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 »

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]