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

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,

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

The Futures of Computing and Wisdom

There has been an increasing interest in discussing the consequences of the technologies we invent and study in HCI. Whether it is climate change, ethical computing, capitalist and neo-liberal models of commerce and society, grassroots movements, big data or alternative paradigms in distributed systems, this workshop will invite participants to explore these consequences and ask how we move forward with responsibility and new forms of knowing and knowledge. We invite participants to join us, as we cast forward fifty years to 2068 to imagine the future of wisdom, and to reflect on how we got there. By writing Fictional Abstracts, an abstract from a research paper yet to be written, we will unpick critical tensions in the advancement of computing over the next decades. The workshop will develop perspectives on the futures of computing and critically reflect on the assumptions, methods, and tools for enabling (and disabling) such futures

HCI and UN's sustainable development goals:responsibilities, barriers and opportunities

Despite increasing interest, Sustainable HCI has been critiqued for doing too little, and perhaps also at times for doing the wrong things. Still, a field like Human-Computer Interaction should aim at being part of transforming our society into a more sustainable one. But how do we do that, and, what are we aiming for? With this workshop, we propose that HCI should start working with the new global Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) that were formally adopted by the UN in September 2015. How can Sustainable HCI be inspired by, and contribute to these goals? What should we in the field of HCI do more of, and what should we perhaps do less of? In what areas should we form partnerships in order to reach the Sustainable Development Goals and with whom should we partner

Backfiring and favouring : how design processes in HCI lead to anti-patterns and repentant designers

Design is typically envisioned as aiming to improve situations for users, but this can fail. Failure can be the result of flawed design solutions, i.e. anti-patterns. Prior work in anti-patterns has largely focused on their characteristics. We instead concentrate on why they occur by outlining two processes that result in anti-patterns: 1) backfiring, and 2) favouring. The purpose of the paper is to help designers and researchers better understand how design processes can lead to negative impacts and to repentant designers by introducing a richer vocabulary for discussing such processes. We explore how anti-patterns evolve in HCI by specifically applying the vocabulary to examples of social media design. We believe that highlighting these processes will help the HCI community reflect on their own work and also raise awareness of the opportunities for avoiding anti-patterns. Our hope is that this will result in fewer negative experiences for designers and users alike

Undesigning the Internet:An exploratory study of reducing everyday Internet connectivity

Internet connectivity is seamlessly integrated into many of our everyday habits and activities. Despite this, previous research has highlighted that our rather excessive Internet use is not sustainable or even always socially beneficial. In this paper, we carried out an exploratory study on how Internet disconnection affects our everyday lives and whether such disconnection is even possible in today’s society. Through daily surveys, we captured what Internet use means for ten participants and how this varies when they are asked to disconnect by default, and re-connect only when their Internet use is deemed as necessary. From our study, we found that our participants could disconnect from the Internet for certain activities (particularly leisure focused), yet they developed adaptations in their lives to address the necessity of their Internet use. We elicit these adaptations into five themes that encompass how the participants did, or did not, use the Internet based on their necessities. Drawing on these five themes, we conclude with ways in which our study can inspire future research surrounding: Internet infrastructure limits; the promotion of slow values; Internet non-use; and the undesign of Internet services