[M6] Contemporary theories (part II)

Turn to the wild 

and

Turn to embodiment

In my understanding they are not in conflict with two first approaches: turn to culture and turn to design. in fact they can be a way of looking at and problem solving, (as an example) for a case of "turn to culture problem". where the two first talk about the topic and concern of the design, these two try to shape a kind of lens or philosophy to look at the situation and approach it.

One good thing that I learned during this concept mapping was that I dont need to draw a clear border between different theories and methods. Actually many of them are overlapping. and it is possible in many cases to apply several of these theories to a particular setting and even get a very similar outcome, however sometimes some will be much more descriptive of the problem space and will result in a better solution.

ps: the grey area is kind of general overview, elements repeat in the right side again to make the map more readable

Copying prevention:

-No, I dont like them!
-Yes, They might be effective on temporally preventing copying!

Although being temporally effective does not mean that their good will overdo their harm, or the cost of their implementation.

nowadays physical hardware locks may seem ridiculous but i think that digital and software ones will look as absurd in a few years(even now they are funny and annoying).

I dont know how much of the financial loss in software industries come from copying for personal use, but I think that the copyright enforcement should be directed towards copiers who do it for the purpose of sale and distribution. because I believe that with fair pricing and just licensing, even in the case of propriety softwares, people are willing to pay for their use.

and in the case of professional copying, this kind of copying preventions dont really work, because the mass copier already has or will develop the necessary skills to unlock any copy prevention, as they have done so far.

Software licensing landscape in 2020

Since 2020 is not that far anymore! I dont expect radical changes in licensing in a 6 years period.
however looking at current trends, some  movements towards new types of licensing already started.
boldest change is growth of softwares that recognise and treat cloud or hosted as a new way of computing. it can follow with XaaS(anything as a service) models.
another change is shift from perpetual to different terms of licenses. while traditionally one would buy a software and could use it for ever(if needed!), licenses for shorter terms, with lower prices seem reasonable.
I also see more awareness in users about ridiculous or very permissive(from user side) agreements, and think that this kind of licensing will be replaced by something that user would willingly agree with rather than being forced to.

a nice picture that shows the trend:

table from: "The future of software pricing excellence: An introduction "*

*Mark McCaffrey et.al. The future of software pricing excellence: An introduction

The business of science

Here, politics of science seems to be relevant topic as well. for example in Iran many scientists dont even have paid access to the scientific journals because of sanctions.
This covers not only so called "nuclear physics" related papers, but almost all other areas too. definitely this deepens the digital divide; and this is the case for many countries that dont necessarily think like US.

back to the "business of science", about the case of over simplified educational books; we recently were reading an american book for one of our courses in TLU. teacher already warned us that it may get too obvious sometimes! and he added that "apparently this is the way americans like to do it".
after reading some chapters of the book nearly all of the students agreed that the book could fit in half the pages as it is now, and loose no educational content. then we thought: yes maybe "this is the way americans like to do it"! but after reading "The business of science" part of the wiki, I am thinking perhaps deeper reasons are involved.

same thing happened in Iran about learning aid books for schools, they become almost like a table:
"if question is this, then answer will be that..."
they dont leave any space for student to reason and drive the logical conclusions from the scientific fact. causing the problem of  "educated! people" with minimal reasoning power, unable to adapt solutions to new problems.

GNU GPL

strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats...

Strengths, Opportunities
-GPL like other free licences, provides a platform to make sure that a piece of software is and will be distributed widely and freely.
-GPL implies that source code of the software should be available when this license is used, this makes compatibility in softwares easier to reach and the software becomes transparent in its content and function.
-free licenses try to benefit society rather than individuals.
-every new version of GPL is more covering and compatible with other free licenses.

- it emphasises on making reuse easy by providing a description, help file or any other mean that is necessary to read and use the code.(for example code can be encrypted but the key should be available to the user)
-modifications for private use is excluded from the hard rules.

weaknesses, threats
-Its emphasis on non proprietary distribution of software, is in its nature limiting. This imposes that software driven from an original piece with GPL license has to have GPL license. It can maximize the pool of freely available software but
-In version 3 it says GPL-protected software “shall not be deemed part of an effective technological measure under any applicable law” ; which is another "limitation" that is not in line with the philosophy of the freedom, although the "technological measure" is somehow tries to limit freedom itself.

Paper Review

1. Turn to Design: 

Developing the Drift Table

In this paper authors are challenged to a domestic technology for households to promote non-utilitarian, “ludic” values in the home.

The final design that results from their work is a "drift table", where images of England's landscapes are displayed through a window on the table. image drifts to the left and right based on the weight balance on the objects located on the table.

Paper describes the design process, prototyping and testing. to start they have done ethnographic studies of information flow in the home and made many concept studies and sketch proposals.

After agreeing on a table like design, they has some choices of different tables, but in order to get away from task oriented tables such as dining or work table, they decided on a coffee table which implies a more relaxed settings.

this is defiantly goes under "turn to design" approaches.

why it is a "turn to design" work:

It tries to address issue related to human values and it is not addressing a practical or technical problem. "The idea that interaction design be informed by some ideology". it is a "design for lifestyle" because it promotes “ludic” values in the home. it is a "technology-mediated" experience design.

the video demo of the table:

2. Turn to Culture

Hatching Scarf: A Critical Design about Anxiety and Persuasive Computing 

This paper was a short introduction to the "hatching scarf". it did not include design process or a very deep analysis of the philosophy behind it.
Hatching scarf is an interactive scarf that reacts to the action of the user while she/he approaches to the bag of snacks. it is not a positive or negative reaction, but a reaction that is open to personal interpretation.
Designer says that it is an objection against the anxiety and pressure in the society about weight and body shape. it has feminist ideas behind and wants to encourage self expression without judgment.

why it is a "turn to culture" work:

it is a "design activism" to challenge current views on body image and eating habits. 

this design has elements of critical analysis and a re-contextualizing by doing that for "eating" and "reaction" concepts and it addresses questions concerning human nature and the human condition.

I did some research around it and I found this video about it:

http://vimeo.com/64228939

Paper: The Literature Review of Technology Acceptance Model: A Study of the Bibliometric Distributions by Chang et al.

Summary and review:

This paper is about bibliometric study of publications in the field of "Technology Acceptance Model" (TAM) for information systems(IS).
what is TAM:TAM is a very influential and common theory in information systems field, it explains the user adoption of technology use in different environment setting. TAM is based on theory of reasoned action which discusses how attitude impacts behaviour. The model suggests that when users are presented with a new technology, a number of factors influence their decision about how and when they will use it, notably:
Perceived usefulness (PU) - This was defined by Fred Davis as "the degree to which a person believes that using a particular system would enhance his or her job performance".
Perceived ease-of-use (PEOU) - Davis defined this as "the degree to which a person believes that using a particular system would be free from effort" (Davis 1989).[4]

The work:

several papers were collected using “technology acceptance model” keyword and 689 related articles were selected after filtering the original list. these papers were published between 1991-2009.

study shows that number of published papers in this topic grew steadily in this period.

The authors who published TAM literature are from 41 countries. The U.S.A. with 37.32% of total is the primary country to contribute to this field.

disciplines:
TAM is used in variety of disciplines such as:
Computer Science, Information Systems”, “Management”, “Information Science & Library Science”, “Business” and “Computer Science, Cybernetics” 

keywords:most frequent keywords extracted from papers, reflecting the subject areas:
Technology Acceptance Model (TAM)
Electronic commerce
Internet(Web)
Structural equation modeling(SEM)
Perceived usefulness, Usefulness
Trust
Theory of planned behavior (TPB)
E-learning

Bradford Law and Core JournalThrough the 174journals that published TAM papers, 98 journals only published one article.
The result matches the explanations of Bradford’s Law. It indicates the publication of TAM in these journals account for one-third of the total amount.

Author Productivity and Lotka’s Law 

There are total 1692 authors (shown in table 3) contributing to the publications of 689 articles in TAM literatures. According to this data set, 988 authors (58.39%) contributed one article. It is consistent with the Lotka's law that about 60% authors contribute only one paper. The maximum of articles by one author is 14, followed by 11 and 9. the results indicated that the author productivity distribution data in TAM literature consistent with Lotka’s law.

more details on methods used in this paper:

bibliometric methods are a set of methods to quantitatively analyse academic literature, Many research fields use bibliometric methods to explore the impact of their field, the impact of a set of researchers, or the impact of a particular paper.[1]

Two theory is used to achieve this goal:
Lotka’s law which talks about authors impact and productivity in the field.
It describes the frequency of publication by authors in any given field. It states that the number of authors making n contributions is about 1/n^a of those making one contribution, where a nearly always equals two. More plainly, the number of authors publishing a certain number of articles is a fixed ratio to the number of authors publishing a single article. As the number of articles published increases, authors producing that many publications become less frequent. There are 1/4 as many authors publishing two articles within a specified time period as there are single-publication authors, 1/9 as many publishing three articles, 1/16 as many publishing four articles, etc. Though the law itself covers many disciplines, the actual ratios involved (as a function of 'a') are very discipline-specific[3]
y=c/x^n
where y=percentage of authors, x=number of articles published by an author, c=constant and -n=slope of the log-log plot


Bradford’s law that estimates the exponentially diminishing returns of extending a search for references in science journals. One formulation is that if journals in a field are sorted by number of articles into three groups, each with about one-third of all articles, then the number of journals in each group will be proportional to 1:n:n².[2]
Bradford’s law is a regular pattern over a huge number of articles from different journals on a particular subject. concentrated in a small number of journal titles, and the remaining articles would be distributed over the vast account of journal titles



1.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliometrics
2. Black, Paul E. (2004-12-12). "Bradford's law, in Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures". U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology. Retrieved 2007-10-24.
3.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka%27s_law
4.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_acceptance_model

patent in pharmaceutical vs license in software

one can patent a chemical structure, this covers chemical or pharmaceutical innovations.
It means that only one that holds the patent is allowed to manufacture, market the drug.
period of the patent can vary for different drugs and in different countries, in most patent laws nowadays, the term of patent is 20 years from the filing date of the application.(wikipedia) since patent requests are filled before the drug is ready to market, the actual duration of the patent while the drug is in market can be less than 10 years. after the patent is expired the drug can be manufactured and sold by others, this drugs are called generic drugs.

Although patenting is possible in softwares as well, it is not a common way of protection for this kind of IP. it is because in software world there is a clear way of protecting the algorithm(which is comparable to chemical structure of a chemical) by generating executable binary code from the source code.
licensing on the other hand is not common in pharmaceuticals. a drug is a physical entity and it is hard to change and copy it for an end user(if we try to map the licensing here).




http://www.news-medical.net/health/Drug-Patents-and-Generics.aspx
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_patent
http://ec.europa.eu/competition/sectors/pharmaceuticals/inquiry/jacob.pdf
https://www.ffii.org/Frequently%20Asked%20Questions%20about%20software%20patents
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intellectual-property/

Intellectual Property : continental european vs Anglo-American

 Moral rights
It seems that in anglo-american (I call it american) school of IP, moral rights have less or no importance, while in continental european(european for short) it plays a major role. but many claim that in digital age, these two are changing towards a closer. where at least in many european laws the part of moral rights are getting shallower. specially when they attempt to get to an agreement between several european countries that may have differences in one specific law, the part that is generally sacrificed is moral rights.

 Copy,comment, reuse, edit ..
Although in european IP private copy and use may be permitted, American approach gives more freedom to "fair use" when the benefit of releasing information for public is great.

since american IP had a more utilitarian approach, it has favourable characteristics in the era of fast changing technologies and competitive economies. some also claim that moral rights limits artistic work and creativity by restrains like "the right of integrity". in this sense another difference between these two is their flexibility in reuse and modifying of existing creations.

but still some other, strongly defend moral rights of the author by metaphor of "author and creation as parent and child", which follows very funny arguments about selling one's child and so on!

Author vs entrepreneur

As in case of moral rights, in european school, author as a person has the central stage. however in american school ownership of a work done under employment goes to the employer.

Different media, different rights

In american law copyright protection covers media such as sound recording, film(producer) and broadcasting(performer), directly; in european school these go under  neighbouring rights. 

contemporary theories in HCI

Contemporary theories in HCI was a reply to similar wave in society where new human values start to emerge. HCI was young(still is!) and was not really fixed on any specific framework, that helped the field to move along the social and cultural revolutions without falling back. It seems that there is no agreed upon borders or use cases for contemporary theories yet. even parts such as critical theories may be ill understood by many of HCI researchers.
this was yet another hard to grasp reading from this book, the good thing is that after several similar experiences, now I am sure that it will become clear in next few days!

Task 7: Field research project outline

I decided to stay with "Information flow in HCI" topic because after doing some work on this topic I thought I can get a better understanding of it rather than a new subject. Aleksei and I would like to work on this, and have done some planning.

Overall topic or problem description 
nowadays almost everything is done online using ICT tools and technics. considering that HCI program is a subset of ICT and is presented by informatics institute, we should have the best connected system with good information flow. however it is not the case in this program(or maybe whole department). 

 
Description of inquiry context
Context of inquiry is relatively known. we both study in this program and have weekly contact with HCI program related matters. we have already done some field work in the form of contextual inquiry.

Inquiry focus and analytical interest(s)
Since we study theory of HCI in parallel with this course, we are very interested to apply some of those knowledge in this context. two main theories that we would like to look into are: 

-activity theory

-CSCW and group theories 

Contextual inquiry interviews (and other types of data gathering) planned 
We did not interview all of the steak-holders by ourselves, therefore the first thing we will do is to interview at least one of each steak-holder group, here: Student, lecturer, staff .. 

Intended project outcome(s) 
We hope to find out the sources of problem and bottlenecks that slows down the information flow in HCI program and gather some change and enhancement ideas to improve the situation.

Reading: Chapter 3 of "Information Liberation"

Against intellectual property

Chapter 3 of

Information Liberation

by Brian Martin

(London: Freedom Press, 1998)

Here is the link to this chapter:

http://www.bmartin.cc/pubs/98il/il03.html

"Challenging intellectual property must involve the development of methods to support creative individuals."

-my favourite quote!

This was one of the most comprehensive arguments for and against intellectual property. It answered most of my questions and doubts about this topic. as an example, second argument for IP: "people deserve property rights because of their labour" 

was my main concern thinking about any intellectual creation, "shouldn't author receive something because of his/her labour time and risk he/she is taking?" and even if we just consider effort, time and risk; how to measure this thing after the work is done? there is such measures going on for individuals that work in a company. for example if I work as programmer for a bigger corporation, they pay me based on hours of time I spend there, assuming that the risk is minimal for me, and effort is normal(or if higher, paid more). but still company holds unlimited IP on outcome of my work. nobody calculated time,effort and risk that company itself is taking, all that determines the final benefit of the company is market.

I totally like the idea of need for determining optimum period for promoting intellectual work based on present state of innovation and technological advances.

I agree that IP is not the only way production and distribution of ideas can work, even dont say that it is the best one(or close to be good), but in case of a society without IP, given example is university research and publications, there is a fundamental change in Infrastructure of the society necessary. since in universities people dont earn from monetizing their ideas but they get funds from government and industry which that shapes corse of their research. although this is a problematic manipulation in their freedom, it is still very difficult to map and implement into other areas such as art and literature.

another point that caught my eye, was that all of the successful examples of no-IP, were happening in an IP dominant world. we have a world that things are working mostly based on IP and then we have small islands of free from IP areas such as universities or open softwares. we dont know how all these things will function if we remove IP totally.(still this does not mean that I suggest that it wont work, but may not work the same way that we see in these islands now)