Month: April 2003

Protocol work

Just had pierre crevoisier from EPFL visit the Wyona office. We are going to organize a seminar at EPFL to show people how to leverage open protocols and formats. The idea is to embrace the diversity of content and applications, and rather than forcing people to submit to central control (they won’t), encourage them to open up their content via RSS, and their applications via web services.
We believe that as web services bridges gaps in EAI, so does weblog technology cross organizational, social barriers. the underlying philosophy in both is that if you unlock your stuff, you can reap the benefits of group forming and social networks.
Sebastien paquet leads the way by showing the academic community how to use weblogs in research and communication (can you say lab notebook?). Will it be possible to replicate the open source meme and make it one of open minds? The protocol and format barriers are coming down. It’s time for group barriers to follow suit.

Giving the levers away

ben hammersley reports that the hosted version of MT will sport a FOAF creator:

Other features include real-time statistics, posting by email, and automatic creation of Friend of a Friend data – instantly taking an experimental standard and taking it to the mainstream.

can you say manufactured serendipity? with the move of these powerful social network technologies to the mainstream, and the formation of standards bodies, who knows where this very interesting field will be in one years time. then again, the pessimist in me wonders what will happen when these neat toys pass from the realm of the elite to the unwashed masses. reputation spam?

Head start

As “baby signs”are a pretty new thing, we have no long-time experiences with it. There’s no doubt that early phases in development are important for the later being. So this might eventually be a risky experiment as a) long-time consequences for the individual from a physiological/psychological point of view are unknown so far b) even if these consequences should turn out to be “positive” (in an isolated physiological/psychological sense), there’s still a sociological uncertainty and risk as children who grew up with baby signs will probably be outnumbered (globally seen), at least in the near future. By nature, most things out there in the world are tailored for average people (think of educational systems, entertainment, things for daily use etc.). Trivially, the majority as a whole is more closely to average than the minority as a whole which usually leads to subliminal yet natural discrimination of minorities. Thus, will these children be even more bored in primary school etc. leading to a frustrated youth and sociological disadvantages? What’s the worth of baby signs if children won’t find the same environmental stimulation and care in their later childhood? Or if baby signs penalize development of “emotional intelligence”, will these children later experience problems in socializing?

now, here are some baby signs

  • Cold – hugging motion
  • Computer – fingers apart, typing motion
  • Dog – tongue out and panting
  • Finish – palm flat, moving back and forth
  • Flower – sniffing
  • Food – fingertips to lips
  • Gone/Don’t know – palms out at shoulder level and shrug

a few years ago i read a paper in science that claimed substantial IQ improvements were possible with intellectual stimulation from birth. there is a whole industry cropping up it seems.

Interest-free banking

talk about serendipity. i asked a regular visitor, himy, what his site islambank was all about. here is his highly interesting reply:

Being Muslim, we don’t eat pork nor consume intoxicants nor should we deal in RIBA, of which Usury (a Latin word meaning ‘simple interest’), is a major component. Being an observant Muslim, I decided in my teenage years to focus on this neglected area of civil society: Interest-Free Living.

this raised my interest immediately. having been schooled to accept interest as something fundamentally inherent to the financial system, i wondered how could this work?

I kept attending arcane and not-well known Islamic Banking conferences around the world, and every time, I was usually the ‘only’ person in attendance who was not connected to a central bank, or an Islamic Bank, or an NGO, or a regulatory official. So finally, after getting fed up of answering the same questions over and over and over again, I stepped back. On Christmas Day 1997, I plopped down the money and founded IslamBank.COMmunity.
I’ve worked at the Islamic Housing Co-operative here in Toronto, which was one of the first interest-free home financing operations in the Northern World. Today, there are close to 300 Islamic Financial Institutions worldwide. Many in the US as well.
Regular Usurious Banks now have ‘islamic windows’, which are either subsidiary companies which operate completely in line with Islamic Law (The ‘Shariah’), such as CITI-Islamic or HSBC-Amanah Finance, or your country’s NoRiba which falls under the UBS Group umbrella.
In your country, SWATCH was financed completely under islamic financing principals after determining that interest-based financing could not allow their business plan the time necessary to kick the Japanese watch Industry’s ass back after taking 60% of the worldwide watch market from the swiss watch industry, which at one time produced 90% of the watches in the world.

so there are interest-free banking activities underwritten by UBS as well. asked about what bahrain had to do with it

That tiny island has become the ‘Wall Street of Islamic Finance’. Every major Islamic Banking concern with Global aspirations must have a physical presence there to be taken seriously.

i had heard of hawala before, so my first reaction was to associate interest-free banking with it, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. still digging..

fixing opml, or bootstrapping?

danny ayers asks what i think of oml, an attempt to fix opml.
i would agree that opml is not the best format ever, but its what we have to work with imo. i have seen many attempts to fix opml, but i’m personally more interested in leveraging formats than creating new ones. if you have to extend opml, i would personally go for namespaces, and not just add arbitrary elements. kinda the rss 2.0 approach.

danny is working on ideagraph, a mindmap meets outliner meets semantic web application. it supports weblogs, rdf, foaf and a couple other niceties. very cool. danny should definitely attend oscom 3.

Fatality risk

we are experiencing “a disease that spreads like the common cold but kills 4% of its victims”. As far as I can tell, SARS is here to stay, and it will continue to spread. Will we be able to develop a vaccine or treatment before every person on earth experiences the disease?

will we have to mostly abolish international travel to stop an important vector of the disease? will globalization be one of goods and services only? will we shift more of our existence into cyberspace to reduce contagion? a 4% risk has to be put into perspective.

0.0005 %
risk of death on a dive
0.004 %
risk of death from mountain hiking
0.05 %
risk of death from motor vehicle accident
100 %
risk of eventual death

a master list of infectious diseases is available too.