randform

bye, bye THISYouKNOWmustNOTbemaned***

Unfortunately on Oct. 1st some countries signed the socalled Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA). The European Union may eventually join in. The agreement is rather problematic.

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Recently I was –here on randform– recalling some of my pictures of a trip to Oxford. Here some more pictures from a previous trip.

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Some recycled pictures from Oxford, England where I was on a conference last year. Since I had not much time and only my little camera with me, they are a bit random and fuzzy. However they still give some impressions so I decided to post them here.

The image of the women’s room in the youth hostel (see below) may look more uncomfortable than it actually was. That is luckily all the six women in the room were attending the conference and all of them were very considerate people that is the partying teenager stayed out of the room and thus we all had more or less rather quiet nights.

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Last week we did a short trip to the Island of Rügen in the baltic, which is amongst others famous for its stunningly beautiful Chalk Cliffs in the Jasmund National Park, including the Königstuhl (king’s chair). You may know the well-known picture Chalk Cliffs on Rügen by C.D. Friedrich.

update 15.08.11: Warning: especially after that recent rain the chalk cliffs can break. On Saturday evening there was an amount of ca. 30.000 cubic meters of chalk gliding. The Jasmund park authorities thus currently recommend not to stroll in their vicinity. According to the article the sea level has been rising by 28 cm in the last 200 ys. so that the hillside toe vanished. This leaves the chalk without any protection against the baltic.

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The Theseus program is a german research project (sofar funded for five years). It is kind of a bit on the side of the already mentioned Quaero project. Theseus is amongst others concerned with the development of aspects of the semantic web. Moreover it is especially concerned with technology in connection to business applications and services. So for example companies like antibodies-online may look out for unified descriptions of their products* etc. The Theseus project hosts the socalled TEXO lab, which offers now a prize for an app written in USDL (which seems to be some variant of WSDL, i.e. a metalanguage, which describes entities of web services). The website of the prize is in german, but thanks to google-translate (which still works for this site) one can get an easy translate of the site. This may enhance the global competition for a posh enterprise app.

*as a side remark: eventually this could also be useful for flutracking

My talk at the open knowledge confence was well perceived, however on the other hand there were not so many participants listening to my talk. In general it seemed to me that games were not (yet) in the focus of the open knowledge community. That is tere were not so many talks involving games at the conference. Nevertheless there were enough issues of importance and the conference was fun.

The slides of my talk are currently too big for upload, so I only uploaded a newer version of the article.

update (130711): The slides are available now at slideshare.net:

Talk: “Testing new toy economies/political structures in MMOGs” at slideshare.net

An upload of an updated version of the article draft “New economic schemes in games” is at the corresponding randform blogpost.

Cat Caspari has a bit given up on instrumentation so here you can hear Cat singing a capella in her living room. She sings Pirate Jenny (in german) from the Threepenny opera.

Unfortunately I am again without my laptop. This time it seemed to me that the hard disk was anffected – just in case you wonder about the retarded blogging.

Just a little supplement to the last post. It may be interesting to think about the following:

Imagine there are three people on a boat being in an emergency situation. One person has lost all his food, the other two still have all their food. The two who still have their food are in a quarrel about which route to take. Donating a quarter of the food would impair your strength and power to a great amount. Regardless which of the two proposed routes one takes – for either route it is assumed that by donating one half of your food you could in principle survive, but only if everything goes all right.

Imagine the same situation but instead of two quarreling competitors with food you have just one person with food.

Do you think the actions taken with regard to sharing food would be the same in both cases?