Alexandra Carmichael

September 10, 2012

Here is some fun and provocative Monday morning reading for you, from Gary, Alex, and Ernesto. Enjoy!

From 0 to 100 Years in 150 Seconds
An Amsterdam filmmaker collected tiny video clips of 100 people on the street from ages 0 to 100. It’s like witnessing a startling progression of human life, and motivates me (Alex) to work on solving aging!

Empowerment Through Numbers: Biomedicalization and The Quantified Self
In this interesting post from the Cyborgology blog, sociologist Whitney Erin Boesel describes some important ambiguities in the Quantified Self movement. How empowering is it, really? Whitney will be at the conference and invites comment and discussion.

Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas
This amazing book by Natasha Dow Schüll, the product of more than a decade of research, describes in detail one context where behavioral science appears to yield genuine control over human beings: the design of machine gambling systems such as video poker.

“Ubicomp’s Colonial Impulse” (pdf), by Paul Dourish and Scott Mainwaring is a welcome, explicit call for those of us interested in ubiquitous computing to think about the colonialism implicit in our methods and vocabulary. I (Gary) liked it especially because it is accessible (in the sense of not being polluted by jargon or academic point-scoring) while also very challenging to conventional practice.

Reinventing Society in the Wake of Big Data (video)
MIT researcher Sandy Pentland talks about the streams of hidden data all around us -what it means for predicting trends and how it forces us to reinvent ourselves in a data-driven human society.

Men and Women Really Do See Things Differently
A fascinating study out of Brooklyn College discovered that women are better at differentiating between shades of colors, while men are better at noticing details of fast-moving things, especially at a distance. Remnants of adaptations from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle?

And just for fun, from Ernesto and Alex – check out this hug clothing!