I am pleased to announce that the alpha version of ThinkoSphere.com is hereby publicly launched! I have finally integrated the new design. I hope you like it.

What is ThinkoSphere?
ThinkoSphere is a brand new experiment that publicly aims at implementing more Control Systems Philosophy into the democracy. That means I want to give each of you more power in:

• Giving your opinion
• Knowing the opinion of others
• Analyzing thoroughly this data
• Reacting accordingly to the results of a poll or vote

The Control Systems philosophy is pretty straightforward: you sense, you think, you act. This process is scale independent: it is the same that drives your personnality. It is also the same process that drives the society. So let us make it more transparent.

What is the current state of ThinkoSphere?
Currently, ThinkoSphere might look like a classical polling website. However, ThinkoSphere has 2 great features that are innovative, fun and very useful:

• The time tracking of a poll
• The possibility to make the pivot table of 2 polls

It means that, among the “sense, think, act” parts, the sense and think parts are currently the most developed ones.
To be precise, you can:

• Create a poll
• Answer it (once a day, to update your opinion)
• Analyse the total results
• Analyse the evolution
• Analyse the evolution of your own answer
• Make a pivot table of two polls. Very useful to look into the details

What comes next?
Plenty of things: widgets, API, internationalization (i18n), localization (l10n)… But for now, it is time to test in the real word what has already been done. So, what do you think about this project?. You are very welcome to leave your comments here. I am specifically appreciating negative feedback so that I can improve. It is all about control isn’t it?. Moreover, if there are features you want to see added, leave a suggestion here or create a poll.

I had started talking about setting up a development and production environment with git for Typo in this post. Because of this new version of Typo, I have finally had a very good reason to change the set up of this blog and to migrate to git. Installing Typo from its git repository, I have had the opportunity to use the git submodules. That is why in this post I will use the Typo blog engine to make a case study for the use of git with:

• Several repos for development, production and deployment
• Several repos for open source development
• Use of submodules for plugin management and development

Typo, this blog engine, underwent a lot of great improvements these last months thanks to Frederic and Cyril (2 blogs in French). So it was time for me to upgrade this blog to the new version: Typo 5.2 Release Candidate named after Helmut Newton. The main improvements are:

The about page of this blog says this blog is about Linux, Ruby on Rails, Controls and the Thinkosphere project. It is now time to speak about controls.
First things first. What is a control system (CS) ? I am glad you ask because it is not an easy question. A way to answer is to give various examples which I will do in this post and next ones. Right now, I would say that a control system is a set of methods, processes and machines or humans that aims at shifting the state of a system from an initial state to a new determined state while keeping the behaviour of the system inside some bounds. OK, the definition is not very sexy. However, you notice immediately that many systems (if not all) will fall into this definition. That is the point of this blog. I want to show you that control systems are about everywhere. Everything and everybody is either a control system or a part of a control system.

What does a control system consist in ?
A CS is made of actuators, sensors, controllers. Another way to say it is: a CS is made of muscles, perceptors, brains. In order to enter the details of how a control system works I will take the example of an Aircraft Flight Control System (FCS) because it is what I know best as I am a Flight Mechanics and Controls Engineer, and a private pilot.

I wish you all an excellent year 2009 filled with happiness in your private life as well as in your professional life.
Besides that, I wish you to better understand the world we all live in. For this purpose, here are some subjects that deserve all your attention and about which I will blog soon.

• Control Systems
• Economy
• Fractals
• Chaos Theory
• Statistics
• Polls

This beginning of the new year will be very busy around here. Indeed, I am going to make a major update for ThinkoSphere.com with the new design and I will start a blogging series about Control Systems. Later on I will blog about the fractal theory applied to finance because it is today the best theory explaining the crisis that I have found so far. I am currently reading the book “fractals, hazard and finance” from Benoit Mandelbrot*, father of the fractal theory. This book is amazing, it is ten years old but it looks like it was written 2 days ago, after the crisis.

Moreover, I also wish you to be better understood by your company, by your mayor, by your government. I wish you more democracy in your environment. This starts by giving more your opinion when you are polled. So I wish you more polls and finally I wish you to find your interest in ThinkoSphere.com.

* I am actually speaking about “fractale, hasard et finance” a book in French. Its equivalent in English is The (Mis)behaviour of Markets: A Fractal View of Risk, Ruin and Reward. This is probably the best quality and best quality/price ratio book about finance you can buy nowadays!