Less than a week ago I moved for work to Doha, Qatar. I was rather worried, I have to say. The reaction from my colleagues was mostly negative: affectionate, but negative. The reaction from my friends was mixed: some found it excellent, other congratulate me, others said they'll miss us (and me to them!)
My first impression of Doha, is that I do not have a first impression ;-) So far I've only picked small clues about how things will be. Probably many of them are wrong. I write them here to laugh about them later.
The first things is that it is ridiculously hot, 40 Celsius during most of the day, and everybody says this is just a small preview of what is about to come in the next months, where it will go to 50 Celsius and "you won't be able to stand in the sun for 5 minutes".
The cats hated to travel. They spent 12 hours in the cages, with 6 of them flying. When they were "delivered" to me, I found them alone next to the luggage belt. The good thing: they still had water in their dishes, meaning they were not moved so much. The cats were weird after the trip, they did not want to eat and were searching for Fabiola, but now they are easier, eating and wanting to go to the backyard. That, I will let them do it later on when they are more used to this place. For now, Panterita and Trufa are a big chunk of my social life.
I was assigned a house in a gated community where there are mostly people related to education/universities, many families with kids. The community has its own pool and gym. The house looks huge compared with what I've experienced in the last years: Rome (a studio of 16 sq m) and Barcelona (flats of 48 and 64 sq m).
* * *
The other part of my social life are conversations with taxi drivers. Kind of groundhog day: soccer, where is Chile, where is Sri Lanka or Ethiopia, how hot it is in summer, etc. Language is a big barrier. At work everybody speaks English, many of them better than I. Outside work people speak little English or the minimum for basic stuff.
And my activity so far has been ... shopping ;-) To get the home ready, to buy food, a cellphone, etc. There is a mini-mall with a medium-size supermarket attached to the community and I've also gone to the City Center which is the largest shopping mall. Prices are similar to the convenience stores in Barcelona. Here is a sample with approximate prices:
500g of pasta = 1 eur.
Colgate toothpaste = 1 eur.
Two liters of watermelon juice = 2 eur.
Shampoo HnS = 3 eur.
Small box of champignon = 1.5 eur
One cucumber = 2 eur.
Box of tea bags = 1.5 eur.
One lettuce = 0.5 eur.
Taxi from home to airport, 30 min = 10 eur.
Taxi from home to city center, 20 min = 8 eur.
The bills are quite decorated, and as I mix lila and blue I tend to confuse the bills of 100 qar (20 eur) and 1 qar (0.2 eur).
* * *
Most local women wear the Abaya (it covers the head and the body, but not the face) and about half wears a Niqab (a veil that allows you to see only the eyes). I have not seen any woman in Burqa (the one with the net in front of the eyes). Non-qatari women wear whatever they like: jeans, skirts (below the knee), t-shirts, etc. The only thing I saw was at the entrance of the Islamic Museum a friend of mine was asked to cover her shoulders.
On that count, I have not experienced a "cultural shock". I hope to postpone that as much as possible. Well, I was about to experience it: in the toilet at the shopping mall there was a place that looked like an urinal but it was to wash your feet before praying ... fortunately I was suspicious and did not use it for what I thought it was used ;-)
Besides, in many aspects it is a developing country and in that sense, to a first-class human (I am second class), Qatar may look more strange. For instance: my experience to pass some accompanied cargo through customs was strange: there are written rules, unwritten rules, people asking you for money around, it is not clear immediately what for, and in general something systematically dysfunctional. But it can be understood. The logic is that you elbow your way to the counter and shove your papers in front of an officer, smile, and wait. Finally you have to pay to the guys that asked you for money initially because they are legally part of this business, kind of para-officers of this place.
The good side: rules are flexible. For instance the shuttle bus in the airport stops anywhere.
* * *
In the city center there are very pretty buildings. I work at the Tornado Tower which is a twisted tower. Looking at all the funky buildings I thought they could have built a Sagrada Familia, just replacing animals and people by text and abstract motives.
From my office (now that I have an office) you can see buildings, cranes, and a piece of the bay. The work looks interesting, I am just starting to decide what exactly I am going to do, but there is a lot of energy, students, engineers, etc. I still don't have a good sense of what to expect of those around me. I don't care if it is much or little, fast or slow. I just want to understand the work rhythm and who are the reliable people.
* * *
What else can I say? I miss Fabiola so much. I have no idea how these two months without her are going to be. And for someone risk-averse as me, this situation is frightening at times. But I also have a lot of curiosity. I expect to satisfy that curiosity in the next months ;-)
Hugs for everyone. I don't tell you "everybody come to Doha!" because it will be a while before I am certain that it is a good idea ;-)
This week I am starting a new adventure in Doha, Qatar :-) I feel very sad about leaving Barcelona, so I started remembering some random things that happened to me during this time:
I used an entire box of 500 staples.
I was expelled from Spain with 15 days to leave the country ... thanks to a good lawyer and efforts by other people I was able to solve this.
While naked I met some people I knew at the beach ... fortunately, in the water.
I worked in a beautiful train station, in the best job I've had so far.
I made many friends, and I had time to loose a few ones.
I went to China, India, Germany, Poland, France, etc.
I often went to work on a longboard.
I was able to publish a lot and be very productive.
I walked four hours a trail of one hour (lost).
I went to the gym for the first time in my life, and I am still going.
We went every year at least once to the Netherlands and once to Rome.
I saw Italy loose some of its brightest people.
I went from suffering by paper rejections to feel almost indifferent.
I burned a mother board and I learned that yes, you can plug the power source the wrong way.
I dropped a speaker on top of my corporate laptop after less than one month of having it, and I payed the mistake.
I discovered an rsa token can not stand a 5-stories fall.
I understood sangria is the way Spain punishes turists.
I drank at least half a cubic meter of beer.
I had liters of vermouth poured by Robert de Niro.
I spent great afternoons in Part de la Ciutadella and found out the sun is a luxury.
I arrived with 29 years and now I am 35.
I bought for the first time lotion to avoid hair loss and found out how useless it is.
We adopted three cats and saw one of them die.
My grandfather died. My grandmother died. My brother in law died.
I enjoyed having the baker, the guy at the minimarket and at the bar greet me.
I was surprised when it started to happen at my branch in the bank.
Colleagues proved me wrong often, but always respectfully.
I did body pump and aerobics ... in the middle of the Rambla.
I had dinner at Palau de la Musica.
I had delicious calcots and artichokes.
I got addicted to Pimientos del Padrón and Patatas Bravas.
I removed kilos of tuna fish from green salads.
I met tons of crazy cat ladies and found out it is marvelous to be married to one.
I learned to speak much louder than what is comfortable for a Chilean.
I felt very ashamed about how some Chileans treat Peruvians when I was treated as some Europeans treat Chileans.
I went to Suede, The Cure, Depeche Mode, Pet Shop Boys, Groove Armada, Viva la Fete and Arctic Monkeys.
I was addressed often in Arabic and people won't believe I was Chilean.
I learnt Catalan watching Doraemon.
Of course there is lots, lots more than this. Paraphrasing Douglas Adams: "So Long Barcelona, and Thanks for All the Fish!" See you soon, friends! I hope to come back to enjoy this beautiful city and the wonderful people it attracts.
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.
These are the slides from our paper [pdf] on creating teams automatically. It was presented last week by Aris Gionis at CIKM'10 in Toronto, Canada.
This research is about creating and assigning teams on-the-fly as a stream of tasks arrives. It is particularly useful for "horizontal" organizations where there is not a single control point deciding who gets to do what. The algorithm we present tries to balance effectiveness (allocating the rights teams to each task) and fairness (dividing evenly the workload among people, even if they have different skills).
The struggle between species on Earth is, for now, settled. In the quest for evolving new and better ways of surviving and replicating, we have found a powerful and general adaptation. Our brains are able of creating technology to manipulate matter, energy, and information, at a scale far beyond our physical limitations as primates. This adaptation puts us well above the other animals on Earth.
We are a remarkable species that over a few hundred thousand years has been consolidating its position as the dominant species. We have become formidable predators, and while there are still many ways in which the rest of the terrestrial biota can kill us, we are able of sterilizing vast areas of the planet, leaving only the flora and fauna that fits our interests.
But the key to our success, our brain, is not only a tool of survival and replication. Our brain can do many other things that are well beyond the interest of our genes for multiplying themselves. A human can decide, against its reproductive drive, to take contraceptives. A human can decide, against energy efficiency considerations, to spend a great deal of his life creating music, poetry, dance.
A human being may also decide to switch sides. Obviously a human can not stop being a human. But he can decide to advocate for non-human interests, for the interests of the other beings in our ecosphere. He can decide that he does not want its own species to continue growing and dominating the other species in the way they it has been doing it.
This is not something now. Throughout the years, there have always been people who, for various reasons, have decided to join the ranks of the weak. Human sexual dimorphism makes human females with less muscular mass, that have been forced by men to serve their interests. But some men helped the women break free. Also some groups of humans developed the socio-technical mechanisms to create powerful armies before other groups. Those who did have the weapons before, conquered the others. But some white men also helped black men to be free.
In the same way, a human being can decide to join the ranks of the defence of other species, and fight so that other humans curb their exploitation of Earth's resources. Those who decide to give this step will find loneliness and no applause. Those who decide to switch sides, should expect contempt from the other humans. Many of our older institutions are fundamentally enterprises of promotion of human interests, and hence their rejection of any effective way of self-limitation of the human population, and their rejection of any deeper concerns with non-human animals.
Moreover, those who decide to fight for the non-human must understand that it is fundamentally different from protecting the ecosphere so that it can sustain human interests. Many of those who fight for the ecosphere as a resource for humans will simply never switch sides, but their power can also be used as a tool. Those who decide to switch sides and fight for non-human interests, must be willing to create alliances with them too, understanding clearly that while they are not in the same side, there are common interests.
Finally, those who decide to switch sides and fight for non-human interests must expel summarily from their ranks anyone who uses or is willing to use violence in this fight. Creating pain will not reduce pain. You do not take sides with the weak to destroy the strong. You take the side of the weak to find a balanced agreement of coexistence that is harmonious, sustainable, prosperous, and peaceful.
There is much to be said about this confrontation. Most will remain neutral. Those who want to fight, know where they are needed.
The cats hated to travel. They spent 12 hours in the cages, with 6 of them flying. When they were "delivered" to me, I found them alone next to the luggage belt. The good thing: they still had water in their dishes, meaning they were not moved so much. The cats were weird after the trip, they did not want to eat and were searching for Fabiola, but now they are easier, eating and wanting to go to the backyard. That, I will let them do it later on when they are more used to this place. For now, Panterita and Trufa are a big chunk of my social life.
I was assigned a house in a gated community where there are mostly people related to education/universities, many families with kids. The community has its own pool and gym. The house looks huge compared with what I've experienced in the last years: Rome (a studio of 16 sq m) and Barcelona (flats of 48 and 64 sq m).
In the city center there are very pretty buildings. I work at the Tornado Tower which is a twisted tower. Looking at all the funky buildings I thought they could have built a Sagrada Familia, just replacing animals and people by text and abstract motives.
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. 
The struggle between species on Earth is, for now, settled. In the quest for evolving new and better ways of surviving and replicating, we have found a powerful and general adaptation. Our brains are able of creating technology to manipulate matter, energy, and information, at a scale far beyond our physical limitations as primates. This adaptation puts us well above the other animals on Earth.
A human being may also decide to switch sides. Obviously a human can not stop being a human. But he can decide to advocate for non-human interests, for the interests of the other beings in our ecosphere. He can decide that he does not want its own species to continue growing and dominating the other species in the way they it has been doing it.
Moreover, those who decide to fight for the non-human must understand that it is fundamentally different from protecting the ecosphere so that it can sustain human interests. Many of those who fight for the ecosphere as a resource for humans will simply never switch sides, but their power can also be used as a tool. Those who decide to switch sides and fight for non-human interests, must be willing to create alliances with them too, understanding clearly that while they are not in the same side, there are common interests.
