Justine Sanderson

"A typical SBTF volunteer is male and 32 years old. He holds, or is currently enrolled in studies leading to, a Master’s degree in computer science, development studies or international relations. He often works as expert in GIS or ICT and has some experience from public sector or non-profit environments." Mmh, maybe that's an issue...? - Justine Sanderson

Ha! - Justine Sanderson

Tangleball is an Auckland-based creative space. We provide a place for people to meet, collaborate and develop their ideas. We aim to nurture both technical and artistic ideas. Find the details about the one in Silverdale too. - Justine Sanderson

"One of the surprises of the study was that almost none of the physical activities appeared to offer any protection against dementia. There can be cardiovascular benefits of course, but the focus of this study was the mind. There was one important exception: the only physical activity to offer protection against dementia was frequent dancing." - Justine Sanderson

"Their results show that regardless of the degree to which people are open minded, when they feel motivated to reduce uncertainty (either because they have an immediate goal of reducing uncertainty or they feel uncertain generally), they may experience more negative associations with creativity, which results in lower evaluations of a creative idea. Their findings imply an irony. Other research has shown that uncertainty spurs the search for and generation of creative ideas, yet these findings reveal that uncertainty also makes people less able to recognize creativity, perhaps when they need it most. " - Justine Sanderson

" 1) The idea of “right-brainers” and “left-brainers” is a grossly exaggerated misnomer; and 2) learning styles don’t exist." - Justine Sanderson

"[...] the theory behind embodied cognition would say it doesn't matter whether you can tell what metaphor you're acting out. The connection exists, the authors say, because the metaphor comes from how we actually carry out that cognitive act in our brains. Maybe we call it "thinking outside the box" because, at some fundamental level, that's what our brains are really doing. We call it a metaphor, but maybe it's not." - Justine Sanderson

"Stephane Doyen from the Université Libre de Bruxelles has repeated one of the classic experiments in priming and shown that, in this case at least, it’s not the words that create the effect. It’s the experimenters’ expectations." - Justine Sanderson

Tribes in Southeast Asia are being kept from using the latest high-tech gadgets to help them win land rights. - Justine Sanderson

Why do I blog this? Cause I get frustrated when engineer-oriented folks try to design things without thinking about the history, legacy, existing interaction rituals, behaviors and relevancy to normal humans and basically make things for themselves, which is fine — but then don’t think for a minute about the world outside of the square mile around Palo Alto. It could be so much better if ideas like this were workshopped, evolved, developed to understand in a more complete way what “light field imaging” could be besides something that claims camera-ness in a shitbox form-factor with an objectionable sharing ritual and (probably — all indications suggest as much) a pathetic resolution/mega-pixel count. - Justine Sanderson

"And then, around 2008, that changed. The pace of development ground nearly to a halt. The territory had been charted. There weren’t new methods to explore. We as an industry had largely figured out how to do our work. It was mostly a matter of applying the most appropriate tool given the nature of the problem. UX. as a practice, had matured. [...] How do you get a company to sustainably, repeatedly, dependably deliver great experiences? That’s the biggest challenge our field faces. And while as a consultant I could offer advice or guidance, I wasn’t really solving tackling the problem. In order to seriously address these challenges, it requires a day-in, day-out organizational engagement that lasts for years, a kind of engagement that project-based design consulting simply does not afford." - Justine Sanderson

"Do people mix at mixers? The answer is no…Mixer parties are supposed to free their guests from the constraints of preexisting social structure so they can approach strangers and make new connections. Nevertheless, our results show that guests at a mixer tend to spend the time talking to the few other guests whom they already know well" - Justine Sanderson

"I'm now thinking about a larger issue still. If placebo medicine can induce people to release hidden healing resources, are there other ways in which the cultural environment can "give permission" to people to come out of their shells and to do things they wouldn't have done in the past? Can cultural signals encourage people to reveal sides of their personality or faculties that they wouldn't have dared to reveal in the past? Or for that matter can culture block them? There's good reason to think this is in fact our history." - Justine Sanderson

"Combining his two passions, science and theater, Alon has recently created a "theater lab" on the Weizmann campus, as part of the Institute's new Human Brain and Mind Program. The "lab" is a twice-weekly workshop that brings together Weizmann scientists and actors from the Kartoshkes Ensemble Playback Theater, in an attempt to subject to rigorous scientific analysis topics that are not always easy to define, let alone quantify - creativity, spontaneity, togetherness. The theater lab has just produced its first scientific paper: a study that explored the optimal conditions for improvisation, considered to be central to the creative process." - Justine Sanderson

A satire. Indeed, it's not even about Powerpoint. It's about science and the arts. Beautiful. - Justine Sanderson