Support for the Python language has been released for the Series 60 platform, including the Nokia 6600 and 6630. 
 
An interesting titbit: the Python API includes a call to fetch the location data (cell id, area id, etc).  This is encouraging; previously, accessing these variables was undocumented and a bit of a hack, and we have been worried that Nokia might remove this functionality. 

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

CRAFT is organising a workshop on artefacts and furniture that can support collaboration. Our goal is to have an informal meeting between researchers involved in designing, producing or experimenting with things such as tables for enhancing group interactions, walls or carpets that reflect group interactions… any roomware or tanglibles that might enhance the life of our students in our future learning center. The workshop will include talks and working sessions. It will be held in a small village of the Swiss Alps on June 20th-22nd 2005 (arrival on 19th). The exact place is not fixed yet, but the local airport will be Geneva. Geneva airport has now many low cost airlines operating across Europe. The workshop is decsribed in http://craftsrv1.epfl.ch/~cherubini/caif/.

If you are interest to joir the CAIF workshop, send us (mauro[dot]cherubini[at]epfl.ch) a short bio and an abstract of your current related work that could be presented. We hope you will accept our invitation and we look foward to meet you in June.

Finally I managed to merge the different feed I am using in a single feed. I am using feedburner, a nice service that allows you to add extra information to the feed. For instance now it includes my de.icio.us feed.

Please update your feeds: http://feeds.feedburner.com/MauroCherubini-Weblog

Finally we managed to extract dialogues interaction from the COTRAS environment we are using. The idea is to use the coding schema I developed earlier to describe the interaction undergoing. The excerpt presented below offers an example of verbal interaction and committed actions. The goal of this initial phase is to find possible connections between action and speech.

A number of location-based workshops will take place in and around Delhi before Doors 8. In Nomadic Banquet (led by Debra Solomon, culiblog.org) guests walk or take auto rickshaws from course to course, and discover the city’s street food vendors. The workshop will use Delhi’s existing food systems as a point of departure, the idea being to use locative media to enhance the relationship between vendors and hungry people. Juhuu (Juha Huuskonen, juhuu.nu) will do something on VJ-ing in the city. Usman Haque (haque.co.uk/) runs a workshop on open source architecture. Jan Chipchase will show how Video Diaries might be used in service design. And Christian Nold will conduct locative media experiments. Participation in a workshop is by agreement with the workshop leader concerned, and you have to register for Doors 8 first to be eligible to take part. An equal number of places is available for Indian and international delegates.

[via DoorsOfPerception]

Some students working on the table assignment. They have to build and test the usability of a new table that can support collaboration.

Jermann, P. (2004). Computer Support for Interaction Regulation in Collaborative Problem-Solving. PhD thesis, University of Genéva, Genéva, Switzerland. Available from: http://craftsrv1.epfl.ch/~colin/thesis-jermann.pdf.
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This work span in the interaction regulation theory, spotting some light in how feedback can be used to support collaborative learning and work. The author, propose a test environment, called COTRAS which offer the possibility to play with collaborative traffic regulation. The results shows that the metacognitive tool offered can reflec in a more complex and accurate planning.

This work distinguish for the detailed construction of the experimental setup, and the statistical analysis of the results.

This thesis presents a framework for supporting interaction regulation through computational means. Regulation of collaborative problem-solving includes aspects related to the task as well as to the interaction itself. Task related aspects consist of establishing a strategy, planning actions and evaluating progress. Interaction regulation on the other hand refers to the organization of collaboration through communication rules as well as division of labor. These rules and strategies might be established at the outset of the collective activity, but they also need to be monitored and adapted as the interaction evolves. On a moment to moment time scale, regulating collaborative interaction consists of deciding “who does what” in addition to “what to do”. We chose to describe these regulation processes as a negative feedback loop, a concept borrowed from control theory. Following this metaphor, interaction regulation is a four step process that starts with the collection of raw data about the participants’ behavior (e.g. verbal contributions, mouse clicks, messages). In the second step, raw data is aggregated into a set of psychologically and pedagogically meaningful indicators that constitute the current state of interaction (e.g. symmetry of participation, quality of knowledge sharing). In the third step, the current state is compared to a representation of a desired state (standard) of interaction. Then, if there is a discrepancy between these two states of interaction, remedial actions are proposed in the fourth step (e.g. encourage participation or ask participants to clarify their explanations). Computers may offer support for any or all of these four steps. Support for the first two steps might be provided by mirroring tools, which assist learners and teachers in the collection of data by providing them with graphical feedback about their interaction. Support for the second and third step might be provided by metacognitive tools, which assist learners’ or tutors’ diagnosis of the interaction through visualizations which also contain a normative aspect that represents the standards of productive interaction. Support for the fourth step might be provided by guiding systems, which propose remedial actions based on a computational assessment of the situation. Our experimental studies show that a representation of the desired state of interaction is critical for regulation. A mirroring tool did not substantively affect the behavior of subjects while a metacognitive tool led to increased participation in dialogue, including more precise planning. Subjects were able to use the standard provided by the metacognitive tool to judge the quality of their current interaction and to take remedial actions. Mirroring tools might still be effective means to provide feedback to a group of problem-solvers, given that the standards to judge interaction are defined through instructions or are part of the subjects’ mental model of productive interaction.

Recently I have been interested in Paul Virilio’s work about velocity, about criticizing technological progress and the globalisation. One of the idea that was striking me is that of the loss of perspective. Virilio says that because of the velocity at which we move and communicate we lack of the perspective that was proper of previous ages. Here the term perspective it is not just in the physical meaning but it is intended in a more broad sense: historical, anthropological, economical, etc.

‘Velocity’ is the key word of his thinking, the post-modernity treasure, and the modern society capital. Reality is no longer defined by time and space, but in a virtual world, in which technology allows the existence of the paradox of being everywhere at the same time and being nowhere at all. The loss of the site/city/nation in favour of globalisation implies also the loss of rights and of democracy that is contrary to the immediate and instantaneous nature of information. McLuhan’s global village is nothing but a ‘World Ghetto’.

Copyright notice: the present content was taken from the following URL, the copyrights is reserved by the respective author/s.

Some links on the qualitative data analysis I found:
[1] qualitative research resources;
[2] grounded theory;
[3] qualitative research page.

Teil, G. and Latour, B. (1995). The hume machine: can association networks do more than formal rules. Stanford Humanities Review, 4(2):47–65. Available from: http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-2/text/teil-latour.html.
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The philosopher / sociologist of science, Bruno Latour, in 1995, with
Geneviéve Teil, published an essay describing the ‘Hume-Condillac Machine’,
intended as a tool for ‘computer-aided sociology’, from which these remarks
are lifted: “… instead of then wondering how to treat this enormous mass of data [i.e., texts] by applying methods of automatic reasoning or of AI to the documentation obtained, we intend to follow the inverse strategy, and use techniques for treating documents in order to help researchers to artificially produce intelligence about the terrain they are analyzing.”, and “… Instead of taking the royal road, which consists of making computers intelligent so that they are as skillful as the finest sociologists and most intricate hermeneuticians — a road which very soon becomes impossibly steep — we will take the service escalator. We accept the elementary stupidity of computers and we fashion a sociology, a logic and an ontology that work at their level of stupidity … We adopt this strategy of weakness, which was attempted without success by Hume and Condillac for explaining the human mind, for dealing with computers whose non-human mind is sufficiently moronic to really resemble Condillac’s statue or Hume’s blank slate.”.

The start from the assumption that social researcher lacks of tools to analyse complex text and human interactions. Computers are good in making association and statistic. They are not good in finding hidden patterns in the complexity of human communication. They propose a way in between the qualitative studies and the quantitative beauty of science. They call this approach a quali-quantitative study. Their idea is based on the primal existence of networked relations between words and concepts. Building a grid of relations between words/concepts, they hope to stimulate and retrieve the hidden micro-theories interconnecting the concepts of the text.

Very complex, highly theoretical and worth to explore in details.

The abstract of the connected PhD thesis, which I still have to localise, follows:

Geneviève TEIL

Candide, un outil de sociologie assistée par ordinateur pour l’analyse quali-quantitative de gros corpus de textes – ENSMP – 1991

Le texte est au centre de bon nombre d’activités humaines, celle de l’administration par exemple. L’analyse sociologique de texte ne doit pas se contenter de restituer les technologies d’écriture, de lecture, de diffusion et de collecte de textes; elle doit aussi s’attacher à décrire le contenu des textes. Cettedescription doit également rendre compte des multiples lectures, parfois contradictoires, qui sont faites. Ce faisant, l’analyse sociologique de texte se heurte à une importante difficulté que le logiciel CANDIDE se propose de pallier : le volume des textes à étudier. Ce programme ne peut s’appuyer sur aucun ensemble de connaissances a priori, un dictionnaire préétabli ou une grammaireexhaustive qui, s’il n’était partagé de tous les lecteurs, risquerait d’orienter sa lecture. De son point de vue, le texte est un dispositif associant des mots dont ilreprésente le réseau d’association. Nous décrivons son fonctionnement ainsi que diverses analyses de réseau (linguistiques, socio-economiques…). La comparaison de deux lectures d’un même corpus, faites par une équipe d’experts d’une part, par CANDIDE d’une autre, montre la parfaite concordance des deux lectures pour les gros corpus et les spécificités de chacune pour les petits ensembles de textes. Enfin, nous passons en revue des utilisations de cet outil, de l’analyse bibliographique à la veille technologique et a l’analyse de questionnaires ouverts.