faulker038

. I'm in Amsterdam for the 4th international ICT for Sustainability ( ICT4S ) conference. The main conference starts tomorrow but there are two full days of workshops before and after the conference. Today Elina and me held our workshop " Computing within Limits : Visions of computing beyond Moore’s law ". I refer to the workshop as "Elina's and mine" workshop despite the fact there are officially six organisers - because we in fact did 95% of the work (not that that was an inordinate amount to start with). We are still happy for the input we got from our co-organisers and we are very happy that Lorenz Hilty was able to attend the whole workshop! The workshop could be seen as an introduction to the background of and the ideas behind "Computing within Limits" ( official website , my write-up of Limits 2016 ). While we have organised two workshops (small conferences) on Computing within Limits in 2015 and 2016 , both of these have been held at UC Ir...

. Dear Dean of the KTH School of Computer Science and Communication. As the person with the most prominent position in the KTH hierarchy that I have a personal relation to, I would like to draw your attention to a single act of administration. Not because this act of administration is large or important, but in fact because it is the exact opposite. I would like to draw your attention to this small act of administration because of its  unimportance  and the humdrum nature of having to force myself to learn how to catch and return (or at times dodge) such small acts of administration. Having small acts of administration lobbied at me and learning to return them on volley is part of the job I do besides the job I'm  paid  to do: to teach, to conduct research and to do public outreach. Having small acts of administration lobbied at me is distracting and they hinder me from concentrating on my  real  job. Do you care? Can you do something about it? I would like...

. Both books below are about social media and I read them not because I chose to but because I had to. They constituted the course literature in a course about social media that I unwillingly had to teach due to an acute "crisis" (something unexpected happened and we are understaffed... permanently, it seems).  Here's the previous blog post  about books I have read. The asterisks represent the number of quotes from the each book (see further below). **** " Networked : The new social operating system " (2012) is written by  Lee Rainie  and  Barry Wellman   but despite being only three years old (when I read it last year) it already feels aged and past its peak (the students in question agreed). Also, I have for the longest of time had huge problems with sociologist Wellman's ideas about community (or "community") in the age of suburbs and community in the age of the Internet (in fact ever since I wrote my ph.d. thesis two decades ago). His ideas abo...

. My last two blog posts have been about the texts I have worked on during the first half of this year and I have definitely upped the game compared to, well, forever. This blog post constitutes another take on writing but this time in the form of a reflection on writing in general and on my writing in particular. This text also ties back to a question I got on Facebook in relation to the previous two blog posts: "What's your magic trick for being so productive?". Well, a first take on answering that question is that I haven't always been. I was reminded of that when I was the opponent at Per Fors' licentiate seminar before the summer. His way of writing reminded me of mine way back when I was a ph.d. student (as well as later). The "culprit" in my case (and perhaps in Per's) was excessive freedom from any constraints. This had in Per's case resulted in four articles about wildly different topics and with very little overlap (World Systems The...