Symbiosis

"Mutualism is a subset of symbiosis in which there exists between organisms a prolonged relationship that is interdependent and reciprocally beneficial. (...) In the case of the tree-fungi mutualism, the fungi siphon off carbon that has been produced in the form of glucose by the trees during photosynthesis, by means of chlorophyll that the fungi do not possess. In turn, the trees obtain nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen that the fungi have acquired from the soil through which they grow, by means of enzymes that the trees lack. (...) the fungal network also allows plants to distribute resources between trees in a forest: a dying tree might divest its resources into the network to the benefit of the community, for example, or a struggling tree might be supported with extra resources by its neighbours. (...) the network also allows plants to send immune-signalling compounds to one another." Robert MacFarlane, 2019. Underland: a deep time journey. Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC).

February

 

"Living wood, left long enough, behaves as a slow-moving fluid." Robert MacFarlane, 2019. Underland: a deep time journey. Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC).

December

"We create space - our holistic ’view of the world’ - to manage awareness, relate and contrast our embodied information. Perceived space and the space of cognition differ as to whether the space is built from our senses or our memory. The same portion of the brain processes both imagined spaces and those taken in through our eyes.’ Both spaces are the product of mental and bodily interaction. Their construction is conditioned by our age, our culture, and the social world we live in. It is astonishing that we can find consistency in such a relativistic understanding of space. Yet these consistencies ground our selves, our social conventions and the structures and cities that house them." Anders, Peter (2001). Domains of Body and Mind. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, Vol. 7(2), pp. 90-101. Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC).

September

"If restoration is not possible for a disturbed ecosystem in an irreversibly changed environment, then rewilding is the adaptive tactic for regaining and maintaining functionality, perhaps with introduced components. (...) the rise of the rewilding concept is a sign that new approaches are urgently needed to conserve biodiversity and maintain ecosystem services under increasingly unpredictable global conditions, as traditional approaches on their own are demonstrably unfit for the challenges ahead." in Rewilding needs a conceptual framework. Is the adaptive cycle the answer? Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC).

Stillness in a mobile world

Stillness:"an ethical choice between stillness as first aid for an overactive world, and stillness as a real slowing down". Bissell, David, and Gillian Fuller (2013). Stillness in a mobile world. London New York: Routledge. Image by Monica Pinheiro, license CC BY-NC-SA (CC)

On TheBrain page they say: "With PersonalBrain you're never more than a few seconds away from any piece of digital information. Web pages, documents, images, notes... From people and projects to ideas and task lists, it's all there in an instant." What are the assumptions behind this declaration?

1. You always have with you the hardware needed for access;
2. You have the software installed in all the hardware you carry with you, when you need to access;
3. You always have internet access, to use the software installed in all the hardware you have with you, when you need to access; 
4. You will have time to edit all your pieces of digital information with «PersonalBrain» and send always the last version of that «brain» to all the hardware gadgets you use when you need to access it;
5. You will never run out of battery/energy when you need to access!

Even without discussing and going into «Knowledge Management Software» (*), there's a lot of «layers» one needs to have in order to use that metaphoric «digital brain». With paper mind maps, even a paper restaurant towel or napkin will do. This to say, like many other surrogate IT tools we find, sometimes the number of layers needed for using them, make them far more expensive and time consuming, then their counter more traditional tools.

Forgot to mention, I'm a user of mind maps. Read about radial thinking (Buzan & Buzan), started mind mapping in 1999, using paper, pen and colors, and around 2002 also started using software. In 2005 even gave workshops for people interested in mind maps in my working place. So I guess I can be considered a fan of mind maps. The immediacy you get with paper and pen is not substituted with digital equivalent canvas for mind mapping. But the ease you get when in need of changes and the added value of incorporating digital files and links, it's very easy to do. Any how, they complement but do not substitute each other.

(*) Mind maps, either paper and pencil or digital, are «tools» to help us visualize our ideias and connect them. They try to mirror the way our brains organize information, in what's is called radial thinking. Mind maps and concept maps are not the same thing. Mind maps are organized in branches, like a tree. Concept maps, do not follow a tree structure to organize information, but instead show connections between concepts. The effort you put into constructing them, according to your personal knowledge, is what makes them so powerful  to visualize all the connections in what can be just a page! But you'll have to do it, or else you'll have just a catalog or reference work that you still do not know what's inside. 

EIF for EU

European Interoperability Framework for European Public Services (2010). In the annex of the report, they define interoperability as "(...) the ability of disparate and diverse organisations to interact towards mutually beneficial and agreed common goals, involving the sharing of information and knowledge between the organisations, through the business processes they support, by means of the exchange of data between their respective ICT systems."


Further ahead in the report, a reference to paper and face-to-face in the multichannel mix, caught my attention: "Inclusion and accessibility usually involve multichannel delivery. Traditional paper-based or face-to-face service delivery may need to co-exist with electronic delivery, giving citizens a choice of access."

Distance (still) matters!

Olson, Gary M. and Olson, Judith S.(2000). Distance Matters. Human-Computer Interaction, vol. 15(2), pp.139-178.

Contradicting the idea that «Distance is Dead», and supporting with substantive theory in their study, Olson and Olson (2000) clearly show that technological mediated interactions will not completely substitute presence and co-located interactions, even with sophisticated technological use for work: "Distance is not only alive and well, it is in several essential respect immortal" ["(...) synthesized into four key concepts: common ground, coupling of work, collaboration readiness, and collaboration technology readiness"]

Generability in positivism and interpretivism

Como as questões da generalização continuam na ordem do dia (à mais de 100 anos!), esta entrada pode ser útil para mais pessoas dos sistemas de informação (SI), ou não ;)

Lee, A. S. and Baskerville, R. L. (2003). Generalizing generalizability in information systems research. Information Systems Research, 14(3), pp. 221-243:

"Although Yin’s case research method is considered to be positivist, his concept of analytical generalization has received attention and approval from a prominent interpretive IS researcher,Walsham (1995b). Walsham accepts Yin’s notion of generalizing to theory and extends it to four types of generalization. Walsham explains (pp. 70–80) that, beginning with the facts or the rich description of a case, the researcher can generalize to concepts, to a theory, to specific implications, or to rich insight. All four of Walsham’s examples involve generalizing from empirical statements (reflecting the observations made in a case study) to theoretical statements (concepts, theory ,specific implications,and rich insight).

Klein and Myers (1999) also recognize the process of generalizing from empirical statements to theoretical statements. Whereas they acknowledge that “interpretive research values the documentation of unique circumstances,” they also emphasize, “it is important that theoretical abstractions and generalizations should be carefully related to the case study details as they were experienced and/or collected by the researcher” They add: “The key point here is that theory plays a crucial role in interpretive research,and clearly distinguishes it from just anecdotes” (p. 75). For them,generalizing from idiographic details to theory is so important that they elevate it to one of their seven principles for assessing interpretive field work: The principle of abstraction and generalization." (p. 234)

Yin, R. K. (2009). Case Study Research: Design and Methods (Applied Social Research Methods). Sage Publications, Inc, 4th edition.

Klein, H. K. and Myers, M. D. (1999). A set of principles for conducting and evaluating interpretive field studies in information systems. MIS Quarterly, 23(1), pp.67-93.

Eisenhardt, K. M. (1989). Building theories from case study research. The Academy of Management Review, 14(4), pp.532-550.

Walsham, G. (2006). Doing interpretive research. European Journal of Information Systems, 15(3), pp.320-330. [have no full access to the mentioned paper of Walsham, but this 2006 paper, by the same author, expands on the 1995 paper mentioned above]

semantics to pragmatics

Olsen et al (1998). Full Text Searching and Information Overload. The International Information & Library Review, vol. 30(2), pp. 105-122:

"While the tools for writing, storing, disseminating and retrieving documents have undergone a revolution in the last few decades, reading is still a very slow process. For practical reasons, we are forced to determine a working set size, i.e., the number of documents that we can handle."

(...) 

"By combining metadata and subject terms in a vector-based information space, visualization may give us the opportunity to handle larger document collections and to help the user to find the documents that are most likely to satisfy an information need defined on a pragmatic level."

faraway nearness

"Two virtual places may be "separated" by only a keystroke, but their inhabitants will never meet." Kenneth J. Gergen (2000). Technology, Self and the Moral Project. in Identity and Social Change.

transdisciplinarity is about transgressing boundaries

Helga Nowotny (2009), The Potencial of Transdisciplinarity:

"Here I want to assert that knowledge, as well as expertise, is inherently transgressive. Nobody has anywhere succeeded for very long in containing knowledge. Knowledge seeps through institutions and structures like water through the pores of a membrane. Knowledge seeps in both directions, from science to society as well as from society to science. It seeps through institutions and from academia to and from the outside world. Transdisciplinarity is therefore about transgressing boundaries. Institutions still exist and have a function. Disciplines still exist and new ones arise continuously from interdisciplinary work."

Inforgs for The Edge Informavore

Food for though: discussions on The Edge have the transcript of a talk with Frank Schirrmacher, The Age of the Informavore ["The term informavore characterizes an organism that consumes information. It is meant to be a description of human behavior in modern information society, in comparison to omnivore, as a description of humans consuming food."], and short note to bring Luciano Floridi Inforgs to The Edge discussion.

Luciano Floridi (2009). The Philosophy of Information, its Nature and Future Developments. Special issue of The Information Society, dedicated to "The Philosophy of Information, its Nature and Future Developments", vol. 25(3):

"We become mass-produced, anonymous entities among other anonymous entities, exposed to billions of other similar inforgs online. So we self-brand and re-appropriate ourselves in cyberspace by blogs and facebook entries, homepages, youtube videos, and flickr albums. We use and expose information about ourselves to become less informationally indiscernible."

Inforg, connected informational organisms. Detailed explanation in Floridi, L. (2007), "A Look into the Future Impact of Ict on Our Lives", The Information Society, vol. 23(1), pp. 59-64.

"The most obvious way in which the new ICTs are re-ontologizing the infosphere concerns (a) the transition from analogue to digital data and then (b) the ever-increasing growth of our digital space."

"(...) a quieter, less sensational and yet crucial and profound change in our conception of what it means to be an agent. We are all becoming connected informational organisms (inforgs). This is happening not through some fanciful transformation in our body, but, more seriously and realistically, through the re-ontologization of our environment and of ourselves."

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Would like very much to connect to Leonor's thoughts about PI and listen to her reflections about it. Are you there?...

technologies as cultural artefacts

Cornford, Tony (2003) Information systems and new technologies: Taking shape in use. In: Avgerou, Chrisanthi and La Rovere, Renata Lèbre, (eds.) Information systems and the economics of innovation, pp. 162-177.

Woolgar, Steve (1996). Technologies as Cultural Artefacts. In Dutton, William and Peltu, H. Malcolm, (eds.) Information and communication technologies, pp. 87-102.

mobility concept

Kakihara, M. and Sørensen, C. (2001). Expanding the 'mobility' concept. SIGGROUP Bull. 22, 3 (Dec. 2001), pp. 33-37:

"The train and airline infrastructures are highly integrated with ICTs such as electronic reservation systems and traffic control systems. It is therefore important to recognize that the fundamental nature of technological revolution in the late twentieth century is the dynamic and complex interplay between old and new technologies and between the reconfiguration of the technological fabric and its domestication (...).This paper concerns the concept of mobility, which manifests such a transformation of our social lives combining new and old technologies. It is now widely argued that our life styles have become increasingly mobile in the sense that the speed of transportation and hence geographical reach within a given time span is dramatically augmented by modern technological developments and sophistication such as train and airplane systems."

mobile professional work

Kakihara, M. & C. Sørensen (2004). Practicing Mobile Professional Work: Tales of Locational, Operational, and Interactional Mobility. INFO: The Journal of Policy, Regulation and Strategy for Telecommunication, Information and Media, vol. 6(3), pp: 180-187:

"The results of the fieldwork in Tokyo clearly demonstrate that the conventional understanding of mobility, rigidly confined to geographic aspects, does not suffice for grasping the diverse realities of dynamic work practices of contemporary professional workers, in particular mobile professionals. Their work practices exhibit not only an extensive geographical movement in daily work activities but also intense interaction with a wide range of people through both physical and virtual interaction means. They also show flexible operation as an independent unit of business that can be flexibly mobilized by the firms."

Ver tabela 2, página 7. Não tenho acesso à revista. O artigo que aqui disponibilizo faz parte dos arquivos do author.

emerging work practices of mobile professionals

Masao Kakihara (2003). Emerging Work Practices of ICT-Enabled Mobile Professionals. PhD thesis submited to the Department of Information Systems, London School of Economics and Political Science, University of London.

"This thesis aims to offer a theoretical foundation for the concept of mobility, particularly in contemporary work contexts. With support of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in general and mobile technology in particular, contemporary work activities are increasingly distributed and dynamically conducted in various locations. In such an emerging work environment, maintaining a highly level of ‘mobility’ is becoming critical for contemporary workers, particularly for mobile professionals. Based on the theoretical considerations on the concept of mobility, this thesis empirically explores the dynamic and heterogeneous nature of mobile professionals’ work practices.

(...)

The mode of mobility is characterised not only by extensive geographical movement but also by operational flexibility and intense interaction in mobile professionals’ dynamic work activities. Based on these theoretical and empirical discussions, this thesis aims: 1) to theoretically underpin our understanding of mobility in contemporary work contexts; 2) to offer empirically grounded implications for the post-bureaucratic, fluid organising of work; and finally 3) to advance the ongoing debate on the dynamic interplay of work, organisation, and technology."

Context of Work

Kirsh, D. (2001). The Context of Work. Human Computer Interaction, vol. 16, pp. 305-322 [versão html / falta arranjar versão pdf c/ numeração de páginas]:

"I have been describing the context of work as a highly structured amalgam of informational, physical, and conceptual resources that go beyond the simple facts of who or what is where, when. Some of these resources are shared knowledge between participants, others have to do with the structure of the tasks a user is involved in and the different ways he or she has of coordinating the use of physical, informational and conceptual resources between himself, the work setting, and teammates."

"First, we must understand the factors which bias how people react to rich information spaces, loaded with entry points to more information. Second, we must unravel the complexities of the activity landscapes we interactively construct out of the resources we find and the tasks we have to perform. Finally, we must chart the diverse ways people coordinate their activity with their environment and with others."

mobile worker

Perry, M., O'hara, K., Sellen, A., Brown, B., and Harper, R. (2001). Dealing with mobility: understanding access anytime, anywhere. ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact. 8(4), pp. 323-347:

"The rapid and accelerating move towards use of mobile technologies has increasingly provided people and organizations with the ability to work away from the office and on the move. The new ways of working afforded by these technologies are often characterized in terms of access to information and people anytime, anywhere. This article presents a study of mobile workers that highlights different facets of access to remote people and information, and different facets of anytime, anywhere. Four key factors in mobile work are identified: the role of planning, working in "dead time," accessing remote technological and informational resources, and monitoring the activities of remote colleagues. By reflecting on these issues, we can better understand the role of technology and artifacts in mobile work and identify the opportunities for the development of appropriate technological solutions to support mobile workers." [my bold]

They also talk about facets... connect with entry on facets.

Thoughts on Mobility

Falamos em objectos de mobilidade, mas quem move os objectos somos nós, as pessoas. Estes objectos de mobilidade (telefones móveis, computadores móveis, etc.) não são de facto móveis. A mobilidade de que se falava em séculos anteriores, correspondia a objectos de mobilidade, como os transportes (barcos, combóios, carros, aviões, foguetões, etc). Nesses objectos as pessoas eram transportadas, deslocadas, mobilizadas para outros locais. Nos actuais objectos que qualificamos de «móveis», somos nós que os deslocamos para lhes dar a mobilidade.

Para que os nossos telefones nos possam acompanhar e nós os possamos adjectivar de «móveis», outras infraestruturas (bem) fixas, têm que existir para nos permitir «dar mobilidade» aos nossos objectos móveis: antenas, amplificadores de sinal,....

É tão óbvio, que se torna ausente do utilizador comum. O enfoque na mobilidade humana , torna-se o ponto central do olhar. Nós somos a mobilidade.

This thoughts came stumbling after reading in a different kind of journal. One that makes use of multimedia in such a different way to present a line of thought, that my mind was receiving so many stimulus that it was hard to process all the signals i was being bombarded with:

• Vectors Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular. See also pdf with static information about WiFi.Bedouin, by Julian Bleecker. To luch the project, look for the «Launch Project» on the right side of this page.