Without going into a lot of detail about it (no time!) I wanted to quote from this article discussing the ideas of Jonathan Haidt. It’s actually supposed to be a review of George Lakoff’s writing on political language, but it gets further into Haidt’s ideas and research as a better alternative. He’s not so kind […]

[Read more →]

Boing Boing has a lovely paean saying Happy birthday, Carl Linnaeus, to the one responsible for bringing a common vocabulary (and, maybe most importantly, a system of naming) to natural science — one of the cornerstones that has helped human beings (*ahem* … “homo sapiens”) to share and codify scientific learning.
He’s, of course, a […]

[Read more →]

Excellent article on JM’s ideas about how game situations can unlock incredible problem-solving potential in groups of people, and can be applied to anything from medicine to politics.
San Francisco - News - Future Games - sfweekly.com
McGonigal designs games for a living, and she believes they point the way toward civilization’s next step forward. Her […]

[Read more →]

I really loved the idea of glass being a liquid that was just moving ’super slow.’ I first heard it from a tour guide or two in an old building somewhere, and I could swear my chemistry teacher once mentioned it. But, alas, it is not the case:
Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: Fact […]

[Read more →]

Excellent video interview with Wenger.
Interview with Etienne Wenger on Communities of Practice — Knowledge Lab
Etienne Wenger is one of the founding fathers of Social Learning Theory and the concept of “Practiced Communities”. People are learning together – every individual deals and engage in many different communities of practice. Here people negotiate and define what […]

[Read more →]

In a study much like the famous Milgram experiments (where people administered shocks to others behind a partition, in accordance to an authoritative direction), they’re finding that people have high empathic response to avatars (like those in Second Life) even when they know they aren’t real.
Research findings:
Our results show that in spite of the fact […]

[Read more →]

First of all, there’s the 3D meta world about Shakespeare that it’s giving a quarter million to Ed Castronova to develop:
Shakespeare coming to a virtual world | CNET News.com
On Thursday, the MacArthur Foundation is [announced] a $240,000 grant to Castronova and his team to build “Arden: The World of Shakespeare,” a massively multiplayer online […]

[Read more →]

It’s pretty obvious to most people who watch users act and react that they do a lot of what they do based on somewhat primal and/or emotionally driven impulses. And I’m sure there’s a lot of neuroscience stuff out there that explains how this works, but I haven’t encountered any until I read the article […]

[Read more →]

I often wondered what sorts of brain chemicals were involved in music enjoyment — I’ve definitely noticed similar emotional effects between songs I enjoy (especially cranked up while driving) and other things like caffeine. Nice quick interview at Wired News about it.
WN: What are we learning about the link between music and emotion in […]

[Read more →]

The world is going to the crapper in the Middle East right now, so in a way part of me wonders why I’m obsessing over this issue, but it’s important. Like everybody else I’m wondering how President Bush has managed never to veto a single thing in all his years in office.
I mean, if […]

[Read more →]

The Science Of Desire
The beauty of ethnography, say its proponents, is that it provides a richer understanding of consumers than does traditional research. Yes, companies are still using focus groups, surveys, and demographic data to glean insights into the consumer’s mind. But closely observing people where they live and work, say executives, allows companies to […]

[Read more →]

Ubiquitous computing research from AIGA
AIGA - Augmenting the City: The Design of a Context-Aware Mobile Web Site
The produced solution augments the city through web-based access to a digital layer of information about people, places and activities adapted to users’ physical and social context and their history of social interactions in the city.

[Read more →]