( ? , qUeStIoNMaRk )

Clifford Stool’s talk at TED is an absolutely awesome and brilliant learning experience. This talk reveals all the energy, the passion, the hope that lie in scientific inquiry and in an agile mind. As a side effect this should also make you wonder at the propulsive push to the development of a society/country this sort of attitude brings…

“The first time you do something it’s science, the second time it’s engineering, the third time it’s technology, it’s just being a technician. I’m a scientist: Once I do something, I want do something more.”

“I think if you want to really know what the future is gonna be… If you really want to know what society is gonna be in twenty years, ask a kindergarten teacher. In fact don’t just ask any kindergarten teacher, ask an experienced one.
[…]
“I think locally and I act locally, I feel the best way I can help out anything is to help out very very locally… I teach eight-grade science four days a week… I said to my science students: we are going to do seriuos experiments, none of this “open the chapter seven and do all the problems sets”, we are going to be doing genuine physics.

In the meanwhile I get the time to write down some (not so badly) articulated thoughts on the interesting event I attended in Ravenna on October 13th “Strati in Rete” (inside “Strati della cultura” for ARCI’s 50th year anniversary) I’d like to share (for no good reason at all) my notes. I met and took a chance to nicely talk about internet and participation with Alessandro Bottoni (future value of past failings - GNU Arch and BazaarNG), Frieda Brioschi (valorization of expertise and competence in wikipedia), Livia Iacolare (her experience with intruders.tv), Antonio Sofi (participation and new media distribution models - radiohead’s In Rainbows and Magnatune) , Alessio Jacona (the right channels for the right audience - how the participation is changing the way companies “talk” to their customers), Valentina Orsucci (second life and metaverses possible innovations in [e]learning processes and a nice “Prisoner’s Dilemma” based experiment in the classroom) and Elena Zannoni (open source and technology adoption in Public Administration), and other people I forgot to mention.

Kudos to Luca for the organization.

Disclaimer: the notes are (highly) rough and my handwriting is hieroglyphic at best, this whole thing is a kind of experiment.

Strati in rete Notes 1/4 on Flickr
Strati in rete Notes 2/4 on Flickr
Strati in rete Notes 3/4 on Flickr
Strati in rete Notes 4/4 on Flickr

This is a brief placeholder for further investigations. Metaverses are a interesting potential technology toward seamless virtual collaboration. On this topic the Crouqet Project has developed an open source prototype system, called OpenCroquet. Of the features and uses presented, I find the capability of annotating artifacts really appeling to the collaborative creation of knowledge. Here it is the annotation architecture and a brief demonstration. A nice experiment has been made where students explore a number of worlds (portals) and then collaboratively create an idea map in Croquet space about how Croquet might be used as a learning environment.

From the home page…

FreeOSZoo provides ready-to-run images of QEMU virtual computers, pre-installed with a Free Operating System and a set of popular free software. To get started, you only need to install QEMU and download a single file from the FreeOSZoo project.

FreeOSZoo is targeted at end-users, who run proprietary Operating Systems because they are not aware of the existence of Free Operating Systems like GNU/Linux, FreeBSD and other free alternatives. For this audience, FreeOSZoo is the perfect tool for testing an Operating System without modifying their computer.

Here is the page collecting the qemu images.

Virtualization is a quite powerful and useful abstraction: the availability of self-contained ready-to-roll system image really lowers the barrier to test, study, hack, develop operating systems. Assuming you are using a quite powerful machine (e.g. a 2.0 GHz P4 with 512 MB RAM Memory is suggested to have a smooth run) testing a complete software stack (operating system, database, web server, programming environment) is a push-botton experience or, in other words, it is one click away from you. It is also a huge step forward in the repeatability of software experiments, and hence in the scientific accurancy of software development; “provare et reprovare” in Galileo’s words.

This is also a nice chance to take a look at some forward-looking experiments in operating systems design as Plan9, a complete rethought of Unix concepts in a network oriented environment by the Lab who gave us Unix. The Plan9-updated image doesn’t work, or rather I didn’t find a 30-second way of getting into rio, the Plan9 window manager, however you’ll be able to download Plan9 image from the official site and boot it as a live cd to step into a quick view of the OS.