Experiments in Cyberspace

Have you ever spent the last day of the year on-line? Instead of partying, hitting the streets or freezing your privates out in the snow (this obviously rules out the people of the southern hemisphere), have you tried celebrating the New Year in front of your computer in peace and tranquility? Well, before you call the men in white coats let me explain. It happened to me once, about 5 years ago if my memory serves me right. Surprisingly, I was not alone. There were quite a number of souls who were in need of psychiatric help apparently. I will go on and say - at the risk of being called anti-social, cynical, narcissist or a similarly appropriate term for the occasion - I enjoyed it very much. For reasons I will not go into, I had to stay home and rather than watching TV and testing the alcohol barrier, I punched the keys until the early hours of the day while the fan was humming gently in the background, trying to cool the system. This is for those who will spend the evening of Dec

I sometimes come across in blogs an add-on which shows the mood of the owner, the song she listens and the book she reads at that particular moment. Now that Christmas is due and the New Year is imminent (apparently the economic crisis affected my vocabulary), if I had a similar plug-in, mine could as well read: Mood: Gloomy Listening: Sound of Silence Reading: For Whom the Bells Toll Still, in spite of ominous signs, tightened budgets, shrinking profits and accelerating unemployment, this is the time of year to hope, and to reflect . Capitalism, just like it does not distribute wealth equally, does not distribute peace, happiness and joy with a conscience. Well, let me stop before this turns out to be anything but a Christmas post. I wish you all a merry Christmas and a happier New Year.

It is customary to compile a list of events when the New Year is near. As most of you know, Google makes a similar list of popular searches every year on a country by country basis. I have taken the liberty of picking the most interesting queries among them. Here they are: "my" from Australia - This is definitely my number one. When you don't have a mirror, what do you do? Yes, you ask Google. "qq" from China - It probably means something in Chinese; then again, it might not. "you" from Chile - Another intelligent search item. Were they talking to Google bot? It was also the number eight of the Colombians and number nine of the Spanish. I am beginning to suspect you is a nick for a new drug. "danmark" from Denmark - Apparently the Danish like to see how many times their country is indexed by the search engines. "google" from Germany - I have nothing to say. "hong kong" from Hong Kong - The Danish were not alone. &

You surely know Aesop's fable "The Boy Who Cried Wolf." The tragic ending of the shepherd boy and the flock is used to teach us not to lie. However, this short story has always irritated me: there is something wrong with the moral of it. I do not know your experience, but here, in this lovely corner of the world, shepherds hardly own flocks. They are usually hired hands and the protagonist in the fable is also depicted as one. OK, the boy lied and got eaten, but so did the flock. Now, whose flock was it? By not believing him, whose property perished? Whenever I hear cries of help from industries in trouble after the recent economic downturn, I can not help but remember Aesop's tale. Some scream and shout, some refuse to believe because they have been lied and ripped off so many times. Before rejecting help to those who are presumably in need, it is worth thinking about what happens to the flock.

With no intention of upsetting numerous bloggers - some of which I closely follow and benefit - who advise on how to make money on line, Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Fourth Quadrant: A Map of the Limits of Statistics that was recently published in Edge can be an eye-opener. In his analysis of the latest crisis of the banking system, Taleb says, When I was a quant-trader in complex derivatives, people mistaking my profession used to ask me for "stock tips" which put me in a state of rage: a charlatan is someone likely (statistically) to give you positive advice, of the "how to" variety. Go to a bookstore, and look at the business shelves: you will find plenty of books telling you how to make your first million, or your first quarter-billion, etc. You will not be likely to find a book on "how I failed in business and in life"—though the second type of advice is vastly more informational, and typically less charlatanic. Indeed, the only popular such

As the number of social networks increase, so does their importance for bloggers in particular and businesses in general to promote their content through them. It is critical to understand the metrics used to use social media effectively . One particular industry that has high stakes in this is the search engines as social media sources provide an effective alternative to traditional web search by directly connecting users with the information needs to users willing to share the information. For example, users can post questions or new items, and rely on other users to comment or rank the content (e.g., sites such as Slashdot or Digg) or rank the popularity of users (like Twitter). While the responses could be excellent, the quality could vary greatly. Hence, user feedback, such as voting, or rating the content, has become a crucial aspect of the effectiveness of the community as demonstrated by the paper, A Few Bad Votes Too Many? Towards Robust Ranking in Social Media [pdf] by Jiang

Less and less things in life surprise me any more. But this new craze of "let's all follow each other on [insert your favorite network here]" has amazed me. Apparently there is still room for surprises and I have gladly taken it as "I am not that old after all." Fine! Let us dissect and analyze this 'following phenomenon'. What makes the number of followers valuable as a metric? For instance, Matt Bacak of Twitter fame claims he has so many followers that he is the third tweeted??? man in the Tweetland. He thinks it is valuable so he markets it: First Facebook, now Twitter. The Powerful Promoter, Matt Bacak, has taken himself to the top of the social media networks yet again, this time beating out 99.9% of the fastest growing site's members. [...] Turn your income-generating ideas into handfuls of cold hard cash. [...] By Matt Bacak, the Powerful Promoter and author of Powerful Promoting Tips newsletter. "If I could show you a proven, b

After visiting hundreds of sites, all with their shiny favicons displaying in your browser's address bar, you decided to use your own favicon in your Blogger/Blogspot blog. You designed and polished it and now what? Here are the steps you should follow: 1. Upload your newly created favicon to a free picture host and take note of the URL. 2. Visit your site and check your HTML source code by pressing CTRL+U (Firefox users). 3. Copy all the code after the opening head [head] tag up to the opening title [title] tag: [some script]...[/script] [meta content=...] ... 4. Back up your template. 5. Go to your dashboard and choose "layout", and then "edit html" 6. Delete this line from your template: [b: include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/] ... 7. Paste the previously copied code in step 3 in lieu of the line you deleted in step 6. 8. Change the favicon URL to the one you got in step 1 like this: [link rel='icon' hre

Every now then we feel the urge to change our templates in our blogs. This can be out of necessity (we might need a bigger area to upload images), because we get bored with the previous template or upon discovering a new one which complements the topics we write about or our style. Regardless of the platform you use, be it Blogger, Wordpress, Evolution etc, switching to a new template is trivial. But, unlike for instance Wordpress where the images come in its own folder with the template, Blogger images are usually stored in free picture hosts. Pictures hosted at such places can cause you trouble in future: Uploader's account can be deleted for any reason. Such hosts often impose bandwidth restrictions and you can suddenly see warning messages in your blog, or no images at all. Template writer can accidentally delete those images. A good way and a neat trick is writing a post like this, uploading all those CSS images to your Picasa album and change the image addresses in your

Analyzing the crisis of journalism and whether blogging or independent on-line journalism can take the place of media reporting as we know it or not, are not easy issues to tackle. The difficulty stems from the fact that, public's right to access to information, ensuring public's safety, personal and privacy rights, safeguarding the bloggers and anonymity, upholding copyright and patent laws  are all intertwined in a beautiful mixture of a soup we call Internet. Since the topics are huge and will provide enough material to write for many years, I am going to start at a random point. Unlike many though, I do have a proposition to solve most of the problems of today, but to present it gracefully requires time; so it will have to wait. Today, I would like to give three seemingly unrelated news and want you to focus on not who is right or wrong but on the mechanics of them, i.e. how things operate or unfold. First, we have the report of Committee to Protect Journalists,

I have partially covered some of the social networks you can use . Now, let us focus on making the most of them. I will recommend a slightly different strategy for you to follow. After you have made your own experiment and decided on which networks you will concentrate your efforts, here are some tips for you: Do not rush submitting your own posts Do not try to game the system in vain. Instead, give your readers the opportunity to bookmark and/or submit them. This will be a new experiment with which you will measure what percentage of your subscribers take the time to bookmark and share your posts. Think how you can improve the submission rates Most probably, the initial results will be discouraging, that's good! Now, reread your posts and note how you could have written them better, especially the titles. Check if your bookmark links function properly and if they are clearly visible. Do you encourage your readers to share? Use comments to your advantage When answering a rea

Linda Hilfling, with her project Gate Peepin' and the Misspelling Generator, will be among the speakers of Speaking out Loud symposium of Netherlands Media Art Institute , to be held on December 18, 2008. Linda works with the premises of participation and public spaces within media structures, with a focus on means of control (codes, organization and law) and their cultural impact. Her artistic practice takes the form of interventions reflecting upon or revealing hidden gaps in these structures. Initially designed and coded in python and bash by her and also available as a Firefox extension thanks to Erik Borra, the Misspelling Generator intervenes directly within the Google search engine, allowing users to take advantage of the informational gray-zone of misspellings. And it does exactly what it claims: Each query typed into the normal Google search-box will generate misspellings inserted above the normal Google results – similar to Google’s 'Did you mean', but now

Devil's Advocate reporting: Time and again I read news about a cryptically named organization introducing a new device, technique or mechanism having an equally cryptic name that will limit or restrict unwanted use of a product throughout the Internet, and soon after, time and again, I am informed that same mechanism is rendered useless by a crack. For most, it looks like a game of hide and seek, played by thieves and the police, good and bad or you name it. Is it really so? We often forget that this game is played in cyberspace, between parties with views wide apart. Back in 1964, Marshall McLuhan wrote in Understanding Media, The telephone: speech without walls. The phonograph: music hall without walls. The photograph: museum without walls. The electric light: space without walls. The movie, radio and TV: classroom without walls. Man the food-gatherer reappears incongruously as information-gatherer. In this role, electronic man is no less a nomad than his Paleolithic ancesto

No, I am not obsessed with speed if you have mistakenly got the impression after seeing this post and how to design an efficient blog . I live in an unfortunate area with an Internet connection averaging around 8 Kb per second, which is 1/13 of those who live 10 kilometers to the east and west of me. The tel-co will supposedly make some infrastructure improvements only after January, 2009. Well, at least that is what they claim. I can handle a slow connection but it is really annoying to wait for my own blog to load for 40 seconds. So I decided to make it leaner for my own sake. Before writing this post, I pulled down various statistics of the site (home page only) to help me improve a bit: Total HTML: 19,899 bytes, compressed; Total images: 53,785 bytes; JavaScript: 230,649 bytes; CSS: 8,417 bytes; Total CSS imports: 4. Looking at the above figures, it is apparent that there are only two areas I can make some improvements: JavaScript and CSS imports. I focused on cutting bac

A common concern for all bloggers new and old is reaching a wider audience. They start with their family members and a few friends, and they write their feelings, thoughts, experiences etc, hoping to gain more subscribers in the wild wild web. Sooner or later, they direct their attention to the so-called social networks as getting traffic from search engines is difficult, at least initially. I will briefly touch upon my experiences with some of them and sincerely hope you will find this review useful. Before we go on, however, I want you to ask yourself a simple question: Do you enjoy using them? Your answer to this is the KEY CONCEPT here. If you think a particular network will bring you readers just because you manage to throw in a post or two, or any number of them, you will soon discover you are wrong. The buzz word is, and has always been the user experience , and you are one of those users. If the network(s) of your choice helps you find interesting blogs, good articles an

On the outside it reads: He revealed eternal Truth, bringing Joy to millions. He astonished the world with His command over Nature. He changed history forever. Now that Christmas is close, you may wish to send one of these cards John Powers designed to your loved ones ;-)

Einstein was a great scientist and without exception all physics students new to his work are introduced to his use of Gedanken Experiment or thought experiments. Gren Ireson, a lecturer at Loughborough University, UK, where his research interests include quantum philosophy, physics of sport and learning and teaching physical sciences, contests that a thought experiment has three requirements [PDF]: It is carried out in the mind (however one cares to define 'mind'). It draws on experience. It allows the experimenter to see what is happening (perhaps a better term to use than 'see' is 'imagine' or 'form a mental image').  I see a lot of blogs announcing they do follow comments lately, so I will humbly use Einstein's technique to shed some light on do follow commenting today. Let us start with a definition first. Google's Matt Cutts speaks: The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives web masters the ability to modify PageRank flow

I have seldom been to Second Life ; not that I do not like the idea but because of my unstable and slow Internet connection, which turns the experience to a misery. I am aware that some people are not easy with the idea of an on-line 3D world created by its virtual residents' wild imagination but to tell you the truth, it can be fascinating. Let's see if I can change your mind, too. According to Second Life Herald, the always-fairly-unbalanced e-zine founded by philosophy professor Peter Ludlow, two virtual world ballet companies premiered new productions on Sunday, November 23, 2008. La Performance with its high school gym-style performance of "You Are So Beautiful" of Shakespeare (music by Zucchero, and choreography by Jie Loon), and Ballet Pixelle (formerly known as Second Life Ballet) with "The Nut: A Slightly Abridged Telling of The Nutcracker" (music by the Bolshoi Ballet Theatre Orchestra, and choreography by Inarra Saarien) opened the season.

In their recently published article Collecting and Preserving Video games and Their Related Materials: A Review of Current Practice, Game-Related Archives and Research Projects , Megan A. Winget and Caitlin Murray[1] argue for the importance of collecting and coming to a better understanding of video game "artifacts of creation," which will help build a more detailed understanding of the essential qualities of these culturally significant artifacts. Surprised? Don't! Digital Age has its own quirks, and preservation of its products [data] may have a lot more impact than you think. Compare it to what had happened in the Middle Ages, when people were using pergament :[2] Some researchers have been formed, using special tools, methods and approaches, in order to study and teach a very specific and "weird" scientific field: "written history sources of the early middle ages" 600-987). This field is quite different from analogous "more ancient"

According to Los Angeles Times, Six Apart, the company behind major commercial blogging platforms TypePad and Movable Type, is offering free blogs to laid-off journalists via their Journalist Bailout Program : Hello, recently-laid-off or fearful-of-layoffs journalist! We're Six Apart (you know us as the nice folks who make Movable Type or TypePad, which maybe you used for blogging at your old newspaper or magazine) and we want to help you. We're a company founded by bloggers, and we've supported on-line journalism from the beginning. During a time when so many great journalists are worried about losing their jobs, we want to do what we can to help. So we've put together a program to put you on your first steps towards independence. But I did not read the story from LAT first. While Times focused on how generous was Anil Dash's (from Six Apart) offer and the difficulties of making money on-line, it was Graham of Entrecard who truly got to the bottom of the real

  With this photo, my intention, of course, is not to draw your attention to the " Life's Short. Get a Divorce. " campaign of Corri Fetman[1], the Playboy playmate and the hottest attorney (she is also called the lawyer of love because of her invaluable legal input as a regular columnist in the said magazine) in the galaxy, a fact, as it was affirmed by Marvin the Paranoid Android. Rather, I would like to talk about Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind [Barnes&Noble], by Gary Marcus, a professor of psychology at New York University. Marcus argues that evolution is a terrible designer (those who favor intelligent design can read: [insert your favorite deity here] did a clumsy job); not only our bodies are flawed, our mind is also completely messed up. There seems to be two systems operating in our minds: an ancestral system and a deliberative one. We have been unable to shake off the ancestral system dating millions of years despite our feeble a

For me, that is! Every once in a while I stumble upon a blog that mentions about these sexy, classy, fashionable, affordable, high quality, smart (yes-sir, smart), high profile designer frames (with variable dimensions) and eyeglasses using the latest modern materials, manufacturing and marketing systems. Apparently, buying a pair is a must if you want to acquire an aura of Zen.Ni-Cad batteries may not last but the effect of these eyeglasses with a wide range of patterns and prices will. In doubt? It is even in the news, you dumb foxes! After seeing these words a hundredth time, I have almost started to believe  Jason Calacanis, who announced his retirement from blogging . But what hurt me most is this analysis of the Economist:[1] The rest of the world may well have missed the unfolding of his tragedy. Behind it, however, is a bigger trend. Blogging has entered the mainstream, which -as with every new medium in history- looks to its pioneers suspiciously like death. To the earlie

I have (sort of) established that censorship in internet cannot succeed without violating basic human rights. Sadly, this is the de facto case, they are not observed in half of the world today. There are a number of experimental projects that aim to provide freedom of expression and of information retrieval. I would like to introduce one of them: The Free Network Project . Freenet, as is commonly known, is software designed to allow the free exchange of information over the Internet without fear of censorship, or reprisal. To achieve this Freenet makes it very difficult for adversaries to reveal the identity, either of the person publishing, or downloading content. The Freenet project started in 1999, released Freenet 0.1 in March 2000, and has been under active development ever since. What makes Freenet different from other similar projects is found in these few sentences: The journey towards Freenet 0.7 began in 2005 with the realization that some of Freenet's most vulnerab

Excluding its simplicity, a big plus, Blogger has some disadvantages over other free blogging platforms. It heavily relies on JavaScript (this quite plain site ships 100,034 bytes of JS) rather than server side scripting, i.e. PHP or Perl, it claims to be XHTMl 1.0 strict, yet the very first script Google flushes breaks the validation, resulting in 461 errors, 164 warnings for this very site. These problems inevitably slow down loading of the pages and design concerns for running an efficient blog become even more critical. Now, I can live with extensive use of client side scripting (JavaScript) and 461 errors because there is nothing I can do about them and modern browsers are really fault tolerant (which makes them less secure, too). But I can not live without Comment Luv. It is the coolest, sweetest idea in the whole blogosphere. It is trivial to install it on a, say, wordpress blog. When I found out that there was a Comment Luv plug-in for Blogger , I had to try it. And I di

How does code dream? What are dreams of code? Piksel08 examines the other side of code, an alternative side to a hard-coded reality of work and play. Open hardware and free software project a utopic vision, yet exist within economies of capital, the dream factory of mainstream technology. Within the chance meeting of sewing machine and umbrella on the dissecting table, hardware and software are flattened. Piksel08: code dreams explores the dreams of this soft machine; bachelors coding for pleasure, reverse engineering paranoiac constructs of the real, automatic coding practice, soft hardware, and everyday magic.  Also spracht Piksel's informative page about this year's event, Piksel08 , where artists and developers working with Free/Libre and Open Source audiovisual software and hardware will congregate in Bergen, Norway this year. If you are around, do not forget to take a look. There is also a live CD of last year's event ready for download at the site. Image: Exp

Since this seems to be a popular topic, let me throw in a post in the early stages of this fresh blog of mine. It is popular because everyone and his dog have written something about it. Now, hear what this cat has to say. Why do you blog? No, I am serious, think about it. What is your aim, your target? What do you want to achieve? This is the single most important factor that will have an impact on designing an efficient blog (you noticed the emphasis on efficient, didn't you?). Here are some thoughts: You want to spread your ideas, i.e. you want to be read. You want to sell your products, crafts, etc. on-line. You want to make money from advertising or similar. If you consider the above, you will see that: First group needs readers or subscribers; Second, customers; Third, targeted visitors. You should evaluate your blog, from top to bottom, taking into account what type of visitors you expect. Without further ado, excluding the third group (there is a plethora of ar

 B   A   R   A   C   K   O   B   A   M   A 66  65  82  65  67  75  79  66  65  77  65 - as ASCII values  3   2   1   2   4   3   7   3   2   5   2 - digits added \_____/ \_____/ \_____/ \_____/ \_________/    5       3       7       1       9       - digits added Thus, "barack obama" is 53719. Add 1954, the year Elvis recorded his debut single, putting the end to all morality and good taste - the result is 55673. Subtract 1912, the year Titanic went for its first and last voyage. The result will be 53761. Turn the number backwards, and add 3 - the symbol of fulfillment. The number is now 16738. Add 6391 to it - this is the year Bruno Hauptmann, baby killer, was executed, written backwards - you will get 23129. Add 81 to it - this is the symbol of bondage, written backwards - you will get 23210. This, when read backwards, gives 01232. This is 666 in octal, the number of the Beast... Evil, QED. Courtesy of Evilfinder . It is a small script with a small d

Complexity (the number of ways-hows-and-whys a system can act) may become an anachronism as novel research demystifies consciousness reducing human complexity to a deterministic system. Biomachines that bypass time consuming conscious activity ultimately may be fielded by the DOD. The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) is already working towards this end. Through its Neurotechnology for Intelligence Analysts program, it has probed brain signals triggered when an analyst sees something interesting in a satellite image. The analyst's brain registers the discovery long before the analyst becomes cognitively aware of it. "The brain can signal the discovery three times faster than the analyst can respond... My goal is to use these technologies to harness the speed of thought... I know it's possible, especially if we confront these challenges not just as problems of biology and neuroscience but problems of physics, math, materials science and microtechnology."

Anyway, Pamela is in the market for a new computer and she might let me build it! I think in her mind though I could potentially be not b/p AT ALL at a higher dose and so she might raise me until that point? I am not good with criticism, even though I try to be. Sometimes you feel as though you can not forgive, or you won't let yourself because it hurt so much. I just read in Health that cilantro can kill salmonella, so you might want to wash that down with some fresh salsa. Your a strong person and with time, I believe you can get over him, all right? And you believe you will pretty much know as soon as you might that person. I guess that's because everyone loves the light-and-natural look these days, so the industry had to make a scent to go with it. So on Thursday, I was all nervous and everyone go to try out -but me and like two other people. Do you smugly sneak your Way into conversations that don't really have anything to do with religion? So I found some mp3 software

A recent article about Argentina's attempt to block Internet users from searching for information about some of the country's most notable individuals that showed up in Slashdot has made me ponder. How do you run a successful censorship campaign in the Internet? As explained in the post, it is trivial to make such attempts a complete failure [1]. What most people forget or do not want to acknowledge is in order for it to succeed a coercive element has to be present, and that is the lack of basic human rights. Let us for instance take my home country, Turkey. Access to YouTube is blocked (I am using a proxy, kind of slow but it works), whole wordpress.com is unreachable (I am not using ISP's DNS and can run my own if necessary, I have bind installed, so the miserable attempt fails). Now, think again. Why does it fail? It fails because no one is knocking down my door in the middle of the night and take me and my computer with a lame excuse that I am using a proxy or VPN,

I come home and tell my cat about it. And a few fun questions: What is your favorite soap? What is your favorite thing to use when you masturbate? What is your favorite time of day to have sex? It was really very nice to spend time with just my family. He is a prick at times, and doesn't mesh well with the rest of the family, personality wise. How can President Bush give speeches promoting democracy and expect to be taken seriously when people at home and abroad with the current election scandals in Florida, a puppet government in Iraq, and receiving an endorsement from Iran because they feel he would be more indifferent to human rights violations than John Kerry. I had the post-op visit with the surgeon yesterday. I took off yesterday, and we headed up to Baltimore. Afterwards, we were going to go to the American History museum, but it was already 3:30, and it closes at 5, so we decided to walk around and see the monuments and such. Austin was good and fresh and lovely,

It was cute fellow crisis volunteer!!! I'm sure the parents around me thought I was nuts, but how can you resist Josh Groban? I thought of her as Class Mom, when we went to the pumpkin farm for a Halloween field trip. A little later, after seeing my parents get divorced due to disputes over money, the American dream of amassing astounding wealth grew more distasteful for me. You'd think marriage was a cake and if they gave some to the gay people, there'd be none left that wasn't eaten or slobbered on for everyone else to eat. Name ten movies that when you see them at a rental place or think about them you want or have to rent them? We would wrap them in tin foil and put them in the bag. The funniest thing in the WORLD is a kid ripping open a fistfull of pixie sticks, dumping them in her mouth and then doing flips and cartwheels while screaming like a wild animal for the remainder of the festivities. I'd say more, but then what would the stuff below be for? W

I made some postcards. I think I'm in serious denial... at least to some extent... I must have been crazy to think that he would want to spend some time with his new wife! And that would be to the point where I don't want to try. Have been spending the last several days drifting through things, touching down occasionally to talk to friends, do chores. After all the shit he had been through and was still facing he was more concerned about my stupid knee than about himself.

Yesterday I came across Michal Zalewski's site . While reading it (could be a bit technical for most), I noticed an interesting tool, an automatic blogging engine. What it does roughly is it takes a number of arguments you provide and outputs a blog post after checking some pre-defined sources in its database. My intention is to use this engine or similar tools, tweaking its sources where and when necessary, and post my findings here. For what it's worth, unlike Zalewski, my emphasis will be on social, psychological and cultural aspects, not on programming or artificial intelligence.

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