Post ECCS Conference round up.

ECCS’10 finished last Friday. It’s a strange thing to put up such a big event for complex systems studies.

The first thing one notices after everybody else has left is that you already miss the conference. The frenetic rhythm of the conference impregnated your body in such a way that it feels a bit strange not having it around. The second thing I’d like to say is about how great the participants were (Even when we put them into buses and to the crazy Lisbon traffic.). The success of this conference wouldn’t even be half of what it was if the participants weren’t so great. Finally, It was very nice to see young students preparing the future of complex systems studies. They (We) met Friday and had a great brainstorm that, in my view, will percolate and will be very important in the context of Complex Systems Studies for the next years in the World. For now there’s a website hosted at the Complex Systems Society with some details. It will be updated regularly in the future by the CSS members. So if you aren’t a CSS member yet, please do join and participate in the discussion of the future of Complexity Sciences.

AppleScript: Close All

One of the problems with having a todo list bigger than the the Eiffel Tower is that sometimes I have more applications open than my computer would like to handle. To clean my desktop I could use a Logoff / Login sequence, but that would interfere with Dropbox synchronization and therefore I opted to use an AppleScript that closes all windowed applications.

The close all script that I use is the following:

-- Insert Date and Time into your documents
-- @2010 David Rodrigues
set exclude to {"Finder"}
tell application "System Events"
	set end of exclude to displayed name of (info for (path to frontmost application))
	set app_list to name of every process whose visible is true
end tell
repeat with this_app in app_list
	if this_app is not in exclude then
		tell application this_app
			activate
			quit
		end tell
	end if
end repeat

Remember, put the script in the ~/Library/Scripts folder (don’t forget to activate the “Show Script…” in Apple Script Utility

I now have a much cleaner desktop…

ECCS10 – The tools to prepare and run a conference

Now that ECCS’10 preparation is almost finished and we approach Monday morning, I find myself wondering about the tools we used to prepare this conference. I can say the workload would have been much higher if we didn’t have some online colaboration tools. Here is the list of what I think made a significant contribution to success.

  • Dropbox. Dropbox by itself made the life of the team much easier. There was always someone editing some file, sharing some logo of a sponser or archiving emails from participants. I think I’ve seen the Growl notification from Dropbox more than the times I breathed.
  • Google Docs. The capabilities of simultaneous editing made this another power presence on our daily routine pre-ECCS’10.
  • Skype. Meetings made easy. Even during summer when part of the team was three thousand kilometers away we had a way to get work done.
  • On a smaller scale, Inkscape, Textmate and Photoshop where very important.
  • A final note to Drupal. It’s been perfect for what we needed with the versatility to add some other things. Just the right platform.
  • A negative note: The Myreview system for the submission process. IT SUCKS! BIGTIME! Someone needs to develop something that doesn’t require a course in rocket science to work with. Myreview needs an easy to use interface for admins, chairs and reviewers. A general overhaul is needed.

Futebol: Ranking Zon Sagres – LPFP — Jornada 3

O ranking da liga Zon Sagres após a 3a jornada é:

Jornada 3 - Ranking de equipas Elo

A previsão da jornada anterior acertou em 5/8 resultados. Ainda não suficiente para ganhar o totobola mas a ideia é que o ranking com o andar da carruagem consiga melhores resultados.

A previsão para a jornada 4 é:

 V.Setúbal 0.65 -X- 0.35 Beira-Mar
  Marítimo 0.68 -X- 0.32 P. Ferreira
V.Guimarães 0.19 -2- 0.81 Benfica
     Leiria 0.17 -2- 0.83 Nacional
 Académica 0.53 -X- 0.47 Naval
      Porto 0.79 -1- 0.21 Braga
Portimonense 0.38 -X- 0.62 Rio Ave
   Sporting 0.90 -1- 0.10 Olhanense

Abulafia Digital – August 25, 2010

Comentários agora com Dis(c)qus(são)

Reactivei os comentários no SPP através do Disqus a ver o que dá. Os posts mais antigos devem continuar durante bastante tempo sem comentários (pelo menos até que eu tenha tempo para lhes dar uma olhadela)

Futebol: Ranking LPFP – Jornada 2

Já não fazia um ranking do futebol nacional há bastante tempo mas hoje para matar o tempo (e porque o campeonato está no princípio) decidi voltar a calcular o ranking ELO da liga portuguesa. Aqui fica:

Ranking Elo LPFP - Jornada 2

Ranking Elo LPFP - Jornada 2

Para os interessados, o Ranking inicial foi calculado a partir dos resultados das classificações dos últimos 3 anos de liga (já não sei onde param os meus rankings antigos). O ELO foi calculado com desvio padrão de 400 e com K=24 à semelhança do que acontece no Xadrez (mais ou menos).

A partir deste Ranking a previsão para a jornada 3 da LPFP é (com SD=800 e K=24):

   Nacional 0.49 -X- 0.51 V.Guimarães
    Benfica 0.92 -1- 0.08 V.Setúbal
P. Ferreira 0.65 -X- 0.35 Portimonense
  Beira-Mar 0.29 -X- 0.71 Académica
      Braga 0.75 -1- 0.25 Marítimo
  Olhanense 0.61 -X- 0.39 Leiria
    Rio Ave 0.04 -2- 0.96 Porto
      Naval 0.13 -2- 0.87 Sporting

Como se diria no tempo em que o totobola tinha um programa na RTP, “boas apostas”!