Live blogging Beth Mynatt’s talk about Inventing the Digital Life
Told you so.
In the car, driving home from Grand-dad’s, the boys were discussing trips they’d like to take. Archie: Chicago is seven meters away. Carter: (snort) That’s crazy! We can see seven meters away, and it isn’t Chicago. Me: Wouldn’t that be cool though? We could totally see Aunt Meg from here. Archie: It’s 1740 meters away. [...]
Practically, no particular
Our HCI Design Theory class has begun discussing the relationship between design and science. The latter is a quest to explain truth through repeatable observation, describing a predictable understanding of the general. The former, on the other hand, is about changing the truth through the creation of new things on behalf of specific others. If the design view of science criticizes it for a focus on an impractical general rule, then so, too, is a particular an impractical abstraction of reality.
School Daze– Part Three
At one point over the weekend, Kevin described our decision to take leave from the public school as a divorce process- full of loss and grief. It has been gut-wrenching, and there are moments of extreme self-doubt. The sad reality is, I don’t see reasonable class sizes, meaningful assessments or even a little time to be a kid in the future of our school. I do see a rich local support group for homeschooling, an optimistic child and parents willing to try something new.
The Dissociative Identity of Social Psychology
My sociology minor kick-started a four-course track over the next two years with an Introduction to Social Psychology course. My first attempt to synthesize the reading was painfully slow and uncertain. The fractured history of social psychology, though, may be very relevant to my main course of study: Informatics. Will there one day soon be a data informatics that slightly differs from a sociological informatics and computer science informatics, all equally relevant but not communicating in ways beneficial to the questions they try to answer?
Super Friends
Now, this is some research I can get behind. Physicist Pablo Gleiser of the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research in Buenos Aires, Argentina, is studying the Marvel Universe for the relationships its characters hold with one another. “The Marvel universe looks almost like a real social network,” says Gleiser. It turns out that the good guys benefit from strong social networks while the bad buys are isolated.