Recently Fianna Fáil, who runs a public account (obviously) blocked David the editor of Politics.ie. So, out of spite to Fianna Fáil, I have set up a new twitter account for anyone that has been blocked by them, this account will essentially tweet everything they do, except it will never block anyone, ever. You can follow this new account here.

This works because basically any public account on Twitter is the same as an RSS feed, you can even follow Twitter accounts in a feed reader (which is pretty handy if you don’t use Twitter but are interested in one or two people’s daily mutterings). To follow someone in a feed reader simply find the link to the RSS feed of their Tweets (underneath their followers mosaic) and add this URL to your feed reader the same way you would with a blog.

Now I’m no political analyst and won’t get into how ghastly it is for Fianna Fáil to block any member of the public from viewing their “informative” messages, but let this be a small lesson to them that they’ve absolutely no idea what they’re doing online.

Have you been blocked by Fianna Fail on Twitter? Has any other Irish political party started blocking members of the public online?

If I could choose any person to be my research mentor it would be Dr. Preece. This woman has a 35 page CV online describing her incredible academic career. As early as 1975 she was working on e-learning initiatives in the UK and after completing her PhD studies in 1985 she pursued research focused on ground-breaking topics such as information systems, computer mediated communication, human?computer interaction, and online communities. She eventually moved to the USA in 1996 to lecture in the University of Maryland Baltimore County, in the Information Systems Department. Today she is the Dean of this department, supporting a long list of PhD students. Her work has taken her all around the globe, she has published hundreds of papers and authored numerous HCI books. She has achieved so much, in what had been a traditionally male dominated field. Her career is certainly something to aspire to.

The Only Real Social Media Expert

Dr. Preece’s current research focuses on the design and management of digital social media, and it’s quite possible that Dr. Preece is one of the only people qualified to call themselves an actual “social media expert”. Back in 2000 when social media was just a glint in Biz Stone and Mark Zuckerberg’s eyes Dr. Preece was hard at work bringing together the usability focus of human-computer interaction and the broader human focus of sociability. She introduced the significance of understanding the interrelationships between people’s behaviour online, sociability and usability. She illustrated how people’s interactions create online communities, and that developers can influence their success or failure by how they design software and polices. This was a novel approach that she continues to pursue today.

I would love to bump into Dr. Preece someday, but it’s not because I would love to pick her brain about all of these fascinating topics we share an interest in. Instead I would ask her to tell me her story, because I bet it’s an incredible one.

This post was written for Ada Lovelace Day – an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science.

These days technology like the iPhone helps us to track our own personal habits, Twitter gives us an insight into popular topics and analytics give us fascinating web usage statistics. Whilst technology has greatly enhanced our ability to collect interesting data about human behaviour, it’s important to realise that using such data to make conclusions about why we behave in such a way is unwise without investigating the differences between causality and correlation. Take for example the problematic question of whether the Internet is addictive or if addicts use the Internet.

The Relationship Between Psychology and Technology

Only thorough psychological research can investigate the motivations behind our behaviour. All of the modern day branches of psychology are governed by extremely strict rules that ensure that only legitimate and ethical research is conducted and published, and said research employs extensive statistical analyses on data derived from various methods including interviews, questionnaires, experiments, etc.

It is for these reasons that I believe that the relationship between psychology and technology needs to be much stronger. If we use psychology to understand and explain our interactions with technology today, we can help our future selves by using this information to make technology more accessible, usable and helpful for everyone.

There is absolutely no escaping the fact that one day you will be old. Most people regard getting older to be a physical decline, a frailty of the body, without considering the cognitive and social changes that occur as you age. It is for this reason that I take an interest in Irish research centres like the NCBI Centre for Inclusive Technology and the CASALA Centre (soon to open in Dundalk IT) who aim to improve future technologies by conducting cognitive and social psychological research with older adults and people with disabilities.

In today’s Irish Times an article describes the recent Business of Ageing conference held in Dublin, highlights some of the fantastic assisted living technologies being developed here in Ireland and suggests this country could be a leader in developing technology for older adults.

Let’s hope this prediction comes true. Not only would I love to work in this area of research and development, I for one would like to continue being an early adopter of new technologies. I would be incredibly angry if, as I got older technology slipped out of my reach, the way the majority of older adults are excluded today.

A big thank you to Damien Mulley,  Willie White from the Project Arts Centre and Alexia Golez for the hours of fun we had participating in and winning the Dublin Tweasurehunt on Saturday.

Team “Invasion of the Booty Snatchers” was a combination of old friends and new ones led by the lovely Dena. Though we were exhausted by the very end, it was worth every heart pounding second, taking us all over Dublin 1 to places I’d certainly like to revisit (possibly at my own pace though!). Overall a great bit of exercise and loads of fun. Check out the #tweasure hash tag on Twitter to read all the buzz about it and check out the brilliant video below.

Dublin Tweasure Hunt from Jentertainment on Vimeo.

I put him in a glass jar and was careful to punch air-holes in the the lid and I left him overnight in the backgarden on the windowsill.

The next day he had died, and I was really sad to see him go. Myself, my brother and the little girl and boy next door decided to give him a proper burial. We dug a little hole in the flowerbed in the next door neighbour’s backgarden and had a funeral for our dearly departed insect friend. In the middle of the ceremony the bee climbed up out of the hole in the ground and scared the bee-jesus out of us. We ran screaming from that garden as the zom-bee flew away never to be seen again.

It’s one of my earliest childhood memories and it still creeps me out a little bit.

What’s your earliest memory?

Inspired by a Twitter conversation with @Burkie.

I would argue that if you’re tweeting, you’re certainly not trying to sleep or doing what’s good for your body in preparation for shutting down for a few hours. I myself have suffered some restless nights and made a real effort to combat the problem, rather than accepting it and suffering through more zombie like days in the office.

Turn Off Your Computer 30 Minutes Before Sleep

If you’re suffering from occasional difficulty getting to sleep at night you should consider the effects of using a computer late at night. Studies have shown that the brain remains stimulated after using a computer (or watching television), which in turn makes your sleep restless. The simple act of shutting down the computer 30 minutes before you’re planning on going to sleep can help relax you.

Research has also shown that the bright light of your computer monitor (let’s also not forget that mobile phone screens also produce a bright light) suppresses the production of our sleep hormone melatonin. If you are suffering from an especially bad case of insomnia then try shutting down the computer at least two hours before planning on going to bed.

Though you may enjoy the calming effects of using the computer, your brain on the other hand is thinking “light = daytime”. Staring at your computer screen means keeping yourself alert and wide-awake and returning online to complain about your inability to sleep is simply aggravating the problem.

If you are used to the routine of using the computer right up until bedtime, try to create a new routine for yourself. Use the last 30 minutes of your day to read a chapter out of that book you’ve been meaning to finish, to relax in the shower, to tidy up your apartment. Stick to the new routine and see if it helps improve your sleep.

Is checking if anyone has replied to your latest tweet or commented on your blog really worth loosing sleep over?

Avoid Caffeine Within 6 Hours of Bedtime

Coffee. Internet users are it’s biggest fan, but it does more harm than good to you in the evenings.

Caffeine is a short term solution if you are low on sleep and need to remain active, it blocks adenosine reception so you feel alert, and injects adrenaline into your system to give you a boost. The trouble is, that the half-life of caffeine in your body is around six hours. Consider a cup of coffee at 6pm, half the caffeine in that cup will still be floating around in your body at midnight. By avoiding caffeine within at least 6 hours of your bedtime you’re giving yourself a better chance at being able to fall asleep and the less caffeine in your body the better your sleep will be.

Also, excessive caffeine consumption has a negative effect on your digestive system, so you may suffer from heartburn when you try to sleep at night. Coffee (even decaf!) reduces the pressure on the valve between the esophagus and the stomach so that the acidic contents of the stomach pass up to the esophagus leading to heartburn, which is far harder to cure when you’re lying down as it’s even easier for that acid to travel to your esophagus.

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If the above two tips don’t work for you, I would recommend talking to your doctor as persistent insomnia can have detrimental effects on your physical and mental well being.

You can also try the following guidelines:

• Get up at the same time every day, even at weekends. Irregular sleep patterns undermines your ability to sleep.
• Avoid daytime activities in bed (like eating or watching TV) but reading before bed may be helpful.
• Do not smoke before bedtime, nicotine is a stimulant and just like caffeine it can disturb your sleep.
• Avoid alcohol within four hours of bedtime, though it may induce sleep it makes sleep more fragile and broken throughout the night.
• If you are unable to sleep, leave your bed and engage in a quiet activity elsewhere (not TV or using the computer) and return to bed when you feel sleepy again.
• Go to bed only when you are sleepy. Do not extend your bedtime hours in the hope of sleeping longer, in most cases you may be awake for longer.
• Exercise. People who take regular exercise sleep better than those of us sitting in-front of our computer screen 12 hours a day.

The biggest benefit of the new retweet function is how it adds a method of highlighting localised trends. If 20 of your twitter friends retweet the same message you won’t see it 20 times, but you’ll see 20 “likes” beneath it instead, giving weight to the content of the message. It also stops your stream being diluted by the same message over and over again, which can be frustrating. And at the end of the day, if you’ve not had much time to use twitter you’ve got the “retweets” section to conveniently show you the highlights you’ve missed from your own personal stream that day.

The retweet feature also takes into consideration attribution; the original composer of the tweet appears in your stream and this is a wonderful way of discovering new twitter users. In essence it’s a solution to the fix @replies issue twitter had, everyone was so angry that they wouldn’t have an organic method of discovering new users to follow, now you do.

The other great thing about retweets is that it adds an extra dimension to keeping track of the tweets YOU find most interesting. If like me you use the favorite feature in twitter for something else entirely than the ability to view “retweets by you” will help keep track of the tweets you found important enough to share.

Overall I’ve enjoyed watching the evolution of the service and will continue to do so. I find it most interesting how, just like with Facebook users, change is scary and new but after awhile everyone gets used to it and moves on to being mad about something else entirely.

The lovely Clarabel on Twitter posted this photo last week. This is a fine little collection of psychology text books (and a Philosophy one thrown in for good measure) that would be perfect for any undergraduate psychology student. As a psychology graduate myself I understand how expensive psychology text books are, so please, if you know anyone that could do with a helping hand with their first or second year of college ask them to get in contact with us. Leave a comment here, send me an email (sineadcochrane at gmail dot com), a tweet, or, contact Clara via an @ reply on twitter. These books are free to a good home and are in perfect condition. Even if any of these books have new editions now available, more often than not there are only slight changes made and they would be perfect to help you with your long road of study ahead.

*Update* Two hours after posting this the books found a home. Yey books!