Reflexions on Cultural Bias and Adaption

SvenskMud1 is an Internet-accessible Multi-User Domain (MUD) system. But, in contrast to 99% of all Internet-accessible MUDs, SvenskMud is not a global community. SvenskMud is instead the first vernacular (i.e. non-English speaking) MUD in the world, and the only Swedish-speaking MUD in Sweden today. This paper problematizes four questions regarding cultural attitudes and their relationship to CMC technologies. Moving from the historical and the general to the present and the specific I will in turn discuss the following questions: (1) how have American cultural attitudes (historically) shaped the development and use of CMC technologies? (2) how do cultural attitudes (today) shape the implementation and use of CMC technologies? (3) how do cultural attitudes manifest themselves in the implementation and use of MUDs? (4) how do cultural attitudes manifest themselves in the implementation\ud and use of SvenskMud

Уровни нитратов/нитритов в сыворотке крови у больных артериальной гипертензией, перенесших грипп

гипертензияплазманитратынитритыгрип

In Search of Fairness: Critical Design Alternatives for Sustainability

Does fairness as an ideal fit within the broader quest for sustainability? In this paper we consider alternative ways of framing the wicked problem of sustainability. One that moves away from the established preference within HCI, towards technological quick-fixes. We adopt a critical lens to challenge the belief that by merely changing practices at an individual level one can do away with unsustainability. This thinking, we argue, is flawed for many reasons, but mostly because of the wickedness of the sustainability problem. By analyzing the case of Fairphone, we illustrate how it is possible to imagine and design change at a broader level of community engagement, when it comes to concerns of fairness and sustainability. We contribute to a deeper understanding of how social value laden enterprises along with open technological design can shape sustainable relationships between our environment and us.

Law, order and conflicts of interest in massively multiplayer online games

In huge online games such as EverQuest or Star Wars Galaxies where a great number of players can be connected at the same time, social interaction is complex and conflicts become part of everyday life. There is a set of rules and norms in the game for what is allowed and what is prohibited and these are partly set up by the game publisher and partly evolve over time among the players themselves. Conflicts are surprisingly often based on disputes and quarrels revolving around a limited number of rules and norms that have been established over time by the players themselves in the game. This paper describes and exemplifies a number of often-contested behaviors around which most in-game conflicts revolve. Examples are primarily taken from two studies of Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot but the paper also draws on results from five other studies of five different massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs). After describing different types of conflicts in MMOGs, the paper goes on to analyze these incidents in terms of social dilemmas. A social dilemma can concisely be describes as a "tension between individual and collective rationality" (Kollock and Smith 1996). The most well-know example of such a dilemma stripped down to its bare bones is the prisoner’s dilemma (Axelrod 1984, Poundstone 1992). A character in a MMOG can however belong to several groups that operate on different levels and there can be conflicts not just between the individual and the collective rationality but also between different levels of collective rationality. These levels are generically referred to in terms of micro, meso and macro (see Skågeby and Pargman 2005 for an example of analyzing conflicts of interest in file-sharing networks in terms of micro, meso and macro relationships). In MMOGs, these three levels correspond to: 1. A small group of close peers and well-known friends bound together by strong ties (Ganovetter 1973) (micro, everyone has a personal relationship with everyone else). 2. A "mid-sized" group of peers and recognized acquaintances (meso, a relatively small network with personal relationships or overlapping relationships between members) – typically a guild in Everquest. 3. A large group of anonymous strangers bound together by weak ties or by no ties (macro, ten thousand characters with accounts on the same sever). The typical relationship at the micro level is one of friendship, the typical relationship at the meso level is one of being acquaintances and the typical relationship at the macro level is one of being strangers. We can also relate these levels to the traditional sociological categories individual, family and close friends, community and society. This paper assumes that tensions, conflicts, misunderstandings, critical incidents and breakdown are fruitful starting points from which to analyze MMOGs (or "virtual societies"). The perspective presented here thus and in good company with Marx, Engels and Weber writes itself into the "conflict tradition" of sociology (Collins, 1994). Having defined a framework with three different levels of collective rationality, the paper proceeds by utilizing said framework to analyze concrete examples of conflicts within a MMOG in terms of a) conflicts between the individual rationality and the (different levels of) collective rationality (such as for example between a character and the guild he/she belongs to) and b) in terms of conflicts between different levels of collective rationality (such as for example between a guild and everyone else on the server). Finally we call attention to a particularly interesting class of conflicts of interest where it is eminently difficult even to determine if specific behaviors are best described as "crime in progress" or as the ultimate examples of "helping your neighbor". We end the paper by further outlining a framework for regarding MMOGs in terms of virtual societies and virtual communities at the same time (e.g. as virtual societies harboring numerous smaller virtual communities). References: Axelrod, R. (1984). The evolution of cooperation. New York: Basic Books. Collins, R (1994). Four sociological traditions. New York: Oxford University Press. Granovetter (1973). The strength of weak ties. Americal Journal of Sociology, Vol.78, No.6, pp.1360-1380. Kollock, P. and Smith, M. (1996). Managing the virtual commons: Cooperation and conflict in compter communities. In S. Herring (ed.), Computer-mediated communication: Linguistic, social, and cross-cultural perspectives. Amsterdam, Holland: John Benjamins. Poundstone, W (1992). Prisoner’s dilemma: John von Neumann, game theory, and the puzzle of the bomb. New York: Doubleday. Skågeby, J. and Pargman, D. (2005). File-sharing relationships: Conflicts of interest in online gift-giving. Submited to the 2nd international conference on Communities & Technology,

Exploring tensions in Responsible AI in practice. An interview study on AI practices in and for Swedish public organizations

The increasing use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems has sparked discussions regarding developing ethically responsible technology. Consequently, various organizations have released high-level AI ethics frameworks to assist in AI design. However, we still know too little about how AI ethics principles are perceived and work in practice, especially in public organizations. This study examines how AI practitioners perceive ethical issues in their work concerning AI design and how they interpret and put them into practice. We conducted an empirical study consisting of semi-structured qualitative interviews with AI practitioners working in or for public organizations. Taking the lens provided by the In-Action Ethics framework and previous studies on ethical tensions, we analyzed practitioners’ interpretations of AI ethics principles and their application in practice. We found tensions between practitioners’ interpretation of ethical principles in their work and ethos tensions. In this vein, we argue that understanding the different tensions that can occur in practice and how they are tackled is key to studying ethics in practice. Understanding how AI practitioners perceive and apply ethical principles is necessary for practical ethics to contribute toward an empirically grounded, Responsible AI

Privacy as Contextual Integrity in Online Proctoring Systems in Higher Education: A Scoping Review

Privacy is one of the key challenges to the adoption and implementation of online proctoring systems (OPS) in higher education. To better understand this challenge, we adopt privacy as contextual integrity theory to conduct a scoping review of 17 papers. The results show different types of students’ personal and sensitive information are collected and disseminated; this raises considerable privacy concerns. As well as the governing principles including transparency and fairness, consent and choice, information minimization, accountability, and information security and accuracy have been identified to address privacy problems. This study notifies a need to clarify how these principles should be implemented and sustained, and what privacy concerns and actors they relate to. Further, it calls for the need to clarify the responsibility of key actors in enacting and sustaining responsible adoption and use of OPS in higher education

Privacy as Contextual Integrity in Online Proctoring Systems in Higher Education: A Scoping Review

Privacy is one of the key challenges to the adoption and implementation of online proctoring systems in higher education. To better understand this challenge, we adopt privacy as contextual integrity theory to conduct a scoping review of 17 papers. The results show different types of students' personal and sensitive information are collected and disseminated; this raises considerable privacy concerns. As well as the governing principles including transparency and fairness, consent and choice, information minimization, accountability, and information security and accuracy have been identified to address privacy problems. This study notifies a need to clarify how these principles should be implemented and sustained, and what privacy concerns and actors they relate to. Further, it calls for the need to clarify the responsibility of key actors in enacting and sustaining responsible adoption and use of OPS in higher education

The glass box user model for filtering

The first requirement on an interactive system in a domain such as information filtering is to be an interface to knowledge, rather than just a knowledgeable interface. We borrow the computation instruction metaphor of a system as "a black box in a glass box" as a means to conceptualize the problem of giving a user control over the actions of an interactive system. The application domain we work in is that of information filtering. In the "black box", we hide complex knowledge of the domain objects such as facts and assumptions about text genre identification, while the "glass box", which is what the user sees, only shows the neat top level knowledge of the domain conceptual categories such as e.g. categorization rules

Проблема преемственности преподавания информатики в средних учебных заведенях и медицинском вузе

ОБРАЗОВАНИЕ МЕДИЦИНСКОЕВУЗЫМЕДИЦИНСКИЕ УЧЕБНЫЕ ЗАВЕДЕНИЯСРЕДНИЕ СПЕЦИАЛЬНЫЕ УЧЕБНЫЕ ЗАВЕДЕНИЯИНФОРМАТИКА /ОБУ

Do you believe in magic? Computer games in everyday life

Huizinga's concept of a 'magic circle' has been used to depict computer games and gaming activities as something separate from ordinary life. In this view, games are special (magical) and they only come to life within temporal and spatial borders that are enacted and performed by the participants. This article discusses the concept of a 'magic circle' and finds that it lacks specificity. Attempts to use the concept of a magic circle create a number of anomalies that are problematic. This is not, as has been suggested earlier, primarily a matter of the genre of the game, or a discussion of what an appropriate definition of a 'game' might be. Rather, in this study with hardcore gamers, playing computer games is a routine and mundane activity, making the boundary between play and non-play tenuous to say the least. This article presents an alternative theoretical framework which should be explored further