Life Expansion: Toward an Artistic, Design-Based Theory of the Transhuman / Posthuman

The thesis’ study of life expansion proposes a framework for artistic, design-based approaches concerned with prolonging human life and sustaining personal identity. To delineate the topic: life expansion means increasing the length of time a person is alive and diversifying the matter in which a person exists. For human life, the length of time is bounded by a single century and its matter is tied to biology. Life expansion is located in the domain of human enhancement, distinctly linked to technological interfaces with biology. The thesis identifies human-computer interaction and the potential of emerging and speculative technologies as seeding the promulgation of human enhancement that approach life expansion. In doing so, the thesis constructs an inquiry into historical and current attempts to append human physiology and intervene with its mortality. By encountering emerging and speculative technologies for prolonging life and sustaining personal identity as possible media for artistic, design-based approaches to human enhancement, a new axis is sought that identifies the transhuman and posthuman as conceptual paradigms for life expansion. The thesis asks: What are the required conditions that enable artistic, design-based approaches to human enhancement that explicitly pursue extending human life? This question centers on the potential of the study’s proposed enhancement technologies in their relationship to life, death, and the human condition. Notably, the thesis investigates artistic approaches, as distinct from those of the natural sciences, and the borders that need to be mediated between them. The study navigates between the domains of life extension, art and design, technology, and philosophy in forming the framework for a theory of life expansion. The critical approach seeks to uncover invisible borders between these interconnecting forces by bringing to light issues of sustaining life and personal identity, ethical concerns, including morphological freedom and extinction risk. Such issues relate to the thesis’ interest in life expansion and the use emerging and speculative technologies. 4 The study takes on a triad approach in its investigation: qualitative interviews with experts of the emerging and speculative technologies; field studies encountering research centers of such technologies; and an artistic, autopoietic process that explores the heuristics of life expansion. This investigation forms an integrative view of the human use of technology and its melioristic aim. The outcome of the research is a theoretical framework for further research in artistic approaches to life expansion

MORE CARE Overview

International audienceThis paper provides an overview of MORE CARE, a European R&D project financed within the 5th Framework Energy Programme. This project has as main objective the development of an advanced control software system, aiming to optimize the overall performance of isolated and weakly interconnected systems in liberalized market environments by increasing the share of wind energy and other renewable forms, including advanced on-line security functions. The main features of the control system comprise advanced software modules for load and wind power forecasting, unit commitment and economic dispatch of the conventional and renewable units and on-line security assessment capabilities integrated in a friendly Man-Machine environment. Pilot installations of advanced control functions are foreseen on the islands of Crete, Ireland and Madeira

Using Mata to work more effectively with Stata: A tutorial

Stata's matrix language, Mata, highlighted in Bill Gould's Mata Matters columns in the Stata Journal, is very useful and powerful in its interactive mode. Stata users who write do-files or ado-files should gain an understanding of the Stata-Mata interface: how Mata may be called upon to do one or more tasks and return its results to Stata. Mata's broad and extensible menu of functions offers assistance with many programming tasks, including many that are not matrix-oriented. In this tutorial, I will present examples of how do-file and ado-file writers might effectively use Mata in their work.

Using Mata to work more effectively with Stata: A tutorial

Stata’s matrix language, Mata, highlighted in Bill Gould’s Mata Matters columns in the Stata Journal, is very useful and powerful in its interactive mode. Stata users who write do-files or ado-files should gain an understanding of the Stata–Mata interface: how Mata may be called upon to do one or more tasks and return its results to Stata. Mata’s broad and extensible menu of functions offers assistance with many programming tasks, including many that are not matrix oriented. In this tutorial, I will present examples of how do-file and ado-file writers might effectively use Mata in their work.

Using Mata to work more effectively with Stata: A tutorial

Stata's matrix language, Mata, highlighted in Bill Gould's Mata Matters columns in the Stata Journal, is very useful and powerful in its interactive mode. Stata users who write do-files or ado-files should gain an understanding of the Stata-Mata interface: how Mata may be called upon to do one or more tasks and return its results to Stata. Mata's broad and extensible menu of functions offers assistance with many programming tasks, including many that are not matrix-oriented. In this tutorial, I will present examples of how do-file and ado-file writers might effectively use Mata in their work.

Optional Soil Moisture Sensor Protocol

The purpose of this resource is to measure the water content of soil based on the electrical resistance of soil moisture sensors. Students install soil moisture sensors in holes that are 10 cm, 30 cm, 60 cm, and 90 cm deep. They take daily readings of soil moisture data by connecting a meter to the sensors and using a calibration curve to determine the soil water content at each depth. Educational levels: Middle school, High school

Farmland Stewardship: Can Ecosystems Stand Any More of It?

Second in my series of articles on farming and environmental policy, this article examines farmland stewardship rhetoric in light of the reality of extensive agricultural exemptions from environmental regulation

Farmland Stewardship: Can Ecosystems Stand Any More of It?

The relevant question no longer can be simply whether farmers love their land and resources; rather, the question is how good an ecological steward they have been of our land and resources. In Part I of this introductory Essay, I explore the farmland stewardship claim in more detail. I endeavor to convince readers that the claim, trumpeted not only by farmers and the farm lobby, but also by legislators and farm regulators of virtually every political stripe, is primarily a rhetorical device to move attention away from farming as a significant source of environmental degradation and, therefore, a worthy target of environmental policy attention. After stripping the farmland stewardship claim of its mythology, I turn in Part II to the theme that defines the Conference topic and courses through the other articles in this symposium volume: how should we respond to the poor ecological record of farming