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June 28, 2009

“Because a country using only one language and having only one custom is weak and frail”

Filed under: General, Hungary, Private — Ivan Herman @ 12:27
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Saint Stefan
Image via Wikipedia

I have already blogged a few weeks ago on the sad success of right wing extremist parties in Europe. One of the toughests and, in my view, most frightening one among those is the Hungarian “Jobbik” party, with its openly racist, anti-Semitic message. Being Hungarian, I feel embarrassed and saddened by their success… However, a new Facebook group, set up recently to fight against this Hungarian phenomenon, has made me realize a sad irony, too.

One of the historical figures of Hungary is St Stephen I of Hungary, the first king of Hungary. He established the Kingdom of Hungary more than a 1000 years ago, ensuring the future of his nation. As such, he has become, among others, the reference point for all nationalists and, of course, racist movements in Hungary.

St Stephen had a son, Prince Emeric (Imre); and St Stephen wrote a text to prepare his son to play his a role as a king. This old text, known as “Saint Stephen’s admonitions to his son Emeric”, is available on the Web thanks to the National Library of Hungary (sorry, only in Hungarian, I could not find an English translation). It consists of 10 general admonitions, the 6th being on the role of foreigners (the text actually uses the word “guests”) in the country. It would be a bit long to translate, but the title of this blog may be the most important sentence of the paragraph:

Because a country using only one language and having only one custom is weak and frail

(If you are interested by the original: “Mert az egy nyelvű és egy szokású ország gyenge és esendő.”)

Wise words coming from the “dark” middle ages! Worth for a number of people, from the Netherlands to Hungary, to think about…

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June 8, 2009

The right-wing extremists on the move…

Filed under: General, Hungary, Private — Ivan Herman @ 9:24
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The right-wing extremists on the move—in Austria, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Denmark, the Netherlands. It is a shame— for the large people’s parties and for the voters, which did not participate in the elections.

This is a quote from a blog published on the Web site of the German ZDF television (see the German original). I couldn’t agree more. I live in the Netherlands, where Geert Wilders’ rasist party became one of the strongest parties in the country; I carry a French passport and the Front National will still send representatives to the EU Parliament in the name of France; and I also carry a Hungarian passport and the local right wing “Jobbik” party of Hungary has made a breakthrough yesterday evening. This is not a good day…

(Somme “nuggets” from the declarations of the EU representative of Jobbik: “I would be glad if the so-called proud Hungarian Jews would go back to playing with their tiny little circumcised tail rather than vilifying me”,…“We had a dream that we would not become a second Palestina. This dream has just come true…”. Wonderful…)

One can of course be optimistic: these movements come and go, they are in a minority. And I hope optimism is till o.k. But when I see these people marching on the streets of Budapest where I grew up, or when, as a foreigner in the Netherlands, I am indirectly accused by an official party of stealing the job of locals, then, well, it is not easy to keep up my optimism…

March 14, 2009

The art of consensus… in standards and in politics?

Filed under: General, Private, Work Related — Ivan Herman @ 12:20
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When you work at, or with W3C (or any other standard setting organizations, for that matter) there is always a discussion on the pros and cons of consensus building. It is hard to achieve, not always pretty, and it is certainly one of the reasons why the process slows down. But most of the participants also recognize the benefits, too. It is nevertheless not always easy to strike the right balance between consensus and speed, that is for sure.

I realized the other day that some of the political and economical discussions these days provide nice analogies. As we all know, the economical turmoils of the past few months force all governments around the globe to do something. But there is no agreement on what this “something” is; all governments are frenetically trying to give it some shape. This is also true in the country where I happen to live, namely the Netherlands. A few weeks ago the government made some dramatic announcements on the possible effects of the crisis, and also declared that major changes have to be done in the economic and social fabric of the country. And since then? Well, enter the typical Dutch approach: consensus building.

One has to know a little bit how the political system works in this country. There are elections, of course, and various parties make all kinds of promises before those. But after those elections comes the next phase: building a coalition (it never happens to have one party gaining an absolute majority). This coalition is based on building consensus. Future coalition parties come together, and they shape what is called a “government contract” (after all, this country built its wealth on trade!). This is a real contract, that all parties sign, and which reflect the consensus among the parties of what they can achieve together and what they cannot. Each party has to give up some of their electoral promises, but the whole country understands that and, as long as it is clearly stated in that contract, it is perfectly all right. From that point on, the government’s job is to, essentially, fulfil that contract. Of course, creating such a contract is a long process (last time around it took 5-6 months to build a government!). However, the result is that, comparatively, the stability of the Dutch governments, and indeed of society as a whole, is quite remarkable when compared to many countries around. In the 20 years that I have been here I have seen only a few minor strikes (nothing compared to France or Italy…), no major social unrest, and all this coupled with a relatively high living standard.

So to come back to the current state of affairs: the economic turmoils mean that, in fact, a new contract has to be signed because the old one has become, essentially, moot by the bank crisis. So the government parties and the major trade unions are now fiercely negotiating to find a new consensus. This has been going on for weeks and nobody knows what the outcome will be. Maybe I will have to work longer for my pension, maybe I will have tax reductions, maybe I will have to pay a higher tuition fee for my son… all these are on the negotiating table. What is interesting is to see the sharp contrast between this process and the way the crisis is handled in some other countries (like those that I follow more closely, ie, France or Hungary where the governments seem to take fairly one-sided steps without too much consultations with the rest of the society). The Dutch way is certainly way slower and, well, maybe more boring (it is more fun seeing strikes paralysing a whole country like France than just wait for these merchants to finish their negotiations:-) but, maybe, more beneficial on long term. We shall see of course, I may be wrong. But consensus building may prove beneficial again on the long run.

B.t.w., this Dutch way (which is also used in Belgium, actually) has even gained a name: this is the “polder model”, and it even has a Wikipedia page!

November 16, 2008

Classical Music and Improvisation (re: Gabriele Montero)

Filed under: General, Private — Ivan Herman @ 14:20
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It was the French Classical Music channel (France Musique) that made me discover the name of Gabriele Montero. A great classical pianist from Venezuela (if a person like Marta Argerich says “I have rarely come across a talent like Gabriela’s. She is a unique artist.”, well, that means something). But what really caught my attention is that Montero does something very rare: she does classical music improvisation.

Musical improvisation has a strange history in Western classical music. There was a time when it dominated classical music: Bach was considered to be incredible improviser at the keyboard, and so were most of his contemporary musicians like Händel or Telemann. In fact, the tradition claims that some of Bach’s keyboard pieces are just the write down of his improvisations (the best known example is the “The Musical Offering” which includes a three-voice fugue for keyboard and which was probably the improvisation of Bach when he visited Frederick II of Prussia). And, in fact, even when playing “published” music a baroque artist was not only allowed to improvise a little bit here and there, but it was, sort of, expected from him.

But this tradition has disappeared. (I am not talking about jazz here. That is different.) Today a classical musician is supposed to follow the notes, the dynamics, the speed, etc, exactly as written down by the composer. Of course, this is not 100% true, musicians do have a great freedom of expressiveness, otherwise any machine would do. But it is certainly not allowed to deviate from the notes as written down in the music. Improvisation is not expected by the public, rarely practiced by musicians, not taught at conservatories. Actually, if an artist still does it, the “established” community of musicians will very often consider this as not “serious”, not worthy of a real classical musician… It requires a certain guts for a serious performer to do it in public.

Well… and Gabriela Montero has the guts. And that is why it is worth remembering her name. There are a bunch of videos on YouTube; maybe the one I prefer is a baroque style improvisation on Debussy’s Claire de Lune. Quite amazing: improvising counterpoint on the fly… She also has some CD-s where she recorded improvisations she made on Bach tunes (“Bach and Beyond”) or Baroque tunes in general. If you are interested in classical music but you also want to hear something a bit… unusual, then it is worth checking out!

B.t.w., she also has a web site (of course :-) where one can submit her a tune, she would improvise on it and send back the result in MP3. I might check this out sometime…

October 4, 2008

Internationalization and smart phones: an unhappy marriage?

Filed under: General, Private, Work Related — Ivan Herman @ 18:01
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I recently went through the process of renewing my mobile contract which (in Europe) is usually a good opportunity to update one’s phone. Although my previous (smart) phone, a Nokia 9300i, served me well, an upgrade to a newer model is always a good idea. However, it turned out to be more complicated than I thought…

The complication is that I am a little bit off the beaten track, so to say. I live in the Netherlands, but I usually work using English, and I have text (addresses, data) on my smart phone in Hungarian. This also means using characters specific to this language (ie, ű, ő). Ie, I need a system in English, but with the possibility to, somehow, type in those characters, too. I have lists of all my books, CD-s, etc, that I have been maintaining for many years and I’d like to have around on my smart phone. I would not think this is too much to ask…

Of course, following the hype, I looked at the iPhone. Although I must admit I do not really sympathize with the business approach taken by Apple for iPhones and its applications, I thought I would have a look nevertheless. But… Apple doesn’t speak Hungarian. Neither does it speak Czech, Croatian, and other Central European languages for that matter, except for Polish. This means that there is no way one can type in those characters (and I am not sure it could display them all right). With all the hype around the user friendliness of Apple I was shocked to see them forgetting about cca. 30-35 million people who would simply want to use their own language properly. Exit Apple’s iPhone…

Next stage was Windows Mobile based smart phones; after all, it claims to be Unicode based! And there are some very sexy models out there these days (like, the HTC Touch Pro or Samsung’s Omnia), which try to compete with the iPhone. So I had a look. Using an English model the system gives you the possibility to use a virtual keyboard, and this indeed gives the option of using a “symbol” pad containing all kinds of characters including my Hungarian ones. A little bit awkward but, well, one can live with it. So, for a moment, I thought I was sold! But then came the shock: there is no way one can get a Windows Mobile phone with an English operating system in the Netherlands! Providers can give you Dutch systems only. To add insult to injury, for some reason or other, the Dutch system does not include that extra symbol key pad. (Why?) Ie, even if I accepted to use a Dutch system, it would not be usable. Exit all Windows Mobile devices…

My next target was Nokias E90. A slightly older concept than these sexy new breed of smart phones, no touch screen, no animation but, after all, who really cares if otherwise it does the job? It is sold as an upgrade of the old 9300i (where I had no problem with those characters), so I expected to have all features I was looking for without any problems. Wrong…:-( The E90 (ie, Symbian S60, the operating system) indeed offers you a way to type in accented characters. But, as a default, only the Western ones… Ie, no problem typing in œ, or ç, but no ű or ő (or characters like ř, č, ł, to refer to non-Hungarian ones, too). Ie, the E90 is actually a step back compared to its predecessor, where typing in all these characters was not a problem.

Dead end? Well, almost. Thanks to my colleague, Steven Pemberton, we found out that Symbian gives you the possibility to switch languages via what it calls “writing aids”. This changes the available character set. The models sold in the Netherlands have English, Dutch, and… Romanian. Why Romanian I have no idea. But I was lucky: although the Romanian language does not use ű or ő, it so happens that there is a significant Hungarian minority living in Romania, so the character set for Romanian included those two characters, too. Ie, I was off the hook, but that was shere luck, not design. If I want to type in a, say, Czech character (eg, if I buy a new CD of Dvořak) then, well, I will have to do some copy paste:-( But I had no choice so, after all, I decided to live with that, and I am now the happy owner of a Nokia E90. Story ends.

Don’t take me wrong. For a bunch of other things the E90 is a very very good smart phone, has a much faster processor than the 9300i, Web access is really a breeze (it uses Safari, afaik), it looks and feels great. Ie, it serves my purpose after all. But I dream of a time when internationalization is not a pain but a natural part of these devices (or any other device, for that matter)…

June 13, 2008

Web data visualization with ontologies

Filed under: General, Semantic Web, Work Related — Ivan Herman @ 10:14
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It is nice to see when very different communities reuse one another’s work, ie, when the fragmentation of research and development into different fields is, at least a little bit, reduced… I ran into a paper Gilson & al[1] on “From Web data to visualization via ontology mapping” in a journal (the Computer Graphics Forum) that is usually not read by Semantic Web experts. So it may be worth drawing their attention on it… Instead of trying to paraphrase the content of the paper, why not simply reproduce the abstract:

In this paper, we propose a novel approach for automatic generation of visualizations from domain-specific data available on the web. We describe a general system pipeline that combines ontology mapping and probabilistic reasoning techniques. With this approach, a web page is first mapped to a Domain Ontology, which stores the semantics of a specific subject domain (e.g., music charts). The Domain Ontology is then mapped to one or more Visual Representation Ontologies, each of which captures the semantics of a visualization style (e.g., tree maps). To enable the mapping between these two ontologies, we establish a Semantic Bridging Ontology, which specifies the appropriateness of each semantic bridge. Finally each Visual Representation Ontology is mapped to a visualization using an external visualization toolkit. Using this approach, we have developed a prototype software tool, SemViz, as a realisation of this approach. By interfacing its Visual Representation Ontologies with public domain software such as ILOG Discovery and Prefuse, SemViz is able to generate appropriate visualizations automatically from a large collection of popular web pages for music charts without prior knowledge of these web pages.

Worth reading. And thanks to my friend David Duce to talk to me about it…

[1] O. Gilson et al., “FromWeb Data to Visualization via Ontology Mapping,” Computer Graphics Forum, vol. 27, Number 3, 2008 (the paper is also available on-line). The paper was originally presented at the joint Eurographics/IEEE Symposium on Visualization, where it won the best paper award.

June 10, 2008

WWW 2009 site is up

Filed under: General, Semantic Web, Work Related — Ivan Herman @ 9:29
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Although it is still relatively far away (and some of us still have a fresh memory of the WWW2008 conference in Beijing), the Web site for WWW2009 is up! Of course, if you want to submit something, then it may not be that far away :-)

June 3, 2008

In memoriam Ferenc Fejtő

Filed under: General, Hungary, Private — Ivan Herman @ 11:04

Ferenc Fejtő (or, if you prefer, François Fejtő) passed away yesterday. I know his name was not widely known in the “West”, and that is unfortunate, but nevertheless Wikipedia has an entry which is fairly accurate (the French Wikipedia article also gives his partial bibliography).

The Hungarian regime of the 80’s and before (as indeed most dictatorial regimes) was mostly afraid of knowledge. Knowing the truth, knowing the real history and not only what was officially taught was considered as subversive. Ie, many books were banned, forbidden; the books of Fejtő were high on their list, so to say. I still cherish some of his books (“Histoire des démocraties populaires”, “Chine/URSS”; the former was also published in English by Pall Mall Press in 1971, under the title “A history of the People’s Democracies”) that I had to smuggle into the country in the 70’s or the 80’s coming back from my trips abroad and which helped me a lot in understanding the history of the environment I was living in. It was good to have such intellectuals like him.

March 2, 2008

Book worth reading: on Paul Erdős

Filed under: General, Hungary, Private, Work Related — Ivan Herman @ 10:54

If you are interested by the personalities behind mathematics, or simply in the peculiar mind of a genius, it is worth reading Bruce Schechter’s book on Paul Erdős (well, with my Hungarian background I should really write Erdős Pál). Erdős Pál was undeniably one of the greatest scientific minds of the 20th century and certainly one of the greatest mathematicians ever. But also a very peculiar personality. He lived a completely “monastic” life; he never had a fixed job, a place he could really call “home”, all his worldly possessions would fit into a suitcase, and he spent most of his life traveling around the globe from one conference to the other, from one city to the other, wherever he had friends he could do mathematics with. He was author or co-author of around 1,500(!) articles; the number of collaborators was so big that the community came up with the humorous notion of “Erdős number”. He was also incredibly generous in helping young, talented mathematicians to start their career.

I did not have the pleasure to meet Erdős personally, although I had the privilege of having some of his closest collaborators as my teachers at the University of Budapest in the early 70’s (Turán, Sós, Simonovits, Hajnal,…). But he regularly came back to Hungary. We never knew when (nobody did, in fact); the news suddenly spread among us that Erdős was in Budapest and that he would make a presentation, well, tomorrow afternoon. And we went, forgetting our regular, scheduled courses and listed to his talk. His lectures were always great, witty, and full of interesting and unsolved problems. He would usually come with a problem saying “this seems to be an open issue, I have the feeling that it could be solved this and this way; I give a prices of 100$ to whoever solves this”. Or $10 or $1,000, depending on the problem (although the monetary side was not the most important in trying to solve those problems; the perspective of gaining an Erdős number 1, ie, becoming one of Erdős’ co-authors, was much more of an incentive). Even if our field of interest did not coincide with Erdős’, these lectures were always among the highlights of the year. And it did not occur often; I think in those 5 years that I spent at the University, I saw him twice, or maybe three times… certainly not more.

It may be an unusual analogy, but his personality, and the style of his appearances remind me of another genius in a totally different area, namely Sviatoslav Richter. Much like Erdős, he was one of the greatest personalities of the century in a particular field (as a classical pianist) who also led a kind of a recluse, monastic life without real possession and ignoring all traditional signs of success. And much like Erdős nobody knew when he would appear in Budapest for a concert nor what he would play; the news spread among those interested and we all ran to listen to his performances (played in a darkened concert hall, with barely a small lamp on the piano illuminating the music sheet only). And his performance of Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier remain among the most cherished memories I have from my youth. Much like Erdős’ occasional visits.

A book worth reading.

[1] Bruce Schechter: “My Brain is Open, the Mathematical Journeys of Paul Erdős”. The book is not new, but just appeared on some airports, that is where I found it…

February 12, 2008

On the “Google generation”

Filed under: General, Private, Semantic Web, Work Related — Ivan Herman @ 17:03

I stumbled across an interesting study made for the British Library and the UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) on the the “Google generation” and the Web, more exactly search. The goal of the study is to analyse this generation’s behaviour in terms of Web usage, more specifically in terms of finding information on the Web and the role that libraries can play. The target of the study are libraries and librarians, ie, it is a somewhat specialized view, but it is nevertheless interesting read.

Unfortunately, it is long. But, luckily, there is an executive summary; although it is 35 pages, it is worth reading. (I must admit I did not find the time or energy to read more than this summary until now.) I reproduced (in a little bit shortened form) slides 18 to 20 at the end of this blog: these are “myth buster” results that I found fairly interesting…

There is also an nice comment and predictions on the future evolution (and the necessity of libraries to react on those) which include a note on the Semantic Web. I quote from the pages on “looking into the future”:

The world wide web as we have seen and experienced it so far could be completely revolutionised by the advent of the `semantic web’. [...] Some pundits believe that this scenario is very far away and, indeed that it may never happen on a wide scale. Our view is that the semantic web is a tool that will reach its tipping point fairly soon. In five years, 2013, there could be substantial developments that might allow a whole generation of undergraduates to begin to experience its potential.

This is especially likely to be the case in niche areas, like e-Science, especially biology, creating new opportunities for major research libraries to be involved in completely new forms of activity such as real-time publishing and the sharing of experimental data on the internet.

Note that the text also refers to “sharing experimental data”. Amen! :-)

So here are some of the myth on this generation and the related finding of the study:

They are more competent with technology
Our verdict: Generally true, we think, but older users are catching up fast. [..]
They have very high expectations of ICTs
Our verdict: Probably true, since we live in a global web culture dominated by a handful of unifying brands. [...] this expectation is relative, all of us are information consumers now.
They prefer interactive systems and are turning away from being passive consumers of information
Our verdict: Generally true, as borne out by young people’s media consumption patterns: passive media such as television and newspapers are in decline.
They have shifted decisively to digital forms of communication: texting rather than talking
Our verdict: Open. it is very difficult to see messaging as a fundamental trend, its current popularity is certainly influenced by its relatively low cost compared with voice.
They multitask in all areas of their lives
Our verdict: Open. There is no hard evidence. However, it is likely that being exposed to online media early in life may help to develop good parallel processing skills. The wider question is whether sequential processing abilities, necessary for ordinary reading, are being similarly developed.
They are used to being entertained and now expect this of their formal learning experience at university
Our verdict: Open. [...] We are a little concerned by the current interest in using games technologies to enhance students’ learning and library-based experience. When broadcast news makers introduced entertainment show production techniques 20-30 years ago, research showed that these enhanced `interest’ but impeded the absorption of information.
They prefer visual information over text
Our verdict: A qualified yes, but text is still important. As technologies improve and costs fall, we expect to see video links beginning to replace text in the social networking context. However, for library interfaces, there is evidence that multimedia can quickly lose its appeal, providing short-term novelty.
They have zero tolerance for delay and their information needs must be fulfilled immediately
Our verdict: No. We feel that this is a truism of our time and there is no hard evidence to suggest that young people are more impatient in this regard.[...]
They find their peers more credible as information sources than authority figures
Our verdict: On balance, we think this is a myth. Research in the specific context of the information resources that children prefer and value in a secondary school setting shows that teachers, relatives and textbooks are consistently valued above the internet. We feel this statement has more to do with social networking sub-culture and teenagers’ naturally rebellious tendencies[...]
They need to feel constantly connected to the Web
Our verdict: We do not believe that this is a specific Google generation trait. Recent research by Ofcom shows that the over-65s spend four hours a week longer online than 18-24s. We suspect that factors specific to the individual, personality and background, are much more significant than generation.
They are the `cut-and-paste’ generation
Our verdict: We think this is true, there is a lot of anecdotal evidence and plagiarism is a serious issue.
They pick up computer skills by trial-and-error
Our verdict: This is a complete myth. The popular view that Google generation teenagers are twiddling away on a new device while their parents are still reading the manual is a complete reversal of reality[...]
They prefer quick information in the form of easily digested chunks, rather than full text
Our verdict: This is a myth. CIBER deep log studies show that, from undergraduates to professors, people exhibit a strong tendency towards shallow, horizontal, `flicking’ behaviour in digital libraries. Power browsing and viewing appear to be the norm for all. The popularity of abstracts among older researchers rather gives the game away. Society is dumbing down.
They are expert searchers
Our verdict: This is a dangerous myth. Digital literacies and information literacies do not go hand in hand. A careful look at the literature over the past 25 years finds no improvement (or deterioration) in young people’s information skills.
They think everything is on the web (and it’s all free)
Our verdict: Open. Anecdotally, this appears to be true for a large minority of young people, but no one seems to have framed a research question in this form and investigated it more deeply. Certainly this was a prevalent view earlier in the evolution of the internet, indeed its central ethos. To reverse the question, there is much evidence that young people are unaware of library-sponsored content, or at least reluctant to use it. This is the library’s problem, not the fault of young people.
They do not respect intellectual property
Our verdict: This seems to be only partly true. Findings from Ofcom surveys reveal that both adults and children (aged 12-15) have very high levels of awareness and understanding of the basic principles of intellectual property. However, young people feel that copyright regimes are unfair and unjust and a big age gap is opening up.[...]
They are format agnostic
Our verdict: This may be true of some users, young and old, but not all. We have not found any careful analysis of this question, which is surprising given its import for libraries and publishers alike. We suspect that this is no longer a meaningful issue: content is no longer format dependent in cyberspace.
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