albrechtslund.net

Dissertation completed and submitted

I am excited to announce that I completed and submitted my PhD dissertation earlier today. The title is “In the Eyes of the Beholder: Introducing participation and ethics to surveillance“. Next will be the oral defense, which hopefully is before the summer.

Today, I will be relaxing with my family and eating chicken Tomorrow, I will go to the university and celebrate with friends and colleagues.

The sun is certainly shining in Aalborg this weekend!

Friends Indeed? (Washington Post)

I just realized (ok, I googled my name) that my article Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance, published in First Monday 13(3), was mentioned in the Washington Post. The article is entitled Friends Indeed? and is about online social networking.

Here is a quote:

Summer friendships, for example, have been transformed. The ritual of meeting again at the beach after a long winter was once marked by hours of catching up. Not today. Networked people who haven’t seen each other in forever already know about the new boyfriend, and what happened to the old one — in very great detail. They also know about the old school and the new job. They have known, every day, no matter where in the world they roamed, the instant that emotional change occurred. Now, after the initial squeals and swaying hugs, conversations pick up in mid-sentence. It’s a mind-meld uncanny to watch.

This is a world of “participatory surveillance,” says Anders Albrechtslund of Denmark’s Aalborg University in the online journal First Monday.

Real online friends watch over each other — mutually, voluntarily and enthusiastically, in ways that can be endearing.

One nation under CCTV

Banksy did it again. Read the story here or here and see the pictures here.

Tour de Research

It all started as an April 1 joke about scientists using brain dopping. Jonathan A. Eisen, an evolutionary biologist, organized a joke about an alleged “crack down” on the science community:

The US National Institutes of Health is to crack down on scientists ‘brain doping’ with performance-enhancing drugs such as Provigil and Ritalin, a press release declared last week. The release, brainchild of evolutionary biologist Jonathan Eisen of the University of California, Davis, turned out to be an April Fools’ prank. And the World Anti-Brain Doping Authority website that it linked to was likewise fake. But with a number of co-conspirators spreading rumours about receiving anti-doping affidavits with their first R01 research grants, the ruse no doubt gave pause to a few of the respondents to Nature ’s survey on readers’ use of cognition-enhancing drugs.

Very funny. Nature performed an online survey about scientists using cognition-enhancing drugs asking these questions:

1. Have you used cognitive enhancers?
2. Did they work for you?
3. Would you talk to me about your experiences?

The poll results show that 20% of scientists admitted to using brain-enhancing drugs. TWENTY PERCENT! Take a look at the story.

Videos from the web

About a year ago, I made a list of online films and video clips which I like (all freely available on the web, of course). More here:

• The Last Lecture (2007, 1 hr 44 min). Randy Pausch’s famous and great lecture about childhood dreams. Probably the only HCI scholar (or scholar in general) to reprise a great lecture on the Oprah Winfrey Show.
• Louis and the Nazis (2003, 1 hr 19 min). Scary stuff. I also enjoyed Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends (1999) which aired in Denmark a few years ago. Memorable episodes are UFOs (49 min) and Porn (49 min).
• Heidegger (49 min), Sartre (48 min) and Niezsche (50 min). Three episodes of the BBC series Human all too human.
• Derrida (2002, 1 hr 26 min). The movie.
• The Chomsky-Foucault debate (1971, 13 min). There is also a book. Here is some of the editorial review from Amazon: “In 1971, at the height of the Vietnam War and at a time of great political and social instability, two of the world’s leading intellectuals, Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, were invited by Dutch philosopher Fons Edlers to debate an age-old question: is there such a thing as “innate” human nature independent of our experiences and external influences?”

Any other suggestions?