Abstraction’s ecologies : post-industrialization, waste and the commodity form in Prunella Clough’s paintings of the 1980s and 1990s

This article’s aims are twofold: firstly, it argues that Prunella Clough’s engagement with consumer items in her paintings of the 1980s and 1990s constitute a sustained engagement with the fluctuating nature of the commodity form, moving beyond the established critical narrative whereby these works are understood as simply redeeming “everyday” materials. Secondly, in order to do this, it proposes new artistic frameworks for Clough’s work, moving away from her early association with Neo-Romanticism to foreground her relationship with Pop and Minimalism, and with Post-Conceptual painting. Clough’s late works, it finds, powerfully condense histories of industrial production and painting in Britain.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Some Peer-to-Peer, Democratically and Voluntarily Produced Thoughts About \u27The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom,\u27 by Yochai Benkler

In this review essay, Bartow concludes that The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler is a book well worth reading, but that Benkler still has a bit more work to do before his Grand Unifying Theory of Life, The Internet, and Everything is satisfactorily complete. It isn\u27t enough to concede that the Internet won\u27t benefit everyone. He needs to more thoroughly consider the ways in which the lives of poor people actually worsen when previously accessible information, goods and services are rendered less convenient or completely unattainable by their migration online. Additionally, the Internet is easy enough to be optimistic enough as a technological achievement, but just as nuclear fission can be harnessed both for electrical power generation and annihilating destruction, the raw communicative capabilities can\u27t be qualitatively assessed without reference to specific content. Pornography and its symbiotic relationship to the Internet require thoughtful scrutiny. Astroturf and other targeted attempts to instrumentally distort democratic discourse need to be analyzed and possibly also rechanneled or contained. The impact of moving resources online upon people who substantially live in an offline, analog world, needs to be contemplated more fully

The Critical Role of Public Charging Infrastructure

Editors: Peter Fox-Penner, PhD, Z. Justin Ren, PhD, David O. JermainA decade after the launch of the contemporary global electric vehicle (EV) market, most cities face a major challenge preparing for rising EV demand. Some cities, and the leaders who shape them, are meeting and even leading demand for EV infrastructure. This book aggregates deep, groundbreaking research in the areas of urban EV deployment for city managers, private developers, urban planners, and utilities who want to understand and lead change

Fair Use and the Fairer Sex: Gender, Feminism, and Copyright Law

Copyright laws are written and enforced to help certain groups of people assert and retain control over the resources generated by creative productivity. Because those people are predominantly male, the copyright infrastructure plays a role, largely unexamined by legal scholars, in helping to sustain the material and economic inequality between women and men. This essay considers some of the ways in which gender issues and copyright laws intersect, proposes a feminist critique of the copyright legal regime which advocates low levels of copyright protections, and asserts the importance of considering the social and economic disparities between women and men when evaluating the impacts and performance of intellectual property laws

Lightning Strikes on Commercial Aircraft: How the Airlines Are Coping

The hazard posed by lightning strikes is an important issue in commercial aviation. Extensive research into methods for coping with lightning strikes has been continuing for many years. This paper addresses the issues pertaining to lightning strikes, impact on commercial aviation, and initiatives undertaken to prevent lightning strike mishaps. This paper concludes that commercial airliners are generally quite safe during electrical storms. The metal skin of the plane conducts the current on the outside around the passengers. Fuel tanks are now designed to prevent entry of electrical charges

Exploring mischief and mayhem in social computing or: how we learned to stop worrying and love the trolls

In this paper, we explore the role of mischief as borderline socially acceptable behaviour within social computing applications. Mischievous activity pushes the boundaries of the implicit social contract present in all online social systems, and, we argue, is of vital importance understanding online social interactions. Using examples from games and other applications, we explore mischief as an act of appropriation, which reinterprets mechanics defined by developers in unexpected and sometimes upsetting ways. Although frequently interpreted as negative and anti-social behaviour, we argue that mischief serves a vital social role, and find surprising richness in the chaos

Confessions of a live coder

This paper describes the process involved when a live coder decides to learn a new musical programming language of another paradigm. The paper introduces the problems of running comparative experiments, or user studies, within the field of live coding. It suggests that an autoethnographic account of the process can be helpful for understanding the technological conditioning of contemporary musical tools. The author is conducting a larger research project on this theme: the part presented in this paper describes the adoption of a new musical programming environment, Impromptu, and how this affects the author’s musical practice

CONCEPTUAL DESIGN OF CONTROL ROD DRIVE MOTOR TYPE MAGNETIC JACK FOR NUCLEAR POWER PLANT

The Control Rod Drive Motor (CRDM) controls the reactor power of a G.A Siwabessy and automatically shuts it down during an emergency using a three-phase motor that drives a ball-nut spindle attached to the magnetic SCRAM through the transmission gear. However, there are several weaknesses associated with this design, such as the inability of the ball nut to rotate when a disturbance occurs at the motor limit switch continuously. This causes the threads on the control rod shaft to wear out due to friction and release from the holder. Therefore, this research aims to develop a CRDM with a magnetic jack for a nuclear plant, which moves the extension shaft and the control rod components vertically and linearly. The control rod's motor must pull, insert, hold, or drop it from any point. This conceptual design is the first step in determining prototyping design criteria with a magnetic jack to understand the working mechanism. The control rod gripping motion simulation was also presented using ANSYS Rigid Dynamics to reduce the failure at the design phase before prototyping. The simulation results showed no collision on each component capable of affecting the overall system performance. Therefore, the control rod motor functions properly in carrying out the pulling and lowering movements on 19.1 mm infrequency