Graham McGregor

Beyond the looking glass: Fooling the brain with the augmented mirror box

Video mediated and augmented reality technologies can challenge our sense of what we perceive and believe to be real. Applied appropriately, the technology presents new opportunities for understanding and treating a range of human functional impairments as well as studying the underling psychological bases of these phenomena. This paper describes our augmented mirror box (AMB) technology which builds on the potential of optical mirror boxes by adding functions that can be applied in therapeutic and scientific settings. Here we test hypotheses about limb presence and perception, belief, and pain using laboratory studies to demonstrate proof of concept. The results of these studies provide evidence that the AMB can be used to manipulate beliefs and perceptions and alter the reported experience of pain. We conclude that the system has potential for use in experimental and in clinical settings.

EPrints makes its mark

Purpose – The purpose of the paper is to report on the impact and cost/benefit of implementing three EPrints digital repositories at the University of Otago, and to encourage others to follow suit.Design/methodology/approach – Three repositories were successfully implemented at the University of Otago using existing commodity hardware and free open source software. The first pilot repository was implemented within ten days, and is now a fully functional system that is being championed for institutional‐wide use by the University Library. The other two repositories emerged from different community needs. One is academic, concerned with collecting and researching indigenous content; the other is designed to preserve and manage collective memory and heritage content for a small rural community.Findings – The paper shows that digital repositories can be established quickly and effectively with surprisingly few resources; readily incorporate any kind of extant digital content, or non‐digital material that is c...

Making memories available: a framework for preserving rural heritage through community knowledge management (cKM)

While most of the research in Knowledge Management (KM) has focused on business communities, there is a breadth of potential applications of KM theory and practice to wider society. This paper explores the potential of KM for rural communities, specifically for those that want to preserve their social history and collective memories (what we call heritage) to enrich the lives of others. In KM terms, this is a task of accumulating and recording knowledge (using KM techniques such as story-telling and communities of practice) to enable its retention for future use (by interested people perhaps through KM systems). We report a case study of Cardrona, a valley of approximately 120 people in New Zealands South Island. Realising that time would erode knowledge of their community a small, motivated group of residents initiated a KM programme to create a legacy for a wider community including younger generations, tourists and scholars. This paper applies KM principles to rural communities that want to harness their collective knowledge for wider societal gain, and develops a community-based framework to inform such initiatives. As a result, we call for a wider conceptualisation of KM to include motives for managing knowledge beyond business performance to accommodate community (cKM).

Chinese or English? Language choice amongst Chinese students in Newcastle upon Tyne1

Sociolinguistic patterns of Chinese communities in Britain are a rich and important field which has yet to be systematically explored. Any investigation into the internal structuring and cultural norms and values of these communities must be sensitive to the social and historical background of the people concerned. As a first step towards providing more accurate information, this paper discusses the complexity of the composition of the Chinese population in this country. Findings from a pilot study of language choice within a sub‐group of students are presented. These findings are discussed in the context of wider sociolinguistic issues the Chinese people face as they seek to come to terms with life in Britain.

Achieving Understanding: Discourse in Intercultural Encounters

This is another outstanding text in Longman’s, Language in Social Life Series. It should be purchased and read at the earliest possible opportunity, since the practical, methodological, and theoretical issues it raises warrant urgent scholarly attention and response. Its wide ranging disciplinary and interdisciplinary focus and its attempt to grasp the nettle of what is to “achieve understanding” in the discourse of intercultural encounters, provide one of the most ambitious and stimulating research monographs that I have come across in some time. While there are numerous autobiographical accounts of migrant, second language experience (for example, Hoffman, 1989; 1990). detailed empirical and discoursal studies of what it is to try to resettle and recreate oneself in another culture are only just beginning to emerge (cf. Clyne, 1994; Scollon & Scollon, 1995). What is different about Achieving Udersrnnditzg is not only the nature and scope of its data, which is interlingual and international, but also its interpretivist, interactional focus. To its credit, this is not a book that shuns or sidesteps the fuzzy, messy, or untidy considerations that characterize human discourse practices (Mortensen, 1994). I t is an honest and extensive account of a large scale project that explores the communicative processes, contexts, and consequences of lives lived in other languages, and within which linguistic choice is constrained by economic and personal necessity rather than educational privilege or individual preference. In the spirit of its egalitarian ethos, the research is shared across five different authors who singly and conjointly report on the complex and difficult issues that surround the early stages of adult language acquisition by migrant workers in five different majority language environments -English, Gemian, Dutch, French, and Swedish. These environments take us well outside the comfort zone of the classroom to a world of ethnic and linguistic diversity in which interactions with others are “constituted in an immensely complicated network of dimensions, relations, and modes of knowledge” (Schutz, 1967: xxvii). Bremer et al. are able to take advantage of this complexity by examining the conditions of participation and interpretation that affect different minority ethnic workers and the majority group members with whom they have to interact and deal. The data of these interactions was collected over a two-and-a-half-year period and is described as “not perfect” (p. 6). The difficulties of collecting naturally occurring conversational data are manifold (cf. Stubbs, 1983: Chapter 1 l), but I guess the caveat of imperfection here largely stems from the use of additional simulated and role played interactions to recreate experiences that might never otherwise have been captured. While I think the authors arc rightly cautious about the interpretive and qualitative perspectives they wish to pursue, a little “devil’s advocacy” along the lines of Sharrock and Anderson (1987) may be worth considering. They argue: