Theme 1

Journal - Energy Policy

While the journal I have chosen isn’t only for media technology, it do in fact contain it from time to time. I believe the environment is an important field where Media Technology and ICT can make a difference, as the video example at the end showcases. The journal have an impact factor of 2.7 and 5-year impact factor of 3.2 which is quite good. Although this is part due to the fact that they don’t only publish in the field of ICT, which obviously means that they can get a broader citation. Nevertheless, I think this journal is both fitting and very interesting.

Paper - Making energy visible: A qualitative field study of how householders interact with feedback from smart energy monitors

Published in Energy Policy, this particular academic paper have an impact factor of 54 according to the google scholar ratio. The paper, by Tom Hargreaves, Michael Nye and Jacquelin Burgess, is a qualitative study of household energy consumption. For a year selected households in the UK participated in a trial where they tested the effects of having monitors which displayed their energy consumption. They tried three different monitors, which differed regarding how much information that was displayed. It went from low to high information flow and different kinds of capabilities of the monitors.The most advanced one could display 100 individual units. The study is very much like the now ongoing trials of the swedish enerfy company E.ON called “Sveriges största energisparexperiment” (which can be found [in swedish] on http://experimentet.eon.se/#nyheter).

I’ll focus my critic on the findings.

To analyze the findings, they used a method called grounded theory. From my understanding, grounded theory is a way to make a relation between different qualitative data and from that formulate a hypothesis for the research. So it’s kind of opposite of traditional research. Anyhow, I think that they present the data in a way that is easily understandable. They first describe the general consensus and then point it out with a quote from the interviews. The data is selective and only showing small parts of what they have, but I think that is understandable when dealing with qualitative data, especially interviews. It isn’t easy making it understandable for the reader, and you do really get a lot of data during interviews. I think they have made a good selection of what data to show. In conclusion, they did an ok job for nine (9) pages.

Questions

1. Sense-data is the data with which we perceive the world, eg sound, touch, sight etc.
   
   
2. Proposition is when we know facts about an object without knowing the said object in person. Statement of fact is similar; it instead deals with properties which we are familiar with, particular and universal. In general, these two concepts deal with knowledge/facts that we ourself don’t necessarily have experienced, which is the way they differentiate from other verbal expressions.
   
   
3. “a phrase of the form 'the so-and-so' (in the singular) I shall call a 'definite' description”. My interpretation of definite description is that it means that a person or an object, and only that, have a qualitative of some sort.
   
   
4. The main points for chapter 13 is that the more points provided for a fact, the more likelihood of it being true is higher; also, the more something is alike another, the more doubt you’ll have about the differences. The main points of chapter 14 is that philosophy have many similarities with other sciences, but differentiates in the fact that it is very self-doubting. The second important point of the chapter is that we as a species don’t have the true abillity to know the world a priori at this point in time.