By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Game Genre Map: The Cognitive Threshold in Strategy Games
Nick Yee, Quantic Foundry, 2016/01/21
Interesting article that maps popular strategy games against a 'gamer motivation model' - on one dimension, the level of strategy involved in the game, and on the other, the pace and excitement of the game. I tend to prefer high-strategy games and my personal favourite, Civilization, ranks third among them. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Why People Get More Stupid in a Crowd
Michael Bond, BBC | Future, 2016/01/19

Close to ten years ago I was in the middle of clarifying my thinking on what I called at the time 'groups and networks' in papers like That Group Feeling and talks like Groups vs Networks: the Class Struggle Continues. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The truth about “1 Like = 1 Prayer” posts on Facebook
Craig Charles, Techexplained, 2016/01/19

A question I've received a lot recently revolves around why I want a distributed network rather than a centralized system like Facebook or Twitter. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Platform Cooperativism: Challenging the Corporate Sharing Economy
Trebor Scholz, Rosa Luxemberg Siftung, 2016/01/19

"Despite all the scrumptious, home-cooked convenience of the 'sharing economy,'" writes Trebor Scholz, "we may end up sharing the scraps, not the economy." It's time for an alternative. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment
Mike Hearn, Medium, 2016/01/18

I've discussed Bitcoin and blockchains on this website before. This article is about the failure of that system, at least in the case of Bitcoin. The reasons are on the one hand technical, but on the other hand, the result of human failure. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Self-organization of complex, intelligent systems: an action ontology for transdisciplinary integration
Francis Heylighen, Integral Review, 2016/01/18
These are sweeping claims, but from my perspective they are fundamentally correct: "the fundamental constituents of reality are seen as actions and the agents that produce them. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Young, educated and underemployed: are we building a nation of PhD baristas?
Usman W. Chohan, The Conversation, 2016/01/18
The focus of this article by a World Bank consultant is the Australian labour market, but there are some not-so-flattering references to the Canadian and American environment as well. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Big Data as a Service: the Next Big Thing?
Ahmed Banaf, OpenMind, 2016/01/15

We are already working with the idea of big data as a service in the LPSS project, so I can easily see it becoming something more widely available in the future. But it's not just data in the cloud; it's tools as well. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Interview: Stolen, the problematic app that lets you buy and sell people on Twitter
Holly Brockwell, Gadgette, 2016/01/15
I remember there was once an application called BlogTrader or something like that where you could buy and sell 'shares' in blogs and websites in a fictional stock exchange. This current site is a bit like that, only much more annoying. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The e-health literacy framework: A conceptual framework for characterizing e-health users and their interaction with e-health systems
Ole Norgaard, Dorthe Furstrand, Louise Klokker, Astrid Karnoe, Roy Batterham, Lars Kayser, Richard H. Osborne, Knowledge Management & E-Learning: An International Journal, 2016/01/15
This is a paper from a special issue on e-health literacy. I think defining a  framework (20 page PDF) for the topic is a good idea, but I'm not convinced that the following characterization is as useful as it could be. More...