier). More details about the data processing can be found at the previous posts, one and two.

The balloons were hanged from the 4th floor at the UCLA d|ma Broad Art Center creating a histogram-like pattern, one that would (supposedly) represent time lag across space.

The whole idea behind the project was to capture manifestations of remembering|forgetting contained in the emails, so for every batch of balloons (i.e. time lag) a representative textual email snippet was also presented. For example:

Lots of photos of the installation can be found at my flickr page as well as esa's and tommy's. The entire project was ephemeral, so it was meant to be destroyed and... forgotten. Balloons went down by noon:

and we then popped all of them in a matter of few minutes:

forget me not [part 2]

2007-06-11T02:18:00.000-07:00

continued from part 1.

From the 30,000 emails sent to your future selves, we selected the ones in which terms like remember, remind, forget and forgot were highly recurrent. We ended up with about 3,000 emails. Quality stuff like:

i hope you remember that you were happy. drunk, but happy. | does he even remember me? | remember, your meds don't like alcohol. | remember: life is a waste of time, time is a waste of life, get wasted all the time, and have the time of your life. | remember that you once did have a life.| remember not to sell out - stay an atheist! | don't forget that it smelled like piss. | i hope I don't forget how to drive. | actually you can forget the past. | don't forget, invest your money. | i really hope i forgot her already, now that i'm reading this e-mail from the past. | and don't forget to wash your hands after you masturbate. | please, forget about the past. move on. | have conversations that you'll never forget. | don't forget to get married tomorrow | make them forget about every time you've broken their hearts by fucking up every little chance they've given you. | don't forget to pee after having sex. | i will never forget what killed us. | dont forget to brush your teeth. | remember the spam! | remember the underwear discussions. | remember how emotionally needy all girls named "kate" seem to be. | remember he was diddy before pdiddy knew he was diddy! | remember that there are also plenty of uglier people in the world, so get over it. |

and also,

i love you. don't forget to love me.

and... my favorite,

don't forget - you're a tree!

ok, anyway... we thought it would be cool to look at all these data from two different perspectives: the time lag (how far in the future you're sending the email) and the overall mood of the emails.

Time lags vary from 1 day to 30 years. Email volume spikes at 1, 6, 12 months and then goes down considerably. Mood was calculated assigning different weights to the most recurrent words (those in the tag cloud of part 1). For example, love and happy were given positive values and hate and sad were given negative values.

We then assigned values to colors (dark red: positive, pink: negative). Why pink? No particular reason: we want to represent these colors using balloons. Red balloons seem to be available in more shades than others. We ran some data crunching to find out how mood changes over time. To aid visualizations we divided data from the 3,000 emails into 99 sections. Each section will express the mood for about 300 emails and hopefull we'll get some sort of pattern. Why 99? Von 99 luftballons!

We're installing the balloons on Tuesday (June 12) outside the Design|Media Broad Art Center at UCLA. They should be visible all day long, then they will pop or something. It is an ephemeral installation - it is meant to be forgotten. I'll post some photos though.

We produced some visuals too, like the ones above. The top one is a saddish 6-month email. The second is a happier long-haul email (10 years).

web2.0pia

2007-05-24T11:21:00.000-07:00

From Wikipedia:
According to Tim O'Reilly, "Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform."

but also:
Some technology experts, notably Tim Berners-Lee, have questioned whether one can use the term in a meaningful way, since many of the technology components of "Web 2.0" have existed since the beginnings of the World Wide Web.

Berners-Lee is right in saying that, technology-wise, there's nothing about web2.0 that is not in web1.0. We are making our blogs and sites nicer - polished and greyish with cool css - more functional and organized via user-generated folksonomies, more discoverable via rss, more participatory and so on. This is all nice, but clearly this is just reusing web components that have been around for a while. We are still very html 4.01 and we're probably going to stick to that for a while.

O'Reilly, though, is also right. He talks about business - a revolution - a new business model. The web is already fully immersed into it and we are seeing advertisement potential prevail over technical and functional capabilities (e.g. myspace and youtube).

Myspace, in particular, is, in the O'Reilly paradigm, an example of web2.0 application. It is a big deal and it understands "the rules for success" pretty damn good. I went to Twiistup last week, an event to showcase tech talents in Southern California. All of the start-ups showcased that I talked to mentioned myspace in a way or another (they had fancy widgets, gadgets and services for your myspace profile). It was weird to hear all those web-2.0-startups talk about myspace. But, it's the way it goes. Myspace, with its 1996-look is *the* web2.0. In fact, it does not even use folksonomies, microformats or ajax. But, it's got the $$$ and the public. Myspace Tom has 179380791 friends (as of today) and probably doesn't really care about rdf or xhtml. Does he need to?

Footnotes
1. The term web2.0pia (web2.0 + utopia) was coined by Leila Chirayath while talking about metaverses and third lives. Over some late-night veggie burrito.
2. The image above depicts 30,000 reams of office paper, or 15 million sheets, equal to the amount of office paper used in the US every five minutes, by Chris Jordan.

forget me not [part 1]

2007-05-07T23:07:00.000-07:00

futureme is a pretty basic web service that allows you to write yourself a letter to be delivered at a later date. they currently host nearly 400,000 letters, about 30,000 of which are public (as of yesterday). by writing a letter to your future self you might, for example, remind yourself of something you are scared of forgetting. or perhaps, you might remind yourself of something you are trying to forget and you want to check on your progress. Stuff like:

subject: hello, future (Dec 20, 2002, sent Mon Mar 1, 2004)
where is saddam hussein now?

subject: am i a loser? (Dec 24, 2002, to be delivered Jan 1, 2010)
do i still live at home?

subject: drinking causes embarrasment (Sep 14, 2003, sent Sep 14, 2004)
Dear FutureMe,

If you forgot, let me remind you, you got really drunk this weekend, at a crappy psuedo-hip lounge bar in Wellington, you said some unfortunate things, to a big client, and you might get fired tomorrow.
moral of the story, you need a girlfriend to keep you out of trouble. so by the time you get this, I want to hear about the smart funny attractive girl, who kept you from making an ass out of yourself.

Love,
you (me)

as part of my data aesthetics class, we (me and my team) would like to capture and display instances of remembering\forgetting patterns in daily cyber\meat time\space. futureme is a good place to get some data from and play around with it: scraped some data, calculated word occurrences, filtered out some major stop words and obtained the following cloud of recurrent words. note how words like "remember" and "forget" show up in the top. it's now time to play around with all the 30,000 emails and produce some aesthetically pleasing visualizations.

dear hope futureme love know life time like que happy remember good year right future going really things years better think make email past day birthday today la way people work new friends en feel school old maybe say sure hey best tell thats job hopefully te world forget need thing read tu let man little se great je come god live probably long didnt ive ago du writing wanted getting oh ok havent youll look working self ya days college thought hard person family living girl el married care si lot home wonder da ich hi said es house bad wish write fun end die months et away letter hes finally mom send guess money stop big friend night does went try having pretty le hello nice hows lo para wont change na reading thinking heart moment ur und talk kids christmas doesnt mi start mail dad place alive far matter hell believe week mean trying actually soon shit ps times ne message lost high guy happened cool por making looking whats stay help yeah told bu ass wrote feeling mind point started loved isnt sitting beautiful able lol gone hate okay espero shes met stuff car later changed kind luck gotten id eu talking ben says left miss happen important true como bit em ve real month dreams fucking yes fuck stupid gonna enjoy der makes um theres relationship wait arent bet dream anymore ha coming tomorrow summer com baby parents di crazy est date ask pas course wonderful idea sad damn ti lets leave ik mas das came reason yo loves play una learn used ma weight weeks knows al va amazing worth currently music forever lose head december este wow cause sorry dead felt guys close pm toi er boy peace different ce ja plan room vida waiting bir second wrong sending finished buy wife mais taking hoping awesome use turn rest meet il hair remind knew smile che morning book youd hurt class del touch den voc proud haha lots site break bien ser worry age ist pero case children los ready wouldnt single afraid learned playing moved couple decided called nicht strong wasnt son boyfriend girlfriend ones fine spend quite bye took means worked chance funny goals moi les fact business hot healthy bed hold yesterday ta sex weird goes dan forward half girls uma thank happiness fall understand trust body scared truly las face pour futuro anyways present sie sa late sleep det ama todo imagine fat laugh saw dating eyes kiss sweet open quit turned set noch loving tonight pass woman moving plus grade seriously check listen written pastme comes mit feliz ou party deserve husband young theyre hours war mother ko pain career wondering special doubt dia phone happens words perfect short dude nie watch receive free dans watching longer van ke heres address run listening starting

p.s. a very cool bibliography on remembering|forgetting can be found here.

p.p.s. i ran into some remarkable piece of hidden html poetry in the process of data scraping:

<a href="legal.php">legal & privacy</a> 

sorry futureme. don't worry.
we're students. we make no money.

the web as a narrative|collection

2007-04-03T01:15:00.000-07:00

I was reading an interesting paper on ways to merge databases and narratives into a new form - one that would account for the poetics, aesthetics and ethics of the database. A snippet reads:

The open nature of the web as medium [...] means that web sites never have to be complete; and they rarely are. The sites always grow. [...] All this further contributes to the anti-narrative logic of the web. If new elements are being added over time, the result is a collection, not a story. Indeed, how can one keep a coherent narrative or any other development trajectory through the material if it keeps changing?

(from Lev Manovich, “Database as symbolic form”, Convergence 5(2):80-99)

I thought this was in line with a talk I am hosting this week at UCLA (flyer below). If you are interested in internet archives, see you there.

p.s. the article goes onto describing the 'database cinema' of Greenaway and Dziga Vertov. Really cool stuff.

Beach cities in Los Angeles

2007-03-28T12:11:00.000-07:00

More GIS stuff. I looked at patterns of walkability and bikability in the greater Los Angeles area, focusing on the two beach districts: 1) Santa Monica, Venice and Marina del Rey, north of LAX and 2) Redondo, Manhattan and Hermosa Beach - the South Bay cities.

Here's some layouts. If you are interested in more, you can download the full presentation slides and the write-up. Or look at some more layouts.

[in brief] It turns out that downtown Santa Monica is the most "pedestrian-sustainable" neighborhood: it sports the highest number of amenities, an adequate number of schools and grocery stores (uniformly distributed), bicycle lane access and is also the only significantly illuminated residential area at night. As it is populated by lower income families (compared to the rest of Santa Monica and the south bay cities), it is probably the only area in which many individuals benefit of its walkability and bikability.

Venice | Venezia

2007-02-25T12:07:00.000-08:00

As part of a grad class I am taking in the Urban Planning Dept on Geographical Information Systems, I thought of creating some maps comparing spatial distribution and access to grocery stores in the two canal towns, the one back home and the one I live in.

Surprisingly, Venice and Venezia do play as good candidates for such comparison, not just cause they have the same name, canals and a bunch of tourists, but also because of similar area and population (if you only take into consideration the main island of Venezia and the ZIP 90291 for Venice).

So, I pulled out geographical information from a bunch of different places, including the Italian and American Yellow Pages and the excellent resources from the Regione Veneto. With some tweaking here and there, I fed them into ArcGIS, ESRI's very buggy and expensive GIS software. Here's what I got:

Venezia. Lots of disperse grocery stores, supermarkets and ministores. Venezia is highly touristic, yet residents have ready and easy access to stores within a 0.2 mile walking distance, except from localized low-populated areas, like the port, public gardens and university campus. Trivia: population in Venice is in steady decline every year - population will be zero by 2030, when the town will become officially some sort of gated theme park. Poor thing.

Venice. Shops are clearly arranged along well-defined "strips", namely Lincoln, Venice, the Boardwalk and Main Street. Most residents will need a car to get to stores and they will probably opt for cheaper, larger stores out of Venice. Venice, though one of the most walkable, bikable and bohemian neighborhoods in L.A. was still designed with the "car in mind". Venice was founded around 1905. In the early 30's, most canals were paved to provide car access. Streetcars and public transportation around L.A. were removed to boost the car industry. In the past five years though, traffic has gotten out of control. And it will just get worse. What's gonna happen? How much more traffic can we take? Apart from the plans for an enhanced subway system or more freeways, my bet is that the Great Wrong Place will naturally turn back to a more sustainable neighborhood-oriented organic growth. More shops and more facilities will start appearing closer to your home, serving diverse, dynamic and ethically rich local communities.

If interested, check a couple more maps and larger sizes.

One laptop per child

2007-02-14T00:07:00.000-08:00

Straight outta the MIT Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte was at UCLA the other day to talk about his baby: the $100 laptop (really $148 these days...)

The initiative, despite some criticism, is admirable. For a start, One laptop per child is non-profit: with some big money expected in the short term, the benefit is all for the end user: the child. (price is set to go down to $50 by 2010).

Despite the low cost, it should be a pretty solid machine: semi water proof, AC and human powered (i like the dynamo-like bicycle crank idea), wifi mesh network and reflective b&w sunlight readable mode.

Awesome interface. I didn't have enough time to play around with it (I had it sitting on my lap for less than a minute), but it looks like they totally turned inside out the classic windows|mac|linux desktop look-and-feel. Supposedly, the GUI is all about socialization. And they are pushing for as little features as possible. Clean cut.

The major problem I can think of is gray-market traffic (e.g. parents selling their child's laptop, ebay, etc.). In order to discourage this, the machine will have a totally distinctive appearance (much like a Post Office truck, "would you steal it?") and activation codes. I am not entirely sure that these precautions will actually work in certain countries (or Naples), but hey, whether you like it or not, kids (or adults) will be playing games and socializing on a cool machine rather than learning useless Word and Excel.

150 million units are expected to be dispatched by 2008: 50% of the entire world's machines will run Linux. Now, beat that.

p.s. Oh! And no CAPS LOCK KEY!

Visualization of co-authorship networks at CENS

2007-01-21T16:25:00.000-08:00

Being an multidisciplinary research center, CENS is an optimal environment to study how academics from different research departments and disciplines collaborate and interact with each other.

I have collected bibliographic information from 542 publications and plotted nodes (authors) and relationships (number of co-authored papers) using Krackplot.

They are especially good to discover a) independent clusters of authors that collaborate densely only within their group/division and b) authors acting as "routers", i.e. bridging across clusters that would be otherwise disconnected.

Have a look at some other maps and some documentation.

Structural Holes and Good Ideas

2007-01-19T17:51:00.000-08:00

(for those interested in social networks, a report of Ron Burt's paper)

Hypothesis
People with connections across structural holes are more prone to have good ideas than people in densely interconnected but closed networks.

Key concepts
Structural holes and the social capital of brokerage.
Robert sits in a structural hole and in a better position than James for the production of good ideas (and social capital). This is because he is connected to three different clusters (A, B and C) even though James is more strongly interconnected to actors in a single cluster (B). Information and opinion are more homogeneous within than between groups, so that Robert's bridging location across different groups gives him early and broad access to diverse information and interpretations which in turn provides him with a privileged position for seeing good ideas: the social capital of brokerage.

Four levels of brokerage.
1) Make people sitting on both sides of a structural hole aware of the other side's interests and difficulties
2) Transfer best practices between sides
3) Draw analogies between sides
4) Expose new trends and behaviors that combine elements from both sides

Network constraint index.
A summary index to measure brokerage. It depends on the network size, density, and hierarchy. For example, the constraint index of an actor is high if the actor’s network peers share information with one another directly (dense network) or indirectly via a central contact (hierarchical network).

Path distance.
Path distance is the minimum number of relations required to connect two people. When two people are directly connected their path distance is one. If they are connected via one intermediary their path distance is two, and so on.

Network centrality.
The centrality of an actor in a network is a measure of its importance. In a discussion network, network centrality is measured by the constraint index. For example, a central actor in my network is one who "speaks often to the people with whom I often discuss my work".

Evidence
The hypothesis that brokerage across structural holes increases the chances of having a good idea is demonstrated via a study conducted on 673 managers responsible for the supply chain of a large electronics company.

Method.

Personnel records are used to collect and organize managers' basic data such as job rank (Director, Senior Manager, Manager I, II, III), division, geographic site, education and age.
Managers were prompted with a web-based questionnaire asking a) "who do you discuss supply chain issues with?", b) "what would you do to improve the company's supply-chain management?" and c) "who have you discussed this idea with?"
Based on the data collected a discussion network was generated, using network constraint index to measure brokerage and analyzing discussion partnership based on job rank, division, etc.

Analysis.

Brokerage opportunities and incentives: managers, across diverse job ranks and divisions, showed substantial clustering (primarily turning to one another for discussion) and fragmentation (relying on few weak links to connect different groups): a fertile environment for enterprising managers to discover structural holes and construct bridging ties across groups. Yet, structural holes exist. In order to find out why, it is crucial to look at the incentives offered by the company to reward brokerage: salary, job evaluation, promotion.
Good ideas: ideas were evaluated by two senior managers. It is found, as expected, that good ideas come especially from managers a) senior ranked, b) working in purchasing divisions (brokering more often with external companies), c) with substantial education, d) working in urban branches, e) having a smaller network constraint.

Discussion.
The hypothesis advanced above was confirmed. In particular, results obtained suggested implications for creativity and reproduction of social structures.

Creativity. A good idea is such for the value it conveys, not for the source of the idea or the idea itself. At structural holes, brokers have early and broad access to a variety of different interpretations - a privileged position that allows them to deliver valuable ideas to the right audience at the right time. As good idea are transported through structural holes, they accumulate more value.
Structural reproduction. Positive and negative cycles to reproduction: managers with high network constraints often have their ideas rejected by higher ranks - they learn not to talk, but at the same time, managers with low network constraints are likely to get their ideas approved and are expected to continue to produce good ideas.

Discussion questions

The relationship between structural holes and social capital is confirmed using a corporate network environment as a basis. Does it apply to other networks as well?
What does an optimal network look like? If structural holes are exploited and filled efficiently, they will eventually disappear. How do you then recreate le vide that drives the creation of ideas?
How do you define the "goodness" of an idea? In this study, the goodness of ideas expressed by managers was assessed only by two senior managers. Is this enough? In some cases, for example, both managers were uncertain about the soundness of a "possibly very good" idea and they dismissed it.

html flora

2007-01-15T14:37:00.000-08:00

A very cool tree-like visualization of HTML code from texone.org.
I run it once for my blog and got this:

wow. maybe a little confusing and not as helpful as plain ones like this, but I like the idea of translating html trees into images of trees with branches, roots and leaves.

(from the texone.org tree applet page:)

tree accesses the source code of a web domain through it's url and transforms the syntactic structure of the web site into a tree structure represented by an image. this image illustrates a tree with trunk, branches and ramifications. first each tree is initialized, than all html links are detected, chronologically saved and finally displayed.

the first tree corresponds to the domain; according to the syntax of the web site each further tree that builds up represents a sub page including all existing elements. the color of these trees reflects the color values of the domain and its sub pages.

parallel to the graphic conversion, a permutation of the source code into midi data is generated analogous to the evolving trees, their branches and ramifications. any midi compatible hard- or software can be triggered by these midi data.

the structure of any url can be visualized and transformed into sound. the aesthetic is not arbitrary or accidental, rather each url/domain determines the variation of trees in form and color.

tree is a translation program. the simulation of real space by software as a starting point and basic question characterizes the search for an algorithm (design specification) which illustrates a real tree. tree interprets each html page as a design specification; the html space determines the algorithm and generates the visual world of the translation beyond simulation.

built with processing :: prohtml

bummer

2006-12-12T18:37:00.000-08:00

My friend Norman, acting chancellor of UCLA, just sent me an email. It reads:

Ooops.
Now they're all over the news.

p.s. I don't know who wrote the letter but "sophisticated" is a pretty hip term to describe a hacker.

Homeless

2006-12-06T00:17:00.000-08:00

I am looking for a place.
Apartment or room in cool house share.
In Venice, Hollywood or around UCLA.

A bit more about me:
About me Photos myspace

Can you help?
Email me!

In Santa Cruz

2006-11-27T00:36:00.000-08:00

I spent last weekend with Alex in Santa Cruz, NorCal. Besides from being one of the largest surfing communities in the country, Santa Cruz is home to the hippiest campus in the US. UCSC is 100% treehugging-compliant. The campus is fully immersed in the woods. Awesome. And the students are known to be emo-environmentalists and tree liberators. At least until some time ago. Unfortunately, I forgot my camera in L.A.

p.s. Santa Cruz also has an awesome napoli-olé-olé/boccieball/karaoke bar. A jewel in town.

Languages

2006-11-21T01:14:00.000-08:00

In a way, I wish I spoke only one language.
That way, expressing myself would be easier.
There would be a one-way road connecting my brain to my mouth.
Right now, I feel like I have a busy Interstate 10.
I am trying to be cool and make some partitions in my brain.
But it's getting out of control.
Next time I meet you, I might speak to you in my own Esperanto.
It's a monster mash - the language I speak in my dreams.
Just like Stefan, in La Science des rêves.

Ph.D.

2006-11-06T16:15:00.000-08:00

phdcomics says it all. It's a lot of work!

Social networks

2006-10-24T17:11:00.000-07:00

Forget myspace, friendster and facebook
Bumping into people you know, by accident, in different places, is the real thing.

Last night, I was at the Dragonfly in Hollywood at some electroclash show and I bumped into Seb. He played trumpet every tuesday night at the jam sessions at the AMR bar, in Geneva. My friend Jane captured the moment.

And, for a strange coincidence, it was exactly at the AMR in Geneva that about a year ago I bumped into another old friend of mine, from London (also a trumpet player) that I hadn't seen for five years or so. Bumping into people makes me happy. I think it's not about the world being small, it's about the kids partying a lot.

Books

2006-10-16T21:40:00.000-07:00

So, in the past couple weeks I have been doing quite a lot of reading. Mostly in the fields of Information Retrieval and Philosophy of Information (epistemes, ontologies and all that...). The latter is proving quite a challenge for me, but hey that's the way to go.

Apart from school reading, there's a couple of other books I have had a chance to look at:

Sixteen Tons is a catalog of work by the Department of Media and Arts at UCLA. I went to the artists' reception. They had nice visuals and cheap wine.

Professione fotografo will teach me how to be a good photographer. I really needed this. And it's got some pretty cool photos inside.

Pilules Bleus by swiss artist Frederik Peeters is a really cool all-about-geneva comic book. It reminds me a lot of switzerland.

L'etudiant etranger by Philippe Labro should be a good read at this point. I havn't got the book but I'll get it at some point soon. It talks about Buicks: si vous n'avez pas une Buick, vous etes cuite. Exactly.

from helL.A.

2006-10-09T00:11:00.000-07:00

My first 3 weeks in the city of night.

sweet. blue skies.
went swimming in Venice Beach the other day and saw the best sunset ever.
it hasn't rained once yet. and apparently it does not rain since april. wtf??
even small crappy coffee houses have soy milk.
and veggie restaurants are all over.
biking the car town is possible. my new 60's road bike is my new italian girlfriend.
and my old-school Buick is my new american lover. and she's hot.
quite a lot of reading and partying.
not much time left to sleep around.
i am learning a lot though.
will post some more photos on flickr at some point soon.
in the meantime, i started using facebook too. it looks pretty neat. at least compared to theirspace. you can find me here.

word frequency in a (nut) shell

2006-10-03T18:37:00.000-07:00

You can compute word frequency of a text document using a simple pipe of UNIX commands in the shell:


$ tr ' ' '
> ' < input_file.txt | sort | uniq -c | sort -n -r -o output_file.txt

It's that easy.

Geneva, September 2006.

2006-09-14T08:24:00.000-07:00

Au revoir!

(photo by VeloManiac)

Taxonomy-driven document classification

2006-09-08T07:50:00.000-07:00

It is about time to sum up some of the work I have been doing at CERN in the past few months. I have been involved in a collaboration with the DESY Library to build a controlled vocabulary of high energy physics (HEP) keywords. DESY has been maintaining a list of controlled HEP terms for a long time - well, actually, for ever. These indexes are widely used across HEP institutions and scientific libraries. When we started the collaboration, 8-9 months ago, the vocabulary looked like this: a simple text thesaurus, i.e. a list of keywords, one per line. Throughout the collaboration, we have converted this text thesaurus to an organised RDF SKOS taxonomy - with some light semantics in it too. The formal release of the taxonomy is expected to happen at some point soon and hopefully it will become editable by HEP scientists - a nice collaborative effort that could make it grow into an OWL ontology.

Thesaurus, vocabulary, taxonomy, ontology and whatnot?
There is a little bit of confusion around the exact meaning of every one of these terms. Please check this article for elucidation.

Why all the effort?
Besides the taxonomy, I have worked on BibClassify, an automatic classification module for the CDS Invenio software suite. BibClassify performs keyword extraction from fulltext documents based on a controlled vocabulary - expressed as a SKOS taxonomy. Unlike other keyword extraction systems, BibClassify does not use any machine-learning or AI tricks:
a) it takes a fulltext document as input (e.g. a PDF),
b) it takes a taxonomy as input (SKOS or RDF),
c) it compiles some regexp around the concepts in the taxonomy,
d) it matches the concepts into the fulltext, does some mumbojumbo and calculates the occurrences,
e) pulls out some output keywords from the hat.
BibClassify is written in Python. And it works quite well. You can use it as part of the CDS Invenio suite, or as a standalone program.

The results
For example, running BibClassify on document hep-ph/0608096 using the HEP taxonomy yields to (excerpt):


Composite keywords:
17  inflaton: decay [26, 57]
13  energy: density [17, 13]
6  field theory: scalar [0, 0]
6  effect: nonperturbative [10, 28]
5  baryon: asymmetry [7, 12]
3  operator: nonrenormalizable [7, 4]
2  supersymmetry: flat direction [11, 70]

Main Keywords:
36  preheating
14  mass
10  rotation
10  lead
9  interaction
9  inflation
9  complex
8  reheating
5  spectrum
5  frequency
4  temperature
4  radiation
4  momentum
4  Hubble constant

or, the following tag-cloud visualization (a bit sexier):

Sounds interesting?
Then you might want to check out the hacking guides. BibClassify will be part of the next CDS Invenio release (but will be available in CVS earlier). An article on this subject will also come out soon.

Going digital

2006-08-31T10:49:00.000-07:00

So here we go. In about 2 weeks I will be moving to another continent.
I am starting to pack up my stuff and I cannot believe how much trash I managed to collect during the last two years, in Geneva. Or maybe it is just stuff I don't really need that I was carrying around.

To make things even easier, I am trying to digitize (scan is the word) a lot of important material and old photos. The best ones are those old ones with my hippie parents as well as b&w ones from London and Rome. Most of these photos, I had even forgot about. If it's not online, it's nowhere.

P.S. How cool is my mum?

Hand luggage galore

2006-08-24T05:23:00.000-07:00

I haven't checked in a suitcase in years.
I have been to many places, many flights, and always just one piece of hand luggage.
In a recent trip to India, I managed to pack up all I needed for one month into a small rucksack, which was allowed in the cabin. Traveling light makes me happy. And when traveling, I see often the angry faces of heavy travelers trying to get around with their fat-ass bags.

Will I be able to do it from now on? After the last terror alert in Heathrow, it looks like you are only allowed teeny tiny bags in the cabin. My question is: what has cabin baggage size got to do with airline security? I understand increased search and screening, but the size restriction sucks.

This way, planes are becoming more and more an inconvenient and time-spending means of transport. And they discourage light traveling by forcing you to throw bags into the belly of the plane - bags that very often get lost in outer space or Alabama.

Also, what's all this obsession with planes? Terrorist attacks on trains, ferries, buses - for which no screening is ever done - can produce quite drastic effects too, but hey, maybe just not that spectacular...

Visas and crossings

2006-08-09T12:23:00.000-07:00

Things I have done in the last two weeks:

I obtained a student visa in my passport from the US embassy in Bern. I will start a PhD program at UCLA in Information Science next Fall and I was granted a visa until 2011.

I went on a short tour of "internal" Switzerland - Zurich, Bern, Luzern. I posted some photos on my swiss flickr set. Some things worth noting: toilet designs, fines, trams and trains, benches.

While in Zurich, I found a book on a bench. A note on it read "I'm not lost, I'm on a journey!". This is bookcrossing: a super cool initiative about sharing books after you have read them and tracking their adventures. Who shares wins. And it is a very open access prone initiative.

I got myself a UCLA email account: apepe at ucla dot edu. Feel free to contact me here from now on.

I drove my car back home: Geneva to Manduria, 1400 km, 17 hours in a single day. It was painful.

Back home, in Puglia, I am now enjoying sun, beach and good veggie food. Catch you later.

Moleskine vs. Google Calendar

2006-07-20T07:45:00.000-07:00

Yesterday it was my birthday.
I got a Moleskine Pocket Weekly Notebook as a present. I really like moleskines and this one looks really sleek: soft cover, the week on the left, a ruled page for notes and ideas on the right.

How will I combine this Moleskine with my gCalendar? Well, it seems like gCalendar is not really catching up for me. When I started using it, 3 months ago, I was quite happy about its interface, search capabilities and gMail integration. However, I feel like I am spending most of my time fixing and re-entering badly detected appointments and dates. Simpler applications, like the Todo list module that I use on my netvibes dashboard, are actually proving handier.

Some time ago I thought that a powerful calendar online application could really make a difference. Just like journals are taking the shape of blogs and wikis, I though that shopping lists, diaries and todolists would all get swallowed by a web2.0 app. I think this is not going to be the case for some time.

I will give myself a little bit more time with gCalendar. Then, I will safely switch to good old ink-on-paper. But it will be ink-on-paper2.0: on a moleskine.

P.S. I also got two tickets for a Strokes gig and a really cool card of Borat in v-strings. V-strings are the new Speedos.

Il barone rampante

2006-07-11T17:44:00.000-07:00

If I have to think of a novel that incorporates the essence of treehugging that would be The Baron in the Trees (Il barone rampante) by Italo Calvino. The novel is set in the 18th century in an imaginary town on the Italian Riviera. It is the story of Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò, a kid that, in protest against his noble family and society, decides to spend the rest of his life living on the trees. What seems, at first, just the capricious decision of a young noble, turns out to be a life-long unique experience of arboreal living. Cosimo wanders from tree to tree all his life and is never to set foot on the ground again. The story revolves around his many life experiences and his vision of the world "from above". It is one of the first books I ever read and it stays one of my favorites. It gives a charming sense of freedom and natural, uncompromised, living.

Whenever I get a chance, I treehug. And I do not mean treeclimbing nor just simply hugging (like I do in the photo). I choose a tree, I climb it and I spend some time on it. I find comfortable positions and hang out - sleeping, thinking, relaxing. No listening to music nor reading a book. Just dolce farniente. Like when I was a kid.

They might call it hippie tree-hugging crap or whatever they like.
But I like it.
And trees like it too.

United States of America

2006-06-28T09:23:00.000-07:00

I just got back from a 2-week trip in the US of A.
Some considerations:

My arrival, in North Carolina, was marked by the first hurricane of the season, bearing my name. Upon my arrival at the airport, posters read "Alberto hits the US."
Strange as it might seem, the hurricane even followed a trajectory very close to my itinerary throughout my stay in the country.

In Chapel Hill, North Carolina, I attended an international conference on digital libraries (JCDL). Among the many interesting sessions, a very inspiring keynote by Jonathan Zittrain named "Open Information: Redaction, Restriction, and Removal". Stuff that caught my attention: the changing concept of privacy (e.g. Myspace profiles in a corporate environment, Facebook, blogging), automatic document classification and identity (e.g. Riya face recognition capabilities) and the dumbness of Jeeves. The presentation featured a very cool interactive Q&A platform where you could vote for your favorite questions to be asked.

Freedom, tolerance and acceptance are principles that supposedly stand at the base of the American lifestyle. Yet, sometimes they result in funky attire.

Berlusconi is the cover-boy of Alaska Airlines

While in NY, I enjoyed terrific views from the rooftop of my friend's house in Bedford Ave, Brooklyn. People in Brooklyn are cooler.

Converse All Star are NYC's, if not the US's, most popular shoes. They hang.

Sunsets in NYC are pure magic.

At the LISA conference in Harvard, I made a presentation on CERN's Open Access developments and some specific digital repository features (Protocols for Scholarly Communication).

MIT is neat. Its museum too.

On my way back to Europe, I saw Loose Change 911.

The full photoset is here

Boycott the FIFA World Cup

2006-06-06T16:57:00.000-07:00

To many people, the upcoming (Yahoo!) FIFA World Cup has become a real addiction. They hide their obsession by pulling out the (potential) positive crap of such an international competition. They see in it: unity, fairplay, entertainment. I see in it: over-paid athletes running after a ball in short pants. But also: Coca Cola, McDonald's, Adidas and tons of other sponsors; football fanatism, trafficking of women and a generalized increase in consumism - feeding a greedy money-making machine.

I despise football. The amount of money involved in this business is way too high to consider it a sport any longer. Although many people agree with me on this, most of them consider the World Cup as a "different thing" - an international event, a pure sports competition, yielding to unity and friendship among all nations.

I do not see much unity nor friendship between nations these days. I see a lot of war, instead. And competitions like the World Cup simply enhance one's attachment to her own country. I see national anthems and flags. And flags are always bad news.

Boycott the World Cup.
Boycott football.
Let's put the fun back into football.
Let the trees grow in every football field!

PDF presentations with LaTEX

2006-05-26T07:35:00.000-07:00

For my presentations I do not use Powerpoint. Powerpoint is a commercial software. It is not free and I am not going to pay for it. Also, it does not run on Linux boxes. It can be highly unstable too: I have seen quite a few presentations not working across different software versions/platforms.

I want to produce presentations in a solid, reliable, cross-platform format and PDF is what I choose. In order to produce fancy slides in PDF I use LaTEX templates and stylesheets, coupled with a presentation environment called Prosper.

Ok, it does not give you a Powerpoint-like GUI environment to edit the transparencies, but I think that most people with a tiny bit of programming experience can quickly learn how to make some pretty presentations with cool templates.

The template I am currently using is the one in the screenshot above. It is called PPRtree.sty and you are very welcome to download it and use it/modify it as you wish. If you want, you can also have a look at one of my recent presentations to get started (latex source and output PDF).

NB. Presentation is in French and I have not included figures, nor the CERN logo here.

P.S. To compile, run:


$ latex your_file.tex
$ dvips -Ppdf -G0 your_file.dvi -o your_file.ps
$ ps2pdf -dAutoFilterColorImages=false -dColorImageFilter=/FlateEncode  -dPDFsettings=/prepress your_file.ps your_file.pdf

My music taste in a tag cloud

2006-05-16T07:40:00.000-07:00

Today I changed the way my overall listenings are displayed. It used to contain a last.fm chart of my most frequently listened music artists, like this. This is cool, but I think that a tag cloud gives a better and more instantaneous visualization. As this is not yet offered by last.fm, I wrote a Python script to do that (really, just an adaptation of some code I had already written for something else). If you like the way it looks, feel free to get the Python code and use it to visualize you own music taste.

P.S. I signed up to last.fm recently and I have not yet uploaded all my music on my machine: the rankings are still temporary.

Guédon stands up for OA

2006-05-11T07:29:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week I had the pleasure to attend a talk by Jean-Claude Guédon from the University of Montreal: Let the real OA stand up! say researchers, librarians, publishers, citizens, ...

Guédon, renowned OA activist and promoter, has interesting viewpoints - certainly more innovative than I would have thought. He gave a general historical introduction to OA and then continued with a more in-depth analysis of the current issues the movement is facing in order to build an "open access world". A couple of points I liked:

Science Citation Index. The existence of a commercial index for citations in academic documents is a dubious one. I think it is a rotten one. Indexes like this, initially created for the sole function of aiding information retrieval have been used for decades for quality assessment and research evaluation. The elitist circles around "prestigious" journals and their extremely high subscription fees are the result of such an antiquate evaluation mechanism. With the electronic tools we have, we can do much better than that - and we will.

Copyrights and authors. Authors want to know nothing about copyrights. Neither do I and neither do you, very probably. A number of emerging journals offer solutions in between OA and semi-OA with funky and obscure copyright policies. Projects like Sherpa/Romeo offer useful search engines to browse through all rights offered by different journals, but do we really need all that? I say not. Open should be open. Just like a blog is open. When too many laws and regulations jump into the game, I do not see openness anymore. Creative Commons are doing a good job simplifyinging all that.

Institutional vs. Subject. Institutional and subject repositories are compatible. True. There has been too much discussion on the subject. Subject or institutional? Just let the repository begin. Interoperability and semantic content will sort content out accordingly to the reader needs.

The talk was held on Monday May 8th in Geneva at ITU as a part of a series of Library Science Talks.

Calendars

2006-04-29T09:06:00.000-07:00

I have been thinking of using a web2.0 calendar application for some time now. So, I had a look around to see what there is out there.

30Boxes
+ simple and clean interface
+ only one view (month)
+ APIs were released for third party contributions
+ Powerful settings (can set week to start on Monday, date format, nation-specific public holidays)
- in order to make an event private you have to say it explicitly (I'd rather have it the other way round)
- "quick create" bar not as powerful as Kiko
- need an inline "add event" option (i.e. without unnecessary pop-up)

Kiko
+ quick create bar is powerful: it accepts inline tagging, comments and more (e.g. i can say "06/19-06/21 LISA Conference @ MIT [Work] (Prepare presentation) + johndoe@mit.edu")
+ can add event just by clicking on day (without unnecessary pop-up)
+ Events with long titles do not get truncated, but returned to new line
- interface not as clean as 30Boxes (although you can remove all the sidebar crap in one click)
- poor settings (what if i want to start my week on Mondays?)

HipCal
+ nice interface
+ quick memo and task sidebars (really really handy)
- week and day view are a bit crappy (only upcoming view is usable)
- a bit buggy still
- "add event" is quite fast but it lacks powerful "quick create" from string

Also looked at Trumba, CalendarHub, Planzo with not too much enthusiasm.

When I finished looking at all the above I found out that Google Calendar had just been released.
It is Google Calendar that I am now using. Not that Google Calendar solves all the problems of the other calendar applications though.

Google Calendar
+ GMail integration (you can send events to/from your GMail account emails)
+ powerful search
+ advanced settings (week start, date format, views, notifications, etc.)
+ GMail-like keyboard shortcuts
- "quick add" could be much more powerful (cf. Kiko)
- where are the tags (or labels)?(cf. Kiko)
- when clicking on a day, would want to type directly into the box, without a pop-up (cf. Kiko)
- events with long titles get truncated (cf. Kiko)
- interface could be simpler (cf. 30Boxes)
- need a quickmemo/todo box (cf. HipCal)

In conclusion, Google Calendar wins because of the features it naturally inherits (GMail integration and search). Otherwise, the other applications reviewed - especially 30Boxes (for the interface) and Kiko (for usability) - are doing a rather better job to provide calendar capabilities. We'll see what happens.

Publications

2006-04-15T06:14:00.000-07:00

On the relationship between the structural and socioacademic communities of a coauthorship network. Marko Rodriguez, Alberto Pepe. Journal of Informetrics, in press, ISSN: 1751-1577, Elsevier. Preprint

Between conjecture and memento: shaping a collective emotional perception of the future. Alberto Pepe, Johan Bollen. AAAI Spring Symposium on Emotion, Personality, and Social Behavior. 2008. Palo Alto, CA Preprint

An Exploration of the Life Cycle of Ecological Sensing Data in Collaborative Field Research. Jillian C. Wallis, Christine L. Borgman, Matthew S. Mayernik, Alberto Pepe. International Digital Curation Conference. 2007. Washington, DC

Book review: Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice. Alberto Pepe. InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies. Vol. 3, Issue 2, Article 10 PDF

Know Thy Sensor: Trust, Data Quality, and Data Integrity in Scientific Digital Libraries. Jillian C. Wallis, Christine L. Borgman, Matthew S. Mayernik, Alberto Pepe, Nithya Ramanathan, Mark Hansen. Proceedings of 11th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries. Budapest, HU. PDF

Adding Context to Content: The CENS Deployment Center. Matthew S. Mayernik, Jillian C. Wallis, Christine L. Borgman, Alberto Pepe. Proceedings of ASIST 2007: Joining Research and Practice: Social Computing and Information Science. Milwaukee, WI. PDF

Knitting a fabric of sensor data resources. Alberto Pepe, Christine L. Borgman, Jillian C. Wallis, Matthew S. Mayernik. Proceedings of ACM IEEE Int. Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks 2007. Cambridge, MA. PDF

Drowning in Data: Digital Library Architecture to Support Scientists’ Use of Embedded Sensor Networks. Christine L. Borgman, Jillian C. Wallis, Matthew S. Mayernik, Alberto Pepe. Proceedings of ACM IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries 2007. Vancouver, Canada. PDF

Protocols for Scholarly Communication. Alberto Pepe, Joanne Yeomans. Astronomical Society of Pacific Conference Series Vol. 377. San Francisco: ASP, 2007. ISBN 978-1-58381-316-4 PDF

The digital library as a social and cooperative environment: experience perspective of the CERN Document Server. Alberto Pepe. La biblioteca su misura. Milano: Editrice Bibliografica 2007. ISBN 978-88-7075-654-8 (in Italian)

Dissemination of scientific results in High Energy Physics: the CERN Document Server vision. Alberto Pepe, Jean-Yves Le Meur, Tibor Simko. Proceedings of Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP) Conference. Mumbay, India. 2006 PDF

AstroMAF: visualization and analysis of astrophysical data in the Virtual Observatory. Alberto Pepe. Proceedings of Astronomical Data Analysis Software & Systems XIV. Pasadena, CA. 2004

Blog posts

2006-04-14T15:10:00.000-07:00

blog in my hands.
this is the archive of all my blog posts. click away or subscribe.

2008

2007

2006

Bookmarks

2006-04-14T06:49:00.000-07:00

Conferences

2006-04-12T08:52:00.000-07:00

AAAI 2008 Spring Symposium on Emotion, Personality, and Social Behavior.
26-28Mar 2008 - Stanford University, CA, USA. - Presentation.

iConference: Systems, Shelves and Society.
28Feb-1Mar 2008 - University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA. - Poster and presentation.

Social Data Mining and Knowledge Building.
5-9Nov 2007 - University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA.

Scholary Communication Institute 5: Visual Studies.
8-10Jul 2007 - University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA. - Invited talk.

Countries, Cultures, Communication: Digital Innovation at UCLA.
10May 2007 - University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA. - Poster

IPSN Data sharing and interoperability workshop.
24Apr 2007 - Cambridge, MA, USA. - Presentation.

Open Geospatial Consortium Technical Committee Meeting.
13Dec 2007 - San Diego, CA, USA. - Presentation.

Library and Information Services in Astronomy.
18-21Jun 2006 - Cambridge, MA, USA. - Presentation.

Joint Conference on Digital Libraries.
11-15Jun 2006 - Chapel Hill, NC, USA.

Berlin 4 Open Access.
29Feb-31Mar 2006. - Potsdam, Germany. - Presentation.

Bibliostar (Convegno Stelline).
08-10Mar 2006 - Milano, Italy. - Invited talk.

Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics.
13-17Feb 2006 - Mumbai, India. - Presentation.

Semantic Web Applications and Perspectives.
14Dec-16Dec 2005 - Trento, Italy.

Colloquium on Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics.
07Dec-08Dec 2005 - Geneva, Switzerland. - Organizer.

CERN workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication (OAI4).
20Oct-22Oct 2005 - Geneva, Switzerland.

CERN School of Computing.
04Sep-17Sep 2005. - Saint Malo, France.

International Conference on Electronic Publishing, ELPUB2005.
08Jun-10Jun 2005. - Leuven, Belgium. - Presentation.

European Library Automation Group, ELAG2005.
01Jun-03Jun 2005. - Geneva, Switzerland. - Presentation.

CNI - JISC - SURF conference.
10May-12May 2005. - Amsterdam, Netherlands. - Invited talk.

Joint Workshop on Electronic Publishing.
14Apr-15Apr 2005. - Lund, Sweden.

Berlin 3 Open Access.
28Feb-01Mar 2005. - Southampton, UK. - Presentation.

Doctoral coursework

2006-04-11T21:34:00.000-07:00

Spring 2008

ARCH&UD290. Critical studies of architecture
Instructor: Dana Cuff
Exploration of how architecture operates in relation to wider cultural, historical, and theoretical issues. The seminar has two parallel tracks. On the one hand, it will examine the vein of social and philosophical theory that falls under the rubric of “practices” as it applies to architecture, urbanism, and related scholarship. Drawing from sociology, anthropology, and philosophy, a theory of practice counters objectivist notions of truth, engaging praxis, pragmatism, social construction, and theories of the everyday. In architecture, this perspective also raises constructs of habit, event, situation, and things in the making. Such theory forms a baseline or datum, and as such can be expected to accommodate the transformational and unfolding events.

Geog 295. Geographic thought
Instructor: Michael Curry
A seminar on the concept of "belonging".

Reading group: Social Studies of Science and Technology (STS)
This is a self-organized student-led reading group. Syllabus can be found here

Winter 2008

IS295. Doctoral seminar: Information seeking
Instructor: Ramesh Srinivasan
Examination of behavioral and cognitive aspects of inquirer's information needs and uses, including inquirer's characteristics, information problems, psychological needs, and uses of information and information technologies, and aspects of question negotiation.

Psych 265. Thinking
Instructor: Keith Holyoak
Contemporary theory and research in thinking, problem solving, inference, semantic memory, internal representation of knowledge, imagery, concepts.

HumCS. Formal Modeling and Simulations in Social Sciences
Instructor: Dario Nardi
Exploration of different approaches to modeling empirical phenomena of concern to social sciences. Topics include utility models, learning models, decision models, group competition models, and evolutionary models. Use of multiagent computer simulations and group exercises to explore emergent behaviors among individuals interacting according to models for behavior. Discussion of advantages and drawbacks of more traditional mathematical modeling. Review of alternative forms of formal representations of hypothesized processes and issues related to verification of simulations.

Fall 2007

IS296. Doctoral seminar: Information structures
Instructor: Gregory Leazer
Intellectual principles for organization of information, including principles for design of systems for acquiring, organizing, and retrieving information. System-specific user studies included to extent that design of information systems is predicated on their evaluation and use. Syllabus

IS204. Electronic publishing and digital scholarship
Instructor: Christine Borgman
Survey of current issues in electronic publishing. Topics include history of publishing, digital libraries, scholarly communication, economics, perspective of publishers, universities, and librarians, uses and users of electronic documents, electronic books; new genres in electronic communication, visions of future. Syllabus

SOC201A. Intermediate Statistical Methods
Instructors: Rick Grannis
Intermediate statistical methods using computers: probability theory, sampling distributions, hypothesis testing, interval estimation, multiple regression and correlation, experimental design, analysis of variance and covariance, contingency tables, sampling theory. Website

Spring 2007

STAT M237. Data and media arts
Instructors: Mark Hansen and Jean-François Blanchette
Through expanding reach of telecommunications networks and general advancement of data collection technologies, almost every aspect of our lives can be rendered in data. Contemplation of use of data in creation of media art and examination of each step in process of data collection, analysis, and representation. Topics include databases and data warehousing, exploratory analysis and visualization, clustering and pattern finding, sampling, and various data mining algorithms. Exploration, through discussions, of fundamental concepts like complexity and randomness. Techniques that organize data, search for patterns, and create meaningful and/or expressive representations.Syllabus PDF HTML
Final project: part one, two and three.

IS291B. Doctoral Seminar: Research method and design.
Instructor: Christine Borgman
Survey of quantitative, qualitative, and historical research designs. Ethical issues. Operationalization, conceptualization and measurement; indexes, scales, and sampling; experimental, survey, field, and evaluation research; data analysis. Syllabus

Winter 2007

STAT260. Site-specifics
Instructor: Mark Hansen
Tracking of invisible flows of data through greater Los Angeles metropolitan area, with focus on small number of specific sites situated prominently in both physical and virtual (data) spaces. Documentation of kinds of data that originate, terminate, or simply route through each location. Consideration of analyses (visual, computational, or simply informal), decisions that are made, and actions that are taken on basis of these data, whether they be human or automated responses. Documentation of how patterns of data acquisition and analysis dictate behaviors, enable or restrict movements, and shape local community. Alterations or additions to data flows that could improve quality of life for inhabitants of or visitors to sites. Website

UP206a. Introduction to Geographic Information Systems
Instructor: Leo Estrada
Principles of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and applied techniques of using spatial data for mapping and analysis. Topics include data quality, data manipulation, spatial analysis, and information systems. Use of mapping and spatial analysis to address a planning problem. Website
Midterm presentation, Final presentation, Final paper, Some layouts

Fall 2006

IS291A. Doctoral Seminar: Theoretical Traditions in Information Studies.
Instructor: Leah Lievrouw
Introduction to multiple approaches historically taken in study of information (e.g., library and information science, archival theory, social informatics). Assessment of influence of cognate disciplines (e.g., linguistics, mathematics, philosophy, sociology). Evaluation of epistemological accounts of information sciences. Syllabus

IS293. Doctoral Seminar: Information Retrieval.
Instructor: Christine Borgman
Intellectual principles for organization of information, including principles for design of systems for acquiring, organizing, and retrieving information. Also includes system-specific user studies to extent that design of information systems is predicated on their evaluation and use. Syllabus

Resume

2006-04-08T05:03:00.000-07:00

Alberto Pepe
University of California, Los Angeles
Graduate School of Information -- Box 951520
Los Angeles, CA 90095 U.S.
apepe@ucla.edu

EDUCATION
2010 (expected). Ph.D. Information Science.
UCLA -- University of California, Los Angeles

2003. M.Sc. Computer Science.
UCL -- University College London

2002. B.Sc. Astrophysics.
UCL -- University College London

RESEARCH EXPERIENCE
2006-present. Statistics and Data Management Group.
CENS -- Center for Embedded Networked Sensing. Los Angeles, CA.

Summer 2007. Digital library Research and Prototyping Group.
LANL -- Los Alamos National Laboratory. Los Alamos, NM.

2004-2006. Information Technology Department.
CERN -- European Organization for Nuclear Research. Geneva, Switzerland.

2004. Scientific Computing and Data Visualization Group.
CINECA -- InterUniversity Consortium. Bologna, Italy

AWARDS
2007-2008. Microsoft Research Fellowship

2005-2006. Marie Curie Fellowship

2004. Italian National Research Council Fellowship

SKILLS
Languages.
Besides Italian, my lingua madre, I am fluent in both English and French. Although I read a lot in Italian and French, in the past few years, I have written almost entirely in English. I read and understand Spanish and, when needed, I speak a very colorful version of it.

Computers.
I work mostly on bash shell on Linux platforms. I program in LISP and Python. In the past, I developed in Java, C and C++, but I now prefer fast, light scripting with Python. Other computer tools that I use a lot include emacs, LaTeX and R - the statistical programming language.