A word FOR every Lanaguage IN every Language

Have you ever wondered what the word FOR every language was IN every language?
Data mining Wikidata could give us the answer. Using a new file released by Denny Vrandecic containing the Wikidata Item for each Wikidata Language I was able to create a full matrix of all the combinations.

Let L be the set of all Wikipedias. For every language X and language Y in L, does X have a label for Y? Create a matrix of all the possibilities, and if X has a label Y let’s colour that part of the matrix magenta, if not let’s colour it cyan. Therefore you get a heatmap displaying whether the language on the X axis has a page for the language on the Y axis.

A heatmap displaying whether the language on the X axis has a page for the language on the Y axis.

What interesting things do we find here? Well, most notably is the prominent diagonal magenta line. That’s reassuring. The main diagonal of this matrix represents whether each language has a Wikidata label about itself – and it almost always does. The vertical lines show us which languages have good coverage of other languages. And the horizontal lines show us which languages have good coverage by other languages.

This should serve as a reminder that Wikidata is going to be outrageously powerful research tool.

Can you see any other patterns emerging? (The UTF-8 CSV Matrix, and sourcecode.)

Notconfusingly yours.

Just enought Sketchup II

My follow up class to Just Enough Sketchup (creatively entitle Just Enough Sketchup II ) was on Saturday April 20th 2013. As you can see, the turnout doesn’t still hasn’t failed to impress. I wonder how elastic the audience would be if the price wasn’t free? Nevermind, we had 4 glorious hours of learning Sketchup, two of which we spent printing. (Regretfully uncaptured by camera).

The most notable aspect of this round of 3D printing extravaganzing, was that we were graced by two Middle School Teachers and two Middle School Students. In their capacity to learn Sketchup, I was highly impressed. Children, I’m now recalling are almost humans in their own right?! Only with the plasticity of mind that allows you to download an entire set of program commands in to their brian in a single sitting, have them creatively recombine.

Another item of note was that I was able to question these teachers for feedback on the intructional design of my class. My inability to lead everyone together had worried me, because I must have understood from school that everyone must strictly follow the teacher at their pace. But the two teachers complimented me on supporting free learning by having a central tutorial that students were free to abide, or leave at their own pace.

Are there more 3D printing classes in the works? I’m inclined to set up a more casual weekly, or fortnightly print club. Any takers?

Raw Notes on the Social Detriments of The Google Bus

These are the unedited notes of a paper I fear may never come to light. Therefore I publish them only to avoid loss. You may safely skip reading this.

==Housing==

Want to make a housing community “faux-op”.

Searching for housing difficulty.

3 bed ok, 4 very hard, 5 nearly impossible.

Went looking. – A lot of split houses, duplexes – flats.

===Rationale==

First thoughts are economic.

Any landlord realizes the profit in splitting the house.

Large properties into smaller sub-apartments. – Profit incentive.

==Social Effect, or perhaps Cause==

Second thought. More pernicious or at least a sinister side effect.

Like in Chomsky’s manufacturing consent.

Powers that be want to keep us alone and seperated.

We might share expenses, share food, share tools. Realize different work opportunites. Realize new arguments (John Stuart Mills from Privacy VSI around page 111). We might talk more. Start a hackerspace. Organize politically.

This is undesirable for corporate profits, but more importantly it reduces ‘sociability’ or ‘togetherness’.

I found freinds at Sudo Room through organizing and sharing. That’s not a coincidence. It reversed a depressive trend. My life feels more fulfilling.

Bus==Transport==

Google buses is a term used collectively for private ‘public’ transport. Masquerading public transport.

Mirror the housing in the transport google bus scenario.

===My Commute===

*Supportive job.

*Distance subpart.

*Non car owner, believe in public transit, and sustainability

*I’ve made it work as best I can. Email, reading.

Just enough Sketchup to pretend you can 3D print

As part of the Sudo Room’s Today I learned series one-off classes, workshops, and talks led by members of the Sudo Room community, I threw in my cap to teach Just enough Sketchup to pretend you can 3D print. This is how I capitulated it in advertising:

Glance

• WHEN 2pm on Saturday the 16th of March 2013.
• DURATION 2 hours
• LOCATION sudo room
• PRICE $0
• NUTSHELL Live Sketchup and print tutorial

Participation

Owing to a combination of recent hype on the subject, relative ignorance of the process, and unbeatable price-point, the workshop was well attended at 15 mouse-clickers. Happily, those computer users, were in large part not preexisting sudo room members, which is precisely the point of Today I learned – a hands-dirty introduction to the hackerspace. The participants were also diverse in age, and sex which is either reassuring to the activity or persona that sudo room is trying to project.
[pic from vicky]

Results

It was ambitious to try move the group from varying states of noob-ness to Shape Sheikhs. After the basic and abstract tutorial, I planned to make a put those skills to work, and make a model to print. A variant on the laugh-inducing fingerplate. Yet in spur of confidence I took suggestions from the participants for a shape, and then we had a vote. We were equally split between the adventurers in fingerplate, and those who wanted to hone on simpler objects first. Thus two factions were made, and Miloh from Type A Machines who was attempting to master his pedagogy of 3D printing, took some leadership. Even with the split, the natural effective attention span and fatigue limits of the average human meant that most left without moving from design to print. Strong parting encouragement from the pupils means that a second installment will be on the way.

Yet one particularly dedicated hbergronx saw the process through, past the setting of the sun. In what may be a rite of passage, that mimics my own fascination with understanding the machine at an early stage, he made an interlocking torus (tori?) design. “Reproducing offspring” is a concept famous in the 3D world, where 3D printers can print themselves. Its original meaning is apposite here too where a generation of humans can teach one another to 3D print.

Featured in Documentary on Collectivity

In November 2012 I planned and hosted Wikipedia Loves Libraries in Seattle. While we scoured the old media held within the magnificent Public Library, a team of documenters found our activity to be media-worthy  itself. The following is my part in a short about online collectives. The high production value and acoustic noodling aggrandize my sentiments at 2:06 and 5:27.

Haklab Belgrade Report

As a self-described ‘post-Lonely Planet’ traveller, I’ve been searching for new praxes of global adventure that make good excuses to run amok. For the months of January and February I toured Lisbon, Madrid, Modena, Bologna, Split, Belgrade, and Berlin, trying to understand their local hackerspaces. An example I was particulary fond of was Haklab Belgrade. Lessons to bring back to my budding Sudo Room hackerspace were abound there. I most thoroughly enjoyed  the recounting and education about the former Yugoslavia and pontifications about that history affects modern organizing.

.

Existing not in commercial space at all, but a donated first-floor apartment, Hacklab, if used for it’s orginal intention, would be warming, showering, and dishwashing the everyday lives of at most 2 Serbian citizens. As it is, the living room and bedroom house the main hack area, which when I arrived was the combined chamber for 6 serbs attending the the weekly python workshop. In the middle of git-pushing their work and rearranging the furniture for that night’s screening of the torrented “The Pirate Bay, Away From Keyboard,” I managed to strike up a few interviews with the ragamuffins in exchange for some swigs of the 2.5L bottle of lager, and local wax-topped ‘Rakija’.

Read the full report at the sudo room wiki

Book Review: Working with MediaWiki

Working with MediaWiki by Yaron Koren : WikiWorks Press: 227 pages. Paperback ($35), ePub ($25), and PDF ($20). http://workingwithmediawiki.com/ .  ISBN: 978-0615720302.

Working With MediaWiki Cover

Working with MediaWiki is the latest MediaWiki (MW) book to be released since March 2010, when MW1.15 was current (today in November 2012 Wikipedia uses 1.21). The text is split into two logical and spiritual halves. The first is a from-scratch guide to setting up and tuning MediaWiki in the style of the classical wiki we are used to seeing on the web today. That treatment covers best practices, as well as where two put the right type of brackets for the impatient coder. Although not in it’s title, the latter half of the book is dedicated to Semantic MediaWiki (SMW), the only book to be published on the topic yet. Denser and more demanding in attention, this sector takes a more theory of semantic data approach.

If followed sequentially from the front cover you’ll be led through a tour of the MediaWiki ant colony, only exploring when ready the ill-lit underground veins. The audience is assumed to be those who are unafraid copying mark-up snippets (even if they don’t know exactly what it means) and are tasked with creating a Wiki from fresh installation. Yet this ‘from nothing’ format is not too painful for more advanced users as the explanations are concise without being cursory.  By page 11 you are into the example-driven world of MW-specific issues in a parade-march that is imaginiative yet infomrative – akin to some kind of stylistic cross between National Geographic, and a Math textbook.

Starting with chapters such as Setting up-,  Editing in-, and Organization of-, MediaWiki, you can have a tangible website at toaster oven, if not microwave speeds. By page 179, when you’ll have finished User Management, Extensions, and Running a Successful Wiki,  your historical Pinball Machine wiki (or whatever it is that you’re building) will be indistinguishably on par with any other that you’ll have come across as a netizen.

Yet this isn’t just a walkthrough. Read as a random access referrence manual, each two page long subsection of the 23 chapters is as easy to navigate via the Table of Contents as it to digest as modicum of help. In fact, however arcane it seems to look something up in the ToC for a piece of software whose official documentation is stored in a Wiki itself, there are some invaluable upshots to this seemingly outdated search methodology. The foremost of which is that unlike the free online documentation, or other books which take as a template the online documentation, having a curated index is as much of a discovery tool as it is a finding aid. Even as someone who builds MediaWikis professionally, skimming int the ToC gave me the answers to long standing questions that search never returned; how to display outside images, and the scene of social extensions. Koren often stops midway through abstract technical discussions to say “typically this feature is used as [...],” or  ”on Wikipedia this works like [...],” which again speaks to the fact that this book is not just about MediaWiki, but how exactly others have worked with it.

Then in the second half, you encounter Semantic MediaWiki. Probably you have never used., or heard of SMW.  Koren acknowledges its relative obscurity and builds a compelling argument for its usage throughout its explanation’s unfolding. But first, what is it? “In conjunction with its extensions, SMW can transform a regular wiki into a kind of  collaborative database.” SMW is, roughly,  about pages and bits of pages having properties. As the canoncial example goes Berlin’s population being 3.5 million people, really means that subject Berlin, predicate has population of, object 3.5 million humans. Here you can see a more theoretical leaning in SMW than MW. Whether or not this is caused by Koren’s  ‘nose being too close’ to the matter, the tutorial becomes less example-driven and more of an academic and technical treatise. That is hardly surprising as Koren was heavily involved in the SMW extension programming scene.

The change in approach is not necesarily a bad thing. Although wikis have their standard uses as encyclopedias of varying scopes, there are some creative examples of their usage: blogging, study forums, and fan clubs to name a few. MW has thus been explored as a software many times more than SMW. This fact combined with the greater extensibility of SMW means that SMW is fertile for unimagined projects and uses. Koren’s treatment in gradually growing more abstract can serve the purpose of allowing the readers’ neurons fire more freely – especially coming after the varied, but static examples in the first half.

In fact that motif of universal expression, the complex but large degree of freedom in semantic mark-up is the overarching theme there. The lesson that Koren expounds about Semantic MediaWiki is that since SMW structures can become some infinitely and obsessively detailed, that presenting a user with a blank text editor will be greeted with a blank stare. Thus for a successful SMW, the onus of development is firstly on the administrator, to make a skeleton which users can flesh out. The chapter on Semantic Forms here does describes the solution.  Likewise, building a SMW will mean that you will manufacture freight containers of machine-readable data. In the chapters of Semantic Queries, Drilldown, and RDF and SPARQL, Koren provides an manual on how to write the right punctuation characters to get machines to read and elucidate the data.

The books’ ending does duty in touching on a list of remaining topics which Koren deems indispensible. Collecting miscellaneous details on technical, but practical matters of debugging, multi-language concerns, and data migration among others, there is a sense that Koren is imparting notes kept during his own journey with MW. Lastly you can feel Koren’s earnest passion in the ultimate chapter titled MediaWiki development: a guide for the accidental developer, a map he discovered himself in the field, after his own 6 addicted years as a (S)MW developer, and author of 12 extensions. That is precisely the selling point of Working With MediaWiki: you are not so much reading a book, as sipping diet cokes while sitting cross-legged next to Koren in the back of a lecture hall with a laptop at a developer convention – a private tutorial from the geek himself.