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We are ordinary people. We are like you: people, who get up every morning to study, work or find a job, people who have family and friends. People, who work hard every day to provide a better future for those around us.

Some of us consider ourselves progressive, others conservative. Some of us are believers, some not. Some of us have clearly defined ideologies, others are apolitical, but we are all concerned and angry about the political, economic, and social outlook which we see around us: corruption among politicians, businessmen, bankers, leaving us helpless, without a voice.

This situation has become normal, a daily suffering, without hope. But if we join forces, we can change it. It’s time to change things, time to build a better society together. Therefore, we strongly argue that:

• The priorities of any advanced society must be equality, progress, solidarity, freedom of culture, sustainability and development, welfare and people’s happiness.
• These are inalienable truths that we should abide by in our society: the right to housing, employment, culture, health, education, political participation, free personal development, and consumer rights for a healthy and happy life.
• The current status of our government and economic system does not take care of these rights, and in many ways is an obstacle to human progress.
• Democracy belongs to the people (demos = people, krátos = government) which means that government is made of every one of us. However, in Spain most of the political class does not even listen to us. Politicians should be bringing our voice to the institutions, facilitating the political participation of citizens through direct channels that provide the greatest benefit to the wider society, not to get rich and prosper at our expense, attending only to the dictatorship of major economic powers and holding them in power through a bipartidism headed by the immovable acronym PP & PSOE.
• Lust for power and its accumulation in only a few; create inequality, tension and injustice, which leads to violence, which we reject. The obsolete and unnatural economic model fuels the social machinery in a growing spiral that consumes itself by enriching a few and sends into poverty the rest. Until the collapse.
• The will and purpose of the current system is the accumulation of money, not regarding efficiency and the welfare of society. Wasting resources, destroying the planet, creating unemployment and unhappy consumers.
• Citizens are the gears of a machine designed to enrich a minority which does not regard our needs. We are anonymous, but without us none of this would exist, because we move the world.
• If as a society we learn to not trust our future to an abstract economy, which never returns benefits for the most, we can eliminate the abuse that we are all suffering.
• We need an ethical revolution. Instead of placing money above human beings, we shall put it back to our service. We are people, not products. I am not a product of what I buy, why I buy and who I buy from.

For all of the above, I am outraged.
I think I can change it.
I think I can help.
I know that together we can.I think I can help.

I know that together we can.

Source: democraciarealya.es [2011-05-19]

Here is the presentation I gave on this paper:

C. Castillo, M. Mendoza, B. Poblete: "Information Credibility on Twitter". Proc. of WWW 2011, Hyderabad, India. ACM Press.

Lessig explains corruption in 10 minutes.

"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root." — Thoreau

I am glad to announce that today we released the TAXOMO sequence mining software under a BSD license.

TAXOMO is a data-mining tool for sequences. It takes as input a set of sequences and a taxonomy, and generates a succinct description of the sequences (specifically, a Markov chain with lumped states).

The input sequences may represent any kind of data, e.g.: trajectories on a map, web pages visited by a user, etc. The taxonomy should be defined over the states in the sequences. In the case of a map, for instance, they can be regions and sub-regions for the points in the map. In the case of a web site, they can be categories and sub-categories for the pages.

Taxomo was developed at Yahoo! Research Barcelona, and it is described in:

Francesco Bonchi, Carlos Castillo, Debora Donato, Aristides Gionis: "Taxonomy-driven lumping for sequence mining". Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, Springer, Volume 19, Issue 2, p.227-244 (2009)

For more information and download, see: http://taxomo.sourceforge.net/

Call for papers: Workshop on Web Quality (joint WICOW/AIRWeb workshop)

In conjunction with the 20th International World Wide Web Conference in Hyderabad, India. DEADLINE: 31/Jan/2011

The objective of the workshop is to provide the research communities working on web spam, abuse, credibility, and reputation topics with a survey of current problems and potential solutions. It will present an opportunity for close interaction between practitioners who may have focused on more isolated sub-areas previously. We also want to gather crucial feedback for the academic community from participants representing major industry players on how web content quality research can contribute to practice.

On one hand, the joint workshop will cover the more blatant and malicious attempts that deteriorate web quality such as spam, plagiarism, or various forms of abuse and ways to prevent them or neutralize their impact on information retrieval. On the other hand, it will also provide a venue for exchanging ideas on quantifying finer-grained issues of content credibility and author reputation, and modeling them in web information retrieval.

See the workshop topics and more information »»