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Sin Piel (no Fur) is a demonstration that takes place every year, to raise public awareness about the cost of the manufacturing of fur coats in terms of animal suffering. This year it was done in the steps of Plaça del Rei in Barcelona. In this Reuters photo the activists are preparing for the activity. Fabiola was one of the organizers (in black on the left side):

The demonstration is organized by Anima Naturalis, an international NGO for the promotion and defense of animal rights.

See also photos and coverage in the press.

The Institute of Catalan Studies (Institut d'Estudis Catalans) has upgraded its definition of marriage. It is the first dictionary in the world to do so to include same-sex marriages, which are legal in Catalunya since 2005.

The old definition was "unió legítima entre un home i una dona", legitimate union of a man and a woman. The new definition is "unió legítima entre dues persones que es comprometen a portar una vida en comú establerta mitjançant ritus o formalitats legals": legitimate union between two persons that commit to having a life in common established by rites or legal formalities.

"We should not be slaves of etymologies or certain customs that may have been already left behind [superat]", indicated the president of the philology chapter studies of the Academy, Joan Martí i Castell.

Sources [in Catalan]: RAC1, Pagina26, 3cat24.

The Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web workshop is now in its fifth edition! The deadline for research articles is February 13, 2009.

Adversarial Information Retrieval addresses tasks such as gathering, indexing, filtering, retrieving and ranking information from collections wherein a subset has been manipulated maliciously. On the Web, the predominant form of such manipulation is search engine spamming (or spamdexing), i.e., malicious attempts to influence the outcome of ranking algorithms, aimed at getting an undeserved high ranking for some
items in the collection. Topics include:

• Link spam
• Content spam
• Cloaking
• Blog/forum/wiki spam
• Tag spam
• Review and rating spam
• Click fraud detection
• Reverse engineering of ranking algorithms
• Web content filtering
• Online advertisement blocking
• Stealth crawling

For more information, see http://airweb.cse.lehigh.edu/2009/cfp.html

¡Congratulations! it is time to swing the pendulum back. One of the most appealing facts of the US election results, at least to me, is a sharp division between the future and the past. Old people always vote conservative (¡duh!) but in this presidental election this was really evident.

I have seen change and happiness arrive before. In my case it was October 5th, 1988 when a referendum stated that we wanted democracy and not dictatorship in Chile. It was all joy and happiness, but actually very little changed: those who proposed change became the stronger advocates of the past.

It does not have to happen this time. The fact that young people gave the US Democrats their victory is a great reason for hope. But change will not come for free, and this is just a first step. A quote by abolitionist Frederick Douglass is perhaps appropriate:

If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what a people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. Men may not get all they pay for in this world; but they must pay for all they get. If we ever get free from all the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and, if needs be, by our lives, and the lives of others. (Frederick Douglass in 1857)

Via: Ateología.