Trusting trust the Ebay way

Advertisement used to do exactly this: informing you that a lot of other costumers were trusting X, so you could as well. Then it became something else, but that is another story. There is a form of bottom-up advertisement, a sort of electronic word-of-keyboard, that the digital era has made possible again: customers' comments and feedback. Everyone has more or less learnt the lesson, from Amazon to Saynsbury's, but the master is Ebay.

On Ebay, sellers and buyers need to build their reputation the hard way: by being good sellers and buyers.

It is a reinforcing process: you are judged by the people you do business with; the better your reputation the more business you may have, the more likely it is that you will wish to do your best to make sure that your reputation, gained with so much effort, remains untarnished and may even improved, which means that buyers are more likely to do business with you, but the more business you are likely to enjoy... and so on.

Some time ago, speaking about the semantic web and the various solutions provided for its possible implementation, I draw a distinction which I think applies well in this case too: check whether your solution is time-friendly, i.e. whether time works in its favour. Trust (on Ebay or elsewhere) but also mistrust (in Palestine or elsewhere) are time-friendly: the longer one stays online doing good business the better it is for the business itself; the longer people kill each other, the stronger their mutual hatred. There are other processes that are time-unfriendly: lying, for example (the longer you do it, the more likely it is you'll be discoverd) or compare keeping updated the Britannica (time works against it, by eroding its updateness and accuracy) vs. Wikipedia (the longer it stays online, the better it gets).

Vendors with a high positive assessment rating get higher returns. This is trivial. Exactly how higher, that's more difficult to determine. Now, in a recent study, Oliver Gartler from the University of Bonn and his Aachen colleague Christian Grund have tried to see what financial value a good reputation at Ebay may mean. They have discoveredd that 1% point more in positive customer feedback (votes) pushes the auction price up on average by 4%.

Trust-ability is a very good investment.

For the complete German text of the article click on the title of this blog.

The biggest quantum simulation ever? 1000 atoms

Qbox, the most computationally intensive computer program developed so far, has started crunching numbers to simulate the quantum behaviour of atoms.

Qbox runs on Blue Gene/L, the world's most powerful supercomputer, built by IBM and installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, US. Gene/L consists of 131,072 individual processors wired together, capable of a peak performance of 360 trillion calculations per second (teraflops).

Qbox simulates the quantum-mechanical interactions between 1000 molybdenum atoms under high pressure. This is the difference. Other simulations of interactions between billions of atoms rely on classical molecular dynamics. So far quantum simulations had involved about 50 atoms at a time.

All this power at the service of knowledge and understanding? Yes, but also of military safety.
The simulations should help scientists to establish the reliability and stability of warheads in the US stockpile, some of which have well passed the "best before" date. Watch out for the scientific consequences though.

Eureka at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory

As of today (26th of July) scientists are trying to read the final pages of the oldest known manuscript of Archimedes's work, the Archimedes palimpsest (click on the image).

Archimedes lived in the third century BC. In the tenth century AD, his works were copied by a scribe. This book of 90 pages was then reused in the twelfth century to produce a volume of 174 pages on which Christian prayers were inscribed. Forgers added religious images sometime after 1930. Today, much of the text has already been read, but ca. 15% of it remains indeciphered.

X-ray fluorescence imaging may help scientists to read this missing part. The ink contains iron, and traces of iron can be highlighted when bombarded with X-rays. The Stanford synchrotron has been used for this kind of work since 2005.

With some luck, we should be able to know what Archimedes wrote in those hidden pages of "The Method of Mechanical Theorems". Eureka indeed.

Learning while multitasking not a good idea

How many programs are open at this moment on your desktop?

Exactly! We all multitask, often out of necessity, sometime under pressure, regularly, if we are bored (better multitasking than having one more cigarette or bar of Mars), occasionally, because it might be fun.

It is, of course, a bad idea that may grow into a bad habit, especially if you're trying to learn something new or difficult. Concentration rhymes with attention. It is, by definition, single-minded.

All this is rather trivial, but if anyone needs scientific evidence to support what common sense already knows too well, you may wish to check this recent summary. Here are some pearls:

• "The best thing you can do to improve your memory is to pay attention to the things you want to remember".
• "Our results suggest that learning facts and concepts will be worse if you learn them while you're distracted".
• "Our study indicates that multi-tasking changes the way people learn".
• "Concentrate while you're studying".

Sounds all very reasonable.

The next question is whether multitasking increases efficiency. I'm afraid there is further bad news. But at least this time the findings are interesting, because just a bit less obvious. The scientific evidence is here. But in this case too, it is old news really.

To conclude: multitask if you have but singletask when you can.

Mirror, mirror upon the wall, which is the oldest universe of all?

In Brazil, they say the hart has no wrinkles. But human faces do, and this is a simple way of telling the age of a person. It's a bit like counting the rings in the trunk of a tree. Now it seems that the Universe might be able to do something similar. We only need to hold the mirror (actually, mirrors, see below) in front of it and let (laser) light shine on its wrinkles. It's called laser interferometry, and the wrinkles are gravitational waves.

The Theory of General Relativity predicts (and requires) the existence of gravitational waves. These are the effect of distortions in gravity force made by matter in the fabric of space-time (see here for a dynamic presentation). Imagine a sufficiently heavy ball laying on a flexible net, roll the ball and the net would curve differently and accordingly. Likewise, any moving mass in space-time will produce gravitational waves. The modification in the net/space-time is almost instantaneous, which means that gravitational waves propagate at the speed of light (for an introduction see here).

Several projects are currently addressing the observation of gravitational waves:
- the US project Ligo (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory) and LISA
- the French/Italian project VIRGO
- the Japanese project TAMA300
- the British/German project GEO 600, which has been recently activated.

The task of GEO 600 is to (try to) detect such ripples created in the fabric of space-time by merging black holes, exploding stars and neutron stars, in other words anything so massively dramatic to leave some trace in space-time.

GEO 600 fires a laser into L-shaped tunnels. If there is a gravitational wave passing through the Earth, this will disturb the laser, since it will have the effect of slightly squeezing and squashing our planet. How slightly? Very, very slightly: fractions of the diameter of a proton (one of the particles constituting the nucleus of an atom). This is why building a gravitational wave catcher is an extraordinary challenge. The level of sensitivity must be orders of magnitutes smaller than the thinner hair.

Any successful detection would corroborate Einstein's theory, and would enable scientists to look into the earliest moments of life of the Universe, by observing the remnant gravitational waves from the Big Bang.

Here is how GEO 600 might detect gravitational waves (from BBC Science).

"Two coalescing black holes circling each other [1] are expected to emit gravitational waves that move out at the speed of light.
At GEO 600, a high-powered laser [2] is fired at a 'beam splitter' - a semi-transparent mirror - which divides the beam down two vacuumed tunnels.
Mirrors [a+b] at the far ends bounce the light back; more mirrors [c+d] extend the measuring distance, and yet more [e+f] are used to recycle the power and enhance the signal.
The light paths from the separate arms are recombined and sent to a photodetector.
If a gravitational wave has passed through the observatory, it will have changed the length of the arms and the signal should be evident when analysed by computer".

Synchronize your two lives

Many of us use electronic calendars of all sorts, in the not entirely futile attempt to manage our commitments and agendas less inefficiently. Palm Pilots, BlackBerries, MS-Outlook, Mobiles, PDAs of a variety of kinds... they are all supposed to give us a hand in this era of externalised memories.

Google Calendar, of course, is becoming a major tool. But, until recently, there was a problem. Your life online (Google Calendar) was not in synchrony with your life offline. Nothing worst than having to keep two diaries. "Don't forget to update the other diary" sent as a reminder at the beginning of each day? No thank you, or so the people of the internet complained, just google "Google Calendar Synchronization".

The good news? Well, complaining on the web does have some consequences. For where there is demand, there can be offer, at a little premium or even free.

The following two programs have recently appeared to make sure that your life offline (the electronic diary in your desktop or PDA or mobile etc.) and your life online (Google Calendar) may waltz together, seamlessly synchronized. But do not rejoice too soon: I've tried both with MS-Outlook 2002 Diary (you need at least Outlook 2003) and with Palm Desktop, and both failed to deliver. So hold your breath a little longer, we are almost there, or try them yourself, you might be luckier. In any case, the problem has been identified and solutions have started to be offered.

Remote Calendars (free): "RemoteCalendars is a COM-.NET Add-in for Outlook 2003/2007, written in C#. After installing this plugin, every Outlook user should be able to subscribe, reload and delete a generic remote iCalendar (RFC 2445) from Outlook 2003/2007."

CompanionLink for Google Calendar ("for a handful of dollars"): "a two-way synchronization solution for people that [sic] want to extend their Google Calendar onto their desktop calendar systems or mobile devices. It can synchronize Google Calendar with all the latest Pocket PC, Windows Mobile, Palm, and BlackBerry devices in addition to Outlook, Lotus Notes, Palm Desktop, and Groupwise applications. "

Innate syntax in monkeys

The previous post was about ants and their innate capacity to count their steps to be able to navigate. This is about monkeys and their innate capacity to compose messages using the same sounds (one may say words) but different structure (syntax) and thus convey different kinds of information. How much else do we not know about the ways in which the animal world deal with information?

From the BBC | From the New Scientist

Counting steps, innately

How far may one go in postulating/discovering innate, hardwired information processing capacities in biological agents? Some recent studies show "quite far".

Apparently, ants do have some kind of internal "pedometer" to measure distances.

BBC Science | New Scientist | The original paper in Science

Fast information, but how fast?

Here are two popular ways of checking how fast your internet connection is:

easier and fancier: http://www.ookla.com/speedtest/

more technical and accurate: http://testmy.net/

How to blog - and keep your job

Just in case you might be concerned about how far you can blog, here is some information and advice from the BBC.

Whose information?

It was an accident, an evening in NY free from commitments and OUP meetings, without friends around. Kia and I thought we could go to the theatre. They were showing "Faith Healer", Brian Friel's recitative. We got lucky and bought two excellent tickets.

The play is simple. Three characters speak four monologues in four parts, with a ten minutes break. The first and last monologue belong to Frank Hardy (Ralph Fiennes), an Irish traveling healer who, after some mixed experiences in Wales and Scotland, returns to Ireland in the hope of restoring his ailing powers. The second monologue comes from Grace (Cherry Jones), his long-time mistress, who has forsaken her bourgeois, legal background to join Frank, whom she considers a genius and charlatan. The third is delivered by Teddy (Ian McDiarmid), a seedy showbiz agent who has stayed with the litigious couple partly out of a devotion partly for reasons he himself cannot fully understand.

For two hours, the four monologues recount roughly the same story from each of the three different agents' perspective, refining and complementing our understanding of the internal drama and social problems of a man who, in the end, does not know who he really is or what he should make of his alleged gift.

It is very hard to explain the impact of the play. Ralph Fiennes is so involving, powerful, moving, intelligent and dramatic to empty the minds and hearts of the audience and fill them with a story that is rather simple in its outlines but profound and enormously rich in its human hues and implications. The resonance with one's own experiences is noiseless. His two monologues are a mixture of Greekly-tragic scratches by real life on anyone's skin, a metaphor for the struggle of the artist in coming to terms with his work, and an existentialist comment on whether anyone really ever understands himself.

I found two themes particularly fascinating. How information in all its varieties (memories, attention, self-narratives, social re-identification etc.) shapes and guides the self; and how the flows of information gradually and yet ever newly converge and spiral around ethereal but nonetheless substantive poles of attractions, moulding facts, people, events.

Faith Healer is directed by Jonathan Kent. It will be at the Booth Theater until July 30th. If you cannot see the play, you may read the text in Selected Plays of Brian Friel.

1934 - 1938 - 1982 - 2006 ... and now back to work.

1934 *
1938 **
1982 ***
2006 *** The real final, when "they" became "we".
2006 **** The final final.
How we got there.
How we stayed there.
Pity.
and, according to some, why we could not lose.

The Match

When good news arrive late, but not too late.

Re-ontologizing life: from the Da Vince Code to the Genetic Code

Cloning is not a new dream or nightmare, witness the fiction thriller novel by Ira Levin (1976) turned into a famous film with the same title, "The Boys from Brazil", directed by Franklin J. Schaffner (1978). But it is no longer a sci-fi speculation either. Dolly was born 10 years ago (5th of July, 1996), and the world has never been the same since.

Despite some wacky claims, there are no cloned humans around, apparently, but this possibility will never be locked inside Pandora's box again. Will there be human cloning in the future (e.g. in a thousand years)? The answer can only be yes. The question is whether it will be legal. Compare what has happen to nuclear weapons. Legislation and international pressure has had only some limited success, in terms of control of their proliferation. Likewise, it would be unrealistic to think that humanity will stop at either technical difficulties or moral boundaries. Our best hopes is that we might be able to limit the damage.
Personally, I see nothing wrong in "playing God", my deep concerns are moral, but go in a different direction.
Any technique needs testing, and testing means failure, a lot of failure. One gets things right only after a long trail of trials and errors. And even when a technique is optimized and well-tuned, there remains plenty of scope for mistakes and the usual, statistical malfunctions.
In some cases, one can place security checks and graduate the processing stages in such a way that it is possible, if a mistake is unfixable, to abort the whole process.
In some other cases, one simply does not care if a low percentage (acceptably "low" in terms of financial convenience) of the end products are to be thrown away.
The latter option seems to be the one adopted in the case of animal cloning. Since fixing the creation of a living organism on the fly is, at this stage of our knowledge, undoable, we may just rely on a mass production of, say, rats, and then kill or let die all those that are unhealthy. Is this nice? No. Could a case be made for it? Maybe, depending on what might be at stake (suppose thousands of cloned rats had to be sacrificed in order to discover how to treat AIDS). Could this be an option with humans? Technically, yes. Morally, it should not be, of course. Will morality therefore override other interests? I doubt it. History has seen massacres and violences of all sorts. Humans have used, exploited and abused other humans in the most brutal, disgusting ways. Nobody should have any illusions about what humanity will be able and willing to do to itself tomorrow.

A last thought, which may be phrase in a little syllogism:
1) cloning human beings successfully is possible
2) Jesus of Nazareth was a human being
therefore...
Messy isn't it?
Forget about Da Vince Code, is the Genetic Code that matters.