If you live in Kuopio, or you are an attentive tourist, you are likely to notice a peculiarity of the city in a matter of days, weeks at most. Most locals I have talked to agree: Kuopio lacks a few cozy coffee shops with opening hours beyond 7pm that have a warm interior design, comfortable chairs and couch, jazzy background music, good coffee, tea and pastries. (A library with books, free wifi and owners that are editors of a blog with the latest & coolest curiosities and news of a living in Kuopio.) Most locals I have talked to agree, this is unfortunate. I think, there are at least two coffee shops that match the description best: Kahvilla Kaneli and Fado.

The first, and unfortunately up to now last, time I found Kaneli open while passing by a few weeks ago, I finally had a cup of tea and, out of curiosity, I just had to ask the waitress, a minute short the closing: “Anteeksi, what is the reason for the late afternoon or early evening closing?” She didn’t know exactly but her guess was that it would not be cost-effective.

Hard question. So, here is the experiment, drafted this evening with a friend while sitting on a park bench (and dreaming of an open Kaneli?). If you happen to live in Kuopio, we would like to hear your opinion. Write a comment. Would you like to see Kaneli or Fado open just a little longer during our endless summer evenings? Would it not be cost-effective? How can they attract clientele? We would like to hear what you think. (And don’t forget to invite your friends to the discussion here, a tweet will already do it!)

Here is the deal. If we get back some enthusiasm we will start an online petition to collect names and comments of locals who would like to see our cozy coffee shops to be open just a little longer, during the week or weekends, in the summer or winter, as it fits. We will inform the owners of both Kaneli and Fado about the online petition.

Can we motivate the owners? Or are they right with the cost-effectiveness argument?

Tervetuloa.

[1] Close, Frank (2009). Nothing: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0199225866.

(And increase entropy along the way.)

The pot was placed on the cooking stove shortly after noon with the brief announcement by NZZ that at 2pm CEST the Swiss justice minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf will announce the decision regarding the U.S. request to extradite Polanski. Since, some French rejoice «Merci la Suisse! Bravo la Suisse!» while some U.S. comments iterate around anger, Washington is disappointed and I won’t comment the decision. You are entitled to your opinion.

As I wrote, it began shortly after noon. Later in the afternoon, NZZ reported “Der Regisseur ist wieder ein freier Mann” and various online news sites followed, including the NYT with the headline “Swiss Reject U.S. Request to Extradite Polanski” and commentary at a separate article. While reading through some comments I ended up thinking @nytimes should add an option ‘bullshit’ under “Report as Inappropriate.” (And I have nothing against what reads like a sound argument on why the ruling is wrong.)

It didn’t take long for ‘Roman Polanski’ to get to trending topic status on Twitter — stay there for the better part of six hours — and spammer to ride the wave and link to all kinds of dubious sites. The Swiss were confused with the Swedes, the cuckoo of the German clock was put to guillotine and Swiss law equated to Swiss cheese. Granted, at least the cheese is more accurate w.r.t. geographic context.

I think, the most hilarious gaffe was cooked by CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk) and CNN (@CNN), “The Worldwide Leader in News.” The former with the tweet “France will not extradite Roman Polanski to the U.S. to face child-sex charges. http://on.cnn.com/b9HxzP” — which later was replaced with “Correction: Switzerland will not …” — the latter with a retweet @cnnbrk without reading (emphasis added).

Sunday evening I was home with the feeling a friend and I long ago termed The Bubble of being light that you could lie inside a levitating bubble. I read through my inbox which reliably displays upon click. The better part of its content was clicked to trash, unread. I read through Twitter when, suddenly, I recalled a recent tweet by @kendall telling “Twitter is not the world.”

I suppose, there are a number of possible interpretations for the tweet, a characteristic that is, incidentally, of many tweets. Literally, for instance, take the world as you and I know it — trees, birds, mountains, summer cottages — and Twitter and you conclude “Twitter is not the world,” obviously. Figuratively, you may interpret it as “there is more to the world than Twitter.”

From within The Bubble, the lists of messages pushed up the screen looked not much afar an expression of collective madness. I outright corrected my thinking. After all, chances are that it is not the twitters out there who use Twitter in ever more creative ways to be mad but rather me suggesting they are. With the words of Michael Allingham [1] choice “cannot, by itself, be irrational.” He writes, “reasonableness is a property of patterns of choices, not of individual choices.” There is nothing irrational in choosing to tweet but the choice would look odd if someone also chooses, for instance, to avoid Twitter.

[1] Michael Allingham. Choice Theory: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press Inc., New York, 2002.

A solution could be to expose the data in the repository using a RESTful framework, e.g. Restlet. Part of the elegance of this approach lies in URI templates. For the purpose discussed here, we could route the following URI template to a specific resource,

and replace the templates for sensorId, t1 and t2 with values for a specific request, being t1 and t2 points in time representing an interval. The approach is also elegant because content negotiation allows us to serve multiple representations of the resource, i.e. serve different representations of the time-series depending on the user agent. Notably, a user calling the resource within a browser may want to see a plot of the time-series while an application calling the same resource would be better served with an RDF/XML representation of the time-series, e.g.

Naturally, XML or SensorML may be served also, possibly as a separate representation.

(*) “Time-consuming outdoor dish, where a whole lamb or a large roast of mutton, lamb, pork, bear, etc, is slowly roasted buried in a hole in the ground. The meat is first left to marinate and tightly wrapped in a thick layer of wetted baking parchment and/or kitchen towels, newspapers and aluminium foil. A hole from about half to one metre deep is dug in the ground, preferably in sandy clay soil, and lined with bricks or stones. A large fire is burnt down in the hole for several hours, and the meat parcel is placed on the hot coals and embers. The meat is covered with some of the hot coals and soil and left to cook for several hours until done.” (Source: Glossary of Finnish Dishes, Nordic Recipe Archive.)

It said, 7:8.

I asked the class if anyone could guess what it represents, adding the hint that it is not a C:N ratio. After a few seconds, one guy came up with a suggestion. He was almost right. Indeed, 7:8 was the teacher-to-student ratio of the class, a two weeks intensive course in soil ecology laboratory. Needless to say, the class was likely the most interesting I ever had in my ever longer academic career and the reason why I thought the 7:8 ratio deserves a note was because learning with 1 teacher every 1.14 students is unique and a privilege that I certainly have experienced the first time.

Sitting between the rows, the professor later commented that albeit the cost per student in the course was high and nowadays fewer and fewer Finnish universities offer such courses a lower ratio would likely render the class ineffective. I cannot agree more.

One of the many sweet side effects of the 7:8 ratio was to see how the teacher-student relationship evolved over the period of two weeks. Working closely daily from 8 am to 4 pm definitively lead to an almost complete blurring of teacher and student roles. Granted, laboratory newbie as I am, I always knew I’m the student.

Incidentally, a few hours ago I listened to a recent Ken Robinson TED on learning revolution.

This is a note to a recent thread on one of the personal blogs I follow. The enthusiasm conveyed in an answer to my two cents to the original post motivated me to write this note. The author writes in Italian. To make it easier for you to follow I’m going to translate the main thoughts.

At least partially based on some recent setbacks and on events not too far in the future one of the questions raised in the post is why can’t everything be perfect? In my comment, I wrote that I don’t think experiencing a situation to be not perfect, or for that matter perfect, is a reflection of a quality of the situation but, rather, result of nurturing a distance between ourselves and that particular situation. It is our unwillingness to embrace it, rejecting it.

As usual, also this thought isn’t original to my mind and some attribution is in order. It is rooted in Buddhist philosophy or at least I think so based on how I interpret some of the readings. For a pleasant read in plain English I suggest Charlotte Joko Beck [1].

Di cuore auguri a te, a voi, carissima!

[1] Charlotte Joko Beck. Everyday Zen: Love and Work. San Francisco, Harper & Row. (LCCN Permalink)

A few days ago I read a comment to an article that rather brilliantly iterates on this. It is related to the recent BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico caused by an explosion and consequent sinking of the Deepwater Horizon. The author calls on commenter who say, I quote, “Why in the world do we continue to allow companies like BP ruin the environment?” The author’s basic argument is, I quote, “We as consumers demand that they continue to ruin the environment because we all use petrochemical products in EVERY facet of our lives!” The author goes on listing products that most of us affluent consumers know. Then, what I consider to be the best remark,

I think it’s funny how people are so righteous and indignant about the big bad oil companies, yet fail to take an honest look at their own connection to the situation.

Actually, I kind of falter between that statement and this one,

It’s so lazy for people to sit here and talk about boycotting BP or ousting the CEOs, because that’s simpler than individuals taking a cold hard look at their own consumption and lifestyle.

Indeed.

As per April 27, 2010, the long and short term Issuer Credit Rating for the Hellenic Republic are rated BB+ and B, respectively, by Standard & Poor’s. A more accurate description than ‘Junk’ status is “considered highest speculative grade by market participants” for BB+ and “more vulnerable to adverse business, financial and economic conditions but currently has the capacity to meet financial commitment” for B. While this might not sound like complete ‘Junk’ it doesn’t sound good, especially given that we are talking about sovereign debt rating. But then, one might wonder how valid S&P ratings are in first place.

I have never been to Greece for holidays and I never moved to Greece for work. Therefore, my knowledge about Greek government, its structure and functioning, the Greek economy and the people of the republic is to be considered zero. Further, I have not studied the recent events in depth. As such, I should perhaps not comment at all. That said, I would like to leave a thought. It is actually not specific to the Hellenic Republic.

I consider financial responsibility to be an imperative, for individuals, corporations, sovereigns, or supranational. An entity on the brink of default to me signals first and foremost failure to meet this responsibility. Actually, I consider default the last stage of not meeting financial responsibility. Not being able to zero debt monthly equals to not meeting the responsibility. Though, my view might be a bit too strict the apparently widespread nonchalance w.r.t. financial responsibility, starting at the level of individuals, is distressing.

You might argue that meeting financial responsibility requires different sacrifice by individuals living in different countries. True. A good example is a US student who struggles with tuition fees vs. a Finnish student with no such fees, a few hundred Euro each month pocket money issued by the government plus subsidized housing and lunch. Very different realities, indeed. Though, I still argue, it doesn’t actually matter. No matter how the conditions, it is your personal responsibility to meet financial liabilities, at least in an economy where this is theoretically possible.

From my perspective, going on strike because the seat belts might feel too tight under dire circumstances equals to not having understood that financial responsibility is an imperative. Whatever the reason for the circumstances, I think there is no other way out of debt than fasten the seat belts. Yes, possible misconduct at sovereign or corporation level eventually drips down to the individual level which might be unfair, awful, wrong, mad, inhumane, unethical, amoral, whatever. However one may feel, nothing changes at the basic reality, whether as individual or as individual citizen of a country.

Unless proven wrong, I don’t think bailing out corporations or governments is the right thing to do. It is not the responsibility of Germany or any other country to clean up the mess by pouring billions into a failed entity even if for decades countries have been housing funds of massive tax evasion, a practice that might not have been blocked but is decided and carried out by the tax evader who rests alone responsible for his or her actions. Pointing at Goldman Sachs for having the ultimate tricks to pull white rabbits out of black top hats might not be completely wrong but not complete either as the magician was most likely hired to perform the tricks.

Finally, I don’t think this is a Greek only problem but increasingly so an eurozone concern and from there, you bet, it becomes in a matter of minutes a global issue. (Just consider the DJIA today at the close: -213.04 (-1.90%).)

For the records. Though I had no exorbitant tuition fees, covering costs in Zurich required a yearly income of roughly $25k which implied one or more part-time jobs throughout the years leading to a delayed graduation by a few semesters to make sure I do not fall into debt. Currently, my wage is as low as 10 years ago and it was clear to me from day one that I had to scale back in everything to meet financial obligations. Of course, the real cost to society of my existence likely exceeds total balanced liabilities but one can only balance what is actually measured or measurable. As such, I consider a balance sheet to be positive when all liabilities are met, typically when there is no unpaid check left at the end of the month. With this I don’t want to claim I’m better. I was just lucky to have had an upbringing where financial responsibility and savings were almost sacred.