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What does class mean? In the last week I’ve encountered three conceptualizations – financial, cultural, and aspirational. Under the financial concept, class is determined by whether one’s assets and income are below or above some threshold. Here, class is external to the individual and might vary relatively easily as an individual gains more wealth. This… Read More »
I was completely unaware of this, but apparently cases of academic misconduct, as evidenced by the retraction of papers from journals and other publication venues, have been on the rise. According to the article, retractions from journals in the PubMed database have increased by a factor of 60 over ten years, from 3 in 2000… Read More »
I spent Saturday at the HCI for Peace workshop representing the Voices from the Rwandan Tribunal project. It was fairly informal, with only 10 participants, which made it easy for everyone to participate in the discussion. Several participants presented projects they’ve worked on, including: Lahiru Jayatilaka, a Sri Lankan PhD student from Stanford, who presented… Read More »
Another quick observation about motivation: I was lying in bed just now, tired and thinking of sleep. I picked up the book I’m currently reading (the 2008 Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror anthology, if anyone cares), thumbed to the next story, but barely made it to the end of the second paragraph before giving up.… Read More »
Came across this in an issue of IEEE Computer today. It’s a simple conceptual model from the 1960s by a guy called Bruce Tuckman of the stages small groups go through; groups such as committees, work groups, and project teams. The basic stages seem obvious, but, as with many models of human behaviour, the value… Read More »
Imagine a search engine that, instead of just doing text matching, attempts to parse your statement into questions it can answer, then provides you with as many of those answers as it can. Imagine a search engine that can deal with numerical relationships and analysis. Imagine a search engine that’s tailored towards returning facts and… Read More »
Today I read a paper from 1971 by Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber about “wicked problems” – problems that are intrinsically difficult or impossible to solve in the sense that one can solve a crossword or mathematical proof, or win a game of chess. Wicked problems abound in policy questions and design, and it’s interesting… Read More »
This week, I decided to make sure that Sunday was a day where I wouldn’t have to do any work so that I could actually relax. Normally, I’m really bad at relaxing. I’ll spend most days stressing about work, and this saps my motivation such that I get less work done. In turn, I stress… Read More »
In my last post, I talked about the meaningless of taste as a way of describing our preferences. In this post, I’m going to sketch out a scheme that I tend to use in describing preferences. There are many ways in which a given piece of music might be appreciated. Examples include virtuosity, technical characteristics,… Read More »
You might have heard about the recent kerfuffle over the Facebook terms of service. If you didn’t, this brief summary from Rocketboom will get you up to speed. Mostly, it was about whether or not you could revoke their license to use and distribute your material by deleting your account. Their argument was that they… Read More »