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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.

Kluster is a platform aimed at helping people to develop their idea into real products by providing a system to support virtually any decision making activity (e.g. product development, marketing/advertising initiatives, and event planning). In other words:

kluster is a place to harness the power of community collaboration to get stuff done. everyone has ideas, we provide a platform to get them out of heads and into the world…where they belong.

The platforms is based around some neat concepts (phases - to structure the project -, sparks - to make proposals in a phase -, amps - to refine sparks - , watts - gained through participation and sound investments on successful sparks) that provide (IMHO) a “serendipitous” quantification (and reward) of the participation/activity/idea soundness and a game-like engaging and “flowing” experience. The decision making algorithm is quite sophisticated and more important it is open to change based on the activity of the whole system:

All the activity and participation on kluster is stored and analyzed. The data is used in the decision-making process. Each user’s successes, failures, reputation, areas of expertise, and overall history are considered. This encourages users to earn respect, to act positively, and most importantly, enables extremely educated decisions to be made using real world logic.

The recursiveness of having future developments (e.g. Collaboration Tools) of Kluster modeled as a Kluster project is also nice.

Kluster officialy launches at TED by the unveiling of the TED Kluster project. Project 72 aims to develop a real product in no more than 72 hours (identity / branding, tagline /ad campaing and packaging included).
From project 72 page:

over the next 72 hours we will harness the collective power of TED attendees, and our online community to develop a totally new, tangible product.

we can make anything that fits within our guidelines, but we would love to see something that has a global impact.

rapid prototyping machines, and a team of modelers are standing by…

things will move quick, so you’ll want to check back often.

Doubts may be on the effectiveness and the scalability of the decision making algorithm and the commenting/refining process: project 72 will provide a quick testbed. Time will tell in what decision-making processes (what about a political agenda? what about the planning of a research project?) and if the system will prove successful; from my first impressions I would definitely invest “my watts” on this project.

Via Lambda the Ultimate: ACM Classic Books Series. The ACM posted PDF versions of some books in its Classic Books Series, which are available to anyone who creates a free ACM Web Account.

Among the currently available books, LtU readers are likely to be particularly interested in Hoare and Jones’s Essays in computing science, Adele Goldberg and David Robson’s Smalltalk-80: the language and its implementation, and Dahl, Dijkstra, and Hoare’s Structured programming.

Long time readers will also know that I highly recommend Papert’s Mindstorms: children, computers, and powerful ideas to anyone interested with the effect computers might have on education. Papert’s Logo remains to this day the best children oriented programming language, but even if you disagree with me about this, his book is a must read.

Among the soon to be released there are Dijkstra’s “Selected writings on computing: a personal perspective” and Yourdon’s “Classics in software engineering”; tasteful food for your (computer scientist/software engineer) brain.

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.

What else to add? I think nothing. Go to the Google Research Blog and check out the first post. They are really different, no doubt about it, but some introductive Powerpoint slides (We_are_different.ppt) would have been nice .