Group items tagged

This article is intriguing. It pertains more to bio-technology, but I found it pretty fascinating that parts of our bodies could be engineered to be better than they previously were...including out brains.....? "[Kurzweil] claims that the human brain will be entirely reverse-engineered by the 2020's, and that it will then be able to be modified to be exponentially more powerful than the natural human brain."

Review of a new book about the Turing Test, which Nick Carr discusses briefly at the end of The Shallows. The author Brian Christianson sets out to win the Turing Test.

This (long) report discusses the use of ICTs in the medical field, primarily IN the human body

I'm not sure if I would characterize this topic as being part of social informatics. Cochlear implants, insulin pumps, and spinal chord devices, just to name a few of the devises, do have interactive measures with the human body. However, social informatics is the study of how ICTs affect people's relationships and aspects of their social contexts. Although these devises influence the lives of their users, this article mainly discusses the ethical implications of using these technologies and the regulations that need to be developed to standardize use.

Well, interestingly enough, some of my undergrads over the years have been fascinated by RFID implants and the ethical implications of those actions. It is possible that a simple little think like an insulin pump, or any kind of pump would have an impact on one's actions and lifestyle. See this amazing talk by Charity Tillman-Dick: http://www.ted.com/talks/charity_tilleman_dick_singing_after_a_double_lung_transplant.html

Great article on some digital humanities projects and how they relate to undergraduate teaching. Many of the projects involve digital archives, libraries or databases. I think this is the kind of work future academic libraries can help facilitate

Not sure why it isn't registering that I viewed this... Fascinating article- wish I could share via FB since only classmates see this and I think my teacher friends would find this interesting as well. Just another way diigo limits its usefulness. Great find though!

"The Internet doesn't steal our humanity, it reflects it. The Internet doesn't get inside us, it shows what's inside us. And social media isn't cold, it's just complex and hard to define."

Changing view in anthropology attributes social cooperation/social learning and tools (first as weapons) as characteristics that set humans apart from other primates. See also http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/11/science/11kin.html

This site documents the public response to internet phenomena (e.g., smiling dogs, phrases, viral videos).

This is fascinating to me. Some years ago I have read Richard Dawkin's The selfish gene (http://www.amazon.com/Selfish-Gene-Anniversary----Introduction/dp/0199291152/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1296232952&sr=1-3) and the Idea of Memes, using us, humans, to reproduce and evolve was quite amazing. I would also recommend Susan Blackmore's The meme machine (http://www.amazon.com/Meme-Machine-Popular-Science/dp/019286212X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1296232884&sr=8-1), it was interesting for me. Yes, it falls under the "popular science" category, and her pseudo)scientific style could be a bit irritating; but overall there were some interesting ideas. P.S. I did not get the hyper-linking to work for me. I would appreciate some clues :-)

scientismic - a new term?

Many of the ideas that we are discussing are not so new and even predate the Internet. Marshall McLuhan made a name for himself dealing with these issues in the 1950's and 60's. Although some of his ideas have perhaps not proved true his basic concepts were on the money. From a CBC broadcast May 18, 1960.

This is fantastic! Worth watching. I want to read up more on McLuhan's work. Which of McLuhan's works do you recommend?

My favorite is "The Mechanical Bride" - a great critique of new (at the time) electronic media, consumerism, marketing and how they could affect the way we perceive ourselves. "The Media is the Massage" is a fun and relatively quick read and covers many of McLuhan's key concepts.

Sherry Turkle has a new book out...

interesting: in the new book, turkle, "takes a considerably darker view, arguing that our new technologies - including e-mail messages, Facebook postings, Skype exchanges, role-playing games, Internet bulletin boards and robots - have made convenience and control a priority while diminishing the expectations we have of other human beings."

interesting article. I already thought a few years ago that voice on Second Life was going to alter the "game." Here is some evidence

people often think anonymity on the internet breeds contempt. this article shows it's not that simple.

Y'know if the gamers assume that the female dwarves are Chinese players and they go out of their way to kill with added anti-Asian slurs that would be racist. But they are also female dwarfs. I guess these players can also express their misogynistic tendencies to boot. Nice.

NY Times article on how using a game life like virtual reality aids in the teaching of literature.

Great minds...both you and Laurie found this! Fascinating article!

Really great talk on the Brian Lehrer show from two days ago about content curation. The angle has a lot to do with what journalists/bloggers are doing, there even was talk about a Pulitzer Prize for curation. The featured author talks about how "search is broken." There was a caller (with whom I once worked at People magazine!), who has a site that curates human interest content about the developing world, filling a niche that she says has been greatly under-served. I'll also post a link to her Web site.

Here's a link to a Web site described as a "global humanitarian internet portal to feature engaging stories about the lives of real people in even the most remote parts of the developing world." The creator saw a gap in all content aggregator-type sites, which tend to cover breaking news, and launched something aimed at human interest stories from the developing world.

I posted the brief which has links to the original Google study and Nicholas Carr's underwhelmed response because the summary is nice and easy to digest plus if you wish to delve further you can. Basically Google challenged students in a library versus those using Google to answer 'random' questions- Nicholas Carr responds- " How did the University of Michigan researchers come up with the questions that they had their subjects find answers to? They "obtained a random sample of 2515 queries from a major search engine." Ha! Maybe the question we should be asking, not of Google but of ourselves, is what types of questions the Net is encouraging us to ask. Should human thought be gauged by its output or by its quality? That question might actually propel one into the musty depths of a library, where "time saved" is not always the primary concern".

This center explores how ICTs foster/hinder freedom, democracy, human rights & development.