Abstract: In his 1995 best seller Being Digital, the high-tech visionary and MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte predicted the triumph of the informational over the material. The driving force behind the impending digital revolution, according to Negroponte, was the superiority of bits over atoms. In earlier eras the dissemination of information required the movement of physical material (atoms), and traffic on the digital information superhighway was entirely made up of weightless, immaterial bits, all of them traveling at the speed of light in a frictionless environment. Whereas the movement of atoms was expensive, the distribution of bits was effectively cost-free: as a result, Negroponte argued, the "rapid exponential ... Read More PubDate: 2017-07-22T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: "In the last three years," the New York Times reported in November 1984, "nearly every major Silicon Valley chip maker has discovered that underground tanks filled with solvents had leaked—sometimes into the local drinking water. In October, the EPA proposed adding nineteen sites in the Valley to its Superfund list of sites the government identifies as particularly in need of cleanup. Included in the list are plants owned by the International Business Machines Corporation, the Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation, the National Semiconductor Corporation, TRW Inc., Teledyne Inc., the Signetics Corporation, the Intel Corporation, Advanced Micro Devices Inc., and the Raytheon Company."1 Over the next few years ... Read More PubDate: 2017-07-22T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Power systems are, by nature, instruments of transformation. People build and operate power systems to turn primary resources, such as coal and falling water, into the highly flexible form of energy known as electricity. Power production has measurable environmental consequences in terms of tons of coal mined, number of rivers dammed, pounds of smoke released to the atmosphere, miles connected by transmission lines, and, more recently, acres covered with wind and solar farms.1 At the same time, since the late 1800s, when Thomas Edison and others first offered commercial-scale electric lighting and power, millions of Americans have integrated electric devices into their lives in both beneficial and problematic ... Read More PubDate: 2017-07-22T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Conservation drones are an emerging technology within the field of ecology and natural resource management. They evidence the merging of the technologies of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) with conservation science.1 Praise for the "revolutionary" potential of these machines has reached a fever pitch. In the spring and summer of 2014 I conducted a series of interviews with members of the University of Florida's Unmanned Aerial Systems Research Program (UASRP), which is one site of this growing specialization. This fieldwork allowed me to gain purchase on why these technologies are generating so much excitement. UAS technologies developed by programs such as the UASRP include flying autopiloted machines (mostly ... Read More PubDate: 2017-07-22T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: The article entitled "The Internet in Argentina and Brazil: The Origins of Networking Experiences" appearing in Information & Culture issue 52:2 contained errors in one of its citations. The corrected citation should appear as follows:10. Marcelo Sávio Revoredo Menezes de Carvalho and Henrique Luiz Cukierman, "Os primórdios da Internet no Brasil," in Historia de la informática en Latinoamérica y el Caribe: Investigaciones y testimonios, ed. Jorge Aguirre and Raúl Carnota (Río Cuarto: Universidad Nacional de Río Cuarto, 2009) ... Read More PubDate: 2017-07-22T00:00:00-05:00
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