Search Results for: hess

MacHack VI: Computer chess and the roots of AI

Rebecca Perry June 10, 2020

On January 21, 1967, a mild winter Saturday in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a couple of computer researchers from the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) flagged down a taxi near Tech Square. Loading a bulky, 60-pound teletype called a 35 KSR (“Keyboard Send/Receive”) into the trunk, they set off for downtown Boston, across the river. A short while later, the cab pulled up at the Young Men’s Christian Union (YMCU), and the researchers wrestled the machine up the stairs to the second floor, where the Boylston Chess Club was setting up for a weekend tournament. (read more...)

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The Cloud is Too Loud: Spotlighting the Voices of Community Activists from the Data Center Capital of the World

Madelyn Zander August 13, 2024
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What does it mean to speak about the cloud? While the term tends to conjure images of fluffy white objects, the cloud in technological terms is a complex physical infrastructure that comprises hundreds of thousands of servers distributed around the globe that provide on-demand access to data storage and computing resources over the internet. The problem with describing this physical infrastructure as the cloud is that it abstracts away the data centers, subsea fiber optic cables, copper lines, and networked devices that enable our digital interactions, as well as the consequences that the expansion of this infrastructure poses to people and to the environment. Scholars of infrastructure have written about the cloud’s incredible energy and water consumption to power and cool servers, as well as its massive carbon footprint (Carruth 2014; Edwards et al. 2024; Hogan 2018; Johnson 2023). However, less attention has been given to the cloud’s auditory presence, a problem of growing concern for people who live alongside cloud infrastructure. In this post, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork that began in 2021 with community activists in Northern Virginia, a place known as the “data center capital of the world,” to bring the cloud’s emerging sound pollution problem into focus. (read more...)

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Digital Anthropology of the Senses: Connecting Technology and Culture Through the Sensory World

Adriana Moreno July 23, 2024
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With the ubiquity of the Internet and the overwhelming number of screens that mediate our daily practices, the predominance of the image in daily life is indisputable. The image’s omnipresence has guided countless academic works focused on the visual. For example, visual studies and specialties such as visual anthropology highlight the ethnographic value of images, which, analog or digital alike, have become powerful vehicles for the construction of knowledge (Zirión, 2015; Gómez Cruz, 2012). However, given the predominance of the visual, we have neglected research regarding other senses; this gap widens even more if we consider its intersection with digital studies. (read more...)

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When Cash Rules: A Local Researcher/Activist’s Fieldnotes on “Passive Locals” Living Around Mailiao’s Petrochemical Complex

Lin Hung-Yang August 17, 2021
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Yunlin is a coastal county in Western Taiwan famous for its agricultural produce, also known as “the barn of Taiwan.” However, the exchange value of agricultural produce has plummeted significantly since the 1970s. This has led to the outmigration of the underemployed able-bodied rural workforce to the cities, leaving behind the old and the young. As a consequence of this migration and Yunlin’s agricultural history, the county developed a reputation for being backward and poor. Residents of Yunlin have been eager to prove this stereotype wrong. (read more...)

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被錢收買而無視污染的地方居民？一個返鄉青年的石化廠邊觀察筆記

Lin Hung-Yang August 17, 2021
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雲林縣是台灣西部的濱海縣市，以豐饒的農產品聞名，被稱為「台灣糧倉」。但隨著1960、70年代台灣農業產值下降，工商業快速發展，導致大量鄉村農民移入都市尋求機會。雲林青壯年人口外流非常嚴重，只剩老人與小孩留守。雲林人窮怕了，因此當台塑公司的第六套輕油裂解廠計畫在其他縣市處處碰壁時，雲林縣的政治人物積極遊說，最終於1991年宣布落腳麥寮鄉，縣民歡欣鼓舞地迎接大企業的到來。六輕於雲林縣麥寮鄉西側海濱填海造陸，1998年開始營運，佔地將近21平方公里，是全世界規模最大的石化工業區之一。年產值高達1.5兆元，更佔了全台灣年度GDP的10%左右。 六輕為沿海地區帶來了大量的就業機會與經濟貢獻，卻也衍生出許多汙染爭議。2009年，台大公衛學院教授詹長權的研究成果指出，六輕設廠後鄰近地區空氣中的有毒物質與居民尿液中重金屬的濃度均顯著增加，癌症發生率也遠高於其他地區。這是六輕造成的危害第一次在社會大眾面前公開揭露，引發輿論的譁然。2010與2011兩年內，六輕更連續發生多起嚴重的爆炸大火。再加上近年來台灣社會對於空氣汙染的關注普遍提升，六輕所引發的環保、健康與工安爭議開始受到許多公民團體與新聞媒體的關注，成為全國性的熱門議題。 (read more...)

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SciCom: The Slippery Business of STEM Promotion

Scott W Schwartz July 9, 2019

“One thing is certain: When something is scientifically complex, it’s harder to understand and to communicate” (sciencebranding.com). Regardless of its accuracy, this is a commonly repeated sentiment across many public domains. However, this particular claim was produced within the branch of marketing known as Science Communications with the peculiar intent of convincing drug companies they need to hire “creatives” to extol the virtues of biochemistry to physicians. This is just one manifestation of the Science Communications field, which includes academic journals, NGOs, and PR firms. Armed with the more edgy truncation “SciCom” (or SciComm), the field increasingly resembles other promotional paradigms such as experience design (UX) and immersion marketing, wherein the goal is to seamlessly weave advertising into the condition of being alive. (read more...)

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Deep Thunder: The Rise of Big Meteorology

Scott W Schwartz April 30, 2019

Today has been predicted 26 billion times. The same could be said for tomorrow and the foreseeable days to follow. This prodigious divination is the work of just one entity—IBM’s The Weather Company. These 26 billion daily forecasts of IBM likely represent only a small fraction of the models and projections to which any particular day is subjected (the financial and military sectors are equally ambitious prognosticators). Backed by IBM’s computational juggernaut, The Weather Company is burning through terabytes at a brow-furrowing velocity in its effort to fit the world into a forecast. (Listen Now...)

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Dramatising the Future

Briohny Doyle March 14, 2019

This is the third in a series of posts by scholars who attended the Anthropocene Campus Melbourne, an event hosted in September by Deakin University as part of the larger Anthropocene Curriculum project. Over the four days of the Campus, 110 participants from 49 universities (plus several art institutions and museums) attended keynotes, art exhibits, fieldtrips, and workshops based around the theme of ‘the elemental’. Earlier this year, at the Emerging Writers Festival panel on ‘Writing the Anthropocene’, I was asked if I thought that, in imagining a future world for my 2016 novel The Island Will Sink, I also had an ethical responsibility to ‘get it right’. The question was asked by a writer who also worked as a sustainability officer in community organisations. It led to more uncomfortable questions: As a writer of fiction, is it a problem to use the predicted extinctions and environmental catastrophes of the not too distant future to produce (amongst other things) stakes in a literary production? (read more...)

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