Non-Highlights of the past ten days

When the last remnants of the summer give up to the first colds of the fall, my energy often takes a deep dive. It goes nose down under the comfortable covers of my bed, where I join my cat in long hours of joyful inactivity. Time spent just enjoying being here and now on this planet.

These acute attacks of laziness has proven to be a formidable brake on highlights blogging. I am in the mood for chanting the calm dance of falling leaves, feeling the sobering caress of a cold breeze after a summer spent in the garden worshipping the sun as geckos do.

So instead of writing my highlights of the past 10 days, I’ll just join my cat: she’s hiding under my plaid poncho. She’s just so cute, it is harder and harder to resist cuddling my long time feline friend in her lethargy.

Highlights of the day

• Psychology: “The Rules of Love” and “Breakups: Emotion Vs. Login“.
• Politics: Why Libertarians Should Vote for Obama. I haven’t yet made my mind upon which candidate is better for me. I actually don’t have to. I am not a US citizen, so I won’t vote. It’s still an interesting read.
• In general, I don’t like the direction where the West seems to be headed. We are letting our civil and personal liberties, our privacy fade away in exchange for the illusion of safety. It’s troubling that it’s happening without a sizable portion of the population caring about it.
  We act like frogs in a boiling pan. If we were thrown there suddenly, we’d be all screaming and kicking. If we are put there when it’s comfortable and then the temperature is slowly turned up, we won’t make a fuss: we actually enjoy the warmer water for a while… but we’d still end up bolied. Without noticing.
  Online media and grassroot reporting has the potential to put a brake on it, but the population at large should wake up and support the independent press, even if they don’t fully agree with them. If the fringe is not protected, the mainstream will become narrower and narrower until it’s not free anymore.
  Take Italy for instance: I bet most Italian ignore that two years ago the law against coup d’etat (Codice Penale, article 283) has been reformed. It used to be a criminal act punishable with no less than twelve years in jail to try subverting the state with non-democratic (i.e. anything not in our Constitution) means. Now, it’s only a crime if you do it with violent acts and the punishment has also been reduced to “no less than five years”.
  It’s worth noticing that this very article is the one used in the P2 criminal process. P2 was a masonic lodge that permeates the history of Italy. Started in Piedmont in 1877, it’s always been a center of power. After World War II, it was involved in NATO stay-behind operation Gladio as a counterbalance to the communist influences in Italian left parties and organizations. It became a shadow government, a state within the state. It eventually got involved in criminal actions, it was prosecuted and the police found a document planning among other things for the consolidation and control of the media, the suppression of trade unions and the rewriting of the Constitution. Our current president, Berlusconi, was a member of P2; he was not alone, many of the exponents of the political and economic elite in Italy were part of it on both sides of today’s political fronts. It’s no wonder that many of the goals highlighted in that plan have been achieved since P2 demise. They did it however in somewhat democratic means.

  By the way, the current electoral system for the Parliament was reformed in the same year as the law against coup d’etat – both under the previous Berlusconi government. It broke away from nominal preferences to specific candidates toward preferences to lists assembled by parties’ secretary offices.
  Prodi won the elections that year but his margin was very thin and his coalition shattered in pieces in 2008. In this year election, Berlusconi won and – more interestingly – the far left was completely wiped out from the Parliament. A dramatic change in a country where that political area used to have a lot of power and double digit percentages in the Parliament.

  The current government is working to extend this electoral system to European elections too.

  Politics is a  balance of power. It’s no different from market competition, when two sides fight rhetorically to create a better solution I am happy. The problem is when one group wants to suppress this exercise and pursue the benefit of its members and its members only.
  The change in the italian law against a coup d’etat is troubling. It adds to broadening evidence that the ruling elites (of the whole world, not just Italy) are preparing for harder times, growing inequalities or even a global crisis that will fuel serious social unrest.

• A Colorado law professor highlights the “unprecedented and invasive” danger of deep packet inspection.
• Micheal Moore skips the box office and heads straight for the Net for what will probably be a highly politically-skewed, but still interesting, film.
• On a lighter topic, here is how to make fruit sushi.
• IBM integration of Sametime and OpenSim is interesting; I like the video, it lets people who never used virtual worlds realize their potential as a remote collaboration platform.
• Viruses attacking viruses.
• Nokia working on a text analysis program that will tell individuals apart from their SMS writing style. Useful for forensic applications? I wonder how much time before we have one for MMORPGs: “Kill3rDuD3 2 H07m0m: ur man pwnd. u fk me?” (ok, ok… leetspeek is not my thing)
• As expected, EU proposed copyright extension will only benefit majors. 80% of the artists will get less than €30/year from it. The official rationale for the extension – supporting the aging artists after they retire – is moot (someone should have explained them the concept of saving for a pension anyway).

Highlights of the day

• Linden Lab releases SLim. I am waiting to see the source or the protocol specification before I decide if I like it or not.
• IHT, on the different cultures of America and Europe.
• Six degrees of separation is now three according to a study funded by O2. Global communications and social networks makes people more connected than ever. I wonder if there are studies that correlate the degrees of separation with its impacts on creativity, productivity and happiness.
• Botnets are behaving strangely: activity surged but spam did not. What’s going on?
• Privacy issues with Google Chrome. As expected. I see a coming battle between IE8 and Chrome on privacy, with Firefox (or another open source project, maybe Chrome itself) picking up the best of both worlds. Opera, as usual, will be the innovator that gets a lot right way ahead of others but that everyone ignores.
• UE bans animal cloning for food (In Italian).
• A startup developed and patented a technology for microbes identification in food that is an order of magnitude cheaper and faster than the ones currently in use. The coming field of bionanotech, enabled by ICT with a new wave of massively parallel processors (in the form of GPUs or multi-core CPUs with a large number of cores), will give birth of more and more applications of biosensors in everyday life. It won’t be limited to medical or safety applications, there are big opportunities in lifestyle ones: anyone wants to fund a startup to make a portable pork meat detector for food using DNA barcoding or biomarkers (it would work much like today’s glucose detectors)? If the answer is yes, I’d like to join the effort.
• There is a raising political battlefront, at its extremes are transhumanists and bioluddites: it will probably hit mainstream attention when the debate about drug-enhanced sports hits the mass medias.
  The next Olympics, held in London in 2012, will be interesting as more advanced drugs become available and other non-chemical enhancers (like brainwave entrainment supported by biofeedback devices) become more and more effective.
• Caloric restriction has been proved to be an effective method for life extension in mice. According to a recent paper, it’s vastly due to insulin metabolism: they used pharmacological modulators of insulin/IGF-1 signaling pathway to boost mice life by 37.8%.
• One of the various results of the war in Georgia will probably be the collapse of Ukraine government.
• London’s crime maps will be useful to pick up my new home, if I find a job there.

Highlights of the… weekend

On weekends, even avid blog readers take a pause to visit the Big Room with the blue ceiling and grassy floor. But, hey, too much oxygen is harmful too, isn’t it? ;-)

Here’s a list of things I found interesting:

• The always insightful Contrary Brin on various things, including forecasts sites loosely based on prediction markets, outsourcing innovation and a technology to turn ordinary windows into solar panels that may reach the market in the next few years.
• U.S. Army uses iPods as custom translators: it cuts training costs for soldiers and civilians are familiar with them and find it less threatening. Music can be a powerful cross-cultural communication and bonding method, they shouldn’t limit the use of those iPods to pre-recorded phrases. It would be a waste.
• Energy is in: Google is America biggest investor in geothermal research and Nanosolar gets $300M to expand its production of efficient solar panels.
• Behavioral bias toward women in places of power and in elections: people trust good-looking extremists.
• Google Video For Business: will it help make cloud computing and software as a service more popular in the enterprise?
• Microsoft plays catch up, a job posting hints about its own online store for Windows Mobile software.
• O2 UK will start selling pa-as-you-go iPhones on September 16, 2008. They’ll cost much less than what I’d pay to get one here in Italy. If they are unlocked, I’ll get one when I have my first round of interviews in London.
• Google’s new browser gets a lot right in my opinion.

Highlights of the day: August 29th, 2008

On virtual worlds:

• A McAfee report on security in virtual worlds [pdf] doesn’t completely satisfy Ars Technica. There are some interesting tidbits in the report, such as the recommendation to avoid a common object model now that virtual worlds are converging on common development technologies like Mono/CLR. The rationale is that it would prevent cross-world epidemics. I don’t buy into this idea, as content mobility — being able to switch from a VW to another one — is an important feature for professional content developers. Virtual worlds creators will probably like the idea, it raises the cost of switching from one’s platform to the competition.
• A list of the top 20 most influential people in MMOs.
• Not possible in Real Life comments on how Second Life can make you more intelligent by boosting your creativity and imagination.
• Events in London: Virtual Worlds Forum (6-8 October) and Virtual Worlds London (20-21 October). Gumtree.com is a good place to find an accommodation if you want to visit London on a budget.
• Via Eighbar, a video showing tons of different virtual worlds.
• NVISION shows a surging interest in 3D, both in hardware through stereoscopic monitors and in new interface paradigms and programs like CoolIris, formerly known as PicLens.

On Android:

• More details on Android Market. It’s Google answer to Apple’ AppStore.
• Winners of the Android Developer Challenge have been announced. Italians were not allowed to participate, due to our byzantine law on contests with money prizes. When the challenge was announced, I had the same idea that powers Compare Everywhere and GoCart.

On iPhone apps:

• Dietary online, Mac and iPhone apps (including Diet from yours truly) are on the rise. Is it the end-of-summer effect?
• Direct Line is the real life counterpart of RPG cheaters. They help you navigate to the bosses (read humans) and avoiding their minions when you go through their dungeons (read call centers’ Interactive voice response systems).

On the music business:

• Did you know that the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) was founded in Rome in November 1933, that’s in full blown fascism? This year is the 75th anniversary of IFPI foundation but they aren’t doing anything to celebrate it… well, apart from some anonymous editing on wikipedia. Someone changed “IFPI began as the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry in Rome under the laws of fascist Italy during 1933” into “The IFPI was formed in Rome in November 1933“.
• Music artists do not like that iTunes allow customers to cherry-pick tracks. Customers love to choose tracks one by one, but product bundling makes economic sense (for them too) in high volume, high margin markets — like digital goods. It’s no wonder that MacUpdate Promo and MacHeist have been wildly successful among Mac users.
  Artists do have a point however when they say that an album is not artistically the same as a bunch of tracks. As Jay-Z said “[...] movies are not sold scene by scene”.

Miscellanea:

• Resume building tips and haggling tips from LifeHacker. I wouldn’t however apply the latter to job hunting and negotiation. I tend to aim for the right salary and work to build a stronger negotiating position. Find good and real alternatives to reduce the ZOPA until you get the best possible deal.
• Putin suggests that domestic U.S. politics lead to Georgia crisis. U.S. rejects it. I find it hard to believe Putin, if he meant that it was purposefully caused by American presidential candidates or their proteges.
  The crisis just shown how good are American leaders at choosing just the wrong allies. Mikheil Saakashvili responded to a light shelling with a full blown attack on South Ossetia, triggering the inevitable response from a Russia in search of a way to restore its national pride and looking to curb NATO expansion. An outcome that anyone who runs a state should have been able to forecast even while sleeping! Russian peacekeepers were in South Ossetia for 16 years after a previous unsuccessful attempt from Georgia in the 1990s; South Ossetia and Abkazia have been Russian protectorate or autonomous regions since 1810!
  I think the opposite happened, Russia played its cards very well to restore its position and power on a key geopolitical area. I’d be surprised if Russia didn’t have a role and a plan to make Saakashvili snap.
  Russia has been the country benefiting the most, from the geopolitical point of view, from the crisis. They’re paying the price economically now as their stock market plummets, but it’s worth the bargain in the long run.
  The problem is how badly the West responded, how fractured we were and how weak we appeared to be.
• OAuth got a boost in adoption. It’s a standard for data portability and integration among web services and applications that puts control in the hand of the users. I heard about it for the first time not long ago, from a blog of a friend who worked at Yahoo Brickhouse (that’s Yahoo inhouse incubator) on Fire Eagle.
  I’d love to see it adopted for virtual worlds to web, and virtual world to virtual world interoperability.
• Another one of the key Internet protocol has a major vulnerability. This time it will be harder to fix than the DNS flaw discovered earlier this year.
• UK banking giant changes a customer password because it was offensive to its brand, and refuses to change it back. I surely would not want to use a bank that proofreads my passwords for political correctness, or for any purpose whatsoever.
• Interesting development for the wonderful site Wikileaks (the link may not work if you live in an oppressive regime), they’re going to auction emails from a senior aide to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
• In Italy, there are discussions for an anti-interception law. Berlusconi, who had some embarrassing moments in the past when telephone conversations were leaked to the press, showed support to former president Prodi. The latter, retired from active politics, answered that he is totally against these kind of laws and that it would be fine for him if all his telephone conversations were made public. (in Italian news)
• In 7 years, Europe population growth will be negative. It spells troubles in the long term: both the housing markets, the financial markets who depend on them and the pension funds will be in danger.

Highlights of the day: August 28th, 2008

• Mozilla Ubiquity rocks. It is QuickSilver for the web. It’s getting more twits than iPhone and Obama!
• Veoh Case, Transcoding is not a crime. A U.S. judge decided that transcoding to another format doesn’t remove the DMCA safe harbor protection. It’s important for many online video sites, but also for many technologies that will be keystones of digital, connected, intelligent homes.
• European Commission is misleading EU on copyright extension, says academic: EU Commission paid a scientist to study the impact of a proposed copyright extension. They ignored the results when they were against it and did not even cite the study in their policy documents. Why I am not surprised?
  In the meantime, Clay Shirky wonderfully explains how we need to change the way we think about information and culture:

  We can take advantage of our cognitive surplus, but only if we start regarding pure consumption as an anomaly, and broad participation as the norm. This not a dispassionate argument, because the stakes are so high. We don’t get to decide whether we want a new society. The changes we are under can’t be rolled back, nor contained in the present institutional frameworks. What we might get to decide is how we want this change to turn out.

  (From Edge 255)

• Google Android lost some more pieces. Bluetooth API and GTalkService be gone. I had high hopes in Android at the start of this year, but Google played it all wrong. Let’s hope this reduction in focus will bring quality and a speedy release.
• SpeedDate.com gets $6 million in funds. That’s a good application to geo-localize and I haven’t seen matchmaking apps for the iPhone. I may as well write one, if I don’t get a new job.
• Google Map Maker expands to India. User-generated map annotations. Much like Google Earth’s community, but with a lower barrier to entry.
• TechCrunch is organizing a European event to get start-ups together. We don’t have many occasions to network and meet. It’s a good thing. The should get some VCs in too.
• Human Right Watch affirms that the Olympics worsened human rights abuses in China instead of stopping them.
• Some chinese news:
  • 10% of chinese children – some 40 millions – using Internet are addicted, according Li Jianguo, vice-chairman of the Standing Committee of China’s National People’s Congress (NPC). As usual, politicians call for stricter regulation.
    Internet addiction is not however a problem to underestimate. We’re processing now much more information than what humans processed in any time in history. All this mental activity can deplete our mental energies. The brain has a limited set of neurotransmitters and many high level functions are located in a single important region, the prefrontal cortex. Among the executive function performed by this area of the brain are both focused attention and self-control, the ability to delay immediate gratification for better or more rewarding longer-term gratification.
    Using too much of the former will hinder the latter. The brain is quite plastic while you grow up, but this ability is somewhat reduced once you’re in adulthood. What you did during your teen years is going to have a lasting impact on how your adult brain works, as much as how your personality is.
    It’s not all bad. There are drugs and nutrients that can be use to replenish our neurotransmitters, to cure diseases or just to make our brain able work at maximum power for longer time.
    Are we gonna see what Vernon Vinge described in his books?

    “These people in ‘Rainbows End’ have the attention span of a butterfly,” he said. “They’ll alight on a topic, use it in a particular way and then they’re on to something else. Right now people worry that we don’t have lifetime employment anymore. How extreme could that get? I could imagine a world where everything is piecework and the piece duration is less than a minute.”

  • Time to refresh your CV if you’re a top-level legal expert. China is looking for six general legal counsels for centrally administered, state-owned enterprises. “As a member of senior management, general counsel is responsible for overseeing the legal affairs of a business and offering legal services to help implement major business strategies. These include initial public offerings, major investment and financing projects, among others, as well as mergers and restructuring.” A Legal Counsels Wanted notice will be publicized on Sept. 1.
  • A village somewhere in rural China is still operating a moveable-type printing machine. At the opening cerimony, one of the performances was about it and they got a boost in tourists.
  • Beijing will host the 2008 International Copyright Forum in October. Their approach to copyright protection is interesting, they’re bribing informants with cash.
  • In the last decades, China saw a dramatic rise in quality of life. It’s pushing world pollution and resource consumption to new levels, but it’s not all that bad for us Westerns. More people at our levels of quality of life means more people with our diseases (diabetes, overweight, etc.) and our problems, thus more brainpower to solve them.
• Military researchers are testing a out powder to regenerate lost extremities.
• Analysis of Russia’s security ties in Asia. An interesting read after the lukewarm support that Russia got at the summit in Shanghai.
• Packing light but wanna carry a lot of value? Rhodium, good quality one-carat diamonds or LSD are good choices, but you can’t beat antimatter which (speculatively) sells for $26 quadrillions per pound.
• Videos of recent talks of Nobel laureates. (via Marginal Revolution)
• Industrial organization reading list. (I have yet to go through it, please highlight any hidden gem in comments)
• Stylish clothes that can withstand shots and stabs. They sell at Harrods. A polo shirt that can take a hit from a mini Uzi costs around £5,000.

Highlights of the day: August 27th, 2008

Yesterday was more about quantity than quality:

• Apple to co-host panel on future of video surveillance. Apple presence is interesting. There is a growing interest in affluent, digitally enabled homes to integrate alarm systems and CCTVs with entertainment systems, creating a unified media framework and home storage & computing cloud. The ergonomics and design of Apple products have a big appeal on this better-off market segment.
• Merlin Mann’s on What Makes a Good Blog?
• Eighbar comments on Electric Sheep Company’s Webflock. Google’s Lively, after an interesting start, isn’t showing much progress. ESC is much more focused and has proven experience in virtual worlds. I think we’ll see Webflock used in some large corporation’s website relatively soon.
• Fulley, a site for hypermilers.
• TechCrunch on how Yahoo Japan is worth nearly as much as Yahoo. They did it going hyper-local and choosing the right partner, Masayoshi Son, SoftBank’s founder and Japan’s richest man.
• Several highlights from a blog that I read in bursts. Marginal Revolution on:
  • Obama vs. McCain, “This election, in other words, is becoming a contest to decide which type of elite voters hate — or fear, or mistrust — more: A social elite or an economic elite?”
  • Which body parts are sung the most? Broken down by genre. It’s no wonder what Hip Hop prefers, is it?
  • FriendFeed’s fake following. Social software deception?
  • Markets in panhandling. Be sure to read the comments.
  • On pensions systems: “The Congressional Budget Office estimates that there is only a 7% probability that someone born in 2000 will receive their Social Security benefits as promised today. The better news is that with a probability of 58% the cut in benefits will be 20% or less.”
  • Untangling the economy may take a while.

• The scientifically correct procedure to boil an egg.
• Christian Scholz (aka Tao Takashi) on repoze.bfg, a Zope3-flavoured RoR-like framework ; thanks, I didn’t know about it.
• (in Italian) Stefano Quintarelli comments on what’s going on with our flagship airline. Alitalia is a sample of what’s wrong with Italian politics and business culture. The company should have failed long, long ago. As a publicly founded, It’s been used as a vote tank by all parties all the time. It grew and grew, bloated, inefficient, ultimately causing its own doom. In spring, Berlusconi opposed to an offer from AirFrance affirming there was a group of Italian businessmen that would save the company and keep it in Italian hands. Now, these oligarchs shown up but they demand guaranteed returns. They basically demand an (unofficial) suspension of antitrust laws. No wonder that Ryanair is mad at the government. The Italian people should be mad too, they are the one that will ultimately be paying for it. Unless The End of Aviation happens earlier and we’ll switch to virtual worlds and telepresence as means of long-range collaboration :-)

Highlights of the day

I am going to run a little experiment. I want to see if I can make this blog a little more interesting and attract more readers. I will post links to the most interesting articles and blog posts that I read and starred in Google Reader each day.

Here’s the list for August 26th, 2008:

• Ars Technica: “Of gyroscopes and gaming: the tech behind the Wii MotionPlus“. Gyroscopes measure rotations. They used to be very expensive. Thanks to advances in technology, they reached the price point where they can be employed in mass consumer electronics.
  It’s quite an important news for us, virtual and augmented reality folk. I expect breakthroughs in AR applications in the next couple of years, if gyroscopes find their way into mobile devices.
• HAVA announces official N800/N810 client. I started consulting for an OEM start-up that does HD video and audio entertainment systems for luxury markets. Their products are quite more advanced (and expensive) than HAVA’s players, but I find the announcement indicative of a general trend. Mobile devices are rapidly becoming the preferred entry point toward the growing digital brains of our houses.
  It’s interesting (and expected) that they choose to use Nokia’s N800/N810: it’s both powerful and hacker-friendly device, a perfect tool for prototyping. It’s the forerunner of the emerging MID market that Intel seems so kin to invest upon.
• Nvidia released CUDA 2.0. It’s a toolset that allows mere mortals (read normal C programmers) to use GPUs as general purpose computing units. They expanded their support to Windows Vista, which was missing from the previous major release. It makes CUDA viable for wider adoption.
  We’ll see a brand new class of math-heavy applications, enabled by the instant jump from tens to hundreds of GFLOPs on the computers we already possess.
• Upcoming events on virtual worlds in Europe.
• Vint Falken plays with augmented reality using Irrlicht and ARToolKit.