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The ecology of contexts is a term used in many disciplines and refers to the dynamic interplay of contexts and demands that constrain and define an entity.
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The ecology of contexts is a term used in many disciplines and refers to the dynamic interplay of contexts and demands that constrain and define an entity.
An agroecosystem exists amid contexts including climate, soil, plant genetics, government policies, and the personal beliefs and predilections of the agriculturalist. Not only are these contexts too numerous to list in their entirety for any agroecosystem, but their interactions are so complex it is impossible to perfectly characterize a system, let alone predict the effect a given perturbation will have on the whole. [1] At the same time, all of these contexts are dynamic, albeit at wildly diverging time scales, so the ecology of contexts for an agroecosystem is fundamentally mutable. An awareness of the ecology of contexts is helpful for agroecologists, as the nearly axiomatic acceptance dynamic, and thereby unperfectable, nature of agroecosystems precludes the often damaging notion of a best or ideal approach to agroecosystem management as well as an awareness of the complexity of the response that can result from any perturbation of the system.
This concept of the ecology of contexts provides a useful epistemological device for understanding agroecosystems. This dual relationship of an entity in an ecology of contexts underscores the ecological analogy, with its emphasis on holonic interactions. [1]
Anil Thomas defines "ecology check" as: [2]
... checking to see if the desired result of a technique will work out in other areas of a person's life. ... checking the consequences of your future actions and plans. ... what happens after you make a desired change. How does it affect a person's home, their family, their finances, health, time, etc.? Is it in line with their value system? Is this what they really want? It prevents self-sabotage by making sure a change will be acceptable to all parts. ... When you think "ecologically," you are taking every aspect of your outcome into account. You check to make sure that you are not going to achieve X at the expense of Y, if both are important to you. ...
In child development, for instance, it can refer to the nested scales at which influences on children reside, from the individual (e.g. age) to the broadest elements, like government policies or cultural attitudes. [3]
From computer science is the concept of ecology of context-aware computing, where a device's operation is tempered by information the device itself has about how the environment will affect its functioning and vice versa. [4]
In the field of music therapy, Trygve Aasgaard dealt with the reciprocity of an ecology of contexts, seeing the role of music in therapy as responsive to cultural and other contexts, while at the same time forming part of the environmental context. [5]
Ubiquitous computing is a concept in software engineering, hardware engineering and computer science where computing is made to appear anytime and everywhere. In contrast to desktop computing, ubiquitous computing can occur using any device, in any location, and in any format. A user interacts with the computer, which can exist in many different forms, including laptop computers, tablets, smart phones and terminals in everyday objects such as a refrigerator or a pair of glasses. The underlying technologies to support ubiquitous computing include Internet, advanced middleware, operating system, mobile code, sensors, microprocessors, new I/O and user interfaces, computer networks, mobile protocols, location and positioning, and new materials.
Agroecology is an academic discipline that studies ecological processes applied to agricultural production systems. Bringing ecological principles to bear can suggest new management approaches in agroecosystems. The term can refer to a science, a movement, or an agricultural practice. Agroecologists study a variety of agroecosystems. The field of agroecology is not associated with any one particular method of farming, whether it be organic, regenerative, integrated, or industrial, intensive or extensive, although some use the name specifically for alternative agriculture.
Context awareness refers, in information and communication technologies, to a capability to take into account the situation of entities, which may be users or devices, but are not limited to those. Location is only the most obvious element of this situation. Narrowly defined for mobile devices, context awareness does thus generalize location awareness. Whereas location may determine how certain processes around a contributing device operate, context may be applied more flexibly with mobile users, especially with users of smart phones. Context awareness originated as a term from ubiquitous computing or as so-called pervasive computing which sought to deal with linking changes in the environment with computer systems, which are otherwise static. The term has also been applied to business theory in relation to contextual application design and business process management issues.
Interaction design, often abbreviated as IxD, is "the practice of designing interactive digital products, environments, systems, and services." While interaction design has an interest in form, its main area of focus rests on behavior. Rather than analyzing how things are, interaction design synthesizes and imagines things as they could be. This element of interaction design is what characterizes IxD as a design field, as opposed to a science or engineering field.
Autonomic computing (AC) is distributed computing resources with self-managing characteristics, adapting to unpredictable changes while hiding intrinsic complexity to operators and users. Initiated by IBM in 2001, this initiative ultimately aimed to develop computer systems capable of self-management, to overcome the rapidly growing complexity of computing systems management, and to reduce the barrier that complexity poses to further growth.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to human–computer interaction:
In ecology, an ecosystem is said to possess ecological stability if it is capable of returning to its equilibrium state after a perturbation or does not experience unexpected large changes in its characteristics across time. Although the terms community stability and ecological stability are sometimes used interchangeably, community stability refers only to the characteristics of communities. It is possible for an ecosystem or a community to be stable in some of their properties and unstable in others. For example, a vegetation community in response to a drought might conserve biomass but lose biodiversity.
User interface (UI) design or user interface engineering is the design of user interfaces for machines and software, such as computers, home appliances, mobile devices, and other electronic devices, with the focus on maximizing usability and the user experience. In computer or software design, user interface (UI) design primarily focuses on information architecture. It is the process of building interfaces that clearly communicate to the user what's important. UI design refers to graphical user interfaces and other forms of interface design. The goal of user interface design is to make the user's interaction as simple and efficient as possible, in terms of accomplishing user goals.
Ambient intelligence (AmI) is a term used in computing to refer to electronic environments that are both sensitive and responsive to the presence of people. The term is generally applied to consumer electronics, telecommunications, and computing.
Quality of experience (QoE) is a measure of the delight or annoyance of a customer's experiences with a service. QoE focuses on the entire service experience; it is a holistic concept, similar to the field of user experience, but with its roots in telecommunication. QoE is an emerging multidisciplinary field based on social psychology, cognitive science, economics, and engineering science, focused on understanding overall human quality requirements.
A web widget is a web page or web application that is embedded as an element of a host web page but which is substantially independent of the host page, having limited or no interaction with the host. A web widget commonly provides users of the host page access to resources from another web site, content that the host page may be prevented from accessing itself by the browser's same-origin policy or the content provider's CORS policy. That content includes advertising, sponsored external links (Taboola), user comments (Disqus), social media buttons, news, and weather (AccuWeather). Some web widgets though serve as user-selectable customizations of the host page itself.
Agroecosystem analysis is a thorough analysis of an agricultural environment which considers aspects from ecology, sociology, economics, and politics with equal weight. There are many aspects to consider; however, it is literally impossible to account for all of them. This is one of the issues when trying to conduct an analysis of an agricultural environment.
A pervasive game is one where the gaming experience is extended out in the real world, or where the fictive world in which the game takes place blends with the physical world. The "It's Alive" mobile games company described pervasive games as "games that surround you", while Montola, Stenros and Waern's book, Pervasive Games defines them as having "one or more salient features that expand the contractual magic circle of play spatially, temporally, or socially." The concept of a "magic circle" draws from the work of Johan Huizinga, who describes the boundaries of play.
Communicative ecology is a conceptual model used in the field of media and communications research.
Location awareness refers to devices that can determine their location. Navigational instruments provide location coordinates for vessels and vehicles. Surveying equipment identifies location with respect to a well-known location wireless communications device.
Mobile interaction is the study of interaction between mobile users and computers. Mobile interaction is an aspect of human–computer interaction that emerged when computers became small enough to enable mobile usage, around the 1990s.
Spatial contextual awareness consociates contextual information such as an individual's or sensor's location, activity, the time of day, and proximity to other people or objects and devices. It is also defined as the relationship between and synthesis of information garnered from the spatial environment, a cognitive agent, and a cartographic map. The spatial environment is the physical space in which the orientation or wayfinding task is to be conducted; the cognitive agent is the person or entity charged with completing a task; and the map is the representation of the environment which is used as a tool to complete the task.
Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC) is the combination of cloud computing and mobile computing to bring rich computational resources to mobile users, network operators, as well as cloud computing providers. The ultimate goal of MCC is to enable execution of rich mobile applications on a plethora of mobile devices, with a rich user experience. MCC provides business opportunities for mobile network operators as well as cloud providers. More comprehensively, MCC can be defined as "a rich mobile computing technology that leverages unified elastic resources of varied clouds and network technologies toward unrestricted functionality, storage, and mobility to serve a multitude of mobile devices anywhere, anytime through the channel of Ethernet or Internet regardless of heterogeneous environments and platforms based on the pay-as-you-use principle."
Problematic smartphone use is psychological or behavioral dependence on cell phones. It is closely related to other forms of digital media overuse such as social media addiction or internet addiction disorder.
Roy Want is a computer scientist born in London, United Kingdom in 1961. He received his PhD from Cambridge University (UK) in 1988 for his work on multimedia Distributed Systems; and is known for his work on indoor positioning, mobile and ubiquitous computing, automatic identification and the Internet of Things (IoT). He lives in Silicon Valley, California, and has authored or co-authored over 150 papers and articles on mobile systems, and holds 100+ patents. In 2011 he joined Google as a senior research scientist, and is in the Android group. Previous roles include senior principal engineer at Intel, and principal scientist at Xerox PARC...