User interface design is fascinating to me because of what it reveals about what the designer thinks of the user and the kind of work they should do. Good design makes use of our natural abilities to free us from unnecessary mental work (Siracusa, 2003, crucial nuance added by Feldman, …
‘Use the weapon’ (‘Arrival’, Villeneuve 2016) What is a PhD? PhDs are defined by their original contribution to knowledge. In order to be awarded a PhD the University of Edinburgh degree regulations state: ‘47. The student must demonstrate by the presentation of a thesis and/or portfolio, and by performance at an …
How accurately can you describe the point of view opposing yours on an issue that is core to your sense of who you are? I’m not talking about a nice debating position but for example if you think that Scottish Independence or Unionism is fundamental to your sense of self, …
This is the draft text of an article I completed during our staff/student writing workshop, revised from earlier. Waiting for the delivery man: Temporalities of addiction, withdrawal and the pleasures of dope time Abstract A range of work published in the drug field has reinscribed drug user experience as embodied …
There has always been a theatrical, stagey element to lecturing. That is sometimes literally apparent. We teach in lecture theatres. In the gone before I regularly lectured from a stage. Teaching is a role and a performance. Those facts are rarely made use of explicitly. Some time ago I had …
… there’s no real difference. If it’s irrational at any point it is fundamentally irrational. The answer depends on what a market is and what rationality/irrationality are. In trade terms a market is irrational if it departs persistently from its real valuation. If a market is defined solely as the …
We are well into the era of advanced, generation 2.0 types of malware. Adware, ransomware, cryptocurrency miners and others use social engineering and complex value chains with multiple functions being coordinated through them. Threats to industrial control systems, other backbone processes, and threats that use the internet of things remove the human …
Lovely discussion with students in my not-quite criminology classes about imagery of crime using Europol’s SOCTA 2017. The report crisply and directly illustrates Europol’s assessment of major threats in the field of drug trafficking, human trafficking and cybercrime. Not surprisingly for a report subtitled ‘Crime in the Age of Technology’ …
… structured, rigorous curiosity Also guess who’s convening the Research Design course come the semester start. A challenge in teaching or being taught research design is talking directly about what research design is as a general topic. We can point to specific design types (experiment, ethnography, etc) but it is harder …
The Gift by Marcel Mauss is one of the most profound essays in sociology and anthropology. Mauss was interested in what happened between people, as that is where the social can be found. The structured obligation of the gift is a recurring act. Seen ‘in totality’ as Mass put it, …
