The Squirrelly Thing About Knowledge

The Thing about gaming experience

Despite the increasing popularity in the academic and practical fields of digital gaming, little has been explored and documented about gaming experience, especially firsthand account. This study uses Bruno Latour's concept of the Thing while investigating digital gaming experience from frequent gamers' standpoint using focus groups methodology. Additionally in-depth interviews were conducted w...

The unhappy thing about happiness economics

Time series data show that nations do not get happier over time as they get richer. In contrast, happiness is positively correlated with individual income within a given country at any point in time; the rich generally report greater happiness than the poor. This, the socalled Easterlin paradox, named after the doyen of happiness studies, Richard Easterlin, is also discussed at length in the ha...

Extended Thing Knowledge

Another odd thing about unparticle physics

The peculiar propagator of scale invariant unparticles has phases that produce unusual patterns of interference with Standard Model processes. We illustrate some of these effects in e+e− → μ+μ−. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Nanotechnology: the next big thing, or much ado about nothing?

Nanotechnology encompasses an increasingly sophisticated ability to manipulate matter at the nanoscale, resulting in new materials, products and devices that demonstrate new and unusual behaviour. While emerging nanotechnologies have great potential for good, there are increasing concerns that the selfsame attributes that make them attractive will also lead to new risks to human health. Researc...