Public vs. private funding in R&D

You have probably realised about the current trend of governments to rely more and more on private money to fund research. The USA are well known for going that way, and Europe is now trying to head in that direction too. The 7th Framework Programme of the European Commission is heavily geared towards “industry-driven research”. I have talked about this before, but yesterday, reading the Sunday supplement of El País, something stirred inside me. Again.

Pere-Joan Cardona, a Catalonian biomedical researcher of my own age, leads the Tuberculosis Experimental Unit at a small research foundation in Spain. They are about to start the clinical trials of a vaccine that may prove revolutionary. The interview that El País publishes is full of interesting and fun details, but one of Cardona’s remarks about the state of research in Spain and Europe is especially delightful:

In order to really innovate, public funding is necessary [...] Only the public system is able to generate knowledge without the need of guaranteeing commercial profitability.

This reminds me of something that a Dutch academic said a few weeks ago in a meeting to which I was also attending:

Let’s leave industry to solve their own problems, without the governments having to take care of them.

Are you listening, EC?

India rejects cheap laptops

It seems that the Indian government has rejected Negroponte’s “One Laptop per Child” scheme. The reasons they give include that the programme is “pedagogically suspect” and that they’d rather spend their money in other, more necessary infrastructures than in these laptops.

Have I heard this before? I think so.

More on Ubuntu

After some exploring and googling I found some tricks to get rid of the nasty isapnp errors that prevented my Ubuntu from installing on Virtual PC.

One was solved by disabling the virtual sound card emulation that Virtual PC does by default on evert virtual machine. Uncheck, rerun, voilà.

The other one was not as easy. Googling for “isapnp ubuntu virtual pc” gave me lots of chaff but also some wheat, and I found an obscure forum where somebody reported how decreasing the amount of available RAM for the virtual machine would make the Ubuntu installer continue despite of the isapnp error. So, the error is still there, but the installation continues. So I decreased my virtual machine’s RAM from 1 GB to 512 MB, launch, install… and there it flies. Great. But… why does decreasing the RAM make an ISA PnP error be less important?

I had to fiddle a bit with the video settings for the installation, but after a couple of frustrating attempts, I got Ubuntu up and running on a Virtual PC machine. Running? Well, barely.

My first go at Ubuntu

I like and share some ideas of the open source / free software (OSFS) movement, although I am not an OSFS freak. After much discussion and finger waving of my OSF freak friends, who swear by Linux and have nearly convinced me that Ubuntu would be usable even by my mum, I decided to give it a go.

So I downloaded the current Ubuntu desktop release as an ISO file, created a brand new Virtual PC 2004 virtual machine, and fired up the installation. After a nice menu with some flashy graphics where I choose the option to install Ubuntu, the screen goes blank (i.e. black) and the message:

Uncompressing Linux... Ok, booting the kernel.

appears on top. Nice. After a few seconds and no perceptible CD or HD activity, it pops up:

[   40.487708] isapnp: checksum for device 1 is not valid (0x89)
[   40.495012] isapnp: checksum for device 2 is not valid (0xbe)

And that’s it. Nothing happens. 30 minutes later and still the same.

Introducing Unimod

Lately I have been working on a skunkworks project that I call Unimod. “Unimod” is supposed to stand for “universal modelling”, which describes what Unimod is supposed to be: a low-level, highly generic modelling platform on top of which you can construct modelling environments.

For example, you may think that object-oriented modelling is quite simple: you have classes with attributes and associations, and you can instantiate them into objects with values and links. Only six modelling primitives and we can express so many things. But this is not that simple. Take, for example, the classic question “what is a class?” From a structural perspective, a class has a name and a collection of attributes. Each attribute, in turn, has a name and a data type, at least. For some people, operations (or methods) are essential components of classes too. For some other people they are not essential. And what about events? Are events (in the C# sense) part of a class? We can enrich the basic object-oriented approach with more complex constructs. For example, many find the concept of interface (again, in its C# or Java sense) very useful, and definitely part of the object-oriented approach. So, must the interface concept be a modelling primitive too?