Over the past decade there has been a growing public fascination with the complex "connectedness" of modern society. This connectedness is found in many incarnations: in the rapid growth of the Internet and the Web, in the ease with which global communication now takes place, and in the ability of news and information as well as epidemics and financial crises to spread around the world with surprising speed and intensity. These are phenomena that involve networks, incentives, and the aggregate behavior of groups of people; they are based on the links that connect us and the ways in which each of our decisions can have subtle consequences for the outcomes of everyone else.

Networks, Crowds, and Markets combines different scientific perspectives in its approach to understanding networks and behavior. Drawing on ideas from economics, sociology, computing and information science, and applied mathematics, it describes the emerging field of study that is growing at the interface of all these areas, addressing fundamental questions about how the social, economic, and technological worlds are connected.

The book is based on an inter-disciplinary course entitled Networks that we teach at Cornell. The book, like the course, is designed at the introductory undergraduate level with no formal prerequisites. To support deeper explorations, most of the chapters are supplemented with optional advanced sections.

Par karl about 8 hours plus tard :

@tristan et pour moi, il n’y a jamais eu de clause « ne pas poser nu » dans mes contrats. :p

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# The way views are counted has improved. I learned ten days ago from Julien Hory that Dailymotion counts a view only after a couple of minutes, a time determined as the average viewing time on the site. Before you reach that mark, your view does not count. Cruel, we are not used to this, but it probably gives a much better view of reality.

In 1993, the City of Darkness, or the Walled City of Kowloon, was demolished. To the 35,000 people living in this dense urban slum, the change was the end of a lawless existence. The area was a diplomatic black hole, the model of an anarchist society somehow allowed to grow organically without the aid of any government, existing somewhere outside of both British Hong Kong and China.

The buildings of "Hak Nam" folded into one other in a dense configuration of labyrinthine corridors and seedy brown shacks stacked up 10, 12 and 14 stories high. It was a solid building, 200 x 100 meters, a pulsating anomaly, one of the most densely populated places in the world at the time of its destruction. It was called "the world’s first flexible megastructure, the closest thing to a truly self-regulating, self-sufficient, self determining modern city that has ever been built," "an environment as richly varied and as sensual as anything in the heart of the tropical forest."

As I found out, scratch­ing that itch was actu­ally fast: it took me ~3 or so hours, and that includes trou­bleshoot­ing and gath­er­ing bits of info from all around. With a step-by-step how-to it’ll prob­a­bly take you a lot less than that!

doing distributed version control like Git and Mercurial, Fossil also supports distributed bug tracking and distributed wiki all in a single integrated package.

Dave (Reynolds) raised the point that lists are an integral part of most APIs. This is another thing that we know we need to address in the UK linked government data project, but are unsure as yet how best to do so.

web2py by simply labeling fields and tables in the Database Abstraction Layer (DAL) with .rdf={...} and installing this plugin. The plugin exposes a web service that publishes your database as Linked Data (only tables labeled with rdf). This system works with new and with most legacy databases. It transparently supports SQLite, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MSSQL, Oracle, FireBird, Informix, DB2, Ingres, and the Google App Engine. [read more]

C'est en expérimentant autour de

la notion d'hybridation que j’ai

développé Libel, un assistant de

lecture basé sur l’association des

supports, papier et numérique.

Libel se présente sous la forme d'une

tablette équipée d'un écran tactile

en papier électronique. Celui-ci vient

s'associer au livre pendant la lecture

et fournit des informations

complémentaires au récit telles que

des images, des sons, des vidéos

et des textes de référence.

Dolls from Japan were very popular in America and Europe through the late 19th and early 20th centuries. On these pages, I have collected illustrations and references that suggest the place of the Japanese doll in the minds of American and European children, and of the adults who bought them toys and moralized those toys.

This is python-jabberbot, a Jabber bot framework for Python that enables you to easily write simple Jabber bots. You can use your Jabber bots to provide information about your running systems, to make your website interact with your visitors or notify you about updates or changes you monitor with your Python scripts.

nouvelle catégorie dans le Standblog, Vie en ligne, focalisée sur la protection de la vie privée en ligne et les bonnes pratiques. Parallèlement, j'installais un Wiki privé et je commençais à le structurer de façon à pouvoir accueillir des contributions tierces sur le sujet. En même temps, de nombreux lecteurs m'envoyaient des contributions par mail. Je contactais plusieurs amis compétents en terme de vie privée qui se sont révélés motivés par le projet…

Et puis j'ai décidé d'abandonner le projet.

Which is why I’m (again) stepping back. In a few hours, my Twitter account will be private. Apologies to my 700-odd followers, but I will be following only 42 people – a fitting figure – and have split the folk I’m sort of keeping track of but who continuously spam my timeline into a bunch of themed lists.

Recently, Facebook provided us some information on their server park. They use about 30000 servers, and not surprisingly, most of them are running the PHP code to generate pages full of social info for their users.

If you fold up the map from its fully open state above, it tells a kind of story

Shifting focus

Posted: Wednesday, December 23, 2009 ~ 4:54 PM

This is the last new post that I'll be making on this blog. I decided a while back to shift the focus of my web activities, and thought it was time to formally close things off here.

Why stop posting here? Mostly just a feeling that I needed to shake things up a bit, to put some serious effort behind a few other ideas that I've wanted to work on for a while. Making a clean break just felt right.

There may still be some activity on this site as I back-fill some old posts from other blogging platforms. My goal is to eventually have this as a (more or less) complete archive of my personal blogging from early 1998 to this year. That's a background project of mine that I plan on allocating a bit more time to in 2010.

A huge thanks to Karl Dubost for hosting this blog for so long. In addition to providing this infrastructure, Karl has supported and inspired me in more ways then he may realize. That you are reading this today is due in no small part to him, so you can thank (or blame!) him.

Most students would never think to go to the library's Website to look for primary materials and frankly, the way most of our sites are designed, even if they did, chances are they would never find them.

A slideshow made for the conference HyperUrbain.2 hold in Paris, on the 3rd and 4th June 2009.

More info: http://www.citymurmur.org

Nayar saw the Academy Award–winning Born into Brothels, a 2004 documentary film about children living in Calcutta’s red light district who were handed cameras and joyfully taught to reveal the life before their eyes. “The film reaffirmed that the camera is like no other piece of technology,” he said. It raises emotions “both for the person being shot and for the person shooting.”

It just might be, according to New York: An Illustrated History, by Ric Burns and James Sanders. Taken at Broadway between Franklin and Leonard Streets, it’s believed to date to May 1850.

Andre Kertesz

One of the odd qualities attributed to Stewart was his ubiquity: a perceived ability to be in more than one place at a time. Following a lifetime of walking across the known world, his final years in London were spent in seemingly unending peregrinations across the city, and more than one commentator recorded encountering him in impossible positions: sat steadfast upon Westminster Bridge, and minutes later, as steadfast upon a bench in St James’ Park. De Quincey himself records passing him at Somerset House, and then overtaking him again on Tottenham Court Road – despite having taken the shortest route through Covent Garden.

But efficiency is not the same as effectiveness, and it is that distinction (and our difficulty in understanding it) that exposes the false-logic of behind universal privatisation.

I put together this list for a co-worker who wants to learn more about Cassandra: (0.5 beta 2 out now!)