Skip to main content

Home/ Digital Ethnography at Kansas State University/ Group items matching "behavioral" in title, tags, annotations or url

Group items matching
in title, tags, annotations or url

Sort By: Relevance | Date Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
1More

Mobile Runtime Application Self-Protection is proving to be advantageous as enables app... - 0 views

  •  
    Runtime application security is an overall security innovation that utilizes runtime tooling to identify and forestall PC assaults by taking advantage of data from inside the running application. This innovation makes it workable for engineers and PC heads to decide the sort and extent of assaults against a specific application. Through this strategy, they can figure out which applications are protected or perhaps took advantage of during their run time. The ID of these kinds of assaults permits executives to hinder admittance to noxious codes and to thusly keep the clients from tainting their frameworks with hazardous infections. Mobile runtime application self-protection is usually enabled during the development stage of software development. The availability of security measures helps developers to test the applications at different stages to check for potential vulnerabilities. These measures include performing scans on runtime libraries and running vulnerability detection scans on the systems. Furthermore, developers employ a number of processes to make the software secure. One of these is the usage of application self-protection. In the end, the use of security software developed for the purpose of mobile runtime application self-protection (RASP) is a great step taken to protect a business's applications. It also provides a degree of security protection against viruses, spyware, and other Internet threats that may be brought about by poorly designed applications and by the activities of inexperienced users. It makes it possible to ensure that a business's applications run smoothly without encountering any security issues. Such issues might cause harm to the user as well as to the business as a whole. Read More @ http://prsync.com/coherent-market-insights-pvt-ltd/mobile-runtime-application-self-protection-is-proving-to-be-advantageous-as-enables-apps-to-monitor-for-suspicious-behavior-at-r-3528867/
6More

How anonymous are you online? Examining online social behaviors from a cross-cultural p... - 0 views

  • Visual anonymity exists in an online community if individuals communicate with each other without their physical appearances attached to their messages.
  • A second level of anonymity is the dissociation of real and online identities. In online communities, there is ample anecdotal evidence that many individuals create a new persona for themselves using nicknames and avatars
  • A third level of anonymity is the concept of lack of identifiability, in which an individual’s behaviors are not distinguishable from others’ behaviors
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • A quick glimpse of the table confirms our prediction that Japanese people would prefer to discuss or voice their opinions when there is a lack of identifiability. The US Slashdot has a much lower rate of anonymous cowards, indicating a preference to be identifiable. For the most active topics, 25% of comments on average were made as anonymous coward in the US, compared to 69% in Japan.
  • Due to the industrialization and modernization of the past several decades, changes in social and economic structure have inevitably caused East Asian countries, such as Japan and Korea, to become more westernized. Due to this fact, some argue that Japan should not be considered as an exemplar of collectivistic societies (Takano and Osaka 1999). Yet the striking cultural differences, in the normative degree of anonymity, found in this study suggests that there continues to be a difference between Eastern and Western cultures in how people are motivated to seek and interact with others online.
2More

Document View - 0 views

  • The possibility of genuine anonymity implicates both the positive value in protecting the sources of certain information as well as the danger inherent in allowing individuals to speak and write without detection. For some computer users, anonymity is merely fun and games. For other anonymous posters, however, the ability to remain unknown removes many of the layers of civilized behavior as they realize that they can escape responsibility for negligent or abusive postings.
  •  
    The possibility of genuine anonymity implicates both the positive value in protecting the sources of certain information as well as the danger inherent in allowing individuals to speak and write without detection. For some computer users, anonymity is merely fun and games. For other anonymous posters, however, the ability to remain unknown removes many of the layers of civilized behavior as they realize that they can escape responsibility for negligent or abusive postings.
1More

Going Up? - 0 views

  •  
    A short article about the relationship between "average" people and celebrities. Hanson makes interesting observations about the behavioral effects of being famous.
1More

Coming of Age in Second Life: An ... - Google Book Search - 0 views

  •  
    Millions of people around the world today spend portions of their lives in online virtual worlds. Second Life is one of the largest of these virtual worlds. The residents of Second Life create communities, buy property and build homes, go to concerts, meet in bars, attend weddings and religious services, buy and sell virtual goods and services, find friendship, fall in love--the possibilities are endless, and all encountered through a computer screen.Coming of Age in Second Lifeis the first book of anthropology to examine this thriving alternate universe. Tom Boellstorff conducted more than two years of fieldwork in Second Life, living among and observing its residents in exactly the same way anthropologists traditionally have done to learn about cultures and social groups in the so-called real world. He conducted his research as the avatar "Tom Bukowski," and applied the rigorous methods of anthropology to study many facets of this new frontier of human life, including issues of gender, race, sex, money, conflict and antisocial behavior, the construction of place and time, and the interplay of self and group. Coming of Age in Second Lifeshows how virtual worlds can change ideas about identity and society. Bringing anthropology into territory never before studied, this book demonstrates that in some ways humans have always been virtual, and that virtual worlds in all their rich complexity build upon a human capacity for culture that is as old as humanity itself.
1More

Science gleans 60TB of behavior data from Everquest 2 logs - Ars Technica - 0 views

  •  
    Researchers record 60 Tetrabytes of data of the online game community "Everquest 2" Research is prevelent to social interactions, and code
1More

8 Hours Spent on Screens, Study Finds - 3 views

  •  
    New York Times article from 2009 Study recorded 952 days of behavior. People under 18 were not included in the study. Study's show that people across the age board spend about the same time in front of the screen unlike assumptions that suppose the younger generations spend more time in front of them. About 25% of people asked underestimated the time they spend on media, about the same overestimated their usage.
10More

The Internet and Social Life (Annual Review of Psychology 2004) - 1 views

  • However, the Internet is not merely the Swiss army knife of communications media. It has other critical differences from previously available communication media and settings (see, e.g., McKenna & Bargh 2000), and two of these differences especially have been the focus of most psychological and human-computer interaction research on the Internet. First, it is possible to be relatively anonymous on the Internet, especially when participating in electronic group venues such as chat rooms or newsgroups. This turns out to have important consequences for relationship development and group participation. second, computer-mediated communication (CMC) is not conducted face-to-face but in the absence of nonverbal features of communication such as tone of voice, facial expressions, and potentially influential interpersonal features such as physical attractiveness, skin color, gender, and so on. Much of the extant computer science and communications research has explored how the absence of these features affects the process and outcome of social interactions.
  • Sproull & Kiesler (1985) considered CMC to be an impoverished communication experience, with the reduction of available social cues resulting in a greater sense or feeling of anonymity. This in turn is said to have a deindividuating effect on the individuals involved, producing behavior that is more self-centered and less socially regulated than usual. This reduced-information model of Internet communication assumes further that the reduction of social cues, compared to richer face-to-face situations, must necessarily have negative effects on social interaction (i.e., a weaker, relatively impoverished social interaction).
  • The relative anonymity of the Internet can also contribute to close relationship formation through reducing the risks inherent in self-disclosure. Because selfdisclosure contributes to a sense of intimacy, making self-disclosure easier should facilitate relationship formation. In this regard Internet communication resembles the "strangers on a train" phenomenon described by Rubin (1975; also Derlega & Chaikin 1977). As Kang (2000, p. 1161) noted, "Cyberspace makes talking with strangers easier. The fundamental point of many cyber-realms, such as chat rooms, is to make new acquaintances. By contrast, in most urban settings, few environments encourage us to walk up to strangers and start chatting. In many cities, doing so would amount to a physical threat."Overall, then, the evidence suggests that rather than being an isolating, personally and socially maladaptive activity, communicating with others over the Internet not only helps to maintain close ties with one's family and friends, but also, if the individual is so inclined, facilitates the formation of close and meaningful new relationships within a relatively safe environment.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • STIGMATIZED IDENTITIES McKenna & Bargh (1998) reasoned that people with stigmatized social identities (see Frable 1993, Jones et al. 1984), such as homosexuality or fringe political beliefs, should be motivated to join and participate in Internet groups devoted to that identity, because of the relative anonymity and thus safety of Internet (compared to face-to-face) participation and the scarcity of such groups in "real life." Moreover, because it is their only venue in which to share and discuss this aspect of their identity, membership in the group should be quite important to these people, and so the norms of such groups should exert a stronger than usual influence over members' behavior. This prediction was confirmed by an archival and observational study of the frequency with which stigmatized-group members posted messages to (i.e., participated in) the group: Unlike in other Internet groups, participation increased when there was positive feedback from the other group members and decreased following negative feedback (McKenna & Bargh 1998, Study 1).
  • ON-LINE SUPPORT In harmony with these conclusions, Davison et al. (2000) studied the provision and seeking of social support on-line by those with grave illnesses, and found that people used Internet support groups particularly for embarrassing, stigmatized illnesses such as AIDS and prostate cancer (and also, understandably, for those illnesses that limit mobility such as multiple sclerosis). The authors point out that because of the anxiety and uncertainty they are feeling, patients are highly motivated by social comparison needs to seek out others with the same illness (p. 213), but prefer to do this on-line when the illness is an embarrassing, disfiguring, or otherwise stigmatized one, because of the anonymity afforded by Internet groups (p. 215).
  • Accordingly, Kang (2000) has argued that one potential social benefit of the Internet is to disrupt the reflexive operation of racial stereotypes, as racial anonymity is much easier to maintain on-line than off-line. For example, studies have found that African Americans and Hispanics pay more than do white consumers for the same car, but these price differences disappear if the car is instead purchased on-line (Scott Morton et al. 2003).
  • Yet racism itself is socially stigmatized-especially when it comes to extreme forms such as advocacy of white supremacy and racial violence (see McKenna & Bargh 1998, Study 3). Thus the cloak of relative anonymity afforded by the Internet can also be used as a cover for racial hate groups, especially for those members who are concerned about public disapproval of their beliefs; hence today there are more than 3000 websites containing racial hatred, agendas for violence, and even bomb-making instructions (Lee & Leets 2002). Glaser et al. (2002) infiltrated such a group and provide telling examples of the support and encouragement given by group members to each other to act on their hatreds. All things considered, then, we don't know yet whether the overall effect of the Internet will be a positive or a negative one where racial and ethnic divisions are concerned.
  • People are not passively affected by technology, but actively shape its use and influence (Fischer 1992, Hughes & Hans 2001). The Internet has unique, even transformational qualities as a communication channel, including relative anonymity and the ability to easily link with others who have similar interests, values, and beliefs. Research has found that the relative anonymity aspect encourages self-expression, and the relative absence of physical and nonverbal interaction cues (e.g., attractiveness) facilitates the formation of relationships on other, deeper bases such as shared values and beliefs. At the same time, however, these "limited bandwidth" features of Internet communication also tend to leave a lot unsaid and unspecified, and open to inference and interpretation.
  • As Lea & Spears (1995) and O'Sullivan (1996) have noted, studying how relationships form and are maintained on the Internet brings into focus the implicit assumptions and biases of our traditional (face-to-face) relationship and communication research literatures (see Cathcart & Gumpert 1983)-most especially the assumptions that face-to-face interactions, physical proximity, and nonverbal communication are necessary and essential to the processes of relating to each other effectively. By providing an alternative interaction setting in which interactions and relationships play by somewhat different rules, and have somewhat different outcomes, the Internet sheds light on those aspects of face-to-face interaction that we may have missed all along. Tyler (2002), for example, reacting to the research findings on Internet interaction, wonders whether it is the presence of physical features that makes face-to-face interaction what it is, or is it instead the immediacy of responses (compared to e-mail)? That's a question we never knew to ask before.
  • Spears et al. (2002) contrasted the engineering model with the "social science" perspective on the Internet, which assumes instead that personal goals and needs are the sole determinant of its effects. [In the domain of communications research, Blumler & Katz's (1974) "uses and gratifications" theory is an influential version of this approach.] According to this viewpoint, the particular purposes of the individuals within the communication setting determine the outcome of the interaction, regardless of the particular features of the communication channel in which the interaction takes place.The third and most recent approach has been to focus on the interaction between features of the Internet communication setting and the particular goals and needs of the communicators, as well as the social context of the interaction setting (see Bargh 2002, McKenna & Bargh 2000, Spears et al. 2002). According to this perspective, the special qualities of Internet social interaction do have an impact on the interaction and its outcomes, but this effect can be quite different depending on the social context. With these three guiding models in mind, we turn to a review of the relevant research.
6More

The Decline and Fall of the Private Self - 0 views

  • IRONICALLY, HUMANS NOW ENJOY MORE privacy than ever, says Aaron Ben-Ze'ev, president of the University of Haifa and author of Love Online: Emotions on the Internet. "Two hundred years ago, when people lived in villages or very dense cities, everyone's behavior was evident to many and it was extremely hard to hide it," he says. Today, e-mail and "chatting" online allow for completely anonymous interactions. We can talk and make plans without the whole household or office knowing. But if we're so able to keep things to ourselves, then why are we doing exactly the opposite?
  • the Internet can be more disinhibiting than the stiffest drink
  • "We've been shaped to be very sensitive to each other on a face-to-face basis," says Daniel Wegner, a Harvard psychologist When someone is in front of you, you can read how they're reacting to your admissions, keeping track-as you're hardwired to do-of whether they're comfortable, disapproving, or rapt. But when you're alone in a room and typing on a computer, explains Wegner, it's easy to forget there's somebody on the other end of the line and become oblivious to the consequences of sharing information.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Perhaps we simply have less to be ashamed of in an increasingly free-to-be-you-and-me era. "More and more people believe they are entitled to behave according to their own values and not the norms prevailing in society," Ben-Ze'ev says. That means there is less of a need to keep a protected private self, free from the scrutiny of strangers.
  • Nor do self-disclosers feel sheepish about craving the spotlight. "I've always thought of myself as being in a movie, that my world is larger than life," says Schaeffer.
  • Bookstores and talk shows have long trafficked in the confessions of not-necessarily-notables, but the Internet has democratized and amplified personal gut spilling. Web sites such as postsecret.com and mysecret.tv bring bathroom-wall-variety confessions, such as "I only love two of my children," "I had gay sex at church camp," and "I pee in the sink," to-and from-the masses. Meanwhile, teenagers telegraph their deep thoughts and petty observations for YouTube prowlers hungry for novelty and diversion.
10More

Zoho Creator - Anonymity Project - 0 views

  • What's to stop an online mass of anonymous but connected people from suddenly turning into a mean mob, just like masses of people have time and time again in the history of every human culture? It's amazing that details in the design of online software can bring out such varied potentials in human behavior. It's time to think about that power on a moral basis.
  • In this research, Durkheim's theory of the universalization of religious beliefs is extended to analyze the occurrence of religious rituals. Drawing upon Schutz's phenomenology of social relations, we amplify theoretically the Durkheimian perspective and suggest that the universalization process is stimulated by an increase in anonymity (as opposed to intimacy) in society. Structural factors consistent with anonymity--i.e., increasing population density, political and economic differentiation, and monetary exchange--are hypothesized to influence the universalization of ritual occurrence
  • In a rather wet community, members easily specify other members. This is effective for managing memberships and changing knowledge from tacit to formal. In a rather dry community, members barely identify with other members at all. This method is suitable for the formal-to-tacit phase of knowledge creation. Finally, it is discussed how social intelligence should be designed and what features are needed to support knowledge-creating communities.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Three studies examined the notion that computer-mediated communication (CMC) can be characterised by high levels of self-disclosure. In Study One, significantly higher levels of spontaneous self-disclosure were found in computer-mediated compared to face-to-face discussions. Study Two examined the role of visual anonymity in encouraging self-disclosure during CMC. Visually anonymous participants disclosed significantly more information about themselves than non-visually anonymous participants. In Study Three, private and public self-awareness were independently manipulated, using video-conferencing cameras and accountability cues, to create a 2 × 2 design public self-awareness (high and low)×private self-awareness (high and low). It was found that heightened private self-awareness, when combined with reduced public self-awareness, was associated with significantly higher levels of spontaneous self-disclosure during computer-mediated communication.
  • "The principle of anonymity has an immense spiritual significance. It reminds us that we are to place principles before personalities."
    • Mike Wesch
       
      citation: Alcoholics Anonymous 568
  • A laboratory experiment was used to evaluate the effects of anonymity and evaluative tone on computer-mediated groups using a group decision support system to perform an idea-generation task. Evaluative tone was manipulated through a confederate group member who entered supportive or critical comments into the automated brainstorming system. Groups working anonymously and with a critical confederate produced the greatest number of original solutions and overall comments, yet average solution quality per item and average solution rarity were not different across conditions. Identified groups working with a supportive confederate were the most satisfied and had the highest levels of perceived effectiveness, but produced the fewest original solutions and overall comments.
  • The results suggest that increased visual anonymity is not associatedwith greater self-disclosure, and the findings about the role of discursive anonymity aremixed.
  • Three levels of anonymity, visual anonymity, dissociation of real and online identities, and lack of identifiability, are thought to have different effects on various components of interpersonal motivation
  • suggesting that individuals in Western societies will gravitate toward online communities that allow lower levels of anonymity, while individuals in Eastern societies will be more likely to seek out online communities that promote higher levels of anonymity.
13More

The WELL: Bruce Sterling: State of the World, 2009 - 0 views

  • I have to love a guy who talks about a "collapse gap." He's got a blog called "ClubOrlov" at http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/, and in his intro to a guest post on December 23, he says " I called it as I saw it, and, unfortunately, I seem to have called it correctly. The US is collapsing before our eyes. Stage 1 collapse is very advanced now; stages 2 and 3 are picking up momentum."
  • So that leaves the Americans -- the global wealthy are clinging to 'em like a drunk to a lamppost.
  • I notice that John Robb, one of my favorite prophets of doom, has formed some tacit New Urbanist alliance with James Howard Kunstler, also one of my favorite prophets of doom.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • In my futurist book TOMORROW NOW I was speculating that there might be a post-national global new order arising in cities. Cities as laboratories of the post-Westphalian order.
  • I was on a call recently with a business that produces "resilient cities" planning, database-intensive digital planning.
  • if we allow ourselves to buy into the fragmentation of postmodernity, where positionality, diversity and ennui rule the day, we lose sight that there are big, tangible players who have the power to behave in ways with their political clout, capital, manufacturing and commerce that are either earth-friendly or not earth-friendly.
  • Instead, I hope we will approach a critical mass in the populace where we persistently insist––politically, economically, spiritually––that our business and government leaders adopt behaviors that embrace a new global consciousness
  • The same goes for Americans trying to rebel against Wall Street. There's no visible other space. There's no liberated territory. It's like rebelling against a funhouse mirror because it makes you look so fat and stupid.
  • his is not just a bad vibe happening. Merrill Lynch is gone. Enron is long gone. Madoff is a crook. The big boys are hurting. Cities are broke, states are broke, the feds are a laughingstock. The Congress and the former Administration have fully earned the public's contempt. You can't "blame the media" for that. Even the media's broke -- ESPECIALLY the media.
  • I agree that there's an irrational panic now. There are also a large crowd of severe, real-world, fully rational, deeply structural problems that have gone unconfronted for years.
  • This is a frank recognition of the stakes. It's aimed at the adults in the room.
  • People become happy when they have something coherent to be enthusiastic about.
  • When you can't imagine how things are going to change, that doesn't mean that nothing will change. It means that things will change in ways that are unimaginable.
3More

Being Real - by Judith Donath - 0 views

  • This chapter will address the problem of teleidentity: how do we - or do we - "know" another person whom we have encountered in a mediated environment?
  • Knowing something about a person's social identity is fundamental for knowing how to act toward them, for the complex rules of social conduct that govern our behavior toward each other cannot function in the absence of information about the other
  • When we first meet someone, we perceive only a few details about them: perhaps their appearance, a few words they utter, the context in which we meet them. Yet our impression of them is much deeper. As George Simmel wrote in his influential 1908 article How is Society Possible? we do not see merely the few details we have actually observed, but "just as we compensate for a blind spot in our field of vision so that we are no longer aware of it, so a fragmentary structure is transformed... into the completeness of an individuality."
12More

Participative Pedagogy for a Literacy of Literacies - Freesouls - 0 views

  • Does knowing something about the way technical architecture influences behavior mean that we can put that knowledge to use?
  • Can inhumane or dehumanizing effects of digital socializing be mitigated or eliminated by better media design?
  • in Coase's Penguin,[7] and then in The Wealth of Networks,[8] Benkler contributed to important theoretical foundations for a new way of thinking about online activity−"commons based peer production," technically made possible by a billion PCs and Internet connections−as a new form of organizing economic production, together with the market and the firm. If Benkler is right, the new story about how humans get things done includes an important corollary−if tools like the PC and the Internet make it easy enough, people are willing to work together for non-market incentives to create software, encyclopedias and archives of public domain literature.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • So much of what we take for granted as part of daily life online, from the BIND software that makes domain names work, to the Apache webserver that powers a sizable chunk of the world's websites, to the cheap Linux servers that Google stacks into its global datacloud, was created by volunteers who gave their creations away to make possible something larger−the Web as we know it.
  • Is it possible to understand exactly what it is about the web that makes Wikipedia, Linux, FightAIDS@Home, the Gutenberg Project and Creative Commons possible? And if so, can this theoretical knowledge be put to practical use?
  • "We must now turn our attention to building systems that support human sociality."
  • We must develop a participative pedagogy, assisted by digital media and networked publics, that focuses on catalyzing, inspiring, nourishing, facilitating, and guiding literacies essential to individual and collective life.
  • to humanize the use of instruments that might otherwise enable commodification, mechanization and dehumanization
  • By literacy, I mean, following on Neil Postman and others, the set of skills that enable individuals to encode and decode knowledge and power via speech, writing, printing and collective action, and which, when learned, introduce the individual to a community.
  • Printing did not cause democracy or science, but literate populations, enabled by the printing press, devised systems for citizen governance and collective knowledge creation. The Internet did not cause open source production, Wikipedia or emergent collective responses to natural disasters, but it made it possible for people to act together in new ways, with people they weren't able to organize action with before, in places and at paces for which collective action had never been possible.
  • If print culture shaped the environment in which the Enlightenment blossomed and set the scene for the Industrial Revolution, participatory media might similarly shape the cognitive and social environments in which twenty first century life will take place (a shift in the way our culture operates). For this reason, participatory media literacy is not another subject to be shoehorned into the curriculum as job training for knowledge workers.
  • Like the early days of print, radio, and television, the present structure of the participatory media regime−the political, economic, social and cultural institutions that constrain and empower the way the new medium can be used, and which impose structures on flows of information and capital−is still unsettled. As legislative and regulatory battles, business competition, and social institutions vie to control the new regime, a potentially decisive and presently unknown variable is the degree and kind of public participation. Because the unique power of the new media regime is precisely its participatory potential, the number of people who participate in using it during its formative years, and the skill with which they attempt to take advantage of this potential, is particularly salient.
4More

The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education -- Publications -- ... - 0 views

  • Media literacy is the capacity to access, analyze, evaluate, and communicate messages in a wide variety of forms.
  • Like literacy in general, media literacy is applied in a wide variety of contexts—when watching television or reading newspapers, for example, or when posting commentary to a blog. Indeed, media literacy is implicated everywhere one encounters information and entertainment content.
  • The foundation of effective media analysis is the recognition that: • all media messages are constructed • each medium has different characteristics and strengths and a unique language of construction • media messages are produced for particular purposes • all media messages contain embedded values and points of view • people use their individual skills, beliefs, and experiences to construct their own meanings from media messages • media and media messages can influence beliefs, attitudes, values, behaviors, and the democratic process Making media and sharing it with listeners, readers, and viewers is essential to the development of critical thinking and communication skills. Feedback deepens reflection on one’s own editorial and creative choices and helps students grasp the power of communication.
  •  
    Media literacy is the capacity to access, analyze, evaluate, and communicate messages in a wide variety of forms.
3More

America's Fastest-Growing Salaries - Anthropologists among the top 20 - 0 views

  • 8. Film and video editors edit soundtracks, film and video for the movies, and cable and broadcast television.Salary growth rate: 5.4 percentSalary: $62,958
  • 15. Anthropologists study the origin, cultural development and behavior of humans, while archaeologists recover artifacts to gather information about humans.Salary growth rate: 4.9 percentSalary: $66,861
  •  
    Anthropologists are #15, Film and video editos are #8
4More

2-Channel Gives Japan's Famously Quiet People a Mighty Voice - 0 views

  • The forum's origins trace back to a college apartment in Arkansas, where founder Hiroyuki Nishimura was a student in May 1999
  • 2.5 million posts a day and about 800 active boards split into thousands of threads, 2-channel is the biggest BBS in the world
  • On occasion, the 2-channel community behaves like a mob, turning on members who transgress with massive amounts of hate mail, the revelation of private information and stalkers monitoring their homes 24/7.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Vote rigging: When comedian Masashi Tashiro was nominated for Time magazine's Person of the Year in 2001, 2-channelers hacked the voting system and placed multiple votes that propelled him to the No. 1 position over Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush, and crashed Time.com's server. Tashiro -- who is infamous for his blatant sexual harassment and belligerent public behavior -- was removed from the list.
29More

Man-Computer Symbiosis - 2 views

  • In short, it seems worthwhile to avoid argument with (other) enthusiasts for artificial intelligence by conceding dominance in the distant future of cerebration to machines alone.
  • There will nevertheless be a fairly long interim during which the main intellectual advances will be made by men and computers working together in intimate association. A multidisciplinary study group, examining future research and development problems of the Air Force, estimated that it would be 1980 before developments in artificial intelligence make it possible for machines alone to do much thinking or problem solving of military significance. That would leave, say, five years to develop man-computer symbiosis and 15 years to use it. The 15 may be 10 or 500, but those years should be intellectually the most creative and exciting in the history of mankind.
  • It is often said that programming for a computing machine forces one to think clearly, that it disciplines the thought process. If the user can think his problem through in advance, symbiotic association with a computing machine is not necessary.
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • They would be easier to solve, and they could be solved faster, through an intuitively guided trial-and-error procedure in which the computer cooperated, turning up flaws in the reasoning or revealing unexpected turns in the solution.
  • Poincare anticipated the frustration of an important group of would-be computer users when he said, "The question is not, 'What is the answer?' The question is, 'What is the question?'" One of the main aims of man-computer symbiosis is to bring the computing machine effectively into the formulative parts of technical problems.
  • It is to bring computing machines effectively into processes of thinking that must go on in "real time," time that moves too fast to permit using computers in conventional ways.
  • To think in interaction with a computer in the same way that you think with a colleague whose competence supplements your own will require much tighter coupling between man and machine than is suggested by the example and than is possible today.
  • Throughout the period I examined, in short, my "thinking" time was devoted mainly to activities that were essentially clerical or mechanical: searching, calculating, plotting, transforming, determining the logical or dynamic consequences of a set of assumptions or hypotheses, preparing the way for a decision or an insight. Moreover, my choices of what to attempt and what not to attempt were determined to an embarrassingly great extent by considerations of clerical feasibility, not intellectual capability.
  • the operations that fill most of the time allegedly devoted to technical thinking are operations that can be performed more effectively by machines than by men.
  • If those problems can be solved in such a way as to create a symbiotic relation between a man and a fast information-retrieval and data-processing machine, however, it seems evident that the cooperative interaction would greatly improve the thinking process.
  • Computing machines can do readily, well, and rapidly many things that are difficult or impossible for man, and men can do readily and well, though not rapidly, many things that are difficult or impossible for computers. That suggests that a symbiotic cooperation, if successful in integrating the positive characteristics of men and computers, would be of great value. The differences in speed and in language, of course, pose difficulties that must be overcome.
  • Men will fill in the gaps, either in the problem solution or in the computer program, when the computer has no mode or routine that is applicable in a particular circumstance.
  • Clearly, for the sake of efficiency and economy, the computer must divide its time among many users. Timesharing systems are currently under active development. There are even arrangements to keep users from "clobbering" anything but their own personal programs.
  • It seems reasonable to envision, for a time 10 or 15 years hence, a "thinking center" that will incorporate the functions of present-day libraries together with anticipated advances in information storage and retrieval and the symbiotic functions suggested earlier in this paper. The picture readily enlarges itself into a network of such centers, connected to one another by wide-band communication lines and to individual users by leased-wire services. In such a system, the speed of the computers would be balanced, and the cost of the gigantic memories and the sophisticated programs would be divided by the number of users.
  • The first thing to face is that we shall not store all the technical and scientific papers in computer memory. We may store the parts that can be summarized most succinctly-the quantitative parts and the reference citations-but not the whole. Books are among the most beautifully engineered, and human-engineered, components in existence, and they will continue to be functionally important within the context of man-computer symbiosis. (Hopefully, the computer will expedite the finding, delivering, and returning of books.)
  • The second point is that a very important section of memory will be permanent: part indelible memory and part published memory. The computer will be able to write once into indelible memory, and then read back indefinitely, but the computer will not be able to erase indelible memory. (It may also over-write, turning all the 0's into l's, as though marking over what was written earlier.) Published memory will be "read-only" memory. It will be introduced into the computer already structured. The computer will be able to refer to it repeatedly, but not to change it.
  • The basic dissimilarity between human languages and computer languages may be the most serious obstacle to true symbiosis.
  • In short: instructions directed to computers specify courses; instructions-directed to human beings specify goals.
  • We may in due course see a serious effort to develop computer programs that can be connected together like the words and phrases of speech to do whatever computation or control is required at the moment. The consideration that holds back such an effort, apparently, is that the effort would produce nothing that would be of great value in the context of existing computers. It would be unrewarding to develop the language before there are any computing machines capable of responding meaningfully to it.
  • By and large, in generally available computers, however, there is almost no provision for any more effective, immediate man-machine communication than can be achieved with an electric typewriter.
  • Displays seem to be in a somewhat better state than controls. Many computers plot graphs on oscilloscope screens, and a few take advantage of the remarkable capabilities, graphical and symbolic, of the charactron display tube. Nowhere, to my knowledge, however, is there anything approaching the flexibility and convenience of the pencil and doodle pad or the chalk and blackboard used by men in technical discussion.
  • 2) Computer-Posted Wall Display: In some technological systems, several men share responsibility for controlling vehicles whose behaviors interact. Some information must be presented simultaneously to all the men, preferably on a common grid, to coordinate their actions. Other information is of relevance only to one or two operators. There would be only a confusion of uninterpretable clutter if all the information were presented on one display to all of them. The information must be posted by a computer, since manual plotting is too slow to keep it up to date.
  • Laboratory experiments have indicated repeatedly that informal, parallel arrangements of operators, coordinating their activities through reference to a large situation display, have important advantages over the arrangement, more widely used, that locates the operators at individual consoles and attempts to correlate their actions through the agency of a computer. This is one of several operator-team problems in need of careful study.
  • 3) Automatic Speech Production and Recognition: How desirable and how feasible is speech communication between human operators and computing machines?
  • Yet there is continuing interest in the idea of talking with computing machines.
  • In large part, the interest stems from realization that one can hardly take a military commander or a corporation president away from his work to teach him to type. If computing machines are ever to be used directly by top-level decision makers, it may be worthwhile to provide communication via the most natural means, even at considerable cost.
  • It seems reasonable, therefore, for computer specialists to be the ones who interact directly with computers in business offices.
  • Certainly, if the equipment were already developed, reliable, and available, it would be used.
  •  
    Man-computer symbiosis is an expected development in cooperative interaction between men and electronic computers. It will involve very close coupling between the human and the electronic members of the partnership. The main aims are 1) to let computers facilitate formulative thinking as they now facilitate the solution of formulated problems, and 2) to enable men and computers to cooperate in making decisions and controlling complex situations without inflexible dependence on predetermined programs. In the anticipated symbiotic partnership, men will set the goals, formulate the hypotheses, determine the criteria, and perform the evaluations. Computing machines will do the routinizable work that must be done to prepare the way for insights and decisions in technical and scientific thinking. Preliminary analyses indicate that the symbiotic partnership will perform intellectual operations much more effectively than man alone can perform them. Prerequisites for the achievement of the effective, cooperative association include developments in computer time sharing, in memory components, in memory organization, in programming languages, and in input and output equipment.
1 - 20 of 25 Next ›
Showing 20 items per page