Mobile Activism and Psychogeographic Inspirations: A Qualitative Study on iOS App Making with College Students

A significant portion of scholarly literature explores the ways that youth activists (aged 15-24 years old) appropriate mobile apps—compact software designed and developed to run on a smartphone or tablet—to address social issues. However, there is a paucity of research literature that reveals the ways that they engage in the production of socially useful mobile apps. As a way to address the lack of research on this area of mobile app making, this project draws on a participatory media research design to explore the experience of co-producing an iOS mobile phone app with college students working toward social change in their campus community. The project collects qualitative data from semi-structured interviews and design artifacts. The data is analyzed using the Situationist International’s concept of psychogeography, which ordinarily focuses on place-based investigations. As a means of analysis, psychogeography facilitates a creative method of moving throughout the data corpus while mapping recurring patterns, themes, and ideas that relate to the production of app making with participants. The findings in this study are marked by a disruptive event that caused the project to rupture before ending as methodologically planned. Nevertheless, what appeared as a moment of rupture became an opportunity for capture as the participatory media research project revealed variations on modes of ethico-political praxis that oriented the production of a mobile app that serves local marginalized interests. For researchers seeking to participate with activist-oriented youth on the production of mobile app projects, disruption can become a generative asset that opens up creative spaces and passageways for producing socially useful mobile apps at the grassroots level.Doctor of Philosoph

The 1991 research and technology report, Goddard Space Flight Center

The 1991 Research and Technology Report for Goddard Space Flight Center is presented. Research covered areas such as (1) earth sciences including upper atmosphere, lower atmosphere, oceans, hydrology, and global studies; (2) space sciences including solar studies, planetary studies, Astro-1, gamma ray investigations, and astrophysics; (3) flight projects; (4) engineering including robotics, mechanical engineering, electronics, imaging and optics, thermal and cryogenic studies, and balloons; and (5) ground systems, networks, and communications including data and networks, TDRSS, mission planning and scheduling, and software development and test

Innovation, technology and security: the emergence of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles before and after 9/11

This thesis addresses the relationship between military technological innovation and evolving practices of security before and after 9/11 through the case of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology and particularly the UAV lineage associated with the General Atomics Predator system. Through the case of UAV development the thesis contributes to wider theoretical debates regarding military innovation and weapons acquisition processes. The case illustrates that rather than a moment, innovation is better understood as a process. Rather than linear, however, the process is uncertain, involving complex interactions between institutional pressures, technological development and external events. The thesis presents UAV development in terms of ‘statuses’ of marginality, emergence and assimilation. Establishing the long UAV development history in the US, the thesis explores military innovation theory to consider the reasons for their long Cold War marginality, despite repeated efforts. It then considers the emergence of UAVs in the early post-Cold war period, focusing particularly on the design iterations that yielded the Predator and the bureaucratic political processes through which that system was fielded. Thirdly, the progressive assimilation of Predator is addressed in relation to the growing threat of terrorist networks, and the post-9/11 attempt to reorient existing military and intelligence capabilities to counter terrorism and counter insurgency operations. This raises the question of the relation between technological innovation and the security ‘pathways’ opened up after 9/11, the extent that 9/11 provided a window of opportunity for drone assimilation, and the role of drones in shaping the emergence of a technologically-enabled, remote approach to counter terrorism and military intervention

A Fire to be Lighted: The Training of American Astronauts From 1959 to the Present

This study examines the training of American astronauts from the selection of the original Mercury astronauts in 1959 to the present, as crews of six work aboard the International Space Station. It makes the primary argument that through all of those years, the training sequence has successfully adapted to the challenges of preparing astronauts for flight far more than it has failed. It will examine in more detail than any previous publication how training devices for the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, Space Shuttle, and International Space Station programs helped astronauts to make this statement true. This study will also make the argument that the successful training of astronauts helped prove the value of sending them into space. Sessions at a variety of locales, from electronic flight simulators, to neutral buoyancy pools, to virtual reality laboratories have given astronauts the mental and physical flexibility in space missions that only they possess. In other words, they are not automatons, but rather people who can develop their skills through training. This study will demonstrate that when their missions began, those skills contributed to spectacular successes in space. Astronauts have returned a bevy of scientific data from their scientific experiments in Earth orbit and from their walks on the Moon during Apollo thanks to their trained eyes and minds. They have also serviced the Hubble Space Telescope and constructed an International Space Station that is longer than a football field thanks to their training. As the 21st century continues, astronauts will journey on bolder missions to near Earth asteroids, back to the Moon, and onto Mars. The instructors who train them for those missions, whether belonging to a government or a company, will benefit from reading this study because they will gain a sense of what training methods have worked historically and understand the tremendously strong track record of human accomplishments in space given adequate training

First Annual Workshop on Space Operations Automation and Robotics (SOAR 87)

Several topics relative to automation and robotics technology are discussed. Automation of checkout, ground support, and logistics; automated software development; man-machine interfaces; neural networks; systems engineering and distributed/parallel processing architectures; and artificial intelligence/expert systems are among the topics covered

Box of delights, bridge of feathers: children's drama on Telefis Eireann/RTE 1962-1987

This thesis describes the general character of the children's television drama transmitted on Telefis Eireann/RTE from 1962 to 1987, reviews the programming context of the provision, and evaluates the drama transmitted to dramatic, developmental and cultural criteria. The thesis identifies and analyses a representative selection of the home-originated and imported children’s television drama in the schedules over the period under review. Details of the identified drama transmissions are provided in the Appendices. The Appendices also Include details of home produced children's programmes and of relevant home-originated adult drama. Chapter One outlines some dramatic criteria for classification and evaluation of the schedule content, constructs a developmental perspective of children as users of television drama, and examines the cultural contexts of Irish children as viewers. The selected schedule provision, relevant formative factors, and the programming environment are examined in general terms in Chapter Two. The selected provision is analysed in generic and thematic categories in Chapters Three, Four and Five. Chapter Three examines drama in the fantasy paradigm, which is predominantly animation drama; Chapter Four analyses the live action provision, discussing films originally made for cinema, drama particularly relevant to the actuality of children's lives, adventure drama, situation comedy and family-centred drama, and drama featuring animals. Chapter Five examines two categories characterised by heavy value-loading— drama based on literature and drama based on history; this chapter also discusses sources for research on thesis topics and gives a brief summary of developments in home produced television drama for children from 1987 to date. Chapter Six sets out the conclusions and areas of further enquiry indicated by the study of the provision and the analysis

Animating the Ethical Demand:Exploring user dispositions in industry innovation cases through animation-based sketching

This paper addresses the challenge of attaining ethical user stances during the design process of products and services and proposes animation-based sketching as a design method, which supports elaborating and examining different ethical stances towards the user. The discussion is qualified by an empirical study of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) in a Triple Helix constellation. Using a three-week long innovation workshop, UCrAc, involving 16 Danish companies and organisations and 142 students as empirical data, we discuss how animation-based sketching can explore not yet existing user dispositions, as well as create an incentive for ethical conduct in development and innovation processes. The ethical fulcrum evolves around Løgstrup's Ethical Demand and his notion of spontaneous life manifestations. From this, three ethical stances are developed; apathy, sympathy and empathy. By exploring both apathetic and sympathetic views, the ethical reflections are more nuanced as a result of actually seeing the user experience simulated through different user dispositions. Exploring the three ethical stances by visualising real use cases with the technologies simulated as already being implemented makes the life manifestations of the users in context visible. We present and discuss how animation-based sketching can support the elaboration and examination of different ethical stances towards the user in the product and service development process. Finally we present a framework for creating narrative representations of emerging technology use cases, which invite to reflection upon the ethics of the user experience.</jats:p