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India: Academic Crocodile |
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Tuesday, 08 July 2008 |
If your blogroll doesn't include Indian scholars and academics now,
wait a few years and play catch-up because as the Indian proverb says:
"If you are going to live by the river, make friends with the
crocodile". India is serving notice to the global academic community of
a new dawn in global power and presense. Don't get eaten. Make friends.
India is the fastest growing region of Internet use in the world. During the first half of 2008 India's internet use grew by 27% with over 28 million current users. It is often ignored
by those academics claiming undue western industrialized influence over
the Internet that Asia long ago surpassed North America and Europe in
Internet use. Despite the fact that Asia only enjoys 14%
population penetration of Internet this translates to a massive 38% of
global internet usage (compared to 17.5% in North America and 27% in
Europe) and can only grow from here. This is the reality of the real
global Internet. The idea of the west managing or exploiting the
Internet for neo-colonial means will be a distant memory in a few years.
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Shootout at the Blogger Corral |
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Thursday, 01 May 2008 |
Academics still on the sidelines of the web 2.0 and blogging revolution can learn a thing or two from a recent study on penalty kicks by a group of Israeli economists. Are we blogging (or not) for fear of looking foolish?
There are few moments so loaded with tension in the sporting world as a penalty kick to decide the outcome of a football match. The singular sound of the hushed crowd, the moment when eyes meet in cold embrace between shooter and keeper and finally the outcome inciting rapture or despair.
Turns out that according to recent academic research the key to stopping a penalty kick lies in simple economic psychology. Most goalkeepers move left or right before the ball is kicked but a study on the distribution of 286 penalty kicks indicates the best choice is to remain still in the middle of the goal.
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Velcro Cocktails in the Love Lab |
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Friday, 11 January 2008 |
In the academic world nothing quite says old school (unless you include a winking 40-something prof saying "old skool") like a bottle-juggling, ball-cap grinning Tom Cruise scientist studying and measuring human nature and subjects from behind a two-way mirror.
Cue a postmodern video collage of grainy black and whites with scientists sizing up monkey heads, issuing fake electric shocks and entering 'dreamscapes'?
Not so fast all you baffled dehumanized conformists and nihilists. Fittingly for John Gottman his 21st century "Cocktails and Dreams" is to be the psychological equivalent of "the guy who invented Velcro. Nobody remembers his name but everybody uses Velcro." Preparing to write a glib statement about how funnily enough it's been 10 years since anyone actually used Velcro, Blogscholar packed away his laptop, wrapped the cord and tied it off using, er, Velcro.
Gottman, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Washington, may be on to something that could inspire wholesale changes in how we study and research the networks and interactions of the social web online. Malcolm Gladwell brought Gottman's work into the mainstream in "Blink" by writing of his amazing knack for judging whether or not married couples will split up simply by viewing video footage of them in heated conversation.
Other marital experts and analysts were given exactly the same information but were overwhelmed by the sheer volume of data and video evidence to be processed. Relativism might suggest that there are too many factors at play to make any reliable assumptions about specific relationships on the basis of video evidence alone. But Gottman, trained as a mathematician, is successful an astonishing 87% of the time in predicting cross-culturally which newlywed couples will remain married and which will divorce four to six years later.
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Wherefore art thou R3579X? |
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Thursday, 11 October 2007 |
As the 2007/08 academic year gets into full flow here is a round-up of some interesting new media projects. Students at Pitzer College join community members in Claremont, CA in a practice-based media studies class " Learning from You Tube". The course, called a "pedagogic experiment focusing on the potentials and limits of digital media culture" encourages the public to watch the class or participate. Learning from You Tube lecturer Alexandra Juhatz is another of the growing number of academics using the Future of the Book facility to create drafts of a new texts. Add your comments to her project on the media commons.
" Wherefore Art Thou R3579X?" out of Cornell University won the award for best paper at the 16th International World Wide Web Conference for providing evidence that there is no anonymity or privacy in social networks even if you never provide any explicit information identifying yourself. While 37% of Internet users are in Asia social networking sites scramble to establish identities in China where sites like Xiaonei dominate. Meanwhile the jury for the Deutche Welle sponsored International Weblog Awards has the daunting task of wading through 7000 nominees nicely presented on their interactive map. But the clusters in predictable regional areas remain. And finally the next time you get annoyed by a failing internet connection or software malfunction consider needing to dress up like a tourist in your own country, speak German and spend two weeks wages just to get a posting up on your blog.
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