Sunday, June 26, 2011

Comment

Again an interesting contribution from eMarketer. About how brands begin to enter into the virtual settings of the multiplayer social online games. Well, somehow that was a logical evolution, as the virtual spaces represented by these game settings are getting closer and closer to "real" space by their social contents. Such things already were present some years ago in the Second Life virtual setting, with limited impact however. I am curious about the tendencies which will take place in the future on that ...

Saturday, June 25, 2011

Literature Update

A very interesting paper to read. For those of the group, we had some talks about that few days ago ...

Metcalf O, Pammer K (In Press) Attentional bias in excessive massively multiplayer online role-playing gamers using modified Stroop task. Computers in Human Behavior, Available online 24 May 2011.

And two papers more on the "philosophical" aspects of cyberbehavior. We should not neglect philosophy when dealing with cyberbehavior, as we need, like for any other science, a humanistic approach to frame our research. And as François Rabelais said (one of the leading French humanists of the Renaissance, and, incidently, we studied in the same school: the Faculty of Medecine of the University of Montpellier in France J ... I know, but I had to write it ! J ): "Science sans conscience n’est que ruine de l’âme."

Thomas C, Sheth A (2011) Web Wisdom: An essay on how Web 2.0 and Semantic Web can foster a global knowledge society. Computers in Human Behavior, 27:1285-1293.
Zhou L, Ding L, Finin T (2011) How is the Semantic Web evolving? A dynamic social network perspective. Computers in Human Behavior, 27:1394-1302.

Friday, June 24, 2011

Comment

Some times ago I wrote a small comment on the issue of Cyberpiracy. Today is another interesting issue which seems to concern more and more the governements of most countries: Cyberwar. Just a couple of articles form major US media, about the new American policies, regulation, and strategies regarding the ways to react to situations of cyberwars.

Cyber Combat: Act of War (from the Wall Street Journal)

And for those of us who read French:

Thursday, June 23, 2011

Lab Update

We got another Book Chapter published. This chapter, entitled "When Taste Triggers Sociophobia", deals with the animal models of eating disorders and is getting published in the soon-to-be essential “Handbook of Behavior, Food and Nutrition".
Ok, it may sound a bit far from cyberbehavior ... but actually not, as it is the first of a series of two Book Chapters (I know they will be published in two different books, but still, they are complementary to each other), the second one (which I co-authored with my postdoc Anna) being dealing more with the multimodal aspects of food disorders. And this second chapter bridges in the same text animal studies and human reactions to virtual reality therapies in the context of eating disorders (yay, we did it! I know, said like that it sounds a bit artificial, but I guess you will have to read the two Book Chapters to see how we connected things together). So, one is now published, the second one is in the publisher and on its way (multi-authored books always take ages to get publish, it seems).


Guitton MJ (2011) When Taste Triggers Sociophobia. Preedy VR, Watson RR, Martin CR (Eds), Handbook of Behavior, Food and Nutrition. Springer, pp 1217-1230.

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Literature Update

A very good paper (but that is always the case when it comes from Yadin Dudai's lab J ). Since some years, Yadin Dudai is working on this notion of "real-life" memory, with the final goal of dealing with more ethological aspects of human cognition. That translates, in terms of experimental settings, by the development of more ecological designs, compared to the classical "hit the black dot" computer tasks. Anyway, this paper deals with some of the biological substratum of the process of encoding episodic memory. Cute-edge imagery and excellent memory-oriented experimental paradigm characterises this paper.

Ben-Yakov A, Dudai Y (2001) Constructing realistic engrams: poststimulus activity of hippocampus and dorsal striatum predicts subsequent episodic memory. Journal of Neuroscience, 31:9032-9042.

Sunday, June 12, 2011

Comment

About children exposure to digital media. A very interesting update from eMarketer, about the increase of young chilren exposure to digital media. As I mentionned in the entrance on "Cyber Behavior in Canada" in the soon-to-be published "Encyclopedia of Cyber Behavior", Canada is doing amazingly well in term of Internet use, being one of the countries with the best coverage. Double-edged sword it seems, as Canadian children (obviously, unfortunately) are also among the ones who seems to be the most exposed to digital media ...

Friday, June 10, 2011

Comment

Piracy on Internet is an important issue. And several countries want to get laws on that topic. However, one of the key problem is that restraining Internet use may well go again the freedom that we all want, and that virtual spaces so strongly emphasised. Control and freedom do not always go well together, but things can not iether go simply wild ... This complex debate has already made its way in some countries, but now it seems that USA are getting there too. Well, unfortunately they seem to want to do things with a really "harsh" way, the proposed "Project Ip Act".

The New York Times made a very interesting editorial on that ...


For those reading French, Le Figaro as well had an interesting article :

Saturday, June 4, 2011

Literature Update

Can our profile predict our interests ? Obviously yes ... But can we extract these interests in a systematic way based on semantic-only short information ? If yes, the applications are really important, but it would questions also our degree of autonomy (or, how Kant's philosophy joins the new technology).

Cantador I, Castells P (2011) Extracting multilayered Communities of Interest from semantic user profiles: Application to group modeling and hybrid recommendantions. Computers in Human Behavior, 27:1321-1336.