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With all of the health problems I’ve had recently, I was surprised to find this in Mitcham’s Thinking through Technology: The Path between Engineering and Philosophy, in which he is discussing Heidegger’s conceptualization of technology:

When we suffer or are in pain, we are simply too close to what we are experiencing; we need distance, some self-knowledge, appreciation of who we really are and of our limitations. But this is acquired not through rejection or repression of the pain; it comes only with time and through naming the source of our pain by asking questions and talking about it, rendering our suffering or recalling its background of happiness in poetry and art, sitting quietly and experiencing its presence–or rather what is immediately and unobtrusively there, just on the other side of the curtain of our disturbed feelings–gradually standing back and becoming detached from the tossed surface of our conscious calculations.

Tags:cognition, experience, Heidegger, perception technology Comments are off for this post

The IST Graduate Symposium was held on January 31 and February 1, 2008. I had the privilege of chairing the symposium last year, but this year the event became much bigger, with big names in industry and academia giving keynotes and talks. The symposium gained a lot of support from the administration in this third year.

Annemijn and I proposed a panel about IST research in the developing world, and with some cajoling were able to get six panelists including myself. My advisor, Fred Fonseca, agreed to moderate the panel. There was some good discussion and a diversity of research and opinions that illustrated the complexity and scope of potential IST research in developing countries. There were some good questions from the audience. I thought it went pretty well.

The panel seems to have made enough of an impression that it was the only one quoted in the news blurb put out by the university. And they quoted me(!), much to my surprise:

News - Full Story

Tags:culture, IST symposium Comments are off for this post