Interrelativity

Category: Research

  • Virtual Reality, Somatic Cognition, Homuncular Flexibility and Object-Centered Sociality and Learning

    Jaron Lanier recently wrote about virtual reality and its potential application to learning, utilizing some evocative terms and offering an educational scenario that reminds me of a seminal 1997 paper that described how a Nobel prize-winning biologist fused with her objects of study. The Saturday Wall Street Journal article gave me a keener appreciation for…

  • Empowered: More Platform Thinking, De-Bureaucratization and Redistribution of Agency

    The new book, Empowered, by Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler of Forrester Research, proclaims an inspiring message: social media is increasingly empowering customers to draw attention to their problems, and the best way for businesses to provide effective solutions is to empower their employees with the same tools. The book makes a strong case for…

  • Minority Report and Recent Advances in Pervasive Personalized Advertising

    Several recent articles I've read about new developments in tracking and advertising in different countries – most of which reference the science fiction movie, Minority Report – reminded me of a quote often attributed to science fiction author, William Gibson: The future is already here – it is just unevenly distributed The articles describe the…

  • Mobile Internet Intent, Action and Inaction

    I've recently encountered a number of interesting studies, discussions and disagreements regarding the use of mobile phones to access the Internet. As an iPhone user, I love having the Internet in my pocket, but I often find myself deferring actions that require significant involvement until I have the Internet on my lap, using the larger…

  • All models, studies and Wikipedia entries are wrong, some are useful

    A sequence of encounters with various models, studies and other representations of knowledge lately prompted me to reflect on both the inherent limitations and the potential uses of these knowledge representations … and the problems that ensue when people don't fully appreciate either their limitations or applications … or the inherent value of being wrong.…

  • The “Boopsie Effect”: Gender, Sexiness, Intelligence and Competence

    Last Thursday, I heard segments of a KUOW interview with Deborah Rhode, Stanford law professor and author of The Beauty Bias: The Injustice of Appearance in Life and Law, in which she spoke of the Boopsie effect, wherein women in upper-level positions in historically male-dominated professions find that “attractiveness suggests less competence and intellectual ability”.…

  • Wanted: a new word for “patient” … but which one?

    Years ago, I was surprised to read about a doctor – Bernie Siegel – advocating that people undergoing medical treatment be bad patients. In his 1986 book, Love, Medicine and Miracles: Lessons Learned about Self-Healing from a Surgeon’s Experience with Exceptional Patients, the surgeon urged his fellow doctors to view themselves as privileged listeners –…

  • Platform Thinking, De-Bureaucratization and the Redistribution of Agency

    Tim O'Reilly wrote the definitive guide to the concept and term Web 2.0 back in 2005. The central theme from the outset was to view the web as a platform, and that view has evolved over time to encompass a collection of platforms with varying degrees of interoperability … and varying degrees of openness to…

  • Preemptive Self-Disclosure: Still Unpacking Privacy for a Networked World

    I have long attributed the idea of preemptive self-disclosure – sharing information about oneself in order to forestall negative consequences from not sharing – to Paul Dourish, but over the years, I'd forgotten exactly why. A couple of recent articles I've read about disclosing what many might consider private information – coupled with the 19th…

  • The further commoditization of Twitter followers

    A few months ago, I wrote about the commoditization of Twitter followers, after discovering a number of automated, semi-automated and manual strategies that people – and non-human systems – were employing to artificially boost their Twitter follower counts. My earlier discovery was sparked by noticing some unusual numbers in the profiles of some recent followers…