[Prospective] Optimizing Individual and Public Interests in Information Technology

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RAND reports are always worth to have a glance (and more). I recently read Project Libra: Optimizing Individual and Public Interests in Information Technology (.pdf) by Edward Balkovich, Tora Bikson, David Farber, Robert Kraut, James Morris, Peter Shane, Joel Smith, CP-477, 2004.

This document describes the vision for a program of research to investigate policy implications of emerging information technologies. The research would explore capabilities of future systems of wireless technologies and sensors that implement appropriate protections of privacy and civil liberties; experiment with decisionmaking processes that optimize the balance between privacy concerns and the public and personal benefits of these information technologies; and examine the mutual adaptation of attitudes, behaviors, policy, and technology that come about with experience. Project Libra was conceived as a joint research activity of the RAND Corporation and Carnegie Mellon University

[Weird] Spirit-Led technology: dealing with jesus

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icta (International Christian Technologists' Association) is an incredible organization: "ICTA's primary aim is to assist cross-cultural ministries focused on those with little or no access to the message and love of Jesus.(...) Our mission is to unite the community of technology business professionals, and the work they do, with God's purposes, by gathering together to learn, train, inform, and collaborate. The result will be Spirit-led technologists and technology, transforming the Church and its witness in our technological world. " I don't understand why people would like to mix religion and technology, perhaps it is something related to some fear or angst toward the future... For a atheist person like me this sounds odd.

[MyResearch] Meeting with my phd advisor

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My phd outcome should be more than just guidelines: a model, a grammar... How to represent somebody in space: - dot - trace (which length? time past at each point...) - azimuth

My formal model should be: - a standard syntax to represent teams/groups - for instance, it could be interesting to represent how people cross themselves - have a list of spatial group patterns - have a language/grammar to describe people's movement in space

Use "projet laptop"'s data ?

Our data are something like a huge table with lines like: "at hour Y, Z was at (x,y)". From this, we could establish a serie of more abstract concepts. We hence need a model to interprete such data (logfile), to translate then into something meaningful.

To build our model, we will focus on how an individual has a representation of others in space (mutual modeling): what is interesting for humans among all thoses spatial patterns.

Data-driven model (experiment-based)

I should list all the "socio-spatial features": position, trajectory, duration, speed, social facts (convergence/divergence toward a person/an object, copresence, synchronicity)... if persons meets on a regular basis at the cafeteria, if they pass by each other in a corridor, asynchronous copresence...

What I mean with socio-spatial features is all the spatial characteristics related to people's behavior in space. In this case, topology or objects are just spatial features.

[MyResearch] List of tasks to study spatial representation

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S. Mecklenbräuker, W. Wippich, M. Wagener, and J. Saathoff. Spatial Information and Actions: , An Interdisciplinary Approach to Representing and Processing Spatial Knowledge. Springer-Verlag, London, UK, 1998. In this paper, the authors describes the connections between spatial information and action. Their point is that previously acquired spatial information (i.e. information about locations along a learned route) can be associated with imagined or symbolically performed actions. However, they have not found any evidence that spatial representations are altered by the formation of these associations. The emphasizes the salience of the actions and their connections to the spatial environment.

They also provide the reader with an interesting list of tasks used to study spatial representations: - studying maps of an environment and drawing a map from memory versus giving a verbal description (Taylor and Tversky, 1992) - distance estimation (Rothkegel, Wender, Schumacher, 1998) - orientation and location estimation judgements (Wender, Wagner and Rothkegel, 1997) - navigation task

[Prospective] 10 principles of technology

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Howard Rheingold, in the feature, posted some responses to Neil Postman's 10 Principles of Technology.

4. A new technology usually makes war against an old technology. It competes with it for time, attention, money, prestige and a "worldview".

Again, I will take advantage of my position as first commenter by making the obvious observation that untethering communications from the desktop means spending more time on the move, in the park or at Starbucks, and less time at home or the office. Communication addiction no longer dictates agoraphobic behavior patterns.

[Research] Activity Theory: sketching the structure of the activity

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This picture (taken from Françoise Decortis, Samuel Noirfalise, Berthe Saudelli: Activity theory, cognitive ergonomics and distributed cognition: three views of a transport company. Int. J. Hum.-Comput. Stud. 53(1): 5-33 (2000)) is an interesting example of how to describe an activity according to the Activity Theory. It depicts the structure of the activity, the viewpoint of an entire team of dispatchers (adapted from Engestrom, 1993).

[MyResearch] About the relevance of importing theories in CSCW

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The paper "Activity theory and distributed cognition: or What does CSCW to do with theories?" by C. Halverson discusses a very hot issue that I have to deal with for my phd: what are we doing with all the theories/conceptual framework CSCW/HCI adopted. HCI indeed 'imported' lots of framework: activity theory [engestrom; kuuti; nardi] , actor-network theory [latour], conversation analysis [goffman],coordination theory [Schmidt, nielsen, carstenson], distributed cognition theory [Halverson, hutchins, perry, rogers], ethnomethodology [Button; Hughes et al; randall et al], grounded theory [Strauss], situated action [suchman], and social/symbolic interactionism [Strauss; Star]. The problem is actually that these theories deal with the use and the study of CSCW systems but they poorly address the design of such systems.

By adopting theories from other fields we may be bringing theoretical constructs into focus that are not appropriate for CSCW. For example, activity theory and distributed cognition theory are both theories about cognition. What they can say about group interaction is based on what they say about cognition. That may be OK, depending on how we use the theory. But how do we evaluate their usefulness for us?

She then describes three uses of these theories: - descriptive power: theories are useful to described the world - rhetorical power: theories are useful to talk about the world - inferential power: theories help us to do inferences

She takes the example of Activity Theory and Distributed Cognition to show it can apply to CSCW. She shows that while both AT and DCOG are cognitively based theories they operate very differently. They direct our focus as analysts to different aspects of their respective unit of analyses based on both what they deem as important to analyze (scope of the unit) as well as how they perform the analysis, and how they communicate it.

[Research] Activities between waitresses, waiters and cooks in a cafe-restaurant

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This paper entitled "Cooperative activities with space and time constraints: the case of a cafe-restaurant" by Béatrice Cahour and Barbara Pentimalli deals with the analysis of simple cooperative activities that occur in cafe-restaurant.

We analysed the cooperative activities between waitresses, waiters and cooks in a cafe-restaurant at lunch time, when the place is full of clients and the waiters hurry to get their orders produced in a reasonable time. They are then involved in individual activities but also in many collective communications and coordinations. These various interrelated "paths of action" have been videotaped and analysed with the help of actors' point of view; the analysis indicates the characteristics of the "minimized interactions" taking place in this situation of work, with lots of risks, few feedback signs and undetermined addressees necessitating peripheral awareness; it also indicates the characteristics of the "paths of action" with time and space constraints where strategies are used to avoid spatial movements (by using for example the colleagues' paths of action) and where the constant risk to collude a colleague get them to a subtile bodily synchronization.