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"Tech stakeholders and analysts generally believe the use of game mechanics, feedback loops, and rewards will become more embedded in daily life by 2020, but they are split about how widely the trend will extend. Some say the move to implement more game elements in networked communications will be mostly positive, aiding education, health, business, and training. Some warn it can take the form of invisible, insidious behavioral manipulation."
"The Global Civil Society Knowledgebase is an online database of the LSE Global Civil Society Programme's policy-oriented research expertise. It includes the content of nearly a decade of Global Civil Society Yearbooks, allowing academics, civil society practitioners, policymakers and journalists across the globe to quickly access a wealth of information on global civil society as an increasingly influential source of power and political influence in today's interconnected world."
FERN is a global community of foresight students, alumni, faculty, employers, and advocates of graduate foresight education, employment, and research.
"The Blackberry Project (formerly known as the Friendship Project) is an ongoing longitudinal study examining teen behavior and sociability, which first recruited its subjects in 2003 (starting with 281 third and fourth graders from 13 Dallas public schools) and relied on yearly laboratory and home observation and surveys for data collection. Then, in 2009, the subjects (now entering 8th grade) were provided with BlackBerry devices with unlimited text and data plans paid for by the investigators. The devices were configured so that the content of all text messages, e-mail messages, and instant messages was saved to a secure server to be mined by the researchers — over 500,000 messages a month are being archived. "
"In an increasingly knowledge-based economy, this push to position government-funded research as an engine of economic growth may seem logical. But there are innumerable problems with this commercialization strategy, beyond the reality that it is unclear how areas such as stem cell research and genetics will generate billions in profits."
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First, in addition to all the well-documented social issues associated with industry/researcher collaborations and commercialization pressure – biased results, reduced researcher collaborations, data withholding and the potential for the premature and possibly harmful application of technologies – the emphasis on economics will inevitably lead to more of the kind of hype and overly optimistic predictions described above. When research funding is conditional on the potential for economic growth and rapid translation, the research community will find ways to promise economic growth and rapid translation.
Second, as more and more of the publicly funded research community becomes associated with this commercialization agenda, it will become increasingly difficult to find truly independent voices to critique the hype and calibrate expectations. The best science is dispassionate, independent and objective. The promised pursuit of profits is one of the surest ways to erode these qualities.
Third, it will reduce public trust in the science and the scientific community. Our research team recently completed a survey of more than 1,200 Albertans. We found university researchers funded by government to be among the most trusted. But that trust erodes significantly when those same researchers receive funds from industry.
Finally, this strategy fails to recognize how science usually unfolds. It is very difficult to predict what research will be beneficial or commercially viable. This is especially so in areas as scientifically complex as genetics and stem cell research.
Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have received part of a planned $25 million grant from the DOE Office of Science to tackle the problem of extracting knowledge from massive data sets.
The work is part of the DOE’s newly established Scalable Data Management, Analysis, and Visualization (SDAV) Institute. Researchers in Argonne’s Mathematics and Computing Science division will receive a planned $3.4 million over five years for the research.
In fact, a new report notes that if you actually bothered to read all the privacy policies you encounter on a daily basis, it would take you 250 working hours per year -- or about 30 workdays.
ELSI = ethical, legal, and social implications
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Second, the ELSI framing explicitly focuses on the normative "problems" inherent in scientific and engineering research. This might lead STS scholars to ignore issues in science studies that are less laden with (socially-noteworthy) norms.
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Third, even if STS researchers want to do normative work, ELSI research seems to primarily involve participant-observation, such as attending conferences, conducting interviews, etc. These methods necessitate the continued participation of the the scientists and engineers doing the work. Thus, ELSI-type researchers may be more likely to pull their punches, else they anger or alienate their subjects.
"A central theme in much of my research and advocacy is ensuring attention to ethical values becomes an integral part of the conception, design, and development of information systems. Various frameworks have been developed to help pursue this goal (ie, value-sensitive design, values at play, critical technical practice), which can collectively be termed Values-In-Design (VID). Broadly, VID seeks to broaden the criteria for judging the quality of technological systems to include the advancement of moral and human values, and to proactively influence the design of technologies to account for such values during the conception and design process. VID has been a motivating factor in my research on vehicle safety communication technologies, Web search engine privacy practices, and book digitization projects, just to name a few examples, and my commitment to achieving VID has also lead to explorations of some of its challenges"
Pathways Through Graduate School and Into Careers examines the critical link between graduate education and preparation for careers. The findings and recommendations provide universities, employers and policymakers with concrete steps each sector can take, individually or in collaboration, to support the future success of the U.S. economy and society.
The Research Data Curation Bibliography includes selected English-language articles and technical reports that are useful in understanding the curation of digital research data in academic and other research institutions. For broader coverage of the digital curation literature, see the author's Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography 2010.
"If you’re a psychologist, the news has to make you a little nervous–particularly if you’re a psychologist who published an article in 2008 in any of these three journals: Psychological Science, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, or the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.
Because, if you did, someone is going to check your work. A group of researchers have already begun what they’ve dubbed the Reproducibility Project, which aims to replicate every study from those three journals for that one year. "
"Personal informatics is a class of tools that help people collect personally relevant information for the purpose of self-reflection and self-monitoring. These tools help people gain self-knowledge about one's behaviors, habits, and thoughts. It goes by other names such as living by numbers, personal analytics, quantified self, and self-tracking.
This site is a resource for all things related to personal informatics. "
"Today, I’d like to suggest that the traditional research library faces a similar challenge. The library collection is simply a bigger version of the encyclopedia: a seemingly exhaustive but actually (in the great majority of cases) very limited information portal that invites increasingly-skeptical customers to “start your research here.”"
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But in its fight to retain a strong position in the marketplace of researchers’ time and attention, I think the library’s most powerful weapon is the type of material we usually refer to as “special collections.” Patrons can get commercially-published books and articles from any number of sources, but if your library owns a truly unique document (like a daguerrotype portrait of a 19th-century actor, or the handwritten diary of a Mormon pioneer, or a typescript transcription of an oral history) then access to that document constitutes a genuinely unique value proposition. Historically, we in research libraries have tended to consign special collections to something of a ghetto—a benign and beloved one to be sure, but one that is somewhat outside the mainstream of everyday library services.
That has to change. Greg Silvis, of the University of Delaware library, put it very well when he argued recently that “the future of libraries will not be found in commodity (catalog) records for commodity books.” Serving as a broker for resources that exist in many different copies in multiple formats and that can be found easily through Amazon or iTunes and purchased at reasonable prices is not an area of growing opportunity for libraries. Where we offer real and unique value, value that separates us from the competition, is in those areas in which we have no competition.
"ne of the things that I like most about blogging and social media is the ability to share partially-formed ideas and open them to critique. As I stated in a previous post, I recently had a mild disappointment in enacting a research project. And it got me thinking about why important research is often not conducted because granting agencies are actually not horribly innovative. What is established as a clear trend may receive research dollars, but early stage ideas are often only able to access small pockets of funds."
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