The Impact of Science on Society

Four speeches delivered as part of a public lecture series to assess the impact of science on society are presented. The computerization of society, space exploration and habitation, the mechanisms of technological change, and cultural responses are addressed

Comparative philology, French music, and the composition of Indo-Europeanism from Fétis to Messiaen.

This thesis argues that the disciplines of comparative philology and linguistics exerted significant force on the priorities and techniques of musicologists and composers in fin-de-siècle France, and examines how ideologies of Indo-Europeanism (or aryanism), concomitant with comparative philology, generated efforts to ‘sound out’ Indo-Europeanism in music. Using a relational approach, dense interdisciplinary networks of philologists/linguists, musicologists, and composers are reconstructed to demonstrate how musicological appropriations of linguistic research reverberated in musical composition right through the 1950s. These contexts reveal how wide-ranging repertories emerged from ethnic-nationalist projects of reclaiming Indo-European ‘patrimony’. The thesis is in two Parts. Part I, ‘Philologie comparée, musicologie, and Indo-European hypotheses’, is organised around four overlapping intellectual networks comprising comparative philologists and musicologists. Francophone musicologists’ efforts to model their discipline on that of comparative philology are surveyed. Scholars discussed include Fétis, Gevaert, Bourgault-Ducoudray, Burnouf, Meillet, Aubry, Emmanuel, and Grosset. Arguments concerning the place of music between concepts of ‘language’ and ‘race’ are retraced, with special attention paid to musicologists’ efforts to pinpoint quasi-morphological ‘Indo-European’ musical structures – in particular, ‘modes’ and ‘metres’ – construed as ‘essential’ and ‘ancestral’. Part II, ‘Composing with philology: performances of authenticity and innovation’, describes how the intellectual project elaborated in Part I infiltrated compositional practices. Close musical and paratextual readings show how composers legitimated experimentalism through ‘performances’ of philological ‘authenticity’. Over time, musical parameters such as modes and metres are abstracted and assimilated into compositional lexicons. Composers discussed include Bourgault-Ducoudray, Saint-Saëns, Séverac, Roussel, and Emmanuel. This root system flourishes in the music of Olivier Messiaen, whose rhythmic technique is revisited in light of manuscript materials. From his borrowings of early Indian metres (deśītālas) through his hyperformalist ‘Mode de valeurs et d’intensités’, Messiaen’s rhythmic style is radically reinterpreted as a logical extension of francophone musicology’s disciplinary and epistemological inheritance from comparative philology.Gates Cambridge Scholarshi

Tissue oxygenation through combined laser and ultrasound action

The results in vivo investigation biophotonics of laser-induced photodissociation of oxyhemoglobin in cutaneous blood vessels and its role in biomedical processes are presented. It is shown that in order to make the methods of phototherapy as well as laser therapy really efficient one has to control the oxygen concentration in tissue keeping it at the necessary level. Perspectives of combined laser-ultrasound application for improving oxygen diffusion are discussed

Opto-Acoustic Method of Tissue Oxygenation and its Biomedical Application

Novel opto-acoustic method of tissue oxygenation and restoring normal cell metabolism is proposed. The results of in vivo investigation the phenomenon of laser-induced photodissociation of blood oxyhemoglobin and its biomedical applications are presented. Photodissociation of oxyhemoglobin, the main biological function of which is oxygen transportation gives a unique possibility of additional oxygen extraction for restoring normal cell metabolism. Optical method of determination the therapeutic “dose” based on the response of changes in tissue oxygen concentration in dependence on wavelength and intensity of laser radiation has been developed. It is shown that in order to make the methods of phototherapy as well as laser therapy really efficient one has to control the oxygen concentration in tissue keeping it at the necessary level

Does Siri Have a Soul? Exploring Voice Assistants Through Shinto Design Fictions

It can be difficult to critically reflect on technology that has become part of everyday rituals and routines. To combat this, speculative and fictional approaches have previously been used by HCI to decontextualise the familiar and imagine alternatives. In this work we turn to Japanese Shinto narratives as a way to defamiliarise voice assistants, inspired by the similarities between how assistants appear to 'inhabit' objects similarly to kami. Describing an alternate future where assistant presences live inside objects, this approach foregrounds some of the phenomenological quirks that can otherwise easily become lost. Divorced from the reality of daily life, this approach allows us to reevaluate some of the common interactions and design patterns that are common in the virtual assistants of the present.Comment: 11 pages, 2 images. To appear in the Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '20

Human Rights, Civil Rights: Prescribing Disability Discrimination Prevention in Packaging Essential Health Benefits

The promise of health care as a right has all too often proved hollow for people with disabilities. In this article, we argue that the understanding of health care as a human right, as found in the CRPD, fails to provide the theoretical machinery for responding to the pressing challenges of health care costs. These challenges are real and potentially devastating. We develop instead an account of health care as a civil right. What this right requires is dependent on the context and resources of the time, so long as all have meaningful access to the benefits provided. The ACA includes some provisions that may prove antithetical to this nondiscrimination standard

Exploring the Referral and Usage of Science Fiction in HCI Literature

Research on science fiction (sci-fi) in scientific publications has indicated the usage of sci-fi stories, movies or shows to inspire novel Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research. Yet no studies have analysed sci-fi in a top-ranked computer science conference at present. For that reason, we examine the CHI main track for the presence and nature of sci-fi referrals in relationship to HCI research. We search for six sci-fi terms in a dataset of 5812 CHI main proceedings and code the context of 175 sci-fi referrals in 83 papers indexed in the CHI main track. In our results, we categorize these papers into five contemporary HCI research themes wherein sci-fi and HCI interconnect: 1) Theoretical Design Research; 2) New Interactions; 3) Human-Body Modification or Extension; 4) Human-Robot Interaction and Artificial Intelligence; and 5) Visions of Computing and HCI. In conclusion, we discuss results and implications located in the promising arena of sci-fi and HCI research.Comment: v1: 20 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, HCI International 2018 accepted submission v2: 20 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables, added link/doi for Springer proceedin

Home on the Clone

A poem by Isaac Asimov

Mass and Transverse Mass Effects on the Hadron Emitter Size

We investigate the dependence of the longitudinal emitter dimension of identical bosons, produced in the hadronic Z$^0$ decays, on their transverse mass obtained from 2-dimensional Bose-Einstein correlations (BEC) analyses. We show that this dependence is well described by the expression $r_{||}=c\sqrt{\hbar\Delta t}/\sqrt{m_T}$, deduced from the uncertainty relations, setting $\Delta t$ to be a constant of the order of $10^{-24}$ sec. This equation is essentially identical to the one previously applied to the 1-dimensional BEC results for the emitter radius dependence on the boson mass itself. It is further shown that a very similar behaviour exists also for the dependence of the interatomic separation in Bose condensates on their atomic masses when they are at the same very low temperature.Comment: 10 pges, 2 figure

Tissue oxygenation through combined laser and ultrasound action

The results in vivo investigation biophotonics of laser-induced photodissociation of oxyhemoglobin in cutaneous blood vessels and its role in biomedical processes are presented. It is shown that in order to make the methods of phototherapy as well as laser therapy really efficient one has to control the oxygen concentration in tissue keeping it at the necessary level. Perspectives of combined laser-ultrasound application for improving oxygen diffusion are discussed