Category: News, Links, and Pointers

Happy Birthday to The CASTAC Blog! We Need YOU!

Patricia G. Lange November 5, 2013

Well, this week marks The CASTAC’s Blog’s first birthday, and I think cake is in order! I’m ordering chocolate of course! It has been a wonderful and exciting year as we have kicked off a new blog that is dedicated to exchanging ideas about science and technology as social phenomena. We thank everyone who has posted about their research or their opinions on a staggeringly impressive range of topics, from drones to steampunk! I look forward to all the wonderful posts and commentary that we’ll see in the coming year! The CASTAC Blog is now working through some growing pains! We are pleased to announce that it is time to expand our team! We are seeking 6-7 Associate Editors and 1 Associate Web Producer to ensure the continuously high quality of content that you’ve come to expect from The CASTAC Blog. The job duties and descriptions are as follows: Associate (read more...)

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Fit for Halloween

Elizabeth Churchill October 30, 2013

All Hallow’s Eve, better known as Halloween, is a perfect time to reflect on one’s survival skills. While scholars contest the origins of Halloween–-Celtic? Pagan? Roman?–-one thing is for certain: it’s a good time to be quick on your feet. Just one of the common dangers on All Hallows, at least in my neighbourhood, is hungry, animated corpses with a taste for human flesh, more commonly known as zombies. To be clear, my neighbourhood has a lot of rage zombies. It is of paramount importance to be quick on your feet if you are being pursued by rage zombies. Faster and more aggressive than their predecessors, who shambled along hoping to bump into clueless, hapless and/or immobile tasty humans, rage zombies come after you with gusto. Two stories about getting fitter Before continuing, I want to share a couple of stories, based on journal entries, with you: Story #1 It’s (read more...)

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4S Meeting Preview!

Patricia G. Lange October 9, 2013

The forthcoming meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) is packed with exciting panels, papers, and activities that advance classic STS topics while exploring new themes that are emerging on the horizon. We hope to see many of you there, and we encourage in-person connections while we are all in the same place! Of course, one can never adequately cover a whole conference in a single blog post, but it is safe to say that this year’s 4S is chock full of exciting papers—and for the first time, stand-alone films—that tackle a dazzling array of 4S topics. The conference offers numerous panels that update the discipline’s understanding of long-term issues of interest including: scientific communities in action, risk, environmental crises, sustainability, epistemologies, religion, and food. Yet, new dimensions of these topics are also being explored. For example, although food has been of scholarly interest for quite some (read more...)

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Killing Comments: Back to the Future with Web 1.0

Patricia G. Lange October 2, 2013

Two new strategies for dealing with online comments have set the interwebs a-buzzing. The first is the decision by Popular Science to shut off comments on articles on their website, arguing that they are bad for science. The second is Google’s announcement that it will significantly modify YouTube’s comment system by featuring more “relevant” comments up front, and providing new tools to moderate comments. While some people expect these decisions to usher in a new public sphere, others see them as harbingers of a return to the age of “Web 1.0” (if you’ll forgive that term), which still holds the connotation of highly-restricted forms of online participation. According to Popular Science, although many insightful comments are posted, studies show that people experience more negativity toward certain announcements about science after seeing rude—even if substantively unrelated—attacks. In fact, “even a fractious minority wields enough power to skew a reader’s perception of (read more...)

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1977 Called. They Want Their Headline Back.

Lisa Messeri September 25, 2013

I have a fuzzy recollection of going to the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum when I was a kid in the late 1980s. There was an exhibit about whether or not Mars hosted life.  On display was a clear plastic tube, filled halfway with dirt.  There was a shallow layer of water and the surface was bubbling. To my kid brain, this was dirt from Mars and the fact that the water was bubbling clearly indicated life – not some pump hidden behind the display. I wasn’t really into space or science fiction or aliens, but this stuck with me.  I was very willing to be deceived if it meant that life existed on Mars. As it turns out, I was in good company. The other day, the opening lines of a New York Times article titled “Life On Mars?  Maybe Not” caught my eye: In findings that are as scientifically significant as they (read more...)

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A Byte of the Apple: A Review of the Film “Jobs” (2013)

Patricia G. Lange September 10, 2013

Every few years, my husband makes the suggestion (threat?) to turn my original 1984 Macintosh into a techno-aquarium. Yes, one with real fish swimming in it. At one time it was the cool thing to do. My response is always to staunchly scream, “No way!” And my Macintosh travels with us every time we move. It seems to me that the recent film Jobs (2013) had the opportunity to explore why it is that many of us who lived in Silicon Valley at the time might feel, not just techno-nostalgia for a device, but also excitement to have participated in a significant technological sea change. Sadly, the film never really provides insight about these emotions; instead it falls back on pathetic clichés. For instance, when the Jobs character (this is not a documentary) is speaking to a future designer of the iPod, the designer says that people view the world (read more...)

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EPIC 2013 Preview

Patricia G. Lange August 12, 2013

The Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference is being held 15-18 September in London. EPIC is an important international conference for sharing insight on current and future practices of ethnography in industry. Next month’s conference promises to be very exciting and productive. The program boasts a wide variety of topics, including a number of papers that will quite likely be of interest to CASTAC and STS practitioners and scholars. Many of the themes in the program, such as big data, MOOCs, and energy have been hot topics for The CASTAC Blog in recent months. IS DATA THE NEW OIL? Several papers at EPIC will be discussing “Big Data,” which is a topic that is heating up and is germane for anthropological theory and practice. Big Data, which has been discussed in a prior post by David Hakken, has been designated as a new asset class akin to oil and has consequently (read more...)

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Handbook of Science and Technology Studies CFP

Patricia G. Lange August 6, 2013

Call for Chapter Proposals – Due Aug. 15, 2013 Editors Clark A. Miller, Laurel Smith-Doerr, Ulrike Felt, Rayvon Fouche Reposted from the Society for Social Studies of Science news page. The editors of the next edition of the Handbook of Science and Technology Studies invite proposals for chapters to be included in the new Handbook. This edition of the Handbook is expected to appear in 2016, some nine years after the last edition. Much has happened during that interval: the advancement of STS theories and methods, the development of new ideas and the evolution of long-important themes, the engagement of STS with other disciplines and with the public sphere. We aim to capture an enduring snapshot of the ongoing creative activity of STS in the new Handbook, representing the core theoretical, methodological, and substantive concerns of the field and situating the field in its intellectual and historical contexts. The STS (read more...)

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