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Todd Suomela

The Technium: Chosen, Inevitable, and Contingent - 0 views

  • 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.
Todd Suomela

On the Pew Science Survey, Beware the Fall from Grace Narrative : Framing Science - 0 views

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    This traditional fall from grace narrative about science argues for the need to return to a (fictional) point in the past where science was better understood and appreciated by the public... Yet you would be hard pressed to find this type of rhetoric in the peer-reviewed literature examining public opinion about science, the role of scientific expertise in policymaking, or the relationship between science and other social institutions.
thinkahol *

Light propagation controlled in photonic chips: Major breakthrough in telecommunication... - 0 views

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    ScienceDaily (July 11, 2011) - Researchers at Columbia Engineering School have built optical nanostructures that enable them to engineer the index of refraction and fully control light dispersion.
thinkahol *

Ultimate energy efficiency: Magnetic microprocessors could use million times less energ... - 0 views

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    ScienceDaily (July 5, 2011) - Future computers may rely on magnetic microprocessors that consume the least amount of energy allowed by the laws of physics, according to an analysis by University of California, Berkeley, electrical engineers.
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