Tag: technology
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Our Reluctance to Trust Driving Computers
The advanced radar systems that are slowly making their way into modern cars are already advanced enough to drive our cars for us and save thousands of lives a year, says Robert Scoble as he discusses the safety systems currently available in Ford and Toyota models. The features Scoble describes (and Ford’s Global Chief Safety…
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Behavioural Game Design and the Manipulation of Fun
Over the last twenty or thirty years gaming has changed almost beyond recognition. With the simultaneous growth in behavioural psychology the two fields have collided, as summarised by Microsoft games researcher John Hopson in his look at behavioural game design. Cracked summarises the article well (if not a tad sensationalised) as Five ways video games…
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Licensing and Patents for Green Technology and Drugs
The Seed Magazine ‘panel’ (who?) was asked How can intellectual property be adapted to spread green tech? Their short answer starts by looking at drug licensing (the last sentence is quite shocking): By World Trade Organization law, if a patented drug can improve public health in a developing country, it’s available for compulsory licensing. That…
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Things Every Programmer Should Know (Languages)
As part of a continuing series*, O’Reilly requested “pearls of wisdom for programmers” from leading practitioners of the craft, publishing the responses. The end result is the O’Reilly Commons wiki, 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know. The contributions that appear in the final, published book are freely available as are sixty-eight further contributions that didn’t…
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Conversational Mannerisms of Geeks
I always put up a mental barrier when reading articles such as this as I am of the opinion that it is difficult to successfully produce generalities about a subset of people unless you are quite intimate with their idiosyncrasies. Philip Guo overcame this barrier in his article looking at the conversational behaviours of “geeks,…
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The Humble, Essential and Safe Elevator
Stuck in an express elevator around the 13th floor of the McGraw-Hill office in New York for 41 hours, Nicholas White’s story should be somewhat fear-provoking. Intersperse with information on the importance of elevators in modern cities, a profile of elevator consultant James Fortune and a discussion on the psychology of elevators, the article somehow…
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Anti-Patterns
I’ve written about design patterns a couple of times in the past, but today I discovered anti-patterns: design patterns that “may be commonly used but [are] ineffective and/or counterproductive in practice”. One of the “key elements present to formally distinguish an actual anti-pattern from a simple bad habit, bad practice, or bad idea”: Some repeated…
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Resources on the Psychology of Security and Risk
Professor of Security Engineering at the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, Ross Anderson, has compiled a comprehensive resource page on the psychology of risk and security. The resources themselves are divided into seven section, to wit: Introductory Papers Deception Security and Usability Social Attitudes to Risk Behavioural Economics of Security Miscellaneous Papers Other (Conferences, Websites/Blogs,…
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Elderly Becoming Redundant
If the elderly are mostly recognised and valued for their accumulated knowledge and skills (a contentious assumption in itself, granted), then technological advances are gradually making the older generations redundant, suggests Philip Greenspun. Let’s start by considering factual knowledge. An old person will know more than a young person, but can any person, young or…