French Optical Telegraphy, 1793-1855: Hardware, Software, Administration

The relatively stable contribution of technological change to aggregate growth masks technological trajectories which are, at the sectoral level, often highly discontinuous. For decades, even centuries, the capabilities used to produce a particular good or service may continue essentially unchanged or with relatively minor evolutionary modifications. Sometimes without much warning a breakthrough innovation will create a new technological paradigm, along with an accompanying gale of creative destruction, which is then followed by a period of consolidation within a maturing framework

Communications

The communications sector of an economy comprises a range of technologies, physical media, and institutions/rules that facilitate the storage of information through means other than a society\u27s oral tradition and the transmission of that information over distances beyond the normal reach of human conversation. This chapter provides data on the historical evolution of a disparate range of industries and institutions contributing to the movement and storage of information in the United States over the past two centuries. These include the U.S. Postal Service, the newspaper industry, book publishing, the telegraph, wired and cellular telephone service, radio and television, and the Internet

Without magic bullets: the biological basis for public health interventions against protein folding disorders

Protein folding disorders of aging like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases currently present intractable medical challenges. 'Small molecule' interventions - drug treatments - often have, at best, palliative impact, failing to alter disease course. The design of individual or population level interventions will likely require a deeper understanding of protein folding and its regulation than currently provided by contemporary 'physics' or culture-bound medical magic bullet models. Here, a topological rate distortion analysis is applied to the problem of protein folding and regulation that is similar in spirit to Tlusty's (2010a) elegant exploration of the genetic code. The formalism produces large-scale, quasi-equilibrium 'resilience' states representing normal and pathological protein folding regulation under a cellular-level cognitive paradigm similar to that proposed by Atlan and Cohen (1998) for the immune system. Generalization to long times produces diffusion models of protein folding disorders in which epigenetic or life history factors determine the rate of onset of regulatory failure, in essence, a premature aging driven by familiar synergisms between disjunctions of resource allocation and need in the context of socially or physiologically toxic exposures and chronic powerlessness at individual and group scales. Application of an HPA axis model is made to recent observed differences in Alzheimer's onset rates in White and African American subpopulations as a function of an index of distress-proneness

Ambiguous keyboards for AAC

Purpose – “Ambiguous keyboards” and “disambiguation processes” are becoming universally recognised through the popularisation of “predictive text messaging” on mobile phones. As this paper shows, although originating in the AT and AAC fields, these terms and techniques no longer appear to be widely understood or adopted by practitioners or users. The purpose of this paper is to introduce these techniques, discussing the research and theory around them, and to suggest them as AT and AAC strategies to be considered by practitioners and users. Design/methodology/approach – This is a conceptual paper that describes the use of ambiguous keyboards and disambiguation. The hypothesis of the paper is that ambiguous keyboards and disambiguation processes offer potential to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of AAC and should thus be considered further in research and practice. Findings – The two broad methods for removing the ambiguity from the output of an ambiguous keyboard are presented. A summary of the literature around the use of disambiguation processes provided and the use of disambiguation processes for AAC discussed. Originality/value – This paper suggests that ambiguity should be adopted as a characteristic of an AAC keyboard as should the method of removing ambiguity – namely either coding or a disambiguation process

Language, Communication, Computers and the Law

There is an old story about a drunken man who is looking for an object under a street light. A policeman asks him what he is looking for. It is my keys , he says. Did you lose them here? No, over there.\u27 Why then are you looking for them over here? Because I can see here , is the man\u27s reply. The real significance of this story is very different from what it appears. It is not the man who is foolish but the policeman. We can only look for something from where we can see it. The alternative is to burrow like moles in the dark. But how can we find something that is not there? We can\u27t of course, but we can get a perspective of it by following a ray of light as far as it will go. There are many lights and many perspectives, but no one absolute objective truth, or any one way of finding it

The Design of a Morse-To-Teletype Signal Converter Using Intergrated Micrologic Circuitry.

This paper investigates the use of a Morse to teletype signal converter with existing teletype equipment to continuously monitor and display received Morse signals. This device would greatly reduce operator fatigue and provide increased efficiency. Important aspects of the converter design problem are presented and different approaches to the problems encountered in this design are developed. A micrologic digital design is presented and its operation discussed. Although not fully implemented, it is considered far superior to other methods of implementation. It will accept Morse keyed audio signals in the 300-3000 hz. range at keying speeds of 10 to 100 words per minute and convert them to teletype code.http://archive.org/details/thedesignofmorse1094540077Lieutenant, United States NavyApproved for public release; distribution is unlimited

Rise of the Modern Mediatrix: The Feminization of Media and Mediating Labor, 1865-1945

This dissertation uncovers a vast archive of fictional female telegraph, telephone, and typewriter girls, combining rigorous historical research with feminist, psychoanalytic readings of mass cultural texts to show how the global gendering of low-level communication work shaped modern media. It begins in the United States, where women first performed this work, and explores three further national contexts (France, Germany, and Britain) where female operators and typists circulated as media icons of techno-social connection in an increasingly atomized age. The title “modern mediatrix” describes the essential mediating role white-collar woman workers have played in modern media infrastructure, from switchboard to editing bench. This role has been promoted by corporations, nations, and mass media as feminine for over a century. Across four chapters that engage ad campaigns, plays, novels, and films, I reveal the modern mediatrix to be a uniquely flexible character, capable of creating continuity across industrial ruptures and activating new narrative forms. To trace this character’s construction, I tie her unique semiotic tools and social skills to evolving Christian notions of sanctified feminine transmission, weaving as women’s work, and Hollywood’s reliance on an invisible feminized clerical proletariat. Media scholars who point out telegraphs and typewriters still rarely note the girl behind the machine. For too long, my field has clung to the male factory worker as an all-purpose archetype for cinematic labor and depicted female tech users at home, alone, in the thrall of the apparatus. Instead, my project proposes the rise of the modern mediatrix as an essential theoretical and material foundation for film and media studies. Each of my chapters explores a different facet of the modern mediatrix. I begin in the 1860s, when Western Union began recruiting lady telegraphers and the Catholic Church premiered its Blessing of the Telegraph, with Mary cast as a pure channel for man’s natural use of electricity. Framed by this techno-romantic mother-figure, Chapter 1 examines three teenage girls enshrined in US popular history as the first users of the telegraph, telephone, and typewriter. I show how inventors and companies used virginal foremothers to claim paternity over communications technologies and their feminized workforces. Chapter 2 argues Bell’s speech-weaver ad campaigns coded onscreen operators as vernacular translators of transitional cinematic syntax. Highlighting telephone girls’ enlistment as temp techno-pedagogues during US film’s introduction of cross-cutting and European film’s polyglot transition to sound, it offers women’s film-weaving labor as an alternative to the surgical rhetoric (suture) and patriarchal authorship model typically used to historicize film editing conventions. Chapter 3 traces the secretary’s construction as an automatic audience member in interwar European modernist media. Suggesting that the hypnotic effects of taking dictation stoked Weimar-era anxieties about women workers’ receptivity to media-savvy fascist dictators, it catalogs secretarial symptoms that trouble Frankfurt school divisions of worker-spectators into shocked factory workers and absorbed little shopgirls. Chapter 4 uses the metallic echoes of taps to read Astaire-Rogers musicals as anxious allegories for the Production Code’s reliance on typists, and as encrypted channels to two fleetingly feminized languages, Morse and binary code. A postwar coda draws out the clerical conduit’s transgressive potential, hinted at by her narrative flexibility and explicitly reclaimed in the 1970s and 80s by feminist filmmakers and techno-scientists. With access to the codes of information capitalism, virginal electric muses and hysterical film fans became canny decipherers of mystified techno-cultural matrilineages

A stain in the picture

This article seeks to examine processes of subjectification as attaching oneself to and making oneself at home in networked technological screens and interfaces, particularly in the concatenated, concretized form of the smartphone. The selfie, as a pre-eminent object of social circulation on screens, provides a point of entry into the problematization of the subject's relationship with the technological screen and interface. Taking as my point of departure an image which depicts the act of clicking a selfie, I examine practices at the edge of interfaces such as ‘liking' and ‘scrolling'. I use the terms ‘technological screen' and ‘interface' in a broad sense as referring not just to smartphones, but also to other forms of everyday screens and interfaces, including those which are no longer extant, such as the telegraph key, so as to trace the operation of processes of subjectification in these cases as well. Through a series of anthropological encounters ranging from social situations in the domestic sphere of the home and ordinary social intercourse to larger politicized contexts where questions of nationalism hang in the balance, I examine the conditions that make forceful interruptions of the processes of subjectification possible

Design and Effect of Continuous Wearable Tactile Displays

Our sense of touch is one of our core senses and while not as information rich as sight and hearing, it tethers us to reality. Our skin is the largest sensory organ in our body and we rely on it so much that we don\u27t think about it most of the time. Tactile displays - with the exception of actuators for notifications on smartphones and smartwatches - are currently understudied and underused. Currently tactile cues are mostly used in smartphones and smartwatches to notify the user of an incoming call or text message. Specifically continuous displays - displays that do not just send one notification but stay active for an extended period of time and continuously communicate information - are rarely studied. This thesis aims at exploring the utilization of our vibration perception to create continuous tactile displays. Transmitting a continuous stream of tactile information to a user in a wearable format can help elevate tactile displays from being mostly used for notifications to becoming more like additional senses enabling us to perceive our environment in new ways. This work provides a serious step forward in design, effect and use of continuous tactile displays and their use in human-computer interaction. The main contributions include: Exploration of Continuous Wearable Tactile Interfaces This thesis explores continuous tactile displays in different contexts and with different types of tactile information systems. The use-cases were explored in various domains for tactile displays - Sports, Gaming and Business applications. The different types of continuous tactile displays feature one- or multidimensional tactile patterns, temporal patterns and discrete tactile patterns. Automatic Generation of Personalized Vibration Patterns In this thesis a novel approach of designing vibrotactile patterns without expert knowledge by leveraging evolutionary algorithms to create personalized vibration patterns - is described. This thesis presents the design of an evolutionary algorithm with a human centered design generating abstract vibration patterns. The evolutionary algorithm was tested in a user study which offered evidence that interactive generation of abstract vibration patterns is possible and generates diverse sets of vibration patterns that can be recognized with high accuracy. Passive Haptic Learning for Vibration Patterns Previous studies in passive haptic learning have shown surprisingly strong results for learning Morse Code. If these findings could be confirmed and generalized, it would mean that learning a new tactile alphabet could be made easier and learned in passing. Therefore this claim was investigated in this thesis and needed to be corrected and contextualized. A user study was conducted to study the effects of the interaction design and distraction tasks on the capability to learn stimulus-stimulus-associations with Passive Haptic Learning. This thesis presents evidence that Passive Haptic Learning of vibration patterns induces only a marginal learning effect and is not a feasible and efficient way to learn vibration patterns that include more than two vibrations. Influence of Reference Frames for Spatial Tactile Stimuli Designing wearable tactile stimuli that contain spatial information can be a challenge due to the natural body movement of the wearer. An important consideration therefore is what reference frame to use for spatial cues. This thesis investigated allocentric versus egocentric reference frames on the wrist and compared them for induced cognitive load, reaction time and accuracy in a user study. This thesis presents evidence that using an allocentric reference frame drastically lowers cognitive load and slightly lowers reaction time while keeping the same accuracy as an egocentric reference frame, making a strong case for the utilization of allocentric reference frames in tactile bracelets with several tactile actuators