Home
Todd Suomela's Library tagged → View Popular
Not every cloud has a silver lining: Cory Doctorow | Technology | The Guardian
There's something you won't see mentioned by too many advocates of cloud computing – the main attraction is making money from you
Clifford Nass
Clifford Nass is currently the Thomas M. Storke Professor at Stanford University; he has been a professor at Stanford since 1986. ...Nass's research focuses on (laboratory and field) experimental studies of social-psychological aspects of human-interactive media interaction. Specifically, Nass discovered that people use the same rules and heuristics when interacting with technology as they do when interacting with other people. This approach is called the "Computers are Social Actors" (CASA) paradigm or "The Media Equation" (media equals real life).
The Technium: The Most Powerful Force in the World
Even counting vast tracks of agriculture, the technium entails fewer than one percent of the atoms on the Earth's land surface. Yet the impact which this minute fraction of technological mass and energy has on the planet is in far disproportion to its size. Measured by impact per gram or calorie, there is nothing comparable to things we invent. Technology is the most powerful force in the world.
The Technium: Chosen, Inevitable, and Contingent
-
There are two senses of "inevitable" when used with technology. In the first case, an invention merely has to exist once. In that sense, every technology is inevitable because sooner or later some mad tinkerer will cobble together almost anything that can be cobbled together. Jetpacks, underwater homes, glow-in-the-dark cats, forgetting pills — in the goodness of time every invention will inevitably be conjured up as a prototype or demo. And since simultaneous invention is the rule not the exception, any invention that can be invented will be invented more than once. But few will be widely adopted. Most won't work very well. Or more commonly they will work but be unwanted. So in this trivial sense, all technology is inevitable. Rewind the tape of time and it will be re-invented.
The second more substantial sense of "inevitable" demands a level of common acceptance and viability. A technology's use must come to dominate the technium or at least its corner of the technosphere. But more than ubiquity, the inevitable must contain a large-scale momentum, and proceed on its own determination beyond the free choices of several billion humans. It can't be diverted by mere social whims.
History of Chemical Fertilizer Development -- Russel and Williams 41 (2): 260 -- Soil Science Society of America Journal
-
Neolithic man probably used fertilizers, but the first fertilizer produced by chemical processes was ordinary superphosphate, made early in the 19th century by treating bones with sulfuric acid. Coprolites and phosphate rock soon replaced bones as the P source. The K fertilizer industry started in Germany in 1861. In North America the K industry started during World War I and expanded with development of the New Mexico deposits in 1931 and the Saskatchewan deposits in 1958. Modern K fertilizers are more the product of physical than of chemical processes. The first synthetic N fertilizer was calcium nitrate, made in 1903 from nitric acid produced by the electric arc process. The availability of synthetic ammonia after 1913 led to many new N fertilizers, but physical quality was poor. In 1933 TVA was formed with a national responsibility to increase the efficiency of fertilizer manufacture and use. More than 75% of the fertilizer produced in the United States is made with processes developed by TVA.
Major fertilizers and fertilizer intermediates introduced by TVA include ammonium nitrate, high-analysis phosphates, diammonium phosphate, nitric phosphates, ammonium polyphosphate, urea ammonium phosphates, 11-16-0 and other liquid base solutions, superphosphoric acid, wet-process superphosphoric acid, suspensions, granular urea, and S-coated urea. These have had major impact upon the production of mixed fertilizers, bulk blending, and the fluid fertilizer industry. Future fertilizers not only must be technologically feasible, economical, and agronomically suitable—as have been past fertilizers—but also must meet various air and water pollution standards during production and have reduced total energy requirements.
Don Norman's jnd.org / When Security Gets in the Way
The numerous incidents of defeating security measures prompts my cynical slogan: The more secure you make something, the less secure it becomes. Why? Because when security gets in the way, sensible, well-meaning, dedicated people develop hacks and workarounds that defeat the security.
Open the Future: The "End of Politics" Delusion
...there's a profound ignorance across the tech advocacy community of the importance of politics to human society. Politics means conflict, debate, and frustration. It also means choice. A world without politics is a world where disagreement is illegitimate. It's a world where your ability to choose your future -- to make your future -- has been taken away, whether you like it or not.
-
The core of the argument is straightforward: Politics is part of a healthy society -- it's what happens when you have a group of people with differential goals and a persistent relationship. It's not about partisanship, it's about power. And while even small groups have politics (think: supporting or opposing decisions, differing levels of power to achieve goals, deciding how to use limited resources), the more people involved, the more complex the politics. Factions, parties, ideologies and the like are simply ways of organizing politics in a complex social space -- they're symptoms of politics, not causes.
SkyandTelescope.com - News from Sky & Telescope - A Megascope for Hawaii
Why and how did the Thirty Meter Telescope project decide to build at Mauna Kea?
-
TMT will also cost between 1 and 2 billion dollars when all is said and done. This is not quite at the scale of the world’s biggest science projects, like the Large Hadron Collider or the James Webb Space Telescope, but it’s getting there. In fact, TMT and other proposed observatories of this generation may end up being the biggest telescopes on Earth for all time because the funding required to go even larger would more logically be directed towards putting telescopes in orbit.
-
Adaptive optics is a big part of TMT’s design. It will work both on Mauna Kea and Armazones, but astronomers expect it will work better on Mauna Kea. This is because the upper atmosphere—the part above the boundary layer—is somewhat less turbulent above Mauna Kea than it is above Armazones. Why? According to Racine it’s partly a function of latitude. Because Mauna Kea is nearer the equator it’s relatively unaffected by the jet streams that flow at higher latitutdes both north and south. Armazones’ upper atmosphere is a bit more turbulent in comparison and so somewhat harder for adaptive optics to deal with.
anotherheideggerblog: Interview with Ian Bogost
Today I am happy to bring you the long-awaited interview with Ian Bogost who is currently an Associate Professor at Georgia Tech Institute at Technology, a co-founder of Persuasive Games, and a board member at the educational publishing house Open Texture.
The Role of Intimacy in the Evolution of Technology
by Alessandro Tomasi
In this article, Georges Bataille’s notion of intimacy will be re-interpreted to show that it has a role to play in the evolution of technology. The specifically human form of intimacy can be experienced through the successful adoption of technological devices that have the qualities necessary to fit in and work out in our life context. If they manage to become part of our life, then we experience them as projections of our psychophysical personality, and, as such, they escape our positing, objectifying consciousness. Intimacy can be seen as the organizing principle that shapes the evolution of technology towards an ideal end that promises at least an approximation to the absolute intimacy that is unique to the gods.
OnTheCommons.org » Open Source Hardware
-
Chances are you haven’t heard about the Zoybar, — a modular instrument loosely based on the guitar. As its inventor describes it, “Every user can create his own unique instrument by its own voice and needs. We call this Decentralized Innovation. For the first time these instruments can be duplicated and evolve regardless of location and market interests.”
-
Then there is the Monome, — a midi controller for computer-based music that uses community-created, open-source software. Monome the company consists of Brian Crabtree and Kelli Cain, who have used open-source philosophy to design a “fundamentally adaptable” musical instrument. Each Monome is “a reconfigurable grid of backlit keypads which connects to a computer. Interaction between the keys and lights is determined by the application running on the computer. There is no hard-wired functionality.”
- 2 more annotations...
Weblogg-ed » “Tinkering Toward Utopia”
To that end, Schlechty refers to past efforts at reform as “tinkering toward utopia” and says that if we continue to introduce change at the edges, we’ll continue to spin our wheels. He says that schools are made up primarily of two types of systems, operating systems and social systems, and makes the point that up to now, most efforts to improve schools have centered on changing the former, not the latter.
University of Oxford, Saïd Business School: Institute for Science, Innovation and Society
The Institute for Science, Innovation and Society (formerly the James Martin Institute for Science and Civilization) focuses on research, policy development and teaching programmes which provide new approaches to understanding technological and social change.
Remote Microscopy: Mobile Imaging for Disease Diagnosis | Blum Center for Developing Economies, UC Berkeley
The CellScope project focuses on the development of a modular, high-magnification microscope attachment for cell phones. Due to its portability, affordability and functionality, the CellScope will enable health workers in remote areas to take high-resolution images of a patient's blood cells using the mobile phone's camera, and then transmit the photos to experts at medical centers.
Selected Tags
Related Tags
Sponsored Links
Top Contributors
Groups interested in technology
-
Elearning
A collection of helpful sit...
Items: 19 | Visits: 813
Created by: Maggie Tsai
-
Technology Tools in the Classroom: Using Computers to Engage Your Students
Emerging technologies hold ...
Items: 25 | Visits: 2703
Created by: Jeremy Price
-
Web 2.0
This list compiles some of ...
Items: 189 | Visits: 917
Created by: Jennifer Dorman
Highlighter, Sticky notes, Tagging, Groups and Network: integrated suite dramatically boosting research productivity. Learn more »
Join Diigo