RickyRobinson.id.au

One feels very small when one is crapped on by a bird.

Alan Jones said it.

I just attended a very interesting presentation by Sanjana Hattotuwa about using CSCW in conflict transformation and peacebuilding. What is really great is that initial efforts are already underway to use this software in Sri Lanka. There has already been some success in getting the opposing factions to sit down and use this tool so that each party can describe the conflict from their point of view, air grievances and so on. Great to see technology being used for things that really matter, though, as Sanjana stated, lasting peace will not be brought about by technology but by the people involved in the conflict.

During his presentation, Sanjana said a few things that made me wonder about how context can be used in conflict transformation/resolution. He emphasised the difficulties introduced by cultural differences. A nod in one country means something else in another country (or even within different regions of the same country). It seems to me that the current context has a lot to do with the way you gesture, the way you speak and so forth. This is no different in a virtual setting than in a physical setting, except that in a physical setting the human needs to be aware of these cultural differences, whereas in a virtual setting (like the CSCW system presented by Sanjana) it should be theoretically possible to remove the burden of understanding cultural differences from the human, at least in part, and place that burden on the software.

Another possible channel of research is looking at the ownership of the virtual space that these peace negotiations take place in. Perhaps the paper written by KMH et al about security and access control in context management could throw some light on this?

Unbelievable.

An update on the Merrylands fiasco: somebody decided to fix the error. There is no state of Merrylands any longer.

The US election is still too close to call, with everything unfolding as predicted. But there was one big surprise. According to a story from ABC News Online, the USA has spawned a new state called Merrylands! None of the pundits predicted this.

I’m astonished to find that, according to Google, there is only one weblog called Reality Check, and it’s a long defunct weblog at that. Right now I’m thinking Reality Check with the subtitle The fly in your Chardonnay. I was also puzzled to find that there is not a single web page indexed by Google with that exact sentence. However, a fly in your Chardonnay uncovered many Alanis Morissette misquotes.

Okay, perhaps I was a bit harsh in saying that all Americans would suck if Bush got re-elected. Thanks for sobering me up, BJK, but what were you doing reading my blog in the middle of the night? Of course, I meant I could no longer refer to those smelly ones who voted for Bush as the good people of America.

Obviously it was the wrong post in the wrong place at the wrong time. I’m going to bed before somebody else forces me to post a correction.

Today the good people of America go to the polls. If they somehow manage to do the unthinkable and re-elect George W. Bush, I will never again refer to them as the good people of America. In fact, I’ll probably replace the good people with something very derogatory indeed.

Oh, and I can’t believe that John Howard is openly supporting Bush in this election.

Je ne sais quoi is what I actually meant to write. :) Hey, that could be the name of my blog! Maybe…