Shared Intentionality

The shared intentionality lies at the basis of human society, Dr. Tomasello argues. From it flow ideas of norms, of punishing those who violate the norms and of shame and guilt for punishing oneself. Shared intentionality evolved very early in the human lineage, he believes, and its probable purpose was for cooperation in gathering food. Anthropologists report that when men cooperate in hunting, they can take down large game, which single hunters generally cannot do. Chimpanzees gather to hunt colobus monkeys, but Dr. Tomasello argues this is far less of a cooperative endeavor because the participants act on an ad hoc basis and do not really share their catch.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/science/01human.html?_r=1

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Kuwaiti Women No Longer Need Husband’s Consent to Obtain Passports

After electing first women MPs this year, we have more good news from Kuwait. A constitutional court has declared that the law requiring women to obtain consent from their husbands for obtaining a passport is in violation of the constitutional guarantees of freedom and gender equality.

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New Social Change Game: Emergence MMOG

There seems to be a new social change game in the works. Development is afoot for Emergence, a massively multi-player online game (MMOG) to be released in 2011.

The Backstory: A technical glitch in android programming causes the androids, the global mechanical labour force, to rebel against their human makers. A 12 hour war follows. Nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons employed by both sides leave the earth a shattered shell. Continue reading

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Evidence…

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Carl Sagan

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Adapting the ICT Manual in Arabic

Arabic version of Making IT Our Own: Information & Communication Technology Training of Trainers Manual is almost ready for prime-time. Most of the translation work is complete. We are now in the process of reviewing and adapting it until WLP can put its seal of approval on the final work.

Translating a manual, a challenging information and communication technology (ICT) manual at that, would be a difficult job in itself. However, if you take into account a language like Arabic (spoken by 530 million people and the official language of 25 countries according to Wikipedia’s entry on Arabic Language) with many dialects and variants, the task of adaptation becomes an even bigger challenge. Translation begins to look like a cakewalk in comparison.

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Wikipedia’s Growth Stalling?

Yesterday’s Time magazine has an intriguing question: Is Wikipedia a Victim of Its Own Success?

Up until about two years ago, Wikipedians were adding, on average, some 2,200 new articles to the project every day. The English version hit the 2 million — article mark in September 2007 and then the 3 million mark in August 2009 — surpassing the 600-year-old Chinese Yongle Encyclopedia as the largest collection of general knowledge ever compiled (well, at least according to Wikipedia’s entry on itself).

But Wikipedia peaked in March 2007 at about 820,000 contributors; the site hasn’t seen as many editors since.

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