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We were born through ingenuity and violence...

Multi-lingual video that explains why the Chilean students are demonstrating:

An interesting talk [full transcript in PDF] by Lisa Wade, with title "Promise and peril of the hook-up culture", describes several changes in the last decades with respect to the hook-up culture in campus. On average, during the whole college a student will have 7 hook-ups, 2-3 of them with sexual intercourse. The distribution is obviously quite skewed, with 25% having ZERO hook-ups and 15% having more than 10.

This generation did not invent casual sex, but introduced changes in the way it is practiced. For instance, oral sex used to go after intercourse -- as in the song by Dr. Horrible about sleeping for the second time with someone. Now, the "sexual script" has changed and oral sex goes before intercourse.

Other findings are pretty negative, specially for women. According to their surveys, women are not enjoying much casual sex, and have the impression that the freedom to say yes implies almost an obligation to do so -- often they end up sleeping with people or in circumstances they would have rather avoided.

One of the major findings of the study is that there is little flexibility when choosing how do you want to have sex. The "sex with benefits" kind of relationships or long-term commitments are very difficult because even when there are many who would like to, everyone things the others are against it.

To some extent, the generation has become trapped in a unique way, a unique rule set, about how to have sex, which is generating levels of sexual frustrations that obviously contradicts the whole purpose of these experiences.

See: transcript / slides / video.

Decision-making procedures in online social networks should reflect participants' political influence within the network.

Direct-democracy voting in large online communities may not be the best choice. The degree of commitment of different participants in online communities and collaboration systems varies greatly. In a community in which there are a few core members with long-term commitments to the project, and many other members joining and leaving the project rapidly, egalitarian democracy is neither expected nor appropriate. Thus, the decision-making mechanism is often meritocratic.

In this work, we propose a middle-ground between direct democracy (citizens vote on every issue) and representative democracy (citizens elect representatives that decide on their behalf on every issue). Our proposal, a type of delegative democracy, allows them to express their opinion directly or to delegate their power on a proxy.

Proxy delegation can be transitive: a proxy can delegate in another proxy. However, as our vote travels farther away through a delegation chain, we would like to introduce some reluctance in the way the power is transferred to other people we may not know directly. In that sense, we include a dampening factor (like PageRank does) to reduce the amount of power delegated through long chains. Technically, our system of viscous democracy is a system of transitive proxy voting with exponential damping.

Details appear in the virtual extension of the June 2011 issue of Communications of ACM: Viscous Democracy for Social Networks, by Paolo Boldi, Francesco Bonchi, Carlos Castillo and Sebastiano Vigna.

Read the authors' copy [pdf] »

"The job of the incumbent is not the same as your job, the job of
the policy maker. Their job is to make profit for them. Your job is the
public good".

Talk with subtitles in Spanish // Charla con subtítulos en castellano »