Mediagonal employee Nicola Fankhauser has started a Wikiblog, too. He keeps it going pretty well, today he wrote on The Book of Mozilla.
Worth a look. Provokes a smile :)

Dany le Rouge co-authored an article on the European Commission's ruling in the MSFT antitrust case. The article appeared today in the French daily newspaper La Libération.
Basically it says that the ruling does not help anybody, neither consumers nor competitors, that in fact it imposes but an acceptance tax, allowing unchallenged MSFT to proceed with the practices accused of.
Read the article on line (french!) to find out what the famous and disputatious EU politician thinks will be the consequences of the latest decree for Free and Open Source Software, and to the free access to culture and information.

Always the same old story about scientists looking for god:

π (Aronofsky):
1. Mathematics is the language of nature.
2. Everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers.
3. If you graph these numbers, patterns emerge.

Therefore: There are patterns everywhere in nature.

(works better with soundtrack ;))


Nova Spivack, yesterday:
I often wonder whether there is something potentially cosmic hidden in the distribution of prime numbers -- perhaps something related to the deepest structure and dynamics of our universe in fact.


Always variations on the theme of finding math everywhere in the world, and finding the world in math. I enjoy it every time. :)

Thanks Nova, that piece came just right to cheer me up on this lone saturday evening.

[via moe]

Of course the "rebel without a pause, the Elvis of academia" (quoting Bono), superstar Noam Chomsky had to have a weblog, too.

Local information theorist Jürg Kohlas is teaching a definition of the term "information" that is not actually trendy. Not a word of semantics or interpretation , just a variation of god ol' Shannonian information theory studying the behavior of generic, uninterpreted data. Some might call this impoverishment, others prefer its conceptual simplicity. Ignoring all the mathematics behind, the prose verbalisation of his idea is this:

Information is everything that changes the uncertainty regarding a given question.

And for the math part.. well, it sounds stringent :) ..but as a far as I understood it's contradictory to large parts of the literature.
Unfortunately I don't have the knowledge required to really classify what I'm taught, so it would be great to meet someone who has. Anybody?

Tobias Bühler (above, with camera) is an old schoolmate of mine now working as a cameraman at Viva Switzerland. He took part in the production of the brandhärd video clips "Rap isch Reinigung" ("rap is purgation") and "Noochbrand".
The first of them (second image), which looks like those clips look like and sounds like those songs sound like (a bit boring and puberal, but still quite professional.. IMHO :)), is quite alright, the second now has even been nominated for the "Comet" award, some music award you probably never have heard of. At least I haven't. Toby told me that they're the first group to get there without being appointed by some major player of music industry, which those big players are said to dislike a lot.
So well, if you're among those folks eager to annoy the record industry -or if you just like that sort of gymnasiastenrap- (SCNR) go and vote for them! Just follow the instructions on brandhaerd.ch.
I don't usually listen to this kind of music (Onyx being the only exception ;)), but I just voted for them. First of all for Toby, of course, but then these boys really are kinna fresh, they make no " R&B wit a wack nigga takin' a loop" and are no clichéd gangstaz either.

Almost forgot to tell you: Monday I read a very thoughtful reply to "Notes on the State of Networking" by Lovink & Schneider: Galloway & Thacker: "The Limits of Networking", a great piece on the power of protocols.

I'm a fan of dense visualizations, boiling down large amounts of information into insightful figures. Without any intent I stumbled upon the following two projects today:

Social Circles, visualizing mailing list activity and 'social visibility' and

CVSAnalY, visualizing CVS activity for the PHP project with nice graphs like the heat map, LOC(t) or core group evolution. Not all of them are actually easy to read or really furthering insight.. but well, perhaps you can point some highlights of that domain out to me?

Pictures above are from the Regina Mundi site of Fribourg university. What you see apparently used to be a larger chapel, now it has become the new reading room for students, full of tables and cubicles - but exempt from students.
The feeling to be in there is kind of strange, the hall has kept its strong clerical character, for the modifications to the room itself were not iconoclastic or destructive at all. All those strong religious symbols are still there, having great impact on the atmosphere:
The impressive larger-than-life Christ is behind a large white curtain, the altar is -strange enough- enclosed in that square of white walls in the front of the nave. It is made of massive black stone and had to be walled in, because it had turned out to be impossible to remove it from the building without breaking the entire housetop.
And then the windows, of course..
The tension between those old and strong catholic symbols -catholicism being very strong here in Fribourg- and secularism/laïcité -at Regina Mundi they mainly teach Computer Science and Psychology- becomes quite tangible here. Really impressive.
I wonder how students will continue to use this new space, this morning only a single person went there: the studious girl pictured above.

Today courses at university started again. This semester I'll see, besides things like bio-inspired systems or fCQL, my first WebCT course, a classic piece of eLearning history.
The staff introduced the system to us students this morning, below you see Prof.Kohlas showing a "concept map" of some information theory topics:



We were told that

• the content -mostly formulae with some explanations- is not suitable for being read online, so we'd better print all the ~300 pages
• 
  
• neither the professor nor his three assistants will frequent the forum or offer any kind of support or interaction through the system
• 
  
• the most interesting parts are accessible only from inside the university network

Why eLearning if I can't really use it from anywhere but from university machines? Hm. Makes me wonder what all this is good for at the end.. if it's only for the online quizzes, it does not seem to be worth all the effort and money.
But hey, no need to enclose myself in a wall of prejudice, we'll see how things develop :)
So expect some more reports on how it is to be "on the other side" of eLearning, actually using it. I might even learn something about developing eLearning systems, not only about entropy, coding and cryptography :)

PS: The brand new LerNetz Weblog has more on reasonable eLearning strategies..