Frome the Economist: "Paul Saffo, a futurologist and one of the world's most enthusiastic technophiles, also looks at the downside. “Each of us can create our own personal-media walled garden that surrounds us with comforting, confirming information and utterly shuts out anything that conflicts with our world view,” he says. “This is social dynamite” and could lead to “the erosion of the intellectual commons holding society together...We risk huddling into tribes defined by shared prejudices.”"

Most of the tacit knowledge spitten out in Blogs and so On is OPINION!.

Hardly a day now passes without a new proposal to address the cultural and social problem of integrating migrants. On the left, people want to get rid of the Hauptschule, the bottom layer of a widespread selective secondary school system. On the right, there have been calls to punish youths whose behaviour shows they are not willing to integrate—by expelling them from school or even sending them to a “taster jail”. Chancellor Angela Merkel will soon convene an “integration summit” to air these and other ideas.

(ein Ausschnitt aus einem Brief an meine Freundin Christiane Ubozak)

"For these LiveJournal blogs, the average number of readers is seven, says Ms Trott. Such small audiences are common in participatory media. Indeed, they may conform to the biological norm, whereas mass-media audiences may have been an aberration. Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist at the University of Liverpool, has studied primates and discovered a surprisingly stable ratio between the relative size of the neocortex (thought to be responsible for the evolution of intelligence) and the size of groups formed by particular species.

from the Economist:

For the Americans in the middle, who have no strong partisan allegiances, we have failed to articulate a real plan or vision,” say Markos Moulitsas Zúniga and Jerome Armstrong, two of the most popular Democratic bloggers. “It's not that people know what we stand for and disagree; it's that they have no idea what we stand for,” say James Carville and Paul Begala, two of the architects of Bill Clinton's winning presidential campaign in 1992. The.....On most other issues, people tell pollsters that they prefer the Democrats.

Humanity might have only one origin. It might have gone also through this famous bottleneck (100.000? years) ago, that left only a few thousand of individulals. The neolithic revolution happened in several places on the earth idipendently (see Jarred). Civilization seems to have been born twice between 5000 and 3000 bc. The Egyptian civilation is impressing. Already 5000 BC kingdoms were existing in Northern and Southern Egypt. They were united in 3000 bc starting with the old kingdom.

The Americans are so far away from dominating the world. And weapons are completely useless for this goal (see Iraq) The World will develop 3 main power centres. Europe/NearEast/Mediterranean Idian/SouthAsia China/Japan/EastAsia. THere will be two regional power centers, Brazil and Southafrica. The United States will scale more with Regional Power Centres than with the World Power Centres.. The reason for this is both: ideological and economica

Viaggio tra gli elettori di Ds, Margherita e Prc tentati dalla strana coppia Boselli-Bonino. Per difendere la laicità dello stato e non solo.

• da Il Manifesto del 30 marzo 2006, pag. 2

di Luca Fazio, Giorgio Salvetti

La Rosa nel pugno in faccia lascerà il segno. Pesante. Troppo tardi per scansarsi, nel centrosinistra qualcuno lo ammette. «Siamo molto preoccupati». Potrebbe non essere da fantascienza uno scenario dove saranno Intini e Capezzone a fare il Bertinotti della situazione. Non è un sondaggio, ma è l'aria che tira. «Ma, senti un po', e la Rosa nel pugno?».

I am in the Programm Committee of this interesting conference that tries to bridge the Digital Library and Semantic Web Communities in India. My group will present two papers at the meeting.

Conference Site