Ord blir vad vi gör dem till, det är vi som bestämmer vad de ska betyda eller peka på. Populära betydelseglidningar genom tiderna är ’slyna’, med historisk betydelse ‘liten tjej’ och ’snopp’, som egentligen betyder något avklippt. Och att ‘gay’ betyder glad på engelska vet vi ju allihop eller hur? Det finns inget som säger att ord inte kan ha fler, motsägande, betydelser samtidigt. Krona eller kula, till exempel. Japanska har massor av homografer, där betydelsen kommer av intonationen. Vad fel det skulle kunna bli…

I många vetenskapliga artiklar finner man ordet ‘pervasive’, och det är lika roligt varje gång. Jag vet vad det betyder egentligen, men det kan inte hjälpas, Freud-skadan vill att det ska vara något perverst. Den första stavelsen (eller morfemet) pekar ju på att det skulle kunna vara det. En body-slam av ‘pervert’ och ‘persuasive’, där något blev fel på mitten? Pervasive – Sexuellt övertygande, är inte det en roligare översättning än ‘genomträngande’? Även om en ordentlig genomträngning inte är helt fel alla gånger…

A few days ago, I had shared some great Asperger’s-related links with you people that I had collected from the PsychForums Asperger’s forum. The links were posted in this blog-entry:http://hikiculture.posterous.com/good-aspergers-related-links

I’ve now got another set of great links to share:

http://aspergers-tucson.org/what_is_aspergers
http://childstudycenter.yale.edu/autism/aspergers.html
http://www.mental-health-matters.com/in … cle&id=895
http://www.udel.edu/bkirby/asperger/aswhatisit.html
http://autism.about.com/od/aspergerssyn … aforas.htm
http://www.webmd.com/brain/autism/tc/as … e-symptoms

Here is the thread on HikiCulture the links are taken from – HikiCulture ‘Asperger’s-related links’ thread

If I find more excellent Asperger’s-related links to share, I will post them.

PS. Please share these links with other people.

(*NOTE* – thanks goes out to Quasar for sharing these links.)

Posted via email from HikiCulture – A Forum For Reclusive People (and Hikikomori)

When I began using online Asperger's discussion boards, I had to get used to all of the commonly used 'aspie' acronyms. I eventually learned all of the most common ones, but it took a little while.

Below is a list of the most commonly-used acronyms by individuals with Asperger's Syndrome.

AS – Asperger's Syndrome

ASD – Autism Spectrum Disorder

NT – Neurotypical (this is often what people on the spectrum refer 'normal' people as being)

PDD – Pervasive Developmental Disorder

PDD-NOS – Pervasive Developmental Disorder – Not Otherwise Specified

If you plan on visiting an Asperger's-related discussion board in coming time, that list will serve as future reference.

Posted via email from HikiCulture – A Forum For Reclusive People

Yes, each of us has a choice: to criticise or encourage, to focus on criticism or focus on encouragement.

Personally, I’ve learned to listen much more to those who encourage me. Criticism has far more impact (up to 10 times) than encouragement as we seem programmed to be far more sensitive to threat and danger. And critics are two-a-penny, probably because it takes so little thought to be one.

So take up the challenge of mega-encouragement.  Ask yourself: does this person need more judgement or more courage? It’s a no-brainer, isn’t it!

Someone noticed.

The most powerful comments you can make, negative and positive, lock into these three categories: PERSONAL, PERVASIVE and PERMANENT.

PERSONAL:  It is about THEM.  Make your encouragement very personal. Generalised encouragement is fine “Well done, everyone!” but personal is so much stronger: a handwritten card of congratulations, a phone call to express you appreciation. And use their NAME, not words like ‘my friend’, ‘mate’, etc. The most precious word a person hears is their name.

PERVASIVE: It goes beyond their current situation into every part of their life. Notice several areas of their life where an attribute is gaining strength. “I love your commitment to living with integrity” [pervasive] is much better than “At least you accept that you’ve messed up here.”[local]

PERMANENT: “You’ve always cared for others and you always will.  That doesn’t change because you forgot to make that appointment.”

So do yourself, your friends, and the world in general a favour by moving your whole  philosophy of life a step towards the Encouragement Platform, and make your input personal, pervasive and permanent. After all, a person like you who reads this for into a blog already has a head start in making this a regular part of their life. 

Here are some practical encouragers – even when you disagree with what a person has done, you can help them change by using these phrases:

“Keep going! Someone who is as sensitive/determined/committed as you [personal] will always [permanent] get there in the end.”

“You’re great.  I know you [personal]  – you’ll find a way through anything [pervasive] eventually – it’s in your nature [permanent].”

“I love your unique [personal] determined attitude.  You’re the sort of person who can’t help but improve [permanent] – whatever you put your hand to [pervasive] – even when you make mistakes. I really like that.”

“How is it you’ve come as far as you have?! The fact you’ve come this far only goes to prove you’re a strong person underneath [personal]. You’ll make it through to your goals.”

“You’re a fast learner [non-specific, therefore pervasive], and don’t need anyone to tell you when you’ve messed up, least of all me. I’ve messed up myself too many times to lecture anyone else.”

Personally I’m a better person for having a impromptu funeral service for my mistakes – as soon as possible after they become evident. I mourn their passing and look back months later on what they taught me in the short time they were alive. I don’t need anyone to dig up their remains.  For really significant catastrophes, when I have messed up big time, I want people to help me leave the graveyard, recover from the overdose of human error and live life with courage again, so I tend to surround myself with such people and keep the others further out.  (People who invest a lot in each day, as I tend to do, are the very first people to know just how big the impending disaster is going to be. They don’t need ANYONE else to tell them!)

Endorsement, approval, kindness, and encouragement.  Spew tons of those powerful motivators into the world and I’ll be MUCH more useful to those around me when they come my way!

So will you.

Technology Trends that Threaten and Create Opportunities for BNY Mellon
Peter Johnson
October 16, 2009 1:00 – 2:00 pm

Peter Johnson, Chief Technology Architect at Bank of New York Mellon (BNY Mellon), spoke to the CS department about his role at one of the largest banking corporations in the world. His company handles investments for multi-billion dollar companies and investors, in addition to handling over 50% of the US’s trading infrastructure. I thought prior to the talk that considering his profession and this being a talk about the positive and negative sides of technology, that the lecture would mainly focus on security. This couldn’t be farther from the truth, as I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the talk focused on a variety of things such as virtualization, pervasive computing, deep computing, Web 2.0, SOA, open source and a some information in security and how this can be integrated together to build a better bank.

One of the highlights of the talk was his take on Web 2.0 and how cell phones are redefining how people get their information and live their day. With the capabilities of 3G and the push for a 4G wireless infrastructure people are no longer confined to an office to invest money and the age to start investigating is dropping dramatically. He pointed out that things like Facebook are also changing the way businesses find contacts. Instead of sending out mass quantities of email to find someone qualified for a position or someone who could be an important part of a business plan, Facebook is allowing them to find people with specialty skills and people with personality traits that they find valuable in their business, based on their friends and contacts in social networks.

Development activities ought to reflect the situation and circumstances of a company, its business objectives and its key priorities. For example, there is little point in a company building hypothetical team skills without addressing the following:

• The purpose of the team. For example, a bid team might require specific bidding skills such as defining value in customer terms.
• Where team members are located. People in virtual teams may be widely scattered and they may need special training.
• The role of groups and teams in the management of change, the management culture and management style must be supportive.
• The clarity of the goals given to teams, and the relevance of their priorities to business objectives. People need to understand the broad boundaries within which they operate in terms of goals and priorities.
• The discretion given to teams, and the extent to which people are given the required freedom to act.
• The commitment of senior management to team work, and especially cross-functional and inter-organizational team work. They must be dedicated to ensuring that decisions are taken as close to the customer as possible, and people are enabled to do what is necessary to add value for customers.
• Prevailing attitudes, such as the extent to which people feel part of teams. Empowered team work should be pervasive, rather than the isolated experiment.
• The management cadre. Managers should counsel and coach, value diversity, and foster and encourage teamwork, collaborative activities, self-development and group learning.
• How open people are, and the degree of trust and confidence they have. People need to feel they are able to take initiatives without being paralyzed by fear of the consequences.
• Existing performance within teams, the tools shared within teams, and the approaches and support in terms of technology and process available to them. For example, there should be relatively open access to relevant information.
• Rewards and performance management. This should be supportive of, and should recognize, team work, the acquisition of team skills and the exhibiting of role-model behavior.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, Lectures, Line of Sight

Arm yourself against pervasive spam emails, warn readers

Last week, Viet Nam News called for readers’ opinions on spam messages and mails. We also asked for suggestions to deal with them as they might pose dangers to network and data security. Here are some of the ideas we received:

Hiroshi Ishikawa, Japanese, Ha Noi

Once a minor annoyance, the use of unsolicited commercial email has become a global problem on the internet. It has become such a nuisance that a name has been coined for it: spam.

Spam is not just annoying; it is becoming a more serious problem. Almost all mail servers distinguish spam from official mail by creating a folder for junk mail.

But sometimes, mail which is not junk goes into the spam folder. I have experienced the situation many times, and it’s the most annoying thing to have to look through all the spam messages to figure out which one is not.

While a busy email user might see up to 20 legitimate messages a day, he might also receive up to 3,000 spam messages. If you have done nothing to protect yourself, that kind of volume will make finding your legitimate email a chore.

Be careful when surfing the internet for the best way to prevent spam, because a website touting a spam prevention solution might keep sending you mail on “how to deal with spam” every now and then.

Rowena Santos, Filipina, Ha Noi

I really don’t understand why someone can be able to afford to waste their time on spreading mails about useless things.

Actually, it doesn’t matter if someone sends you an unsolicited message. But after a while it becomes a terrible thing, because you can’t do anything about it, and the senders are somehow one up on you. It doesn’t cost them anything, but it costs you to receive the messages.

As time goes on and more and more messages arrive on the off chance you’ll buy something or visit a site or in some other way gratify the sender, it becomes a problem of a perceived feeling of powerlessness.

The other thing about spam is that each additional offence is compounded. For example, it’s quite annoying that spam-senders tell lies; things such as “you are receiving this because you have opted in”, or “this message is never sent unsolicited”, or “this is not spam”, or “this message is the result of your feedback form”.

In my experience, I always simply reply a very short message to the spammers: “STOP!”, and it has somehow worked.

And finally, in my opinion, SPAM = Stupid Pointless Annoying Messages.

Pham Thanh Truyen, Vietnamese, HCM City

Every day I receive the average of over 20 spam both in my Yahoo and Gmail accounts, and it takes me about four minutes to delete them because they take a substantial storage in my mail servers. There are so many kinds of spam, mainly from Nigeria. I cannot understand how they get my email and even my name.

Most of them give me business proposals that they have relatives in their family dead due to a plane crash or from some disease. Before the relative died, they supposedly left a big amount of money in the bank.

But the email sender does not have the right to withdraw unless there is a foreigner claiming to be his/her next of kin. They promise to share the money 50/50.

The first time I received emails like that, I totally believed in them because the information they gave seemed so reliable; they even sent me many pictures including their passport, ID, their relatives in hospital, or even the address linking to the website of CNN where I could find the information about the plane crash.

The second most popular spam is the lottery prize or that my email was selected to be entered in the Yahoo Promotion Sweepstakes.

The biggest problem is that spam is becoming more and more professional with official signatures, logos, email addresses, even phone numbers with the endorsement from international organisations such as the World Trade Organisation and the United Nations, so we easily fall in their trap.

Now I have learned my lesson and delete such emails immediately after no more than five seconds of viewing. I think functional agency in Viet Nam should research and apply the latest anti-spam software in ecommerce activities.

Graham Bassett, British, London

First off, I think we need to define what constitutes SPAM. I think if people sign up to receive a company’s newsletter, offers, etc, then that is hardly spam. But if that same company just sends out mass mailings to all and sundry, well it gets no thanks or business from me.

I live in Britain and strange to say, even though I hear ‘horror’ stories of huge amounts of junk mail being delivered to other people, I myself receive very little spam. Both at home and at work.

This lack of spam is simply because both the company I work for and my ISP take some proactive action to deal with it. They block emails from known spammers. As a fail safe, I also run a mail programme that enables me to view the contents of the email without downloading it. If I don’t like what I see, I can delete it directly on the server. I can also bounce it back as being undeliverable, clogging up the senders email inbox (if they have one). I can also add the sender to a blacklist that deletes email from that source automatically.

As I mentioned before, the end result is very little spam. It’s simple, and it works.

Harry Dickson

I am quite surprised to learn that such a high percentage of spam originates from Viet Nam. After all, the internet users rate among population of Viet Nam is not very high – about 24 per cent as of November 2008, according to statistics from the Viet Nam Internet Network Information Centre.

It is quite conceivable that users in Viet Nam have had their computers hijacked without knowing it. I have received spam from e-mail addresses at big well-known multinational companies.

Such firms are highly unlikely to be the author of such spams. Furthermore, the products being marketed in the spams are not even related to these companies.

A more worrying trend is the increase of spam coming into mobile phones via SMS. Unlike e-mail spam, SMS spam is impossible to ignore. They are much more intrusive than spam e-mails, which can be automatically directed to the junk mail folder and deleted at our convenience.

Klaus Brandauer, German, Binh Duong

The subject headers scream: “Cut your debt,” “Enhance your attractiveness,’’ ‘’Free auto warranty.’’

It’s a spam jam that shows no signs of abating despite a surge of media attention to the issue of unsolicited bulk e-mail, fraudulent and otherwise. Meanwhile, spam-control legislation is on the table in Congress and consumer backlash is escalating.

The American Association of Advertising Agencies recently approved guidelines and standards for e-mail marketing as its members have said unscrupulous practices by spammers are hurting legitimate e-mail marketing efforts.

My steps to avoid spam include setting up spam filtering software, increasing filtering levels, using multiple email addresses, avoiding chain emails, unsubscribing from mailing lists, reporting spam emails, avoiding viruses, and limiting one’s domain email addresses. This works for me, and hopefully, also for you. —

Source: vietnamnews.vnagency.com.vn

Jag har sedan hösten 2007 gått på utbildningen Projektledning inriktning spel. Då detta är en kvalificerad yrkesutbildning (KY) så måste en tredjedel av tiden vara i form av LIA – lärande i arbete – vilket motsvarar praktik. Jag under samtliga tre LIA-perioder varit på The company P.

LIA på The company P

Jag har gjort min tredje och sista LIA-period som produktionsassistent på The company P AB under våren 2009.

The company P är ett Stockholmsbaserat produktionsbolag grundat år 2005. På P så arbetar man med att utnyttja deltagandes kraft i dom nya medierna. Men man gör också det tillsammans med de traditionella medieformerna som exempelvis TV.

Detta har exempelvis gjorts i den Emmy-vinnande cross-media produktionen Sanningen om Marika (2007) som skapade en gränslös fiktion där deltagarna kunde delta i en berättelse som utnyttjade alla tänkbara medier.

Exempel på kunder till The company P är 20th Century Fox television, Nokia, SVT, Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS) och Svenska spel.

Hur var det?

Att få ha jobbat med de nya produktionerna The Artists som är sam-europeisk crossmedia upplevelse tillsammans med bl a SVT samt TEVA-projekt som görs tillsammans med Tim Kring som skapat HEROES och Nokia har varit otroligt spännande. Triviala saker som att ringa Tim Kring:s assistent gör att dagen helt enkelt känns lite mer spännande. Att sedan få arbeta en del med designen känns är otroligt spännande.

Tills stor del har jag utfört administrativa sysslor såsom ekonomi och bokningar men detta har hela tiden varvats med designarbete, pitchar för kund, hemsidearbete etc. Jag har verkligen trivts med det.

Jag kan inte påstå annat än att jag är väldigt nöjd med denna tredje och sista LIA. Den har förutom många lärdomar gett mig möjligheter till att jobba kvar på The company P. Jag är personligen väldigt nöjd med vart utbildningen och LIA-perioderna har tagit mig.

Läs mer om The company P och produktionerna på:
http://www.thecompanyp.com

Andra bloggar om pervasive, crossmedia, verklighetsspel, LIA, praktik, praktikplats, Sanningen om Marika, Teva

The first keynote talk of the day is from Reinhold Haux, IMIA President, on “Health enabling technologies for pervasive health care: a pivotal field for future medical informatics research and education?” He gave a background introduction to the Peter Reichertz Institute in Germany, named after one of the German pioneers of medical informatics. The institute has a research focus on eHealth, health-enabling technologies, and links to work in robotics, engineering and computer science, as well as being part of a medical school.

Reinhold introduced some of the demographic changes that will impact the future nature of healthcare delivery. There will be less working age people – will this mean that less people are able to afford quality care? Health enabling technologies (HET) and pervasive health may provide some answers. HET are designed to create conditions for sustainable health and self-care. Pervasive healthcare is about continuous care, with focus on home and outpatient care, proactive prevention of illness, assistive technologies, sensors everywhere, and being patient-centric. Saranummi’s 3 P’s of pervasive care are pervasive, personal and personalised. Enabling older people to live longer in their homes, rather than in hospital, can result in greatly reduced health costs.

Reinhold gave realtime examples of the use of triaxial accelerometer (which he was wearing) which can monitor movement, especially falls, and live monitoring of ECG (which he was also wearing). But he notes privacy issues on monitoring of the data. He reported on studies about measuring individual fall risk in people/patients by analysing gait movement; found that they could give high level of  prediction of fall risk, with about 80% accuracy, and activity levels were the most important parameter to measure.

He asked what are the consequences for or relation of HET to health/medical informatics. Is it ‘just’ bioengineering and sensor use? – he feels it is more than this, and is a part of health/medical informatics with implications for research and education. Health and medical informatics is an ever-changing field. HET will particularly have an effect on outpatient and home care. This will have impact on communications with professional and family care givers.

Search/follow @omowizard on Twitter for some further reports.

Government regulation and intervention is very pervasive in our daily lives, especially in business activities. That intervention is both supportive and restrictive. Also, it is constantly changing. The intent of government is generally to provide justice, orderliness, and fairness. A realistic observer may also perceive a governmental desire to play Robin Hood. Some entrepreneurs will find themselves the objects of Robin’s beneficence. Most owner-managers see too much of his ever-present Merry Men.

Entrepreneurs usually don’t concern themselves much with the creation and enforcement of government regulations. Being realistic, they just want to know the rules. They ask how it works and then go on about the business of building their enterprise. Because entrepreneurs need all the help they can get, they will use the rules and regulations that can in any way help the business. If the rules are not helpful they will avoid getting into a position where the rules interfere with the progress of the business. The problem for entrepreneurs is that the regulatory bureaucracy is so massive and complex that they have trouble understanding the rules.

The specialists who devote their professional lives to understanding rules and providing guidance to the rest of us must concentrate on a small segment of the rules to be able to keep up with the changes and the latest nuances in interpretation. This results in the need for many specialists. Despite the burden on time and financial resources, however, it is most prudent to obtain sufficient advice and guidance at least to avoid the wrath and interference of the regulators.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, Line of Sight

Earlier this week I promised a follow-up piece to my rant on tabloids and gossip sites disrespecting celebrities who pass away, as well as their families. On second thought, though, I don’t need an entire piece as much as I need an addendum. Or, if you’re not fancy, just a few more paragraphs.

In watching the coverage of MJ and Billy Mays’s deaths this week, I saw both of the 911 calls made on their behalves played on CNN. What is the purpose of releasing these calls? Sure, fans may have morbid curiosity regarding what went down, but the autopsy report is more conclusive and comes out a short time after the passing. I personally feel that media outlets replaying these calls is nothing short of exploitative.

People (famous or not) who have the difficult task of making 911 calls are concerned with saving a life, not about how they sound in the heat of the moment. It’s no one’s finest hour, for sure. In Mays’s wife’s call to 911, she sobs and is barely coherent. What is the purpose of releasing this? The use of these calls for entertainment (and honestly, what other purpose could there be?) is disgusting and pervasive.

If you want to be sure that you have started with the right three talents, study your best in the role. This may sound obvious, but beware: conventional wisdom would advise the opposite.

Conventional wisdom asserts that good is the opposite of bad, that if you want to understand excellence, you should investigate failure and then invert it. In society at large, we define good health as the absence of disease. In the working world, the fascination with pathology is just as pervasive. Managers are far more articulate about service failure than they are about service success, and many still define excellence as “zero defects.”

When it comes to understanding talent, this focus on pathology has caused many managers to completely misdiagnose what it takes to excel in a particular role. For example, many managers think that because bad salespeople suffer from call reluctance, great salespeople must not; or that because bad waiters are too opinionated, great waiters must keep their opinions in check.

Reject this focus on pathology. You cannot infer excellence from studying failure and then inverting it. Why? Because excellence and failure are often surprisingly similar. Average is the anomaly.

For example, by studying the best salespeople, great managers have learned that the best, just like the worst, suffer call reluctance. Apparantly the best salesperson, as with the worst, feels as if invested in the sale that causes him to be so persuasive. But it also causes him to take rejection personally—every time he makes a sales call he feels the shiver of fear that someone will say no to him, to him.

The difference between greatness and failure in sales is that the great salesperson is not paralyzed by this fear. He is blessed with another talent, the relating talent of confrontation, that enables him to derive immense satisfaction from sparring with the prospect and overcoming resistance. Everyday he feels call reluctance, but this talent for confrontation pulls him through it. His love of sparring outweighs his fear of personal rejection.

Lacking this talent for confrontation, the bad salesperson simply feels the fear.

The average salesperson feels nothing. He woodenly follows the six-step approach he has been taught and hopes for the best.

By studying their best, great managers are able to overturn many similarly long-standing misconceptions. For example, they know that the best waiters, just like the worst, form strong opinions. The difference between the best and the worst is that the best waiters use their quickly formed opinions to tailor their style to each particular table of customers, whereas the worst are just rude—average waiters form no opinions and so give every table the same dronning spiel.

And the best . . . .

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, Line of Sight

Uppdaterat 7/5: Läs Sam Sundbergs artikel Mystisk lek testar gränser i Svenska Dagbladet. Artikeln handlar om Maskernas Stad och jag är intervjuad tillsammans med kordinatörerna Ulf Staflund och Gabriel Widing.

På måndagen den 4 maj samt måndagen den 11 maj har du en möjlighet att uppleva Stockholm på ett nytt sätt. Maskernas Stad är en musikvandring kopplad till verklighetsspelet Maskspel som pågått sedan hösten 2007.

Vill du delta Maskernas Stad? Läs mer här!

Konceptet med Maskernas Stad är en väldigt kul idé. Man tar den värld man byggt upp i Maskspel, men för den skull så kräver spelet i princip ingen förkunskap om just Maskspel. Musiksagan är uppbyggd så att man endast behöver följa ett par enkla instruktioner:

Genom att bläddra i brevet och lyssna på ljudspåren får du reda på vad maskerna vill och var de kommer ifrån. Vandringen tar dig till undanskymda platser på Södermalm. Kanske träffar du andra som gått djupare i spelet och vet mer om Staden vid verklighetens ände.

Inga förkunskaper krävs. Du kan leva dig in i berättelsen med hull och hår eller bara se Maskernas stad som en fantasifull stadsvandring.

1. Ladda ner paketet med ljudfiler och lägg dem på din mp3-spelare. Tjuvlyssna inte på sagan (lyssna gärna på ljudtrailern). Det finns möjlighet att ladda sagan på plats om du tar med sladd, leta efter Maskernas stad-skylten, men vi ser helst att du tankar på sagan hemma.

2. Bege dig till Café Mineur i Gamla stan måndag 4 eller 11 maj mellan 17.00 och 18.30. Beställ en Specialare: tex. Specialkaffe, Specialäggmacka, Specialroibuste etc. Du kommer att få en gåva.

3. Efter fikat börjar en äventyrlig vandring. Det tar cirka tre timmar att följa berättelsen genom staden. Gå själv eller med en kompis om du vill. Medtag paraply vid regn.

Pris 50 kr + fika.

Hela sagan (124M):
http://www.jjg.se/maskspel/Maskernas-stad-mp3.zip

Ljudtrailer:
http://www.jjg.se/maskspel/Masktrailer.mp3

Att med denna relativt låga tekniska förstärkning i form klassisk mp3 så är detta en skön öppning för andra att inspireras och göra teknikstödda pervasive-spel utan att det behöver vara alltför komplicerat.

Efter att ha provgått en vandring så upplevde jag dels att ljudspåren verkligen kunde skapa en mäktig upplevelse men även att jag blev utlurad att se väldigt många fina platser och vyer av Stockholm som jag inte tidigare gjort.

Maskspel är kopplat till romanen Karnevalens tid, skriven av Ulf Staflund, ett väldigt bra exempel på en crossmedia produkt som inte behöver innehålla en teknisk lösning. En bok som anknyter till ett verklighetsspel men som samtidigt är en roman som kan stå för sig själv.

Bakom Maskspel står gruppen Interacting Arts som bland annat har skrivet boken Deltagarkultur vilken jag skrivit om här.

Maskernas Stad – en musiksaga, på Facebook:
Måndagen den 4 maj
Måndagen den 11 maj

Nomenklatur

Crossmedia är en media-upplevelse som sträcker ibland till synes gränslöst över flera medier. T ex den amerikanska TV-serien Lost är universumet både kan upplevas genom att passivt titta på tv-serien eller att mer aktivt undersöka universumet i fejkade hemsidor på internet och även saker gömda ute bland gatorna. Det senare exemplet är ett typiskt verklighetsspel eller ARG – Alternate Reality Games, men crossmedia kan även se på flera andra sätt och behöver inte innehålla spel-liknande element. Transmedia är ett begrepp som ofta används i Europa med samma innebörd som crossmedia.

Verklighetsspel innebär att man använder verkligheten som spelplan. Därför innefattas även pervasive-games inom denna kategori. Verklighetsspel likställs ofta med ARG men är egentligen bredare begrepp då t ex även spel där just verkligheten, våra gator och torg, är spelplanen. Exempel på detta är skattjakter som tex geo-cashing, TittaVaJaHitta, The Wild Kexperience eller mer spelliknande upplevelser som Deathgame, Sanningen om Marika och Let’s Play.

Läs mer om på wikipedia om Verklighetsspel, Crossmedia och ARG.

Andra bloggar om spel, verklighetsspel, transmedia, crossmedia, deltagarkultur, levande rollspel, lajv, stockholm

Mr. President, and Director Training:

Spring has arrived with flowers. The buds have reappeared on bare branches again. Indeed! The March winds are the morning yawn of the year.

All and every little thing tell us
That once again ’tis Spring

Please accept my best wishes for a bright and beautiful season.

This time spring has brought along the advent of cricket season. And the current cricket series with India has caused a sort of fever to cricket lovers. Today is a crucial day for all of us. An important and decisive match between traditional rival teams is about to start and we are here participating in a learning exercise. You are not alone missing the glimpses of the match. My heart also joins the curious thumping of your heartbeat.

I have the opportunity to talk to you, the learned managers under the new system of local government, and I will avail it with honor talking relevant or maybe some irrelevant things.

Overtly or covertly, the district government system is new and complex. Its managers face requirements that are different from their federal, provincial, or private sector counterparts. Because of the complexity and range of those requirements, it is important for DDOs to understand the requirements specific to the district.

Friends! We use management and professional development to refer to those processes directed towards equipping professional managers with the skills, knowledge and attitudes necessary to achieve administrative objectives both now and in the future.

Any human development must be aligned with the entity’s mission and strategic goals in order that, through enhancing the skills, knowledge, learning ability and enthusiasm of people at every level, there will be continuous organizational and individual growth.

The perspectives of management and professional development are interpreted here as including the terms education, learning, training, and development which are seen as an integral part of the wider professional development framework.

I have the reason to believe, my dear officers, that if the training and development of managers of any department is not accorded high priority, if training is not seen as a vital component in the realization of government policies, then it is hard to accept that we have committed ourselves to management and professional development.

Those departments where there is a chronic under-investment in management and professional development that is the prime reason for the poor performance of the financial management or economy at large. The critique that can be constructed is disturbingly pervasive. At the macro level the education and training infrastructure, particularly when subjected to international comparisons is the major basis for consistently failing to address the needs of economic development. Training initiatives failing to provide consistent direction; concentrating on the certainties of vocational relevance rather than longer-term knowledge demands relevant to an imperfect future, and, simply, a lack of overall investment.

At the micro level, despite the relevance placed on bureaucratic system by successive governments, the practice of individual departments is similarly disturbing. Under-investment in management and professional development, whether measured in terms of budgets or training days, is regularly reported. All too frequently management and professional development fails to be regarded as a managerial priority or something that should be fully integrated through a learning culture into everyday practice. The traditional practice of public service, dominance of accountancy traditions and short-term-ism that characterize our bureaucratic inheritance arguably provide infertile conditions for what is essentially a long-term commitment.

While acknowledging the pessimistic construction that I have made, I would argue that investment in management and professional development could play a key role in initiating and facilitating change. You can thus adapt to whatever comes along and to take advantage of it, turning threats into challenges, and rising to these challenges in ways that produce increased benefit to the government and employees.

If I were to prescribe one process in the training of men, which is fundamental to success in any direction, it would be thoroughgoing training in the habit of accurate observation. It is a habit which every one of us should be seeking ever more to perfect.

All organizations, entities, and departments require some form of organizational structure to implement their strategies. Principally, structures are changed when they no longer provide the coordination, control, and direction managers, and entities require implementing strategies successfully. The ineffectiveness of structure typically results from increases in department’s revenues and levels of diversification. In particular, the formulation of strategies involving greater levels of diversification demands structural change to match each strategy. Some strategies require elaborate structures and strategic control, while others focus on financial control.

Allow me to briefly converse about strategic leadership. If you are a strategic leader, you have the ability to anticipate, maintain flexibility, and empower others to create strategic change as necessary. Multifunctional in nature, strategic leadership involves managing through others, managing an organization rather than a functional subunit, and coping with change that seems to be increasing exponentially in the current administrative landscape. Because of the complexity and global nature of this landscape, as a strategic leader, you must learn how to influence human behavior effectively in an uncertain environment. By word or by personal example, and through your ability to envision the future, as effective strategic leader you can meaningfully influence the behaviors, thoughts, and feelings of those with whom you work. The ability to manage human capital may be the most critical of your leadership skills.

From now on, in the 21^st century, many managers working in government across country will be challenged to alter their mind-sets to cope with the rapid and complex changes occurring in the global economy.

A managerial mind-set is the set of assumptions, premises, and accepted wisdom that bounds—or frames—a manager’s understanding of the department and the core competencies it uses in the pursuit of strategic role. Your continuous success depends on your willingness to challenge continually your managerial frames.

Today competition means not product versus product, company versus company, or department versus department. It is a case of mindset versus mindset, managerial frame versus managerial frame. Competing on the basis of mindsets demands that strategic leaders learn how to deal with diverse and cognitively complex situations. One of the most challenging changes is overcoming your own successful mindset.

As effective leaders you should always be willing to make candid and courageous, yet pragmatic decisions—decisions that may be difficult, but necessary in light of internal and external conditions. You should solicit corrective feedback from peers, superiors, and employees about the value of your difficult decisions. Unwillingness to accept feedback may be key reason talented executives fail. This highlights the need for you to solicit feedback consistently from those affected by your decisions.

Because strategic leadership is a requirement of strategic success, and because departments may be poorly led and over-managed, working in the 21^st century competitive landscape you are challenged to develop effective strategic leaders.

At district level you are the top administrative managers. And top-level mangers are an important resource for departments seeking to formulate and implement strategies effectively. A key reason for this is that the strategic decisions made by top managers influence how the department is designed and whether goals will be achieved. Thus, a critical element of your organizational success is having a team with superior managerial skills.

You often use your discretion (or latitude for action) when making strategic decisions, including those concerned with the effective implementation of strategies. You must therefore be action oriented: thus, the decisions that you make should spur the department to action.

Since you are top executives, you have a major effect on your department’s culture. Your values are critical in shaping your department’s cultural values. Accordingly, you have an important effect on organizational activities and performance. The significance of this effect should not be underestimated. Permit me to remind you that acquiring of culture is the development of an avid hunger for knowledge and beauty.

Add innovation and creativity in all your endeavors. It will certainly pay off. Effective leaders focus their work on the key issues that ultimately shape department’s ability to perform effectively.

And in the words of Charles de Gaulle, “Every man of action has a strong dose of egotism, pride, hardness, and cunning. But all those things will be forgiving him, indeed, they will be regarded as high qualities, if he can make them the means to achieve great ends.” To get others to come into your ways of thinking, you must go over to theirs; and it is necessary to follow, in order to lead.

While concluding, let me ask: do you know how do geniuses come up with ideas? What is common to the thinking style that produced “Mona Lisa,” as well as the one that spawned the theory of relativity? What characterizes the thinking strategies of the Einsteins, Edisons, da Vincis, Darwins, Picassos, Michelangelos, Galileos, Freuds, and Mozarts of history? What can we learn from them?

“Much learning does not teach man to have intelligence.”

This is the quotation from the philosopher Heraclitus, who spanned the fifth and fourth centuries BC. Twenty-five hundred years later, he’s still right. You might spend most of your life going to school, reading, looking up facts, acquiring information, and memorizing it. But, although you’ll become more informed, in the end it won’t make you any smarter. Is a reference library smart? Is a computer with a vast storehouse of voluminous data smart? Is the simple act of digesting and then disgorging information either smart or impressive? My answer is simple: “No.”

Anyway, I hereby formally inaugurate this training course.

Thank you for your time and patience.

Thank you for listening.

God bless you!

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, Line of Sight

Eurotech, una delle aziende più innovative nel campo della microelettronica, le sta pensando tutte.

Alle scorse elezioni, gli elettori americani non autosufficienti hanno potuto votare Obama o Mc Cain on line, grazie a dei micro-pc.

Ma questa è solo una delle tante applicazioni della miniaturizzazione di computer in cui Eurotech è ormai leader mondiale.

L’ultima idea è il computer che si indossa al braccio come un orologio, in grado di resistere a condizioni ambientali proibitive, mantenendo le mani libere.

Ma oltre alla sfida di realizzare prodotti sempre più piccoli, capaci di diventare invisibili, l’azienda friulana opera anche sul fronte dell’Hpc, ovvero computer dotati di elevata capacità di calcolo grazie al collegamento di centinaia e migliaia di microprocessori.

La loro parola d’ordine è innovazione continua.

Attualmente lavorano per cambiare il paradigma computazionale da “embedded a pervasive”, ovvero la nuova frontiera prevede computer che sono interconnessi con altri oggetti in una rete di comunicazione, grazie ai quali, ad esempio, sarà possibile portare con sé un sistema che monitorerà in continuazione i principali parametri fisiologici, consentendo magari la prevenzione di molti tipi di malattie.

Le nuove sfide previste?
Riguarderanno il rapporto tra il computer e l’uomo, creare “angeli custodi virtuali”, sistemi in grado di funzionare senza bisogno dell’uomo.

Telefonieren ist immer eine Peer-to-Peer Anwendung gewesen. Anrufe wurden über ein praktisch Schaltnetzwerk weltweit vermittelt. Die Internet Telefonie z.B. Skype hat dieses Prinzip übernommen. Man kann damit direkt von einem Internet Gerät (PC oder WLAN Telefon) zu einem anderen Internet Gerät im WWW ohne Gebühren telefonieren. Konventionelle Geräte können von Skype zwar angerufen werden, man kann aber mit einem konventionellen Telefon keine Skype Verbindung starten.Damit ist die Zahl der potentionellen Nutzer eingeschränkt.

Google hat vor 20 Monaten einen kleinen StartUp aufgekauft, der Server basierende Telefonie anbietet. Der Benutzer wählt sich mit einem beliebigen Telefon am Server (ähnlich wie bei einer Mailbox) ein und kann sich dann entweder durch Eingabe einer Telefonnummer oder durch Nutzung der Services des Google Phone Managers mit einem beliebigen Teilnehmer verbinden lasssen. Bei einem Gespräch von USA nach China geht es über Standardtechnik (Mobil, Festnetz, Internet) zum Google Phone Server in USA und über Internet (ähnlich wie bei Skype)dann zum Google Phones Server in China und von dort wieder über dort Standardtechnik zum Angerufenen. Der Google Phone Server übernimmt dabei auch die Aufgaben einer Vermittlungsstelle, die Anrufe flexibel an ein bestimmtes Gerät oder mehrere Geräte wie z.B. Büro, Heim oder Mobil Telefon weitergeben kann. Google weitet damit sein Angebot an Pervasive Computing Services aus und übernimmt Mehrwertdienste, die eigentlich Telefonanbieter wie Telekom, Vodafone u.a. anbieten wollen, die aber immer noch nicht verstanden haben, dass heute integrierte Software und Services vom Niutzer verlangt werden wie der Erfolg von Apple und Google zeigt. Langfristig kann Google Internet und Telefon Services mit einheitlichen eMail und Telefonlisten, Mailbox  und Verbindungsmanagement aus einer Hand anbieten

Der Google Phone Manager wird zur Zeit nur in USA für einen begrenzten Benutzerkreis angeboten wird aber sicher schnell auch international verfügbar.

A major determinant of a firm’s success is the extent to which it can relate functionally to its external environment. To achieve its proper place in a competitive situation, the firm realistically must evaluate its competitive strengths and weaknesses. This idea—that the firm must know itself—is the essence of the company self-concept. The idea is not commonly integrated into theories of strategic management; its importance for individuals has been recognized since ancient times.

Both individuals and firms have a crucial need to know themselves. The ability of either to survive in a dynamic and highly competitive environment would be severely limited if they did not understand their impact on others or of others on them.

In some senses, then, firms take on its members in other ways than their individual interactions. Thus, firms are entities whose personality transcends the personalities of their members. As such, they can set decision-making parameters based on aims different and distinct from the aims of their members. These organizational considerations have pervasive effects.

Ordinarily, descriptions of the company self-concept per se do not appear in mission statements. Yet such statements often provide strong impressions of the company self concept.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir - Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please contact www.asifjmir.com

To arrive is scary.  What will be our journey, if we are already there?

As I’ve watched the supersonic work pace of Barack Obama, I’ve also been annoyed with the curmudgeonly spirit of many commentators.

I believe they are scared.  Not because of anything Barack Obama may or may not do, but because Barack Obama may be the person we all want to be.   If it is possible to be articulate, poised, present, warm, honest, then we don’t have to be scared, hesitant, insecure, insincere and most of all ‘outsiders’.  We can just ‘be’ and ‘be accepted’.  To arrive is scary.  What will be our journey, if we are already here?

Don’t let disappointment be an excuse to delay arrival

Nonetheless, I was very disappointed by the bombing of Pakistan.  Sending an unmanned drone into a civilian building seems to me a murderous act.  How can we defend this?  I would like this to stop.

We want what we don’t like not to be

My emotional reaction to this event follows a spiral that, I believe, is quite common when ordinary people follow politics and world events. I read the reports and I felt disgust.  Then I felt judgmental.  And then I wanted to reject what disgusted me.

And when reality does not cooperate, we sulk

But the source of my disgust is in power (and popular).  Rejection is not an option open to me. So, I felt down and dejected.  Feeling that there was nothing I could do but endure the undurable, I withdrew, at least emotionally, and felt alienated, despondent and dejected

Curmudgeonly behavior is a mark of esteem in UK but it is “wet”

It is very likely that many people who express a curmudgeonly view are going through a similar process.  Something specific disgusts them, and they allow that one point, important as it may be, to allow them to feel despair about all points.  Positive psychologists call this ‘catastrophizing‘.   We go from one negative point to believing that we lack control.  Not only do we believe that we lack control on this issue, we go on to believe that we lack control on other issues too.  And we don’t stop there.  We go on to believe that we will always lack control, to the end of time.  In other words, we feel that what has gone wrong is persistent, pervasive, and personal.

So what am I going to do?

Put the strength of my feeling in words

Well, this issue is important to me.  I am sickened by the bombing of civilian targets.  I am ashamed it was done.  I leaves me uncomfortable and embarrassed and feeling that our condolences are woefully insufficient.  I don’t even know how to express this adequately.

Be a player

But it is also wrong to write off the hope that has come to the world.  One day I may be in a position to influence decisions like this.  And if I am to open a conversation with influential people, I need to be informed, and much more informed than I am now.  So I will become so.

List specific small things that I can do

And for now, should I meet my MP, who is a UK specialist on the conflict in Afghanistan, I will ask him.  I will tell I am unhappy and that I want to know more.  And though the whole matter makes me want to throw up, I will listen and learn.

Stay where the decisions are made

If we want the world to be as we wish, we cannot pick up our toys and go home every time we don’t like something.  I am afraid the art of politics is to be where the decisions are made.  Sometimes we have to stay and engage.

Stop the decline into ineffectiveness

Positive psychology does not say that the problems of the world will go away.  But it does help us not sink into despair and become ineffectual.

Come with me!

• Is there something that makes you angry and fearful?  Are you overgeneralising from one issue, thinking it is ‘persistent, pervasive and personal’ – catastrophising?
• If you put aside your general despair and remain in the forum where decisions are made, what do you need to do to become more effective at influencing our collective decisions?
• And having thought this through, can you see a way that you may be able to influence events in future?

IET Tech Coffee Morning: Sheep (Nick) Dalton from Computing Dept.

Change to ubiquitous/pervasive computing: from one computer to thousands of users, through one PC per desk, to thousands of computers per person.

So multi-touch surface allowing many people to interact at the same time. (Which is actually several users to one computer … interesting!)

Biggest ontology to visualise: all human knowledge. Amazon is the modern Library of Alexandria.  So he’s captured Amazon’s taxonomy, can zoom in from top-level categories down to groups of ten books.  Using his nifty surface to zoom with multi-touch.

Nice video demo, using a vertically-mounted multi-touch surface. (Very large.) Jeff Han – some ace demos including TED talk from 2006. Created a homebrew craze of postgrads building their own table (and then running away) – not much software. (Minority Report interface actually based on MIT research, not the other way around.) Fiddling with photos is the ob demo.

Problem of ‘gorilla arms’ if you’re waving your arms around in the air for a long time vertically; easier if you have something to press against; even easier if the table is horizontal. Microsoft have announced Surface, a tabletop machine, but they have technological problems – can’t use it in a room with windows (so Ok to use in our shiny new JLB labs).

Parallel to the homebrew computing craze in the 1980s – people build things and if you’re good you keep building things. Hasn’t been a similar movement in between when people are so excited about building hardware.

Hardware: surface, projector, camera. Want to be able to distinguish touching from hovering finger. Strongest image is what’s projected on the screen, so tech challenge is to remove the projected gubbins. Secret is to look without looking (!). Jeff Han’s big contribution: start with big piece of glass or acrylic. Fire infrared LED down the edge, goes through acrylic – as in fibre optic cables, they do the total internal reflection thing at the glass and bounces back in to the glass/acrylic until absorbed (or emitted out the end). So you get 450 IR LEDs and point them in to the edge. 50 LEDs wasn’t bright enough (in about 1m x 60cm) so they did 500. Just a battery and a bunch of lights. When you touch it with a finger, that interrupts the acrylic/air interface, and … it glows in the IR.

So need 1-200 IR LEDs and a big chunk of acrylic.

You can still see what’s on the projector (when you turn it on), which drenches the IR signal with the optical signal. Get an IR optical filter and stick that over the camera. (Possibly for astronomical use?)  Using a Guppy camera (about £1000) but can use a normal webcam. But can take a piece of exposed film (from trad film camera) – which will do the same sort of job as the £30-50 filter. Most cameras are sensitive in the IR anyway; the ‘night vision’ mode on many consumer cameras simply switches off the filter-out-the-IR tech.

Can hack it out of an IKEA table but getting the tech labs to do it makes it look much more scientific.

Can use the acrylic alone, but that’s transparent (so projected image not very clear), so use a layer of Rosco grey (makes the back projection better), then a conformal layer. Polish acrylic with Brasso, then , then, then … to brighten the finger points. Or … a squidy layer of latex – which does work – available in any good fetish shop. But a sheet of silicon works well.

The software he uses is called Reactivision. Not designed for multitouch but you can do that, and can respond to any arbitrary touch on the surface (which is cool and allows for interesting appropriations). Reactivision just does the detection and tracking.  Many other technologies, on different surfaces. OpenTouch works really well too. They output open sound control (OSC) which is a UDP packet, which you can then interpret.  Toolkits for the image processing … but then you’re own your own: this is the level the software development is at right now.

Java Swing, MFC, all of the frameworks – all assume a single user at a deep level. Text needs to go in all sorts of directions.  Whole GUI paradigm needs to change.  Oops!

Fiducials – like a barcode for multitouch. Reactivision software can recognise what they are, and (importantly) what orientation they’re in.

Or can do very simple table by just shining LEDs straight up and on to the fiducials and pick them up from the reflection – makes for tangible technologies – using cards with fiducials on the back but everyday pictures on the top. Eva Honiker observed in a museum context: a digital exhibit with a computer and mouse, the kids will play but the adults go to read the paper on the wall; but the multitouch exhibit is more inclusive as an interface.

Need: acrylic, LEDs, cheap webcam, piece of exposed film, computer (assume lying around), video projector – LED-based are nice (can leave on, bulbs don’t blow and they don’t make noise) and only £100. (Need low-intensity projector so as not to blind the users above!)

Table they designed was deliberately too big to reach over – embedded physical affordance – encourages multi-person interaction rather than one person driving.

Reactivision – was originally designed to help Bjork look good at Glastonbury. Can reconfigure sounds during a performance.  OpenTouch – another multitouch project littering the Internet in response to Jeff Han – but is a good one.  Touche on the Mac, a Mac-ised version you don’t need to mess around with XML and so on.  Open Sound Control is the lingua franca, reflecting the wacky sound project history – bit like Electroplankton and so on.

Alternative technology: capacitance-based, project from above. Underneath have weft and warp of wires. When you touch you form a circuit; can detect fingers by capacitance – and can actually tell WHO is touching, which gives you a lot of fun interface possibilities. (I can move my pieces and you can’t; also good for tracking in research times.) Can buy for £10k at the moment, but possibly coming down as it commercialises. Main problem is getting the projection from directly above.

Can get the same sort of effect with multiple mice – less whizzy-looking but does do the job.

Asus have a new Eee Top – £500 with a touch screen, runs Windows touch version, like iPod Touch. Often only have a bounding box interface, looks like bimanual input but it’s faked. Video-projectors-for-schools people are interested too. Challenge for back compatibility versus doing something actually new. (Like command-line lying beneath windowing systems.) Smart are bringing this to schools in less than six months.  Microsoft see it in hotel lobbies, mobile phone shops.  Others see it in getting stakeholders together to negotiate – group in the Netherlands discussing e.g. getting people to agree about relocating a river.

NATS – National Air Traffic Control Service – consultation about rerouting air corridors, with multiple constraints and stakeholders (safety, fuel usage, noise, etc). Yvonne Rogers showed these interfaces are good for picking up people with different levels of skill.

They’re exploring: what situations does this work best in. Good for small groups.  What’s coming in the next five years? “The next Microsoft is sitting in a garage at the moment fiddling with a multitouch surface.”

They used the capacitance-based table to help Computing Dept decide about who sits where in the new building. Small groups of three. The solutions they came out with were fabulous … but were ignored.  Social failure not technological.

It’s Corny! Potluck dinner and free screening of King Corn

Sunday, November 30

4:30 pm

Location: Century Plaza party room, 24 Wellesley Street West, Toronto

Directions: Wellesley Street West, between Bay Street and Yonge Street, nearest subway: Wellesley

Potluck: Bring a corny dish to share. It can have a lot or a little corn, but make at least one ingredient corn or corn derived!

RSVP and info: torontochapter@cog.ca by Thursday, Nov. 27

About King Corn: a feature documentary about two friends, one acre of corn, and the subsidized crop that drives the fast-food nation. Best friends, Ian Cheney and Curt Ellis, move to the US heartland to learn where their food comes from. With the help of friendly neighbors, genetically modified seeds, and powerful herbicides, they plant and grow a bumper crop of America’s most-productive, most-subsidized grain on one acre of Iowa soil. But when they try to follow their pile of corn into the food system, what they find raises troubling questions about how we eat and how we farm.

In a recent online survey conducted by ABI Research results showed that at least 46 percent (nearly half) were accessing Social Network Technologies by their mobile devices with strong results for MySpace and Facebook eclipsing any other technology.

I feel this is strong evidence for a need to seriously consider pervasive devices when implementing Social Technology initiatives, and indeed in the design of the UIs for the products.

I know both Facebook and WordPress have already developed iPhone interfaces, as I am using those, and there are over 83 solutions in the AppStore under the Social Networking Category which include LinkedIn and MySpace apps as well as plethora of options for Twitter and Blogging.

Overall, an interesting usage characteristic for Social Technology Architects.

Regards,

Glenn Irvine
glenn.irvine@thelotusposition.net