I was puzzled in Amberes when I saw this musician in the street playing this weird instrument. It has strings and it is played like a violin, but it has a kind of amplifier like a trumpet.

Do you know which instrument is this?

Today I was playing with a few social networking applications that offer location services. Why? I want to stop posting only cryptic status messages in Facebook and sometimes really say what am I doing as my friends do (real friends, not only facebook friends), plus I also want to post some location information in my profile and keep track of trips.

One of the most important features to me was compatibility with FireEagle, which is a broker of location information to be used by other applications and social networking sites, that will give me a low entry/exit barrier. I also wanted something that can write to my Facebook profile, as I use Facebook a lot. The resulting setting was a non-trivial data flow that I had to draw to understand:

There are a few sites that are designed to handle location information in a social networking setting. The one I liked the most, from the ones I visited, is Dopplr which is a place for frequent travellers to boast about how many places they have been and where are they going next. Dopplr can read/write from FireEagle and has a nice application for Facebook. The Dopplr site is also pretty neat, I must say, and the Raumzeitgeist has a very cool look.

This is a very nice interview that Larry King did last night to the author of "Religulous", Bill Maher. "Religulous" the movie launches on October 3rd.

Some excerpts from the interview follow.

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About the role of religion in public policy:

BM: The big question that got all the play in the news snippets was asking what should we do about evil? [...] So Obama gives a very nuanced answer, and again this is why I do like this guy. [...] He said, "Yes, we should be aware of evil, but we should be humble about evil." And what he was trying to say, I think, was you know what? It's easy to sit back in America and go, "Well, we're the good people. That's common knowledge. Evil is always over there and never here."

He was saying you know what? We have a lot of evil right here. Look at the prison system. Look at the justice system. Look how we treat immigrants. We torture people now in America. There's, you know, rampant sexual harassment of women in the military. There's a lot of evil that we're doing. OK. This didn't go over very well.

Then McCain is asked. What do we do about evil? Two words. Defeat it. Now, of course, to the people in this audience, this goes over great because when they hear evil, they think of something very tangible: the devil. They're not kidding. They believe in this comic-book figure called the devil who's going to poke your ass in hell if you're bad. Heaven, air conditioning. OK.

This is a recent paper that will be presented in KDD in late August. It describes an interesting application for generating diverse query recommendations.



Francesco Bonchi, Carlos Castillo, Debora Donato, Aristides Gionis: "Topical query decomposition". To appear in proceedings of ACM KDD, Las Vegas, USA, August 2008.

The Inalienable Rights Enforcement Initiative is an initiative that could end up in the November'08 ballot in California. It calls for legalizing the growth, sale, and possession of marijuana, collecting taxes on its through a system of stamps and licenses.

Here is the proposition to end the prohibition:

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An initiative to safeguard the inalienable rights of the people providing for the legalization, regulation, and taxation of marijuana, to finance the costs of drug treatment, invest in job training and new jobs, and give money to be spent at the local level.

This initiative will amend the Constitution of California to defend and safeguard the inalienable rights of the People against infringement by governments and corporations, providing for the lawful growth, sale, and possession of marijuana. Marijuana will be taxed through a system of stamps and licenses--a $5 stamp will be required for the sale of an eighth ounce of marijuana and a $50 annual license will be required for the growth of one marijuana plant. To protect participants and encourage participation in the system, such licenses and stamps will be available anonymously in stores where marijuana is sold. Valid possession of such a license or stamp will entitle possessors to protection against infringement of their inalienable rights by governments and corporations with respect to the lawful growth, sale, or possession of marijuana. This system will be financed by 10% of the revenues generated by the sale of stamps and licenses. The remaining 90% of revenues will be divided equally-30% to finance the costs of drug treatment, 30% to invest in job training and new jobs, and 30% to be spent at the local level. Any excess shall be redistributed equally among the People, except those in a household making more than five times the median salary.