The Bodily Incorporation of Mechanical Devices: Ethical and Religious Issues (Part I)

A substantial portion of the developed world's population is increasingly dependent on machines to make their way in the everyday world. For certain privileged groups, computers, cell phones, PDAs, Blackberries, and IPODs, all permitting the faster processing of information, are commonplace. In these populations, even exercise can be automated as persons try to achieve good physical fitness by riding stationary bikes, running on treadmills, and working out on cross-trainers that send information about performance and heart rate.This essay is drawn from collaborative research conducted under the auspices of the “Altering Nature: How Religious Traditions Assess the New Biotechnologies” project at Rice University from 2002 to 2004 through the financial support of The Ford Foundation (Grant #1010-1601). The paper is submitted with the permission and acknowledgement of the project coordinators and The Ford Foundation. The authors also acknowledge the research and editorial assistance of Dr. Siobhan Baggot and Ms. Sarah Gehrke

Distributed Development of a Logic-Based Controlled Medical Terminology (CSTR-97-1596). Dissertation available from elib.Stanford.ledu

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The Digital Library Integrated Task Environment (DLITE)

We describe a case study in the design of a user interface to a digital library. Our design stems from a vision of a library as a channel to the vast array of digital information and document services that are becoming available. Based on published studies of library use and on scenarios, we developed a metaphor called workcenters, which are customized for users' tasks. Due to our scenarios and to prior work in the CHI community, we chose a direct-manipulation realization of the metaphor. Our system, called DLITE, is designed to make it easy for users to interact with many different services while focusing on a task. Users have reacted favorably to the interface design in pilot testing. We conclude by describing our approaches to this problem. Keywords: Digital library, user interface, direct-manipulation, world-wide web, holophrasting 1. INTRODUCTION The Stanford Digital Library project is focused on creating technology that will allow a user to access digital resources, from stati..

Tool vs. agent: attributing agency to natural language generation systems

This paper argues that we should shift our consideration of natural language generation systems as tools for manifesting human intent to natural language generation systems as agents in themselves. Such a semantic shift would permit a more holistic conversation about the transformative social power of these systems’ output