• What if there were a way to use the internet – and all our web-connected phones and tablets and laptops and games consoles – to foster rather than erode our attention spans, and to replace that sense of edgy distractedness with calm?
• This is the question motivating the embryonic movement known variously as "calming technology", "the slow web", "conscious computing" or (Pang's preferred term) "contemplative computing".

• 007, when Linda Stone, a Silicon Valley executive with 16 years' experience at Microsoft and Apple, followed her doctor's advice to take a course in Buteyko breathing, a Russian technique used to treat asthma and stress. The day afterwards, sitting down at her computer to check her email, she noticed – now that the topic of breathing was on her mind – that she was holding her breath.

  Over the following days, she realised it was a habit; later, after conducting a research project involving more than 200 people, she estimated that around 80% of us unconsciously do the same. (She labelled the condition "email apnea", though it's no less common during other forms of web use.) Breath-holding, not surprisingly, deprives the body of oxygen, seems to exacerbate the "fight-or-flight" response and contributes, as Stone puts it, to "a sense of being in high alert at all times".
• distraction and interruption is immensely profitable
• he real way to build a successful online business is to be better than your rivals at undermining people's control of their own attention
• igher-minded publications (including this one) feel the same pressures. "We're living in a moment when even institutions that used to be in the business of promoting reflection and deep thinking are busy tearing up the foundations that made these things possible, in favour of getting more traffic," says Pang, whose book on "contemplative computing", The Distraction Addiction
• Skinner discovered that the most powerful way to reinforce the push-or-peck habit was to use "variable schedules of reward": to deliver a pellet not every time the lever was pushed, but only sometimes, and unpredictably.
• here's a slightly depressing view of the web according to which we're essentially just Skinner pigeons, compulsively clicking in hopes of a squirt of dopamine, the so-called "feelgood" hormone in the brain. Once you've learned about Skinner, it's impossible not to see variable schedules of reward everywhere you look online
• Cowpocalypse
• vicious Skinnerian cycle that conscious computing seeks to break
• I'm embarrassed to report that I found myself doing what's referred to, in Pang's book, as "paper-tweeting": scribbling supposedly witty wisecracks in a notebook as a substitute for the urge to share them online
• By far the biggest obstacle to my experiment was the fact that the web and email are simultaneously sources of distraction and a vital tool: it's no use blocking the internet to work when you need the internet for work. Still, the overall result was more calmness and a clear sense that I'd gained purchase on my own mind: I was using it more than it was using me. I could jump online to look something up and then – this is the crucial bit – jump off again. After a few 90-minute stretches of weblessness, for example, I found myself not itching to get back online, but bored by the prospect. I started engaging in highly atypical behaviours, such as going for a walk, instead.

• "One of the devices that has historically drawn the most criticism from scholars and theologians for its corrupting effect on humanity seems to have worked out pretty well," the commentator Mathew Ingram wrote at the technology site GigaOM. "It's called the book. If we can figure that out, I'm sure we can figure out how to handle cellphones and status updates."

  According to the advocates of conscious computing, though, none of this quite gets at the point. We can all agree that Facebook and smartphones aren't the first ever examples of "cognitive entanglement", Pang's term for the way we use technology as extensions of our own minds. Writing things in a notebook is entanglement; so is using a library or a landline or sending a postcard or a smoke signal. "Entanglement is nothing new or revolutionary," Pang writes. "It's what makes us human." The problem is not that we've suddenly started depending on technology, but that the technology we're depending on is poorly designed, too often focused on making money for its creators at its users' expense. Undoubtedly, we'll one day figure out how to handle cellphones and status updates without the accompanying distraction and compulsion. But that doesn't mean the distraction and compulsion aren't a problem right now – or that it might not be wise to find ways of adapting more rapidly.
• "To be diverted isn't simply to have too many stimuli but to be confused about what to attend to and why," Young writes. "Distraction is the very opposite of emancipation: failing to see what is worthwhile in life, and lacking the wherewithal to seek it." To recover from techno-distraction, "what's required is not Luddite extremism but a more ambitious relationship to our tools – one that promotes our liberty instead of weakening it."

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• s. Most people lack attentional techniques and information-handling tools to deal masterfully with the information-processing demands of an always-on society -- because we've never been given the opportunity to learn these techniques and tools systematically, within a conceptual framework that makes sense today.

  • so what is that framework?
• task environments;
• seeing the bigger picture of what our existing requirements are (in terms of sorting and filtering information) and how to assert control and gain mastery of our own information retrieval and filtration
• Infotention -- a combination of attentional discipline and information-handling tools -- is a method for turning information overload into knowledge navigation.
• models and methods that they can then adapt to their own needs approaches and platforms
• methodology of infotention -- a means of training your attention to make the best use of your time and online resources -- and uses audio, video, slides, whiteboard, and text-chat to demonstrate how to create and use information dashboards, radars, and filters.
• mindful micro-decision-making and establishing personal attention habits
• constructing information radars and arranging them on knowledge dashboards, learners match their attentional tactics with the visual layout of the dashboard.
• oordinate and synchronize the spatial arrangement of tabs and feeds with their infotention strategy.
• Gain the ability to quickly create radars, scan dashboards, pinpoint key information, and begin refining raw data into actionable knowledge.

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• 3. Keep A To Done List: Most people write “to do lists” that are never ending.  As soon as you tick off completed tasks, you add new ones.    I keep a “to done reflection” list that allows me to see what I’ve accomplished and reflect on it, not bury myself in busyness.

• I’m not opposed to using technologies to support us in reclaiming our attention. But I prefer passive, ambient, non-invasive technologies over parental ones.
• a display engages us in a playful way and our body implicitly learns to shift to use less gas.
• our ultimate opportunity is to evolve our relationship with personal technologies.

• Our tyrannical minds conspire with enabling technologies and our bodies do their best to hang on for the wild ride.

   

   

  With technologies like Freedom, we re-assign the role of tyrant to the technology. The technology dictates to the mind. The mind dictates to the body. Meanwhile, the body that senses and feels, that turns out to offer more wisdom than the finest mind could even imagine, is ignored.
• Optimal breathing contributes to regulating our autonomic nervous system and it’s in this regulated state that our cognition and memory, social and emotional intelligence, and even innovative thinking can be fuele
• Conscious Computing. It’s post-productivity, post-communication era computing. Personal technologies that enhance our lives.

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• Personal knowledge management (PKM) is a collection of processes that a person uses to gather, classify, store, search, retrieve, and share knowledge in his or her daily activities (Grundspenkis 2007) and the way in which these processes support work activities (Wright 2005). It is a response to the idea that knowledge workers increasingly need to be responsible for their own growth and learning. (Smedley 2009) It is a bottom-up approach to knowledge management (KM), as opposed to more traditional, top-down KM. (Pollard 2008)
• t is not clear whether PKM is anything more than a new wrapper around personal information management (PIM). William Jones argues that only personal information as tangible resource can be managed, whereas personal knowledge cannot.^[1] Dave Snowden has asserted that most individuals cannot manage their knowledge in the traditional sense of "managing" and has advocated thinking in terms of sensemaking rather than PKM (Snowden & Pauleen 2008). Knowledge is not solely an individual product - that it emerges through connections, dialog and social interaction (see Sociology of knowledge). However, in Wright’s model, PKM involves the application to problem solving of analytical, information, social, and learning dimensions, which are interrelated (Wright 2007), and so is inherently social.
• equation of PKM with technology has limited the value and utility of the concept (e.g., (Pollard 2008)(Snowden & Pauleen 2008)).

• Skills associated with personal knowledge management.

   
   
  • Reflection. Continuous improvement on how the individual operates.
   
  • Manage learning. Manage how and when the individual learns.
   
  • Information literacy. Understanding what information is important and how to find unknown information.
   
  • Organizational skills. Personal librarianship. Personal categorization and taxonomies.
   
  • Networking with others. Knowing what your network of people knows. Knowing who might have additional knowledge and resources to help you
   
  • Researching, canvassing, paying attention, interviewing and observational 'cultural anthropology' skills
   
  • Communication skills. Perception, intuition, expression, visualization, and interpretation.
   
  • Creative skills. Imagination, pattern recognition, appreciation, innovation, inference. Understanding of complex adaptive systems.
   
  • Collaboration skills. Coordination, synchronization, experimentation, cooperation, and design.
• nowledge harvesting
• Content management tools -
• Other useful tools include Open Space Technology, cultural anthropology, stories and narrative, mindmaps, concept maps and eco-language, and single frames and similar visualization techniques. Individuals use these tools to capture ideas, expertise, experience, opinions, or thoughts, and this 'voicing' will encourage cognitive diversity and promote free exchanges away from a centralized policed knowledge repository. The goal is to facilitate knowledge sharing and personal content management.
• • Razmerita, L.; Kirchner, K.; Sudzina, F. (2009), Personal Knowledge Management: The Role of Web 2.0 tools for managing knowledge at individual and organisational levels, Online Information Review 33 (6): 1021–1039, doi:10.1108/14684520911010981. 
   
  • Pauleen, David (2009), Personal knowledge management: putting the 'person' back into the knowledge equation, Online Information Review 33 (2): 221–224, doi:10.1108/14684520910951177. 
   
  • Smedley, Jo (2009), Modelling personal knowledge management, OR Insight 22 (4): 221–233, doi:10.1057/ori.2009.11.

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• Principles of Attention Stress is a user interface design theory to measure the amount of attention that is required to perform certain tasks in a web application. It is developed by Antradar Software in an attempt to benchmark the easy of use of open source CMS products and to monitor the trend of UI designs.

   

  The Attention Stress theory is based on many psychological observations, of which the two most important ones are:

   
   
  • attention shift
   
  • selection threshold

• adaptive hypermedia (AH) tailors what the user sees to a model of the user's goals, preferences and knowledge.^[1] Adaptive hypermedia is the answer to the "lost in hyperspace" problem, where the user normally has too many links to choose from, and little knowledge about how to proceed and select the most appropriate ones to him/her. Adaptive hypermedia thus offers a selection of links or content most appropriate to the current user.
• hree criteria: it should be a hypertext or hypermedia system, it should have a user model and it should be able to adapt the hypermedia using the model.^[2]
• he conceptual structure for adaptive systems generally consists out of three models; the user model, the domain model and the interaction model

• User model[edit]

   

  The term in this context means a representation of the knowledge and preferences which the system ‘believes’ a user (which may be an individual, a group of people or non-human agents) possesses
• nteraction model are capturing the appropriate raw data and representing the inferences, adaptations and evaluations which may occur.

• The six kinds of hypermedia systems[edit]

   
   
  • educational hypermedia
   
  • on-line information systems
   
  • on-line help systems
   
  • information retrieval hypermedia systems
   
  • institutional information systems
   
  • systems for managing personalized views.^[2]
• We distinguish content-level and link-level adaptation as two different classes of hypermedia adaptation and call the first one adaptive presentation and the second one adaptive navigation support.^[2]
• Conditional text - with this technique, all possible information about a concept is divided into several chunks of texts.

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• The Attentive User Interfaces (AUI) are User Interfaces that manage the user attention. For instance an AUI can manage notification (Horvitz et al. 2003), deciding when to interrupt the user, the kind of warnings, and the level of detail of the messages presented to the user. Attentive User Interfaces, by generating only the relevant information, can in particular be used to display information in a way that increase the effectiveness of the interaction (Huberman & Wu 2008).

   

  According to Vertegaal, there are four main types of Attentive User Interfaces (Vertegaal 2003)(Vertegaal et al. 2006).:

   
   
  • Visual attention
   
  • Turn management
   
  • Interruption decision interfaces
   
  • Visual detail management interfaces

• models have been elaborated for supporting attention (Davenport,Beck 2001)(Roda & Nabeth 2008).

• Tools can been designed for supporting attention

   
   
  • at the organizational level, by supporting organization processes (Apostolou, Karapiperis & Stojanovic 2008)
   
  • at the collective level
   
  • at the individual level, for instance using attentive user interfaces (Vertegaal 2003) (Vertegaal et al. 2006) (Huberman & Wu 2008).
   
  • at the individual level by helping people to assess and analyze their attention related practices (for instance with the tool AttentionScape (Davenport,Beck 2001)).
   
   

  These tools are often adaptive hypermedia, and often rely on profiling the user (Nabeth 2008) in order determine how to better support people's attention.
• • SAKE – Semantic-enabled Agile Knowledge-based eGovernment (IST 027128)
   
  • SUITOR (Maglio et al. 2000)
• augmented attention

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• Management of the list can take over from implementing it.
• To remain flexible, a task system must allow for disaster.

  • um, how?
• To avoid getting stuck in a wasteful pattern, the task system should also include regular (monthly, semi-annual, and annual) planning and system-evaluation sessions,
• achieving long-range goals, the individual may get stuck in a perpetual holding pattern on short-term plans
• "30% of listers spend more time managing their lists than [they do] completing what's on them"
• "tyranny of the to-do list" that forces one to "waste time on unimportant activities"

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• Time management has been considered to be a subset of different concepts such as:

   
   
  • Project management. Time Management can be considered to be a project management subset and is more commonly known as project planning and project scheduling. Time Management has also been identified as one of the core functions identified in project management.^[1]
   
  • Attention management: Attention Management relates to the management of cognitive resources, and in particular the time that humans allocate their mind (and organize the minds of their employees) to conduct some activities.
   
  • Personal knowledge management: see below (Personal time management).
• ravitational goals"
• • A – Tasks that are perceived as being urgent and important,
   
  • B – Tasks that are important but not urgent,
   
  • C – Tasks that are neither urgent nor important. (This list could also include tasks that are urgent but not important.)

  • to whom?

• "Eisenhower Decision Matrix"^[8]). Tasks are then handled thusly: those in...

   
   
  1. Important/Urgent quadrants are done immediately and personally^[9] (e.g., crises, deadlines, problems^[8])
   
  2. Important/Not Urgent quadrants get an end date and are done personally^[9] (e.g.,. relationships, planning, recreation^[8])
   
  3. Unimportant/Urgent quadrants are delegated^[9] (e.g., interruptions, meetings, activities^[8])
   
  4. Unimportant/Not Urgent quadrants are dropped^[9] (e.g., time wasters, pleasant activities, trivia^[8])
• approaches that emphasise the need for more focused and simple implementation, including the approach of "Going with the Flow" - natural rhythms, Eastern philosophy. More unconventional time usage techniques, such as those discussed in Where Did Time Fly, include concepts that can be paraphrased as "Less is More", which de-emphasizes the importance of squeezing every minute of one's time, as suggested in traditional time management schemes.^[11]

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• While a Euclidean space has only spacelike dimensions, a Minkowski space also has one timelike dimension. The isometry group of a Euclidean space is the Euclidean group and for a Minkowski space it is the Poincaré group.

• a time lapse, a moment of indeterminate time in which everything happens
• Kairos also means weather in both ancient^{[citation needed]} and modern Greek.
• e Sophists, who stressed the rhetor's ability to adapt to and take advantage of changing, contingent circumstances.
• educated people are those “who manage well the circumstances which they encounter day by day, and who possess a judgment which is accurate in meeting occasions as they arise and rarely misses the expedient course of action".
• , Prepon deals with the notion that "what is said must conform to both audience and occasion.
• If rhetoric is to be meaningful and successful, it must be presented at the right moment, or else it will not have the same impact on the members of the audience.
• kairos can either be understood as, "the decorum or propriety of any given moment and speech act, implying a reliance on the given or known" or as, "the opportune, spontaneous, or timely."^[6] Although these two ideas of kairos might seem conflicting, Hess says that they offer a more extensive understanding of the term. Furthermore, they encourage creativity, which is necessary to adapt to unforeseen obstacles and opinions that can alter the opportune or appropriate moment, i.e. kairos.

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• e Greek language denotes two distinct principles, Chronos and Kairos. The former refers to numeric, or chronological, time. The latter, literally "the right or opportune moment", relates specifically to metaphysical or Divine time. In theology, Kairos is qualitative, as opposed to quantitative.
• The theory of special relativity finds a convenient formulation in Minkowski spacetime, a mathematical structure that combines three dimensions of space with a single dimension of time.
• wo events in Minkowski spacetime are separated by an invariant interval, which can be either space-like, light-like, or time-like.
• observe different chronological orderings between non-causally related events.
• Views of spacetime along the world line of a rapidly accelerating observer in a relativistic universe. The events ("dots") that pass the two diagonal lines in the bottom half of the image (the past light cone of the observer in the origin) are the events visible to the observer.
• The specious present refers to the time duration wherein one's perceptions are considered to be in the present. The experienced present is said to be ‘specious’ in that, unlike the objective present, it is an interval and not a durationless instant. The term specious present was first introduced by the psychologist E.R. Clay, and later developed by William James.^[88]
• The brain's judgement of time is known to be a highly distributed system, including at least the cerebral cortex, cerebellum and basal ganglia as its components. One particular component, the suprachiasmatic nuclei, is responsible for the circadian (or daily) rhythm, while other cell clusters appear capable of shorter-range (ultradian) timekeeping.
• a greater firing rate allowing the brain to register the occurrence of more events within a given interval (speed up time) and a decreased firing rate reducing the brain's capacity to distinguish events occurring within a given interval (slow down time)
• In sociology and anthropology, time discipline is the general name given to social and economic rules, conventions, customs, and expectations governing the measurement of time, the social currency and awareness of time measurements, and people's expectations concerning the observance of these customs by others. Arlie Russell Hochschild and Norbert Elias have written on the use of time from a sociological perspective.
• Time use changes with technology, as the television or the Internet created new opportunities to use time in different ways. However, some aspects of time use are relatively stable over long periods of time, such as the amount of time spent traveling to work, which despite major changes in transport, has been observed to be about 20–30 minutes one-way for a large number of cities over a long period.

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• hen writing by hand, our brain receives feedback from our motor actions, together with the sensation of touching a pencil and paper. These kinds of feedback is significantly different from those we receive when touching and typing on a keyboard.
• Jean-Luc Velay at the University of Marseille, Anne Mangen has written an article published in the Advances in Haptics
• . When writing by hand, the movements involved leave a motor memory in the sensorimotor part of the brain, which helps us recognise letters. This implies a connection between reading and writing, and suggests that the sensorimotor system plays a role in the process of visual recognition during reading, Mangen explains.

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• The research by Mueller and Oppenheimer serves as a reminder, however, that even when technology allows us to do more in less time, it does not always foster learning.  Learning involves more than the receipt and the regurgitation of information.  If we want students to synthesize material, draw inferences, see new connections, evaluate evidence, and apply concepts in novel situations, we need to encourage the deep, effortful cognitive processes that underlie these abilities.  When it comes to taking notes, students need fewer gigs, more brain power.

• When we write, a unique neural circuit is automatically activated,” said Stanislas Dehaene, a psychologist at the Collège de France in Paris. “There is a core recognition of the gesture in the written word, a sort of recognition by mental simulation in your brain.

  “And it seems that this circuit is contributing in unique ways we didn’t realize,” he continued. “Learning is made easier.”

  • how does he know?

• messiness inherent in free-form handwriting: Not only must we first plan and execute the action in a way that is not required when we have a traceable outline, but we are also likely to produce a result that is highly variable.

  That variability may itself be a learning tool. “When a kid produces a messy letter,” Dr. James said, “that might help him learn it.”
• printing, cursive writing, and typing on a keyboard are all associated with distinct and separate brain patterns — and each results in a distinct end product. When the children composed text by hand, they not only consistently produced more words more quickly than they did on a keyboard, but expressed more ideas.
• writing by hand allows the student to process a lecture’s contents and reframe it — a process of reflection and manipulation that can lead to better understanding and memory encoding.

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• ndwrite notes claim it provides flexibility and control, with the ability to include various formats and annotations often limited by word processing formats. Typing notes, however, eliminates the possibility of losing the notes and handouts while providing organization and clear legibility. As the trend of bringing laptops to class continually increases — with more than 5
• ositively or negatively affects cognitive processing, compared to handwriting notes.
• am Mueller of Princeton and Daniel Oppenheimer, a team of researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, decided to test the effects handwriting or typing notes had on students’ learning abilities in a series of two experiments.
• hose who type their notes may potentially be at risk for “mindless processing.” The old fashioned note taking method of pen and paper boosts memory and the ability to understand concepts and facts.

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• hen ambition eats at you, it feels like no matter how much you accomplish or how hard you work, you haven’t done enough. There’s always more to do. There’s always others doing more. It’s a never-ending battle. Sound familiar?
• This feeling doesn’t stem from a place of failure, it stems from a fear of not living up to your potential. The difference is subtle, but the impact is drastic.
• So, how does one manage their ambition? It’s a question I’ve been wrestling with for years. Below are a handful of things I do when I feel ambition nagging at me.

• But goals, not unlike objectives that are set by a board in a business, are fluid things. Circumstances and priorities change; what’s a priority in January seems laughable in December.

   

  Each quarter I have a recurring calendar notification that holds time for my personal board meeting. Yes, a board meeting with myself. During this board meeting, I review my goals, analyze my performance over the preceding time period, and re-prioritize goals based on what I wish to accomplish and what can wait.
• Breaking yearly goals into quarters allows you to adapt and execute with a clearer mind on the tasks at hand
• Ambition affects more than just your career. If you channel all of your ambition into your career, you’re running risk of a lack of diversification. Your emotion ebbs and flows with the path of your career, which is rarely straight

• Practice “Selective Complacency”

   

   

   

  Complacency sounds like a bad word, but not if it’s selective. The reality is that certain things take time, regardless of how much you’d like them to move quicker.
• Whether that’s giving a career the time it deserves or sitting tight as the market moves. Some things take patience. This has always been difficult for me, an obvious indicator of my lack of self-control, but I’m getting better. And as I do, I’m able to focus in on the things that need my attention now without the distraction of what’s to come.

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• Bitbucket offers for free an unlimited number of private repositories with up to 5 collaborators. If you authorize an academic (*.edu) email account you get unlimited contributors! A popular alternative is Github, but since Github does not offer free private repositories (and keeping your research private is important!) we will use Bitbucket.