Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

From the Publisher:
Written by the author of the best-selling HyperText & HyperMedia, this book provides an excellent guide to the methods of usability engineering. Special features: emphasizes cost-effective methods that will help developers improve their user interfaces immediately, shows you how to avoid the four most frequently listed reasons for delay in software projects, provides step-by-step information about which methods to use at various stages during the development life cycle, and offers information on the unique issues relating to informational usability. You do not need to have previous knowledge of usability to implement the methods provided, yet all of the latest research is covered.

Usability Engineering

How has Japan become a major economic power, a world leader in the automotive and electronics industries? What is the secret of their success? The consensus has been that, though the Japanese are not particularly innovative, they are exceptionally skilful at imitation, at improving products that already exist. But now two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hiro Takeuchi, turn this conventional wisdom on its head: Japanese firms are successful, they contend, precisely because they are innovative, because they create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. Examining case studies drawn from such firms as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, 3M, GE, and the U.S. Marines, this book reveals how Japanese companies translate tacit to explicit knowledge and use it to produce new processes, products, and services.

The knowledge-creating company : how Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation

The literature on interference in the Stroop Color-Word Task, covering over 50 years and some 400 studies, is organized and reviewed. In so doing, a set of 18 reliable empirical finding is isolated that must be captured by any successful theory of the Stroop effect. Existing theoretical positions are summarized and evaluated in view of this critical evidence and the 2 major candidate theories ―relative speed of processing and automaticity of reading― are found to be wanting. It is concluded that recent theories placing the explanatory weight on parallel processing of the irrelevant and the relevant dimensions are likely to be more sucessful than are earlier theories attempting to locate a single bottleneck in attention

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Half a century of research on the Stroop effect: an integrative review.

From the Publisher: 
A Question of Identity 
Life on the Screen is a fascinating and wide-ranging investigation of the impact of computers and networking on society, peoples' perceptions of themselves, and the individual's relationship to machines. Sherry Turkle, a Professor of the Sociology of Science at MIT and a licensed psychologist, uses Internet MUDs (multi-user domains, or in older gaming parlance multi-user dungeons) as a launching pad for explorations of software design, user interfaces, simulation, artificial intelligence, artificial life, agents, "bots," virtual reality, and "the on-line way of life." 
Turkle's discussion of postmodernism is particularly enlightening. She shows how postmodern concepts in art, architecture, and ethics are related to concrete topics much closer to home, for example AI research (Minsky's "Society of Mind") and even MUDs (exemplified by students with X-window terminals who are doing homework in one window and simultaneously playing out several different roles in the same MUD in other windows). Those of you who have (like me) been turned off by the shallow, pretentious, meaningless paintings and sculptures that litter our museums of modern art may have a different perspective after hearing what Turkle has to say. 
This is a psychoanalytical book, not a technical one. However, software developers and engineers will find it highly accessible because of the depth of the author's technical understanding and credibility. Unlike most other authors in this genre, Turkle does not constantly jar the technically-literate reader with blatant errors or bogus assertions about how things work. Although I personally don't have time or patience for MUDs,view most of AI as snake-oil, and abhor postmodern architecture, I thought the time spent reading this book was an extremely good investment.

스크린 위의 삶 = Life on the screen : identity in the age of the internet

Mobile communication is a key enabler for economic, social and political change in developing regions of the world. Today’s internet-enabled, multimedia, and touch-screen mobile smartphones could become the future platform for delivering information and communication technology (ICT) to these regions. We describe Picture Talk, a smartphone application framework designed to facilitate local information sharing in regions with sparse Internet connectivity, low literacy rates and having users with little prior experience with information technology. We argue that engaging citizens in developing regions in information creation and information sharing leverages peoples’ existing social networks to facilitate transmission of critical information, exchange of ideas, and distributed problem solving, all of which can promote economic development.

/pdf/a-picture-and-a-thousand-words-visual-scaffolding-for-mobile-2higiy3msg.pdf

A Picture and a Thousand Words: Visual Scaffolding for Mobile Communication in the Developing World *

In this position paper we summarize our efforts to design, implement, and deploy the infrastructure for conversationally-based knowledge communities We believe that managing knowledge or expertise really means providing an on-line workplace within which users can engage socially with one another, and, in the process, discover, develop, evolve, and explicate knowledge relevant to shared projects and goals Our basic approach is to design systems which, by making users and their activities visible to one another, can make ‘knowledge work’ visible, thus increasing its importance to coworkers and to the organization as a whole

Towards an Infrastructure for Knowledge Communities

Most software development tools focus on supporting the primary technical work -- writing code, managing requirements, filing bugs, etc. Yet with large teams, managing the social aspects of a project can be as complex as managing code. Here, we discuss the iterative design of a visualization that helps developers better understand the social aspects of their work.

Social visualization in software development

A design story about the design of a visualization for controllers who monitor IBM's controls process, provides the backdrop for reflections on the success of a participatory design process. The story illustrates that while the design process appears to lead to a successful general technical solution, the solution fairs less well when viewed from the perspectives of: support for evolving work practices, or support for the particular and contextual tasks of individuals. This leads us to reframe our participatory design process as the design and socialization of end-user programming tools.

Common & particular needs: a challenge to participatory design

For a given time period, for each pair of a plurality of participants in a meeting, it is determined whether a connection exists between members of the pair. For the given time period, for each pair of the participants for which a connection exists, a valence of the connection is determined; a social network is created, depicting the connections and their valences; and, based on the social network, at least one faction is identified within the plurality of participants in the meeting. The steps of determining the connections, determining the valences, creating the network, and identifying the at least one faction, are repeated for a plurality of additional time periods, to assess faction dynamics of the plurality of participants in the meeting.

Wendy A. Kellogg

Papers

A Picture and a Thousand Words: Visual Scaffolding for Mobile Communication in the Developing World *

Towards an Infrastructure for Knowledge Communities

Social visualization in software development

Common & particular needs: a challenge to participatory design

Group discourse architecture