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

The rhythm of life: the perfect rhythm of morse code

Morse code is a unique exemplar of the inherent complexities of rhythm. Learning Morse code in wartime presented challenges to expedite skill acquisition. This thesis explored the strategies used to teach and learn Morse code in the second World War and investigated the resourceful techniques used by the WRANS in an empirical study. The first study investigated the teaching and learning strategies of wartime telegraphists to learn Morse code. Five WRANS described a series of techniques to learn Morse code, including rote learning and repetition, visualisation and pattern recognition, intoning and mnemonics, and music. Music provided effective training for the fundamental teaching and learning of Morse code by matching the rhythmical properties of Morse code to music. Music equipped Morse code operators with a unique approach to Morse code instruction. Learning Morse code with music was described as a way of making sense of the ‘rhythm’ and ‘shape’ of the Morse code letters and proved an invaluable aid to learning and teaching Morse code. The second study examined the effectiveness of learning Morse code with the aid of music. Novices formed two groups, Control Group (no music aid) and Music Group (with music aid). Results confirmed the effectiveness of music training in three Morse code letters, Q V, and A in two experiments, the first with known Morse code letters (Q V A) and the second with unknown letters. The Music Group accurately identified 90% of known and unknown Morse code letters compared to the Control Group who identified less then 50% of known and unknown Morse code letters. This thesis explored the transferable attributes of rhythm perception in music as a teaching and learning mechanism for Morse code. There is extensive research on the complex learning and retention of Morse code but the studies in this thesis have indicated that the ground-breaking wartime strategy of music and Morse code is a powerful duo. The investigation of learning and teaching strategies of the WRANS showed that musical rhythm influenced the skill acquisition of Morse code and the perceptual test suggests that current work in rhythm perception extends beyond music pedagogy and has further implications for all cognitive function

The rhythm of life: the perfect rhythm of morse code

Morse code is a unique exemplar of the inherent complexities of rhythm. Learning Morse code in wartime presented challenges to expedite skill acquisition. This thesis explored the strategies used to teach and learn Morse code in the second World War and investigated the resourceful techniques used by the WRANS in an empirical study. The first study investigated the teaching and learning strategies of wartime telegraphists to learn Morse code. Five WRANS described a series of techniques to learn Morse code, including rote learning and repetition, visualisation and pattern recognition, intoning and mnemonics, and music. Music provided effective training for the fundamental teaching and learning of Morse code by matching the rhythmical properties of Morse code to music. Music equipped Morse code operators with a unique approach to Morse code instruction. Learning Morse code with music was described as a way of making sense of the ‘rhythm’ and ‘shape’ of the Morse code letters and proved an invaluable aid to learning and teaching Morse code. The second study examined the effectiveness of learning Morse code with the aid of music. Novices formed two groups, Control Group (no music aid) and Music Group (with music aid). Results confirmed the effectiveness of music training in three Morse code letters, Q V, and A in two experiments, the first with known Morse code letters (Q V A) and the second with unknown letters. The Music Group accurately identified 90% of known and unknown Morse code letters compared to the Control Group who identified less then 50% of known and unknown Morse code letters. This thesis explored the transferable attributes of rhythm perception in music as a teaching and learning mechanism for Morse code. There is extensive research on the complex learning and retention of Morse code but the studies in this thesis have indicated that the ground-breaking wartime strategy of music and Morse code is a powerful duo. The investigation of learning and teaching strategies of the WRANS showed that musical rhythm influenced the skill acquisition of Morse code and the perceptual test suggests that current work in rhythm perception extends beyond music pedagogy and has further implications for all cognitive function

A plan to integrate audio-visual aids into a unit on communication in introduction to business.

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

Codes of Modernity: Infrastructures of Language and Chinese Scripts in an Age of Global Information Revolution

This dissertation explores the global history of Chinese script reforms—the effort to phoneticize Chinese language and/or simplify the writing system—from its inception in the 1890s to its demise in the 1980s. These reforms took place at the intersection of industrialization, colonialism, and new information technologies, such as alphabet-based telegraphy and breakthroughs in printing technologies. As these social and technological transformations put unprecedented pressure on knowledge management and the use of mental and clerical labor, many Chinese intellectuals claimed that learning Chinese characters consumed too much time and mental energy. Chinese script reforms, this dissertation argues, were an effort to increase speed in producing, transmitting, and accessing information, and thus meet the demands of the industrializing knowledge economy. The industrializing knowledge economy that this dissertation explores was built on and sustained by a psychological understanding of the human subject as a knowledge machine, and it was part of a global moment in which the optimization of labor in knowledge production was a key concern for all modernizing economies. While Chinese intellectuals were inventing new signs of inscription, American behavioral psychologists, Soviet psycho-economists, and Central Asian and Ottoman technicians were all experimenting with new scripts in order to increase mental efficiency and productivity. This dissertation reveals the intimate connections between the Chinese and non-Chinese script engineering projects that were taking place synchronically across the world. The chapters of this work demonstrate for the first time, for instance, that the simplification of Chinese characters in the 1920s and 1930s was intimately connected to the discipline of behavioral psychology in the US. The first generation of Chinese psychologists employed the American psychologists’ methods to track eye movements, count word-frequencies, and statistically analyze the speed of reading, writing, and memorizing in order to simplify and “rationalize” the Chinese writing system in an effort to discipline and optimize mental labor. Other chapters explore the issue of mental and clerical optimization by finding the origins of the Chinese Latin Alphabet (CLA), the mother of pinyin, in hitherto unknown Eurasian connections. The CLA, the pages of this work shows, was the product of a transnational exchange that involved Ottoman and Transcaucasian typographers as well as Russian engineers and Chinese communists who sought efficiency in knowledge production through inventing new scripts. Situating the Chinese script reforms at this global intersection of psychology, economy, and linguistics, this dissertation examines the global connections and forces that turned the human subject into a knowledge worker who was cognitively managed through education, literacy, propaganda, and other measures of organizing information, all of which had the script at the center. The search for efficiency and productivity—the core values of industrialism—lay at the heart of script reforms in China, but this search was inseparable from linguistic orders and political ambitions. Even if writing, transmitting, and learning a phonetic script could theoretically be easier and more efficient than the Chinese characters, the alphabet opened a veritable Pandora’s Box around the issue of selection: given the complex linguistic landscape in China, which speech was a phonetic script supposed to represent? There were myriad languages spoken throughout the empire and the subsequent nation-state, most of which were mutually incomprehensible. Mandarin as spoken in Beijing was different from that spoken in the south, and “topolects” or regional languages such as Min or Cantonese were to Mandarin what Romanian is to English. As a linguistic life-or-death issue, phonetic scripts stood for the infrastructural possibilities and limitations in the representation of speeches. Some scripts, such as Lao Naixuan’s phonetic script composed of more than a hundred signs, were capable of representing multiple Mandarin and non-Mandarin speeches; whereas others, such as Phonetic Symbols that only has thirty-seven syllabic signs, represented only one speech, i.e., Mandarin. Using Mandarin-oriented scripts to transcribe non-Mandarin speeches was like writing English with fifteen letters, hence the acrimonious disputes that fill the pages of this dissertation. Succinctly put, it was at the level of script invention that Chinese and non-Chinese actors engineered different infrastructures not only for laboring minds but also for the social world of Chinese languages. The history of information technologies and knowledge economy in China was thus inseparable from the world of speech and language, as each script offered a new potential to reassemble the written matter and the speaking mind in a different way. “Codes of Modernity” thus conceptualizes the script itself as an infrastructural medium. A script was not merely a passive carrier of information, but an existential artifact. Building on an expanding literature on infrastructures, it endorses the observation that infrastructures, technologies, and the social world around them work in a recursive loop. An infrastructure is not just the physical object that permits the flow of information, goods, ideas, and people, but a sociotechnical product that enables the experience of culture, while imposing constrains on it at the same time. Like electricity grids, transportation systems, and sewage canals, the experience of scripts as infrastructures is the experience of thought worlds. After a long tradition of structuralism and poststructuralism that sought to understand the world through the semiotic prism of language, “Codes of Modernity” argues that it is time for an infrastructuralism that excavates the indispensable media that enable the production of language and thought

NBS monograph

From Introduction: "This report is the first of a series intended to provide a selective overview of research and development efforts and requirements in the somewhat overlapping fields of the computer and information sciences and technologies. The projected series of reports will attempt to outline the probable range of R & D activities in the computer and information sciences and technologies through selective reviews of the literature and to develop a reasonable consensus with respect to the opinions of workers in these and potentially related fields as to areas of continuing R & D concern for research program planning or review in these areas.

The Imagined Sounds of Outer Space

This essay explores how the idea of the ‘sounds of space’ has been articulated in popular culture since the late nineteenth century through the early years of the Space Age. The primary focus is on sound and music in science-fiction films from Europe, the former Soviet Union, and the United States, and the four main topic areas are the sounds of signals from space, the sounds of outer-space technology, the sounds of ‘heavenly bodies,’ and the sounds/music associated with space travel. Framing this central portion of the essay, however, is a discussion of ‘space music’ by various composers for whom writing for the cinema was perhaps one of the furthest things from their minds. The essay argues that, in terms of depictions of weightlessness, perhaps certain works by composers Arnold Schoenberg and Edgard Varèse, and by the rock groups Popol Vuh and Tangerine Dream, have something in common with the music of sci-fi cinema

Design of a Wearable Ultrasound System

Ultrasound imaging is a safe and powerful tool for providing detailed still and moving images of the human body. Most of today’s ultrasound systems are housed on a movable cart and designed for use within a clinical setting, such as in a hospital or doctor’s office. This configuration hinders its use in locations lacking controlled environments and stable power sources. Example locations include ambulances, disaster sights, war zones and rural medicine. A wearable ultrasound system, in the form of a vest worn by a sonographer, has been developed as a complete solution for performing untethered ultrasound examinations. The heart of the system is an enclosure containing an embedded computer running the Windows XP operating system, and a custom power supply. The power supply integrates a battery charger, a switching regulator, two linear regulators, a variable speed fan controller and a microcontroller providing an interface for monitoring and control to the embedded computer. Operation of the system is generally accomplished through the use of voice commands, but it may also be operated using a hand-held mouse. It is capable of operating for a full day, using two batteries contained in the vest. In addition, the system has the capability to wirelessly share live images with remote viewers in real-time, while also permitting full duplex voice communication. An integrated web-server also provides for the wireless retrieval of stored images, image loops and other information using a web-browser

Design of a Wearable Ultrasound System

Ultrasound imaging is a safe and powerful tool for providing detailed still and moving images of the human body. Most of today’s ultrasound systems are housed on a movable cart and designed for use within a clinical setting, such as in a hospital or doctor’s office. This configuration hinders its use in locations lacking controlled environments and stable power sources. Example locations include ambulances, disaster sights, war zones and rural medicine. A wearable ultrasound system, in the form of a vest worn by a sonographer, has been developed as a complete solution for performing untethered ultrasound examinations. The heart of the system is an enclosure containing an embedded computer running the Windows XP operating system, and a custom power supply. The power supply integrates a battery charger, a switching regulator, two linear regulators, a variable speed fan controller and a microcontroller providing an interface for monitoring and control to the embedded computer. Operation of the system is generally accomplished through the use of voice commands, but it may also be operated using a hand-held mouse. It is capable of operating for a full day, using two batteries contained in the vest. In addition, the system has the capability to wirelessly share live images with remote viewers in real-time, while also permitting full duplex voice communication. An integrated web-server also provides for the wireless retrieval of stored images, image loops and other information using a web-browser