Finite Media

Author: Sean Cubitt
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822373475
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Book Description
While digital media give us the ability to communicate with and know the world, their use comes at the expense of an immense ecological footprint and environmental degradation. In Finite Media Sean Cubitt offers a large-scale rethinking of theories of mediation by examining the environmental and human toll exacted by mining and the manufacture, use, and disposal of millions of phones, computers, and other devices. The way out is through an eco-political media aesthetics, in which people use media to shift their relationship to the environment and where public goods and spaces are available to all. Cubitt demonstrates this through case studies ranging from the 1906 film The Story of the Kelly Gang to an image of Saturn taken during NASA's Cassini-Huygens mission, suggesting that affective responses to images may generate a populist environmental politics that demands better ways of living and being. Only by reorienting our use of media, Cubitt contends, can we overcome the failures of political elites and the ravages of capital.

The Key to Language

Author: Laurence Sherzer
Publisher: Laurence Sherzer
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Book Description

Frictionlessness

Author: Jakko Kemper
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 201

Book Description
Frictionlessness provides an examination of the environmentally destructive digital design philosophy of "frictionlessness" and the critical significance of a technological aesthetic of imperfection. If there is one thing that defines digital consumer technologies today, it is that they are designed to feel frictionless. From smart technologies to cloud computing, from from one-click shopping to the promise of seamless streaming-digital technology is framed to host ever-faster operations while receding increasingly into the background of perception. The environmental costs of this fetishization of frictionlessness are enormous and unevenly distributed; the frictionless experience of the end user tends to be supported by opaque networks of exploited labor and extracted resources that disproportionately impact the Global South. This situation marks an urgent need for alternate, less destructive aesthetic relations to technology. As such, this book examines imperfection, as an aesthetic concept that highlights existential conditions of finitude and fragility, as a particularly powerful counterweight to the dominant digital design philosophy of frictionlessness. While frictionlessness aims to draw the user's perception away from the exploitative and destructive conditions of digital production, imperfection forms an aesthetic source of friction that alerts users to the fragile nature of technology and the finite resources on which it relies. These arguments are elaborated through a close reading of three technological objects-a video game that was programmed to expire, an audiovisual performance that laments the fate of disused technology and a collection of music albums that dramatize a techno-cultural logic of relentless consumerism. Together, these case studies underline the value of technological aesthetics of imperfection and point to the need for a renewed ethics of care in relation to technology.

Collision Course

Author: Kerryn Higgs
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262529696
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 411

Book Description
The story behind the reckless promotion of economic growth despite its disastrous consequences for life on the planet. The notion of ever-expanding economic growth has been promoted so relentlessly that “growth” is now entrenched as the natural objective of collective human effort. The public has been convinced that growth is the natural solution to virtually all social problems—poverty, debt, unemployment, and even the environmental degradation caused by the determined pursuit of growth. Meanwhile, warnings by scientists that we live on a finite planet that cannot sustain infinite economic expansion are ignored or even scorned. In Collision Course, Kerryn Higgs examines how society's commitment to growth has marginalized scientific findings on the limits of growth, casting them as bogus predictions of imminent doom. Higgs tells how in 1972, The Limits to Growth—written by MIT researchers Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and William Behrens III—found that unimpeded economic growth was likely to collide with the realities of a finite planet within a century. Although the book's arguments received positive responses initially, before long the dominant narrative of growth as panacea took over. Higgs explores the resistance to ideas about limits, tracing the propagandizing of “free enterprise,” the elevation of growth as the central objective of policy makers, the celebration of “the magic of the market,” and the ever-widening influence of corporate-funded think tanks—a parallel academic universe dedicated to the dissemination of neoliberal principles and to the denial of health and environmental dangers from the effects of tobacco to global warming. More than forty years after The Limits to Growth, the idea that growth is essential continues to hold sway, despite the mounting evidence of its costs—climate destabilization, pollution, intensification of gross global inequalities, and depletion of the resources on which the modern economic edifice depends.

FEFLOW

Author: Hans-Jörg G. Diersch
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 364238739X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 1018

Book Description
FEFLOW is an acronym of Finite Element subsurface FLOW simulation system and solves the governing flow, mass and heat transport equations in porous and fractured media by a multidimensional finite element method for complex geometric and parametric situations including variable fluid density, variable saturation, free surface(s), multispecies reaction kinetics, non-isothermal flow and multidiffusive effects. FEFLOW comprises theoretical work, modeling experiences and simulation practice from a period of about 40 years. In this light, the main objective of the present book is to share this achieved level of modeling with all required details of the physical and numerical background with the reader. The book is intended to put advanced theoretical and numerical methods into the hands of modeling practitioners and scientists. It starts with a more general theory for all relevant flow and transport phenomena on the basis of the continuum approach, systematically develops the basic framework for important classes of problems (e.g., multiphase/multispecies non-isothermal flow and transport phenomena, discrete features, aquifer-averaged equations, geothermal processes), introduces finite-element techniques for solving the basic balance equations, in detail discusses advanced numerical algorithms for the resulting nonlinear and linear problems and completes with a number of benchmarks, applications and exercises to illustrate the different types of problems and ways to tackle them successfully (e.g., flow and seepage problems, unsaturated-saturated flow, advective-diffusion transport, saltwater intrusion, geothermal and thermohaline flow).

Media Theory

Author: David Eppstein
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3540716971
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 330

Book Description
This book presents a mathematical structure modeling a physical or biological system that can be in any of a number of states. Each state is characterized by a set of binary features, and differs from some other neighbor state or states by just one of those features. The book considers the evolution of such a system over time and analyzes such a structure from algebraic and probabilistic (stochastic) standpoints.

Finite-state Language Processing

Author: Emmanuel Roche
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262181822
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 494

Book Description
Finite-state devices, such as finite-state automata, graphs, and finite-state transducers, have been present since the emergence of computer science and are extensively used in areas as various as program compilation, hardware modeling, and database management. Although finite-state devices have been known for some time in computational linguistics, more powerful formalisms such as context-free grammars or unification grammars have typically been preferred. Recent mathematical and algorithmic results in the field of finite-state technology have had a great impact on the representation of electronic dictionaries and on natural language processing, resulting in a new technology for language emerging out of both industrial and academic research. This book presents a discussion of fundamental finite-state algorithms, and constitutes an approach from the perspective of natural language processing.

Chinese Environmental Humanities

Author: Chia-ju Chang
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030186342
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 361

Book Description
Chinese Environmental Humanities showcases contemporary ecocritical approaches to Chinese culture and aesthetic production as practiced in China itself and beyond. As the first collaborative environmental humanities project of this kind, this book brings together sixteen scholars from a diverse range of disciplines, including literary and cultural studies, philosophy, ecocinema and ecomedia studies, religious studies, minority studies, and animal or multispecies studies. The fourteen chapters are conceptually framed through the lens of the Chinese term huanjing (environment or “encircling the surroundings”), a critical device for imagining the aesthetics and politics of place-making, or “the practice of environing at the margin.” The discourse of environing at the margins facilitates consideration of the modes, aesthetics, ethics, and politics of environmental inclusion and exclusion, providing a lens into the environmental thinking and practices of the world’s most populous society.

NBS Special Publication

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Weights and measures
Languages : en
Pages : 726

Book Description

Thermal Computations for Electronics

Author: Gordon N. Ellison
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1000047385
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 405

Book Description
The first edition of Thermal Computations for Electronics: Conductive, Radiative, and Convective Air Cooling was based on the author's lecture notes that he developed over the course of nearly 40 years of thermal design and analysis activity, the last 15 years of which included teaching a university course at the senior undergraduate and graduate levels. The subject material was developed from publications of respected researchers and includes topics and methods original to this author. Numerous students have contributed to both the first and second editions, the latter corrected, sections rewritten (e.g., radiation spatial effects, Green's function properties for thermal spreading, 1-D FEA theory and application), and some new material added. The flavor and organization of the first edition have been retained, whereby the reader is guided through the analysis process for systems and then components. Important new material has been added regarding altitude effects on forced and buoyancy driven airflow and heat transfer. The first 20% of the book is devoted to the prediction of airflow and well-mixed air temperatures in systems, circuit board channels, and heat sinks, followed by convective (PCB-mounted components included), radiative, and conductive heat transfer and the resultant temperatures in electronic equipment. Detailed application examples illustrate a variety of problems. Downloads (from the CRC website) include: MathcadTM text examples, exercise solutions (adopting professors only) plus PDF lecture aids (professors only), and a tutorial (Chapter 14) using free FEA software to solve a thermal spreading problem. This book is a valuable professional resource for self-study and is ideal for use in a course on electronics cooling. It is well-suited for a first course in heat transfer where applications are as important as theory.