Opinion | ZUCO.ORG

The Star Trek legacy

2010 Aug - 22 |

Category: Opinion

In the last 2 months I was going through all the episodes and movies of Star Trek the old series. I grew up with Star Trek, with Mr. Spock and Captain Kirk, and now I can look backwards and see how much it influenced my life. Star Trek was not an usual science fiction series. It was science fiction and morality and good values in action. Star Trek promoted friendship, cultural diversity, peace, understanding beyond oneself comprehension.
The series purpose wasn’t only entertainment. Star Trek was a carrier for ideas, meaning, good values and knowledge that was caught in the mind of kids and adults. It was a show that made you think about the reality and the ignorance we still have about this universe and about the possibility that something unusual could happen beyond our comprehension.

The series always tried to use scientific view of facts and, at the same time, it tried to make it understandable to everyone, it trained people’s minds to think that not only actual knowledge is the absolute truth. The characters always run into the possibility to go beyond their own believes to understand the amazing things that they found. Star Trek helped people to break those mental limitations indirectly.

I’m sure I got influenced when I was a kid and probably Mr. Spock stimulated my interest for science and mathematics. It was a show that offered entertainment, a dose of reasonable violence in terms of self defense and at the same time it was a carrier for moral values.

Knowledge won’t resist the power of time and human irresponsibility

2010 Jul - 28 |

Category: Opinion

All the knowledge we have from ancient times comes from solid, physical storage materials, like stones, papyri and any other long term durable means used in the past to store some information. Of course, people at that time didn’t store information in a stone only because it would resist the centuries to come. Well, they maybe think about that, but it’s also important to keep in mind that there was not so many means to store information at that time.

The other way we are obtaining information is from natural evidences of the influence of mankind in the world. Like pollution, artificial reshaping of natural land and so forth. Also genetic research and the study of DNA is helping a lot to discover more about our history.

But let’s think about the future. Where are we storing our information nowadays? In digital formats on means that won’t last more than few years. The worst thing about all this is that nobody will be able to recover that information in case of a cataclysm or any other worldwide destruction. If I’m lost in an island and I have a hard drive, I will probably attach it into a stick and use it as a weapon to kill some animal and feed myself. I won’t be able to develop, by myself, the technology to recover that data, copy it and store it again in another “machine”.

Think about it, all your pictures, your documents, your own videos, everything lost just because digital storage won’t last more than a few years.
So just as ephemeral as human lives are, so our data is. Information dies as people do, and only some small pieces of that data remain, thanks to the unknown laws of fortune.

I suggest to keep some pictures in paper. Just print from time to time some of them, the one that you would like to last forever. Of course it’s a dream, nothing is eternal, but at least I can assure you that, those few pictures in paper will survive many more years that all your DVDs, Hard disks, memory cards, etc. In case I find myself lost in an island or as a survivor of a cataclysm, I can always look at some pictures in my wallet of beloved people or places. Your mobile phone is useless in such environment.

Also try to write sometimes some hand written letters. Email is ephemeral as well. It doesn’t even exist in our hard drive anymore. More and more people keep it in remote servers, so just imagine. Almost all your life is documented in emails. It’s like a personal diary. Everything lost forever. But remember that ancient books exist today because of paper: in proper conditions it can resists centuries. No data-center will survive more than 100 years without maintenance.

This post is just to remind you that technology is great but it’s still weak. We spend more money developing weapons and developing ways to increase profit than thinking about human inheritance. Knowledge is one of the first things that human will loose when mass scale disasters happen. People priority is survival. Everybody follows that instinct as a general rule. Knowledge is not so important when you are hungry. Let’s think about it :)

What I don’t like of the retweet button.

2009 Dec - 21 |

Category: Internet, Opinion, social

Since the first time twitter announced the introduction of the retweet button, I was a little bit skeptic about it. The only rule Retweets have is to put “RT” before the original tweet. Beyond that there are amazing ways to personalize the RT function.

Anyway, the actual retweet button is far more complex than that and it keeps a useful track of retweets so I can have a list of basically “Retweets by others” , “Retweets by you” and “Your tweets, retweeted”

The only thing I really don’t like of the implemented retweet function is the way retweets are shown in the time line.

For example, I follow @tangerinejp and @Oren_The_Red and they follow me as well, but @Oren_The_Red doesn’t follows @tangerinejp So if I do a RT of @Oren_The_Red, the new retweet function puts the actual avatar of @Oren_The_Red into @tangerinejp’s timeline which is much better than a simple RT. I mean that it’s really good for @Oren_The_Red, because people will get attracted by a good avatar and eventually they will click on the user and follow him.

Now comes @jonnyli and he follows me and he follows @Oren_The_Red as well. In this case @jonnyli won’t see the retweet I did to @Oren_The_Red because he is already following him. But that’s not all; @Oren_The_Red won’t see that I retweeted him!! The only way for Oren to notice it is to go to the retweet records section and check who retweeted him.

RT has several implications from a social point of view. It’s not only a retransmission of information. It’s also a friendly way of showing the following:

Hey dude I’m not just following you, I’m really reading you.
I also love your tweet, it’s interesting and it’s worth retweeting it, it helps me putting good contents to my followers and it will help you to get promoted among my followers as well.
And I want you to notice it, just to see that I agree about what you say.

Well, all these social-human-information, get totally lost with the new retweet implementation. Of course @Oren_The_Red can check it but we are busy people and it’s preferable to have that information just in front of our time-line instead to search for it.

There is one more function, that has no relation with human feelings, as the previous ones, but it’s really important because it’s related with the nature of Internet itself.

We live in a big rock and only a certain percentage of my followers will read my tweets because the other ones are just sleeping, or they are busy with other stuff, or they cannot connect in that moment or whatever. So instead to worry about it and instead to try to find the perfect system to force our followers to read our tweets (and sometimes insistent people are really annoying me) just let’s the natural random behavior of my followers to RT me and remind the others what I said before, showing them what they also liked about what I said.

In this case, if I retweet @Oren_The_Red and @jonnyli was not aware of Oren’s tweets, maybe he will read the timeline in that very moment and notice @Oren_The_Red’s tweet thanks to my RT.

So I would love to see in my timeline when people that I follow get retweeted and when somebody retweet me. Just that, as the manual RT works.

By the way consider to follow: @tangerinejp, @Oren_The_Red and @jonnyli :-)

What do you think about the new retweet function?
Are you a traditional RTer or a new fashioned one?

Someday do we have to pay for twitter? what is its real value?

2009 Nov - 28 |

Category: Internet, News, Opinion

I would like to continue with a comment I wrote in Paul’s blog about the fact that Twitter Japan is planning to charge for its service. Since the first moment everybody speculates about the future of twitter. Is it going to be profitable? how long will it survive? what is the real future of it? and so on.

The real value of twitter is based on its data. Millions of people write everyday thoughts, facts, links, ads, spam, replay to others conversations and so forth. Millions of people, from all over the world, using different languages, from different cultural backgrounds, speaking freely.
Now let’s imagine this. We have a web site, with a really simple form and a submit button. Saying:

So after reading that… will you use that service? Of course not!!

So the idea is, let’s collect people’s data, and let’s do it in an spontaneous way, they will just submit everything they want. We don’t want to put restrictions because we also want to analyze human patterns and thousands of factors related to human behavior. Well we don’t want to learn how human being are just for biological or psychological reasons, we want to understand humans in a better way to be able to improve our clients marketing skills. Of course they won’t sell your private data, like your email, for example, in fact, who cares about your email or address or whatever? The important is: the language you speak, the colors you choose from the different layouts available, where you are and your shared thoughts!

So to make people do that let’s give them something back. Let’s provide a social network. That thing that is in vogue now with all that web2.0 “movement” so they will share their thoughts with us and at the same time we will give them some entertainment. We also let them promote themselves, so some people and companies can use our service as a marketing tool and share with us their strategies :) Well let’s help presidents and religious leaders as well, so we also collect that data.

Do you understand now where is the real value of twitter? Its data!

So for example, a company wants to launch a new product but they want to do some analysis first to try to make some prediction about the success of their possible future inversion. Let’s go and ask twitter. They can do the analysis for them or they can just sell some piece of raw data to be analyzed by themselves. The possibilities are infinite, the real value is that raw data to analyze and manipulate. That data has a radiography of the status of the world, it’s not only a marketing tool it could be used as a political or religion toll as well as a tool to understand actual tendencies.

There is a big difference between the data collected by twitter and the data that could be collected form the internet. Blogs, forums, web sites and so forth provide information about a specific topic. I had to stop many times and do some self reflexive thinking before I wrote this post because I want to transmit what I think in a proper way to make it understandable to everybody. This process is specially stronger when I’m not forced to do it in 140 characters. The common content that you can find in internet already passed through a meditation process that filter the spontaneity and focus on a specific target. Twitter is one of the most spontaneous social networks out there and that’s because we only have 140 characters; it’s not the number by itself but it’s the concept that we have a tiny space to write what we think so we can only think about thoughts, pills of information, ready and fast thinking that just pop-up in our minds and then we try to fit it in that space.

That is the real potential of all social networks, the data they collect and the analysis and results that could be achieved with that information. The ads in those networks only pay the electricity and the salary for engineers. The data they collect is the real value and of course the data generators, the data generation engine, that is users. But don’t misunderstand it. Users are important for two reasons, one is the data they generate and second their presence creates the excuse to convince other companies to pay to put ads that will generate the income to support the infrastructure. But all of this turn around a central core “data“.

I think that twitter Japan should be free, anyway it’s not the first time that Japan is used as an experimental platform. Let’s see if the data generated after and before the twitter-free age differ and change in value.

Feeds, Twitter, browsing the web and no time to produce. Let’s try to be organized!

2009 Nov - 19 |

Category: Internet, Opinion

Following the rule “instead of email it to some friends or put some poor twits let’s write a blog post.”

How much time do I spend using twitter?
How much time do I spend reading blog posts?
How much time do I spend searching for information in the web?
How much time do I spend producing something after I assimilate all these information?

Actually the time I spent in Google finding information got drastically reduced due the huge amount of feeds and the use of twitter. I spend my time reading the updates in the blogs I follow and following the links of people I follow on twitter. I end up just jumping from one link to another reading everything I can. At the end of the day I’m tired; all my brain energies had been spent assimilating information but producing none. So I had to look for a good equilibrium between input and output.

What am I looking for? Information. Yes but what kind of information? Something related to my niche, something that I’m just interested in or something in a new field or just some news to see what’s going on in the world.

The point is that I have to read all these stuff but I also need time to assimilate it and time to be productive. Of course that information will be really useful, not only to keep me updated, but to bring me the opportunity to generate content of better quality.

So I divided it by time and no-time dependent content.
News for example are time dependent content. The end of Second World War II was the hot news in September 1945 but not today. So first let’s think about the sources and organize each of them.
I count with three mayor information sources: Feeds, Twitter and Google.

Feeds:

Separate them by topics and each of them by time and no-time dependent ones. For example in photography I want to know ASAP when a new camera model comes out, it’s price and availability. This information is time dependent. I don’t want to twit about the new Nikon D5000!! many months after it’s launched.
For me actually the time dependent approach is one of the most important ones and I try to read it in the morning and stop reading it until the next day. Usually news information is easy to assimilate in few minutes; just a superficial reading is enough to identify what is really important and what is not. But don’t keep the whole day reading news, it’s worthless.

Keep checking during the day some of the top blogs you consider the most valuable sources of information, specially the ones that not only are important for you but that generate more than one post per day. Be careful and don’t select many of them, at the end you’ll spend all your time just reading.

Twitter:

Actually lists help a lot. I created a list based on topics and one “personal” one where I added the people that I know personally and that are living in the same zone. I don’t want to loose a new tweetup or the info of an event near my zone.

Personally I’m not a channel follower. Too much information, I got overloaded and again because of that, I have no time to do other stuff.
Try to take a rest from twitter, time to time. I stopped to update the status every second to see what happened. It could become compulsive and obsessive. Just let the time pass, one hour is a reasonable time. If you are involved in a conversation of course, you have to keep checking it, but if not, just checking the time line every hour should be a good approach.

Google:

Except the specific search in a specific moment, I do periodic searches about what I cannot find in feeds, twitter and topics related to my niche of interest. In that way I found many useful blogs. I do this around three times per week.

The key is organization and self control to avoid spending too much time doing only one thing. The no-time related content can stay in the cabinet for long time. The most important thing is that you don’t loose it, so keep it apart and little by little you’ll be able to read it all. Anyway I didn’t find any platform or tool that could help me arrange and manage properly the information in the web. I would like a tool that could login to the platforms I joined and do some search on them, bookmark links, program some alerts based on some keywords, time or events, and so forth. Actually I’m using many tools to accomplish only one task: organization.

What do you use to organize yourself with the never ending stream of information?
Do you read everything you find in the web? Don’t you feel loosing productivity and sometimes feeling that after you read so much it’s like you didn’t read anything?

What is stupidity? A call to share: "Entropy Of Welfare"

2009 Apr - 9 |

Category: Opinion

Post updated

Some years ago I was talking with my friend David about stupidity. He told me about the definition of stupidity by Carlo Maria Cipolla, an italian history and economy professor. Cipolla deeply studied the concept about human stupidity trying to define it and creating the 5 laws of stupidity. There are many studies related to this but until now none of them could provide a clear definition of it. Stupidity appears in a subjective and human environment but detailed definitions are hard to achieve.

Anyway, the explanation of Cipolla could be resumed in a diagram representing, that in one word is a way to understand human life.

1. I benefit myself damaging others

Unfortunately this is the common posture in this planet. Everything is based on self profit and nobody cares about the impact of his/her own behavior unto others. Just look around on this planet and realize that the vast majority try to achieve this point. Banks, big corporations and governments, don’t care about the pain in this world, exploiting any resource for their own interests.

2. I benefit others and damage myself

This is the position of the altruist. The good guy, the one that doesn’t care to damage him/herself to help others. Unfortunately people like this is rare and the few ones that exist usually become an object of cult.

3. I damage others and I damage myself

This is the behavior of the stupid. His/her behavior does not create any benefit for anybody. Unfortunately this is the the common result in this world. Almost anybody try to behave as in point 1 but at the end almost everybody ends in this point, doing the most stupid thing: Hurting him/herself and hurting others.

4. I benefit myself and create benefit to others

This is the behavior of the intelligent. This is the goal that everybody as individual and as a group, or as a company or government should try to achieve. It’s not so difficult, just start to share and help others even in small things. Don’t think always and only if the current action will provide us a direct benefit. Maybe it does not provide a direct benefit now, but in the future we will see the fruits of this behavior.

This four points could be better understood in this diagram:

Internet and free and open licenses as Creative Commons and GPL are an example of this. In internet the people usually help others, answering questions, sharing information, as programs, movies, music or any other kind of things, including their time.
Sharing with others, helping others even in small things, even without a direct impact in our bank account or any other direct benefit will help to increase the entropy of welfare.
Benefit our environment will benefit ourselves too.

Finally this is an interesting video about stupidity:

Living resume, footprint, byteprints

2009 Mar - 15 |

Category: Opinion

The development of internet had changed a lot since the beginning of times.
At the beginning people were just simple spectators, reading a Web page and eating information. Little by little Internet changed the way people interacted with it, adding more multimedia, more interaction, and specially becoming a medium that changed according to its users. This is a really important point because nowadays, everybody is a content editor. Any comment, any mini-post on twitter, any picture that we upload to flickr modifies the content of the Internet corpus.

This activity leaves footprints, fingerprints or, in other words, byteprints…
All this data comes from the user, except the one produced by the technical nature of this medium, such as IP addresses, browser versions, OS versions and so forth. We create the byteprints that are cached by search engines that automatically associate them with our identity.

With identity I refer to the one that we provide when we use Internet. I’m not talking about the official one, created by our parents and supported and enforced by governments where everyone of us has a serial number, an official name and family name, a social security number, and so forth. I mean the identity that we are, still now, free to create on Internet.

For example, around 150 years ago people could call themselves as they liked. The name could be decided by parents but actually any person could call him/herself as he liked. There were no pictures, no credit cards, no biometric id systems, no databases, nothing as such. Everybody could be as anonymous as they pleased.
Fortunately Internet is still a medium like that. We can decide our own identity and define it as we want, with the name, picture or whatever we like. We are still free to talk about everything, we are free to think and we are free to be anonymous.
Unfortunately almost all governments of this planet are trying to change this and make Internet a controlled environment where everybody could be recognized, prosecuted, controlled, and monitored. The reason is simple: just to control and make people stop talking against some interests and to filter and censor what governments decide which is true or false.

The freedom to create our own identity has its pros and cons. We control what could be associated to our identity. For example I’d like to be associated with Linux, Photography, Opensource and Japan.
So in the case a company would be interested to get more information about me, not just the resume, they could check the web and see that I’m involved on those topics. Actually almost all companies that decide to hire someone, do a previous search on Google to see more about this person. So the byteprints we leave out there on the Net could be used by companies, particulars or other web services to make a digital personality of ourselves.

Just try to put your name within double quotes in Google and see the results. If you don’t like it that means that the information that you generated in Internet is not the one that you should associate to your name. The process to change this records is slow and painful, its like an Akashic records. So before taking part in any Web site where a login or just a name is needed to be left, first think about who from your multiple ego (personalities) you would like to use and associate with that information.

This is the beginning of the creation of our online personality (or personalities) and online identity (or identities). Not just an id/password but the records of our movements, our byteprints, our comments, posts, pictures, and so forth. If you are not sure about which information you would like to associate with your “identity” a good practice is to be anonymous. Remember, once the information had been cached by search engines it’s really hard to change it.