Cool resource about tips to write military science fiction. War is not about guns or bombs, war is about people. It is about people who cannot or are unwilling to resolve their differences through discussion or other non-violent means. Yep infowar is about people! Social network is about people Inf...
(Prospective) Sterling about malicious spam bot
Via zdnet: In your novel "Distraction," you wrote about a maliciously programmed spam bot driving unstable people to commit crimes. Is that a prediction? That's just a cool notion. That's just science fiction. It's a cool thing. It's interesting to think about. I never saw it actually done. It actu...
[Research] A definition of 'affordance'
This picture expresses the concept of "affordance", this comes from Kimbro. "Affordance" is a term used by perceptual psychologists. Affordance is what an object suggests to us. For example, if you see a bench, you might think to sit down on it, or to lay down on it. Some doors have a panel on onc...
(Research) Impacts of Location Awareness
William Mitchell in the feature: Mitchell: The implications of location-awareness are far from obvious. The technology enables you to reconsider things as fundamental as, say, signage in a city. For example, we traditionally think of a stop sign as part of the fixed infrastructure of the city. But ...
[Prospective] Cooperation and gift
The Economist about why workers who do favours are more productive. IS GENEROSITY good for you? At work, at least, the answer may be yes. There, says a recent article in the Academy of Management Journal, productivity rises when workers help each other more. Francis Flynn, of Columbia University's ...
(Tech) Maintaining Uncertainty to Improve Learning
Today I attended a talk by Kati Makitalo about CSCL (computer support for collaborative learning). She investigates whether scaffolding the interactions through scripts impacts learning.Her starting point is that in online interactions, there is uncertainty at the cognitive and the socio-emotional ...
[MyResearch] Distributed Cognition Methodology
The first step is a cognitive ethnographical description of the activity, Hutchins proposes 3 levels: DISTRIBUTED COGNITION FIRST LEVEL OF DESCRIPTION: description of the tools and representations "details of how the algorithm and representation are realized physically" Marr, 1982. Description of t...
Le digital divide (fossé numérique) ne concerne pas seulement la séparation accès/pas accès au web. Il y a maintenant clairement deux types d'utilisateurs de l'Internet:- tout reste sur mon pc, dans mon email et dans ma tete: utilisant le email, lisant (un peu le web) mais pas les forums, ni les bl...
[Misc] French Wiki Community
I am really pleased to discover the french Wiki community. I entered two very smart wikis:- craowiki - websemantique.org The first one is a bit messy (I like chaos) whereas the other is more structured and focus on semantic web stuff. ...
(Prospective) SMS-TV Interactivity
Via McKinsley Quaterly: Technological pitfalls and disputes with mobile carriers have dampened the enthusiasm of TV broadcasters for programming that invites viewers to interact with it through text messages over their mobile phones. But some broadcasters have underestimated the strengths of SMS-T...