Posts from — February 2007

Social Source Commons:
he ultimate goal of the Social Source Commons (SSC) is to create a “knowledge commons” that maps the NPO/NGO software space and makes sense of the collective expertise related to that software. It aims to provide those who need information on NPO/NGO software access to lists of what’s available, with each list item linked to relevant documentation, localization tools, services and events, user reviews and a place to request the tools and features they can’t find.

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handy and interesting

Here is my current definition of cultural informatics

Cultural Informatics is the application and understandings of information technology in the broadest senses of cultures and cultural institutions.

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Here is an expansion and clarification:

To that end, it deals with understandings of culturally centered information, cultural heritage, cultural communities, the transmission of information through cultures and relations between culture and information technology. While there are productive, design and creative elements to cultural informatics, that design has to be understood as constructed within a rich cultural milieu, and situated as such as part of a process to generate understanding within and across cultures. Cultural informatics must continually be reflexive and critical of the systems we create and participate in order to generate new possibilities that will work across cultural domains. It is not enough to build the tool, we build the tool in a culture, and we build cultural and political assumptions into that tool which have clear implications for the positioning of cultures, peoples, and technologies.

FZ :: Nyheter :: Två teknikdemon från Star Wars: Force Unleashed:

thePeoplesToolbox – Programming Tools :

this site has thousands of tools of use to all kinds of programming tasks from the beginner to expert. it also has useful tools like this tool to represent how a large segment of the population might be seeing the colors that you choose differently. check it out, you might find something useful

YouTube – Children See, Children Do:
Children See, Children Do

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another must see movie, we model our world for forthcoming generations, not just the ‘good’ things, children see it all, and learn to do it all.

Tomorrow’s Professor Blog: 772. Academic Freedom:
This function of tenure has been challenged as “absolutizing” academic freedom: “[T]enure can never protect of guarantee academic freedom,” John Silber opined. “Academic freedom is protected and guaranteed by the courage of individual professors, and by individual administrators who protect individual members of the faculty, and by students. If they express their freedom responsibly, they will not expect immunity from criticism or public disapproval; they will recognize these risks as one of the essential conditions of responsibility.”

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a nice brief review of the history and purpose of academic freedom

YouTube – March of the Librarians:

Can you trust your mind? at hvattum.net:
How good are you when it comes to concentration and perception?
Here is a cool experiment where you can test you ability to focus attention on a certain object in a short video.

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no, one can’t trust one’s mind, but eh..

Radical Society – Review of Culture & Politics:
THE SKEPTIC IS GENERALLY PORTRAYED AS standing, on purpose, outside the normal flow of life. The skeptic refuses to assent to things that most people take for granted, perceiving the world through a protective lens of doubt and incredulity. The skeptic is the one who pauses just as everyone else jumps in.

The funny thing about this picture is that it characterizes an attitude almost exactly opposite to what some of the earliest skeptics actually proposed. For them, the most important thing to be skeptical about was the very tendency for human beings to worry about knowledge. Once you start worrying about whether you really know things or not, it sets off a whole chain of intellectual moves that, to the skeptic, get you nowhere. Skepticism is not about nay-saying and arch looks; it is about getting us back into the normal flow of life, with, perhaps, a renewed and deeper sense of how flowing that flow really is.
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ahh pyrrho.. an old favorite.

In You More Than Yourself — In These Times:
And the same goes for my partners who I communicate with in cyberspace: I can never be sure who they are. Are they “really” the way they describe themselves? Is there a “real” person at all behind a screen-persona or is the screen-persona a mask for several different people? Does the same “real” person possess and manipulate more screen-personas? Or perhaps I am simply dealing with a digitalized entity that does not stand for any “real” person? In short, interface means precisely that my relationship to the Other is never face-to-face, that it is always mediated by the interposed digital machinery whose structure is that of a labyrinth. I “browse,” I err around in this infinite space where messages circulate freely without fixed destination, while the Whole of it—this immense circuitry of “murmurs”—remains forever beyond the scope of my comprehension. The obverse of cyberspace’s direct democracy is this chaotic and impenetrable magnitude of messages and their circuits that even the greatest effort of my imagination cannot comprehend. Immanuel Kant would have called it a cyberspace Sublime.

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zizek on cyberspace