Scared of stairs

via cefn.com

We’re scared of stairs.
I understand that to an engineering mind
It’s just another challenge to be mounted.
But I don’t know why
The young leaders of tomorrow are being
Held back at the edge of a precipice of
Exploring. To excuse
Our own inaction and fear of failure.
We must be seen to take seriously
The risk of stairs at sporting
Events and other venues
For any falling from
The path is your
Problem now
Not mine
I’ll wish
Upon
A

Posted via web from andragy's posterous

Andragy: 2D Goggles - Lovelace and Babbage - Women, Crowbars and Computers

via andragy.blogspot.com

I have a new heroine. Not just Ada Lovelace but Sydney Padua who has created the most fantastic strip about Lovelace and Babbage over at 2D Goggles.

I love also that I can quote women about the world's most interesting stuff right now. See Cynthia Breazeal, Sherry Turkle, Donna Haraway, Katherine Hayles, Patti Maes, Elizabeth Grosz, Catherine Harding and of course, Sydney Padua, who just gets why you've got to love women with crowbars and computers.

Posted via web from andragy's posterous

xkcd - More Accurate Robots

via xkcd.com

xkcd says it all. Our media representation of robots is utterly missing the point.

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Castells in the Sky

A virtual riposte for my ‘off topic’ posts on network theory, feminism and structural cyberbullying! I thought that a blog assignment was perfect for tackling a big topic loosely, and I literally followed a literary path in my approach, where each post from first to last developed a different view of gender within network society while showing the evolution of application of network theories (and their lack) within some levels. Rather than 'off topic', see instead, 1,000 short words sketching in extensive research and original riffs on the topic.

Network theory is the ideal portable laboratory, to use Latour’s concept from “Give me a Laboratory and I will raise the world”, within which to destabilize scale and remove the inside/outside dichotomy, turning the dichotomies of gender and science into dialectic.

However, technological determinism lies at the heart of network theory. As Evelyn Fox Keller) puts it, just as modern feminism emerges from the recognition that women are made not born, contemporary studies of science come into being recognizing the difference between nature and science. There is a historical and epistemological parallel between the two that when combined can illustrate the dynamic instabilities and structural inequalities of, more than anything else, power.

As Foucault says, the perception that power resides in the machine, or panopticon, itself rather than in its operator is an effective and diffuse form of social control.  And so, I was looking from the top down at Harry Seldon’s Panopticon as well as searching for Castells in the sky.

As Latour explains, the laboratory is within the same societal constraints as the rest of society. And so network society is both within the same constraints of science and sex that the rest of us are and the use of network theory as an ‘objective tool’ should be opened to a feminist and science studies perspective, the combination of which is either a seamless epistemological parallel or a place of great dynamic instability depending on your footing.

So I argue, that as a whole, my blog assignment showed a meta-theoretical approach to network theory and feminism, which is something I continually contest and attest. At every stage of the construction of network society, gender has had an impact and continues to do so in the very structure at every scale.

As Foucault says: "the analysis, elaboration, and bringing into question of power relations and the 'agonism' between power relations and the intransitivity of freedom is a permanent political task inherent in all social existence". There is an elephant in the room, hear me trumpet!

2D Goggles - Lovelace and Babbage - Women, Crowbars and Computers

via 2dgoggles.com

I have a new heroine. Not just Ada Lovelace but Sydney Padua who has created the most fantastic strip about Lovelace and Babbage over at 2D Goggles.

I love also that I can quote women about the world's most interesting stuff right now. See Cynthia Breazeal, Sherry Turkle, Donna Haraway, Katherine Hayles, Patti Maes, Elizabeth Grosz, Catherine Harding and of course, Sydney Padua, who just gets why you've got to love women with crowbars and computers.

Posted via web from andragy's posterous

Sherry Turkle on Robotics and Relational Artifacts

Sherry Turkle is Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT and the founder (2001) and current director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, a center of research and reflection on the evolving connections between people and artifacts. Professor Turkle received a joint doctorate in sociology and personality psychology from Harvard University and is a licensed clinical psychologist.

Professor Turkle is the author of Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud's French Revolution (Basic Books, 1978; MIT Press paper, 1981; second revised edition, Guilford Press, 1992); The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (Simon and Schuster, 1984; Touchstone paper, 1985; second revised edition, MIT Press, 2005); and Life on the Screen:  Identity in the Age of the Internet (Simon and Schuster, November 1995; Touchstone paper, 1997).

Seminars and workshops at the Initiative on Technology and Self led to four edited collections, all published by the MIT Press, on the relationships between things and thinking. The first volume, Evocative Objects: Things We Think With, was published in Fall 2007. The second volume, Falling For Science: Objects in Mind, appeared in Spring 2008. The third volume, The Inner History of Devices, was published in Fall 2008. The final volume, Simulation and Its Discontents, followed in Spring 2009. Professor Turkle is currently completing a book on robots and the human spirit based on the Initiative's 10-year research program on relational artifacts.

Professor Turkle has written numerous articles on psychoanalysis and culture and on the "subjective side" of people's relationships with technology, especially computers. She is engaged in active study of robots, digital pets, and simulated creatures, particularly those designed for children and the elderly as well as in a study of mobile cellular technologies. Profiles of Professor Turkle have appeared in such publications as The New York Times, Scientific American, and Wired Magazine. She is a featured media commentator on the effects of technology for CNN, NBC, ABC, and NPR, including appearances on such programs as Nightline and 20/20.

via web.mit.edu

I (andra) recommend reading some of Turkle's papers on nascent robotics and relational artifacts. Although I'm not certain how to relate that to my art. lol.

Posted via web from technoist at play

Henry Markram builds a brain in a supercomputer

via ted.com

The 2009 TED Talk by Henry Markram describes how we now have the maths to model the neurocortical columns of the brain. He (and IBM) have built Bluebrain, a computer capable of modelling the brain. What's most interesting to me are the philosophical questions raised; what is a person? where and how do we begin and end? and with whom can we communicate? even, why are we here? And especially, what can a robot think? And is our brain evolving outside of our body in augmented reality?

These are all touched on in this fabulous TED Talk . It's one of the best 15 minutes I've spent all year! I've added the official TED bio below to do better justice to the rich subject than I can.

"In the microscopic, yet-uncharted circuitry of the cortex, Henry Markram is perhaps the most ambitious -- and our most promising -- frontiersman. Backed by the extraordinary power of the IBM Blue Gene supercomputing architecture, which can perform hundreds of trillions of calculations per second, he's using complex models to precisely simulate the neocortical column (and its tens of millions of neural connections) in 3D.

Though the aim of Blue Brain research is mainly biomedical, it has been edging up on some deep, contentious philosophical questions about the mind -- "Can a robot think?" and "Can consciousness be reduced to mechanical components?" -- the consequence of which Markram is well aware: Asked by Seed Magazine what a simulation of a full brain might do, he answered, "Everything. I mean everything" -- with a grin.

Now, with a successful proof-of-concept for simulation in hand (the project's first phase was completed in 2007), Markram is looking toward a future where brains might be modeled even down to the molecular and genetic level. Computing power marching rightward and up along the graph of Moore's Law, Markram is sure to be at the forefront as answers to the mysteries of cognition emerge.

"Markram refers to the robot as "science on an industrial scale," and is convinced that it’s the future of lab work. "So much of what we do in science isn’t actually science," he says, "I say let robots do the mindless work so that we can spend more time thinking about our questions.""

Jonah Lehrer, Seed Magazine"

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