November 2010
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Thanks
Volunteers welcome you New World Grid welcomes more and more people every day.
Thanks to the following for their generosity and for the time spent on the welcome region.
If you wish to participate helping new registred to feel at home quickly, you can at any time join the volunteer program. To do this, simply fill out the form at the following address:
Thanks to : Eden Cat, Kire Laasonen, Marline Laasonen, LeoMaxx Sautereau, Claudius Utopy.
www.newworldgrid.com/lang/en-us/volunteers Accompaniment will be provided so that you’re comfortable in your new role.
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Community
Office Hours :
administrators presence Meet an administrator
Contact us !
The «Office Hours» are resuming every Tuesday evening at 21:15 on New World. It’s a onehour event open to all residents and visitors to discuss the evolution of New World.
If you have questions regarding any of the articles or would like information on our nonprofit activities, please contact us by email at support@newworldgrid.com
You can also share with us your project ideas; if you’re a teacher, manager or member of a non profit organization, it will be an opportunity to meet officials of the Virtus association that manages New World. See you soon !
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Mount Grace Priory Church Nears Completion The priory church, which is the centre of the lives of our 15th century monks, is nearing completion. It has been built as it was in the 1430s, about the time that the cloister was rebuilt (the crane is still there in the background of the cloister area!), but before the side-chapels were erected later in the century. Part of the main garth (cloister area) has been set out as a cemetery for the monks; it is the practice at the existing English Carthusian priory at Parkminster to bury the monks within the cloister, as a daily reminder to those who remain. Memento Mori. Once the interior furnishings of the church are complete, work will begin on the smaller garth to the south of the church. Here is where the servant monks had their cells, where the travellers’ accommodation was sited, and where the support services (granaries, storehouses, stables, kitchens and so on) were located.
5 English Heritage Help
Community helpers
Paul Bryan, Head of Geospatial Imaging at English Heritage, the UK national organisation for ancient monuments, has carried out an aerial survey of the site for us, using a digicamera mounted on a drone survey helicopter under radio-control from the ground. The first photo shows the operator as he images the church from a vertical position, while the second photo shows the church from the same position in our in-world simulation, with the roof of the church removed to aid comparability.
Romsey Homewood, our Sculptie Mistress, has provided some wonderful 1-prim sculpties: the pulpitum, separating the nave from the choir, which forms the base of the church tower; and all the windows made as 2-sculptie structures, replacing items that would otherwise have taken 7 to 20 prims to reproduce. Her build talents range from the sacred to the profane-- from the flaxen altar-cloth, to the scruffy old builders’ tarpaulin that covers a hole so that the rain won’t get in where the cloister walkway is being rebuilt. Cendres Magic has kindly offered to provide the software that will drive our crane, and the eventual water-mill, and is hereby appointed the Mount Grace Master Scripter. (Imagine the task that the crane presents: progressively shortening the length of the prims representing the ropes, while altering the angles of the ropes, jib, and load-basket appropriately, all at the click of a mouse on the crane windlass!)
Christi Maeterlinck Virtual Mount Grace site curator
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R.E.R.S. The RERS* project on New World Grid *RERS literally means « mutual knowledge exchange network »
Who are we ?
Our project
Hello,
However, it was found that the most marginalized groups of: young school leavers, adults having integration difficulty, illiterate public, exchange among themselves in associations but are having problems to meet other people. This, in order to exchange knowhow of other people.
We are part of an association named Foresco, which brings together in France and overseas networks of reciprocal exchanges of knowhow. There are 300 networks in France, the principle is to enable people to exchange knowhow by triangulation: Pierre offers guitar rudiments to Paul, Paul shows how to cut roses to Anne, Anne explains algebra to Peter .... More particularly, as manager of the Fogas association , in the neighbourhood of Marseille I am developping networks of reciprocal inter-association exchange of knowhow in difficult districts. It’s the same thing, except that rather than creating the 301’s network, we support associations in difficult districts so that their public get a benefit of it. It is about developing a ‘’solidary reciprocity’’ and enhancing exchanges of people who do not believe to have any knowledge and any future.
We would like to try metaverses, to support meetings for mutual knowhow exchanges. Physical appearance, age, showing, a eventual physical disability, and especially the fear they go through during a first contact should be obstacles easier to overcome. Our project with difficult ditrict associations (northern suburbs of Marseille, district of the “Pins” in Vitrolles ...) is part of a process of mutual solidarity: we are not anymore waiting for the rich giving to the poor, «the poor» own wealth (with their knowhow) they are ready to share.
7 transmission, people support, cooperation. As here-above stayed the basic difficulties related to representations and discrimination are here an interesting possibility. But beyond that, the people and item virtuality is presenting very good prospects in our view, even if we still do totally identify them. For example, a conceptual object as «a knowhow» is shown here as a leaf, visible, being moved, questioned, shared. This knowhow is permanently visible to everyone on the tree without even having to speak, or being contoling. The implementation of a «task», fosters the implementation of a kind of more efficient cooperation because this task is represented here by an item. The actual status is as follow : • The New World Grid team team has kindly made available a platform on which you are welcome, • We are still working in real life with associations, for the time being. • On New World Grid we have developed a tree (see central image) • On the basis of another tree which we do not have the rights to export it (we are looking for a solution), • Most scripts are written. Here we are…
Our cooperation expectances Beyond technical aids which will be welcome, we are questioning ourselves about the interest of using metaverses for knowhow
Moreover, many bemoan the blurring of the real relationship to the detriment of a culture linked to new forms of communication (chat, sms, and now these places that embody more virtuality). As a sociologist I know how a «real» relationship can be unhealthy, artificial and I am even wondering whether such virtual places do not offer more human rules for a relationship. For example, see as New World Grid team keeps on its place the concept of free service and item. Now, we look forward attending any discussion or initiative related to these subjects and you are all invited to come, share or help us. We will soon be ready... soon...
Falstaff Delvalle (Pierre-Yves Perez)
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Grid Computing
What is Grid computing or «volunteer computing» ? A computing grid allows to do distributed computing : it uses computing resources (processors, memory, ...) of thousands of computers to give illusion of a very powerfull comput. This model allows to resolve important computing problems needing very long time to execute in a “classical” environment. (From Wikipedia) Thus, Grid Computing enables scientists worldwide to find solutions much faster thanks to the thousands of computers of volunteering Internet users : it is also called volunteer computing. Many projects such as LHC@Home, led by CERN, European Organization for Nuclear Research, or Rosetta@ Home, whose objective is to find molecules that can cure major human diseases, leverage volunteer computing to accelerate research.
What connection with New World Grid ? New World Grid is what is commonly called a grid, based on the OpenSimulator software platform. This grid is composed of several squares called regions that one can observe on the virtual world map. Resources are distributed across many computers and servers to simulate the virtual world. Then, the concept of «grid» shows a relation between :
9 OpenSimulator and its virtual world technology as a grid of square virtual spaces, and Grid Computing or volunteer computing using a grid of distributed resources.
Two different but complementary technologies These two technologies are yet very far apart in their purposes. OpenSimulator is intended to simulate a 3D virtual environment. Grid computing aims to make calculations primarily oriented scientific. However, if one considers that these two technologies generally require significant resources, we realize that they can coexist together. In recent months, we tested the BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) client software on our servers, which is a software Grid Computing. These tests are successful because, when OpenSimulator requires only few resources on the server, a part of these resources are used by BOINC for volunteer computing, with no impact on the virtual world performances. This way, we can bring our modest contribution to projects such as World Community Grid to help fight AIDS (FightAIDS@Home), Childhood Cancer (Help Fight Childhood Cancer), and muscular dystrophy (Help Cure Muscular Distrophy).
OpenSimulator and BOINC On that occasion, we developed a module OpenSimulator that communicates with BOINC. It is thus possible to view the BOINC data in real time and see the progress of the various calculations directly from the virtual world (see background picture). It is also possible to interact with BOINC to stop or restart the calculation.
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New World University
New World University : learn to create A new region called New World University has been providing the community. The goal of this initiative is to provide a public, stable and permanent place so that any member of the community can discover and learn how to create 3D objects using LSL scripting, OSSL or C# to create OpenSimulator modules. The university, whose infrastructure is currently being completed, is based on the region created by the OpenVCE.net project and available under the GNU Lesser GPL License. It is now available and ready to welcome students and teachers.
How to attend a course ? To attend classes, you can join the group New World University and receive email notifications of course, and monitor the planning of the course on the University Google Agenda1. The courses will be available in French or English, or both, voice conference or chat, depending on the preferences and possibilities of the professor organizing the course.
How to become a teacher ? To become a teacher, you must contact us in the virtual world, or send an email to support@newworldgrid.com. We will then contact you, and you may be allocated a parcel of land temporarily or permanently, on your name, for the purpose of the courses. It will also be possible to use freely SLoodle, our Moodle platform being available on http://moodle.newworldgrid.com 1 http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=1rkdomnqfkep5shvjcmub1r2eo%40group.calendar.google. com&ctz=Europe/Paris
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Our Partners
Dreamstreams, Canada http://www.dreamstreams.ca Le Parc des Arts, France http://www.parcdesarts.com
CrĂŠdit Agricole - Parlons Innovation, France http://www.parlons-innovation.com
OpenVCE.net, Great Britain http://openvce.net
Copyright Virtus France 2010
Association registered to the Journal Officiel under the number W653001494