Belated HI351 Lego Stuff

As requested:

Lego 2001: A Space Odyssey


Lego Steam Punk


Lego Futurama


Hope you all did well on your exams!

Dwelling in Possibilities

I'm not sure how many people are in Professor Schulmann's HI365, but if you are you'll recognize this. Mark Edmundson's article "Dwelling in Possibilities" I think does a good job of highlighting some of the themes from this course in the context of how students of our generation (this article was posted on this site 14 March, 2008) interact with the changing technology. He talks about the computer sublime, consumerism, and the incessant need for information in the age of the Internet. Regardless, its a really interesting read from the point of view of a professor facing a college full of Crackberry-addicted internet jockeys.

Dwelling in Possibilities: Our students' spectacular hunger for life makes them radically vulnerable

Soyuz Superteam

So, I'm a dork who just became ridiculously excited. I was wikipediaing ( if people can say googling) around and I found something pretty cool. "Soyuz" as in the Apollo-Soyuz project and as in the first C in CCCP (Soyuz means union in Russian) is actually the name of a group of Russian superheroes. Each character is based off of a figure from Russian mythology. These characters were first created by John Ostrander and, interestingly, were first introduced in the pages of the Firestorm comic, who was the creation of a nuclear accident and who had the ability to rearrange the atomic structure of matter.

Here's a link to the Soyuz wikipedia entry.

Geek Flowchart

So as I was procrastinating in studying for my exams, I was surfing the 'internets and came across a link to a flowchart that describes the evolution of a geek. Basically it made me happy and I felt like some other people might enjoy similarly procrastinating. Good luck to everyone, by the way. Especially to those of us who excel in the art of not studying until the last minute.

[click to view full image in new window]

Cape Wind

This is the website for the Cape Wind project going on. It's been coming for a long time, with a fight. Residents of the Cape don't want a wind farm off in their view. They even have bumper stickers protesting it...usually found on their enormous SUV's. They are definitely an example of technological sublime. There is a part of NY where wind turbines border a few miles of road and its hard not to be in awe of them.

Here's some video footage of a wind turbine. One of people's problems with them is that they believe the turbines will create a lot of noise. But as you can see....we make more noise than the turbines.

brain scans reveal our cognitive response to androids

Culture of Comic Books

I'm doing some research for another class on Popular Culture during the Great Depression by focusing on comic books, movies, and radio. It seemed like a lot of people were interested in the book Men of Tomorrow that was posted earlier in the semester. I found another book that deals with comic books and the rise of youth culture in America. It's called Comic Book Nation and if anyone is interested, you can find it here.

Here's an article I found from Time Magazine looking into the importance of Earth Hour. Starting at 8 pm on March 29th, lights were turned off across the world for just one hour. As the article argues, while such a movement does not have much immediate environmental impact, it's less about the numbers and more about the symbolism of doing whatever we can, no matter how small, to help the world around us.

Earth Hour

review terms & essay topics

Daedalus and Icarus Sir Anthony Van Dyck, c. 1620


On the final next week (5/9 at 9 a.m. in CAS 223) you will complete 12 ID questions (out of 12) and write two essays. The ID questions and the essay questions will be selected from the 50 terms & 4 topics below.

Only 12 of the ID terms will be presented, and you will have to answer all 12. The 4 essay topics will be grouped in pairs, and you will have to write on one topic from each pair.

ID NAMES & TERMS:

1 Howard Scott

2 Technocracy

3 Futurama

4 Leo Szilard

5 Trinity

6 Bikini

7 Konstantin Tsiolkovsky

8 Robert Goddard

9 Werner von Braun

10 October, 1957

11 John Glenn

12 Valentina Tereshkova

13 Velcro

14 Tang

15 Apollo 8

16 Apollo-Soyuz

17 Challenger

18 La Mettrie

19 Charles Babbage

20 Alan Turing

21 IBM punch cards

22 "War Games"

23 "Solid State" electronics

24 "Pong"

25 MS-DOS

26 The "1984" ad

27 Moore's Law

28 Philo T. Farnsworth

29 Populuxe

30 Newton Minnow

31 Marshall McLuhan

32 "All You Need is Love"

33 DARPA

34 ARPANET

35 Tim Berners-Lee

36 LambdaMOO

37 Buckminster Fuller

38 eugenics

39 James Watson and Francis Crick

40 Asilomar Conference

41 "12 Monkeys"

42 Diamond v. Chakrabarty

43 Humulin (tm)

44 Human Genome Project

45 J. Craig Venter

46 John Muir and Gifford Pinchot

47 Rachel Carson

48 The Whole Earth Catalogue

49 Solar-Thermal

50 Singularity


ESSAY TOPICS:

w. Consider the changing relationship between human beings and nature as depicted in any three primary sources from the course reading. How does each author depict the impact of new technologies on the landscape, on living things, and on the human body itself? How does each of these works seem to evaluate the impact of human technology on the natural world---as positive, negative, or something else?

x. Consider the cultural and political impact of new technologies and new modes of production / consumption as explored in Paul Boyer's By the Bomb's Early Light and Lizabeth Cohen's A Consumers' Republic. Although both authors concentrate on the period following WWII, what different types of technological change does each view as most influential and why? How might a student of history integrate and expand upon their studies of U.S. culture and politics in the period of rapid technological and social change following WWII?

y. Imagine that you have been given to the opportunity to replace three secondary sources on the HI 351 syllabus with three very easy-to-watch popcorn movies. In order to seize this opportunity, however, you must first make a detailed and compelling case that each popcorn movie you propose to add to the syllabus explores all of the same major issues as each book you propose to subtract---and explores them more effectively.

z. The painting above depicts Daedalus advising his son Icarus on how to safely use the wings he has made for him. As we know from the story, (& from the vapid smile on the boy's face), this advice will not be heeded. In your estimation, is the human race, in its use of new technologies, more likely to follow the fate of Daedalus or Icarus? In you answer to this question, be sure to consider the arguments of those we have read and studied, among them Aldous Huxley and Freeman Dyson, who have taken a clear position on this question. Explain whose writings you find more persuasive, and why.

Yucca Mountain Repository

One problem facing nuclear power sites is the issue of storing and disposing of nuclear waste, whose radioactive half-life can last between thousands and millions of years (plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,110 years). Large-scale repositories in remote areas seem the best solution, but there is a real danger in transporting nuclear waste, even in the concrete-lined drums they're stored in. Carrying nuclear waste on public roads, through the atmosphere, or even on railroads through areas with people is a risk many aren't willing to take. The Yucca Mountain Repository is the center of a currently halted Congressional debate. The site itself has been approved for dumping 77,0000 tons of material, but the facility has yet to be laid out.

Link: http://www.yuccamountain.org/archive/legal.htm

Stewart Brand

Here is a clip from a recent lecture by Whole Earth Catalogue founder Stewart Brand in which he argues that the global trend toward urbanization will "defuse the population bomb" and lead to a more educated global population with, in the long run, a higher standard of living.

Buckminster Fuller clips

In the first video, geodesic dome inventor Buckminster Fuller explains his response to the anti-technology or "Luddite" point of view that had gained popularity in the sixties and seventies. The second clip describes the global power grid that Bucky was the first to propose.

We Can

Here's a site submitted by Anna Webster.

Radioactive Waste Converted Into Inert Substance

http://www.ecofuss.com/radioactive-waste-converted-into-inert-substance/

A group of Russian researchers in collaboration with the Israeli’s Environmental Energy Resources (EER) have developed a reactor that converts radioactive waste into inert byproducts. Although there were many who thought that this is not possible, Itschak Shrem from the Shrem, Fudim and Keiner, an investment company, announced the breakthrough at a press conference in Tel Aviv.

Sorry

The link i just posted to Inhabitat is not working i believe.

http://www.inhabitat.com/

enjoy!

Treescrapers?

I found this interesting website discussing the possible future use of treescrapers, essentially a skyscraper that works like a tree, makes oxygen, distills water, produces energy, and changes with the seasons. This is the link.

This website called Inhabitat has a ton of really cool green technologies on it. check it out.

JYL

Green Consumerism?

Technological advances in the environmental field have trickled down from the realm of high science into the everyday world of the consumer. These environmental inventions and innovations, such as hybrid cars, biofuels, and energy saving appliances, have attained messianic status, saving Americans from environmental damnation. This article from the New York Times examines this notion and concludes more optimistically, by discovering that most consumers (in a survey) were aware that they could not solve the problem of pollution and climate change by buying things. 

Craziest Green Technologies

I found this really interesting website about the strangest green technologies that have been invented in the last few years. There are examples of solar powered cell phones and other really weird devices. If you're interested the article can be found at this link.

BU's Environmental Grade Deflation

The Sustainable Endowments Institute puts out a report every year grading major universities on their commitment to environmental sustainability initiatives. For 2008, BU received a C, which is actually an entire letter grade above last year (we are among the biggest improvers over last year's report). We're actually among the leading universities in the Food & Recycling category, but fall short in most of the others - especially in endowment transparency (grade: F). In case you're wondering, overall grades for Northeastern - B, MIT - B+, and Harvard - A-, putting them at the top of the class, naturally. But at least we only tied with BC. Here are links to BU's report card and the entire report.

I admit it. I'm a Trekkie so this invention is SUPER exciting.

Real Trekkie Tricorder Invented

By Charles Q. Choi, Special to LiveScience

posted: 30 April 2008 ET

A "Star Trek" tricorder, left, and at right an image from a medical scanner of a simulated breast tumor displayed on a cell phone screen. Medical scanners plugged into cell phones could help detect cancer and other disorders. Credit for scanner image: Boris Rubinsky et al.

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A "Star Trek" tricorder, left, and at right an image from a medical scanner of a simulated breast tumor displayed on a cell phone screen. Medical scanners plugged into cell phones could help detect cancer and other disorders. Credit for scanner image: Boris Rubinsky et al.

New handheld medical scanners coupled with regular cell phones resemble "Star Trek" tricorders and could see what ails you with a push of a button.

The invention, using off-the-shelf cell phone technology, would allow medical scanners could boldly go where none have gone before — to the aid of the roughly three-quarters of the world's population currently without access to ultrasounds, X-rays and other imagers used for everything from detecting tumors to monitoring fetuses.

In addition to offering medical scans in developing nations, the devices "could find their way in ambulances, or rural clinics," said Boris Rubinsky, a professor of bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley.

Medical imagers are typically bulky combinations of scanners, processors and video monitors. Rubinsky and his colleagues instead physically separated these components, so the most complicated elements of imagers — the powerful computer processors — can reside at a remote central location.

The researchers next devised a simple portable scanner that could plug into a cell phone. The phones transmit the raw scanning data to the processors, which create images to relay back for viewing on the cell phone screen.

Cheaper approach

The surprisingly simple setup is described in the April 30 issue of the journal PLoS ONE.

The scheme would significantly lower the cost of medical imaging because one processor facility could serve multiple imagers.

"You could be out in the middle of a remote village and still have cell phone access," said researcher Antoni Ivorra, also at Berkeley.

The portable scanner was hooked up to a cell phone with a USB cable and tested on a gel-filled container that simulated breast tissue afflicted with a tumor. Diseased tissue conducts electricity differently than healthy tissue does. The image that was sent back had the simulated tumor clearly visible onscreen.

Simple and flexible

These devices could work with any cell phone that can send and receive pictures or audio and video clips.

"The size of the data in the study was only six kilobytes, which is ridiculously small," explained researcher Yair Granot at Berkeley. "A one sentence, text-only e-mail message is bigger than that."

Rubinsky noted that "people are able to watch full movies on their iPods" so cell phone screen sizes should not be a major impediment.

In the future, ultrasound scanners could also couple with cell phones. Just the ultrasound scanner "might cost about $1,000, while a whole ultrasound machine with all the other components might be about $70,000," Rubinsky told LiveScience. "We could take medical imaging and possibly benefit the entire world."

Simply donating existing medical scanners to the world's poorest regions is not a viable, long-term solution, Rubinsky said.

"More than half of the medical equipment in developing countries is left unused or broken because it is too complicated or expensive to operate and repair," he explained. "We set out to develop something that locals could sustain on their own, as well as something that is relevant to local economies and technologies."

Broad implications

These portable scanners "could open up whole new avenues of health care for the developing world," Rubinsky said. "Health professionals in rural clinics could affordably get the tools they need to properly diagnose and treat their patients."

Although diagnosis and treatment of roughly one-fifth of all diseases can benefit from medical imaging, "this advancement has been out of reach for millions of people in the world because the equipment is too costly to maintain," Rubinsky said. "Our system would make imaging technology inexpensive and accessible for these underserved populations."

The scanners could have broad applications in the developed world, too, he said.

"Health professionals in rural clinics could affordably get the tools they need to properly diagnose and treat their patients," Rubinsky said. "If you had a car accident, you could put a cap on the hat of the victim in the ambulance, and before the ambulance even gets to the hospital, all the information can go through the cell phone, maybe to spot if that person has internal bleeding in their head."

http://www.livescience.com/technology/080430-cell-phone-medical.html