Context-awareness in mobile tourist information systems: challenges for user interaction

Context in mobile tourist information systems is typically captured as the current location of the user. Few systems consider the user's interests or wider context of the sights. This paper explores ideas of how to model, observe, evaluate, and exploit a richer notion of context in this application area. We discuss the influence of such a richer context model on the user interaction for both the capturing of context and the context-aware user/device interactions

The Permanent Tourist: Guidebooks in Travel and Education

About a year ago I heard a paper presented by Gary Day at the University of York on the fate of theory in higher education. He looked at the ways in which university departments had been brought within the auspices of a culture of inspection. In a world where higher education commands a fee and is thus becoming more and more commodified, there must be some means of assuring the quality of the product on offer, as there are for other kinds of product on the market ranging from telecommunications to food safety. In particular, he references Catherine Belsey’s Critical Practice (1980) and Peter Barry’s Beginning Theory (1995) as landmark moments in a drive to render the skills gleaned from English courses more quantifiable. If a Higher Education course is a commodity in which students are investing time and money, they need to feel certain that by the end of the course they will have received the skills in which they have invested, otherwise they will select another course from the market. These guidebooks to literary and cultural theory are thus an important means of providing the students with the skills they require. They minimize the students’ personal response to texts, providing instead a checklist of what various authors and critics ‘do.’ It is a scenario in which the reader is rendered entirely passive, as if he or she simply absorbs from the manual a basic sense of how they should approach a text if they want to give it a post-colonial, gay, or Marxist reading. To do this is to measure English and the human sciences against the material progress of science and technology – criteria by which they will always be judged wanting since the study of English per se does not achieve material results. Instead, the trend is to generate a set of students who will at least read and think in certain routine ways, which in this case means not thinking for themselves at all, merely consuming and absorbing passively the skills which their theoretical manuals provide. The use of guidebooks in higher education in many ways thus forestalls the possibility for really creative individual work and expression, generating instead a gradually homogenised discipline, English Literature. The production of a passive reader and routine patterns of response informs my idea of guidebooks more generally. It is in the nature of guidebooks to present stable meanings and self-contained units of information. At the same time, the construction of a guidebook means that it is not amenable to interrogation. To depend on a guidebook is not to know what questions we would need to ask in order to disavow the contents of that book. The user of the guide – whether reader or traveller – is thus in many ways a passive figure. In this paper I look both at travel guides and fictional representations of the Guide and suggest that the line dividing them might not be as clear as it seems

Ruminations: Sundry Notes and Essays on Logic

Ruminations is a collection of sundry notes and essays on Logic. These complement and enrich the author’s past writings, further analyzing or reviewing certain issues. Among the many topics covered are: the importance of the laws of thought, and how they are applied using the logic of paradox; details of formal logic, including some important new insights on the nesting, merger and splitting up of hypothetical propositions; details of causal logic, including analogical reasoning from cause to cause; a cutting-edge phenomenological analysis of negation. Additionally, this volume is used to publish a number of notes and essays previously only posted in his Internet site, including a history of Jewish logic and an analysis of Islamic logic

Let’s Play: A Walkthrough of Quarter-Century-Old Copyright Precedent as Applied to Modern Video Games

Looking to the copyright protection over the audiovisual displays of video games, current precedent—created by extensive litigation in the 1980s over early arcade games—may be a round hole into which the square peg of today’s highly complex video games would have difficulty fitting. This is an issue that has increasing importance as the market for the passive consumption of video game audiovisual displays through tournament streams, walk-throughs, etc., continues to balloon. If courts were to apply precedent from litigation in the 1980s to video games as they exist today, the idea that copyright protection automatically attaches to any and all audiovisual displays generated by a game may not hold true. It is uncertain to what extent the reasoning in early arcade game litigation regarding the issues of authorship, the idea/expression dichotomy, and fixation would yield similar holdings. Moreover, it appears similarly uncertain to what extent a retreat from earlier precedent may impact publishers’ rights in downstream uses of audiovisual displays. Even if potential defendants prevailed under either an idea/expression dichotomy theory or a fixation theory—meaning the copyright does not attach to audiovisuals at the outset—later-fixed audiovisuals may still be protectable. The strongest argument potential defendants have, therefore, is that their interaction with the game precludes copyrightability for the audiovisual displays due to a lack of “original authorship” on the part of the publishers