Gunnar Wolf - Nice grey life - page 60

Yesterday night, Regina and me arrived to Nicaragua. Ready to greet us, we found quite a good number of good friends. We had a nice pizza+beer dinner at Diana’s house, and some of the foreigners among us were distributed among the houses of several locals. This morning, we woke up –together with Víctor, Moray and Gaudenz– in Norman’s brother’s beautiful house. We had breakfast with the family, were picked up to go to the hotel that will have the ho(n rr)or to host us all for the following two weeks, and walked to the Universidad Centroamericana (UCA) campus. Contrary to...

I will sound monothematic, but I have been devoting quite a bit of work to this topic lately: Trying to stop the advance of e-voting in Mexico, Latin America and the world. Why trying to stop it? Isn’t technology supposed to help us, to get trustable processes? Yes, it’s supposed to… but it just cannot achieve it, no matter how hard it is tried — I won’t get into explanations in this blog post, but there is plenty of information. Feel free to ask me for further details. Anyway — Yesterday (Sunday, 2012-06-17) was the fifth simulated voting that will...

Over and over, in different media we are told that all automatization means progress, and is surely a positive change. Many people expect us techies to be the first enthusiasts for all technifying changes — But sometimes, our task is to bring to the public’s attention the reasons as to why some processes should not be automatized. An example for this is voting. Democratic countries have as their maximum, refoundational act the periodic renovation of the ruling class through the free, secret and universal vote. There is, of course, a recognition to the importance that voting holds, as well as...

Note: All of the information linked to from this post is in Spanish and related to Mexico… Part of it will be translatable via automated means, some will not. Sorry, that's what I have, and it's too much text to invest the effort to hand-translate I have been following the development of the different e-vote modalities in Mexico for several years already, although I have only managed to do so methodically in the last half year or so. If you are interested in my line of reasoning as to why I completely oppose e-voting, you can look at the short...

During the February 2012 presentation of our book, “Construcción Colaborativa del Conocimiento”. Left to right: Max de Mendizábal, Irene Soria, Carlos Cruz, Gunnar Wolf, Alejandro Miranda

And in the academic world… What is Open Access? What is the motivation for it? Does it have any relation to Open Source (that is, Free Software)? I was invited to talk at the “Digital tools for academic publishing” forum at Instituto de Ingeniería, UNAM. This talk attempts to cover those points. Attachments cc_by_sa.png (5 KB) crecimiento_de_oa.png (215 KB) Original sources in Emacs’ Org mode (793 KB) por_campo_en_2009.png (555 KB) Slides exported to a HTML overview page (21 KB) Slides in PDF format (990 KB) software.png (21 KB) tipo_de_contenido.png (7 KB)

As stated in the 2012-04-30 edition of the Debian Project News, this weekend I will be meeting Holger Levsen (who has been there for over a week now) in Managua, Nicaragua, as part of the Debian Tour 2012, a set of talks meant to raise awareness and interest on Debian between the Nicaraguan (+Central American) user groups, university students, companies and government. Not all of the planned activities are present in the Debian Tour webpage. I know I will be giving my talk on Debian in the Free Software projects’ universe, this Saturday at Universidad Centro Americana (UCA). Besides this,...

54Km. Not a very fast pace, mainly because we were going between people for long stretches of time. Very interesting trip. Further details of the workout (Flash required) in my SportsTracker.

The Northern edge of Cd. Nezahualcoyotl used to be Mexico City’s garbage dump, limited by one of the main open-air sweage systems. Its size is unbelievable – Huge is too small a word for it. After many years of being the dirtiest place in the city, it was shut down. Its land is poisoned unsuitable for basically anything. So, it was buldozered, leveled and covered in sand — and became an Ecological, recreational zone. The saddest, dirtiest ecological zone I’ve ever seen. A very surrealist setting. At least, recreational it is. Over the dead soil, 76 football fields were drawn....

Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl’s main symbol: The coyote. Very small, in front of it, you can see a state of Aztec Emperor Nezahualcóyotl.