Category: Work
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Academia Redux: Joining the Institute of Technology at the University of Washington, Tacoma
This past Monday, I returned to the classroom after a hiatus of over two decades. While I have given occasional guest lectures and other presentations in academic settings in the intervening period, for the next six months, I will be engaging with students in classrooms at least twice a week in my new role as…
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The Power of Pull: Institutions as Platforms for Promoting Individual Passions
There are a number of interesting and provocative ideas in The Power of Pull, by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison. I’ve already tweeted about a number of articles by the authors – based on their book – that highlight the importance of physical places, the ways we can shape serendipity and…
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Remembering Community: Fixing the Future via Community Currency at Hour Exchange Portland
Community is more like something that we're remembering than something that we're creating all over again. I was inspired by physical therapist and sailor Stephen Becket's words at the end of a segment of David Brancaccio's upcoming special edition of PBS Now, Fixing the Future, shown on tonight's PBS Newshour. I'd forgotten how much I…
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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”.…
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Notes from CSCW 2008
I attended the 2008 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work this past week in San Diego. There were a number of interesting people, papers and projects presented there, many focused on work, others focused on computer support for other kinds of cooperative and/or competitive activities. During my first few years of blogging, I had…
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Snoop: An Investigation into Possessions, Perceptions, Projections and Personalities
Sam Gosling‘s new book – Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You – blends an engaging and accessible overview of some of the key concepts and research findings in personality psychology and environmental psychology with what amounts to a collection of short detective stories. Snoopology, the art and science of determining “which of your tastes…
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Move-in Day for Strands Labs, Seattle
Today we moved into our new office at 4143 University Way NE – right on "the Ave", the heart of Seattle’s University District, and literally a stone’s throw from the University of Washington. View Larger Map We occupy the top floor of a three-story building, with 3400 square feet to grow into, and two (!)…
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Dark Nights of the Soul
Maureen McHugh, a science fiction writer (who also enjoys "not science fiction" books), has written about the challenges of writing novels (and battling cancer) on her blog, No Feeling of Falling. She augmented her words – which unfold with exquisite openness and vulnerability – with a graphical depiction of the soul work involved in rising…
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Principal Instigator at MyStrands: A Prospective Perspective
This is my first week as Principal Instigator at MyStrands. I wrote last week about leaving Nokia to join MyStrands, in which I focused primarily on the leaving part. I wanted to write a little more today about the joining part, and the excitement I feel about reprising and redefining my principal instigator role in…