“Chinese Elm 1030595 . . . (or can I call you Dale??)”: Communication and representation in mediated encounters with nonhuman others

The last couple of years have seen an uptick of different technological forms presented as mediators of human/nonhuman interaction, and these developments have been accompanied by an increase in scholarly interest. Here, we engage with the human urge to enter into communicative exchanges that implicate “other” entities, but we also wonder what is at stake, analytically and ethically, in these mediated communicative acts. Following an approach informed by work in the environmental humanities as well as science and technology studies and media studies, we explore three sites of (ostensible) encounters between humans and nonhuman others—plants and animals—and argue that while certain technological mediations can facilitate human “noticing” by rendering nonhuman others sense-able, it does not follow that such interventions open up a space where participants can meaningfully respond to each other

Bottom-up Infrastructures: Aligning Politics and Technology in building a Wireless Community Network

Contemporary innovation in infrastructures is increasingly characterized by a close relationship between experts and lay people. This phenomenon has attracted the attention from a wide range of disciplines, including computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), science and technology studies (S&TS), organization studies and participatory design (PD). Connecting to this broad area of research, the article presents a qualitative case study concerning the building and maintenance of a grassroots, bottom-up information infrastructure in Italy, defined as wireless community network (WCN). Methodologically, the research is based on qualitative interviews with participants to the WCN, ethnographic observations and document analysis. The aim of the article is to understand the alignment between the technical work implied in building this bottom-up infrastructure and the political and cultural frameworks that move people to participate to this project. Relying on the field of science & technology studies, and in particular on the notions of ‘inverse infrastructure’ and ‘research in the wild’, we disclose the WCN’s peculiar innovation trajectory, localized outside conventional spaces of research and development. Overall, the presentation of the qualitative and ethnographic data allows to point out a more general reflection on bottom-up infrastructures and to enrich the academic debate concerning bottom-up infrastructuring work and other similar typologies of collaborative design projects in the domain of infrastructures

Discrete dinuclear cyano-bridged complexes

The cyano-bridged complexes [L14CoIIINCFeII(CN)5]-, [L14CoIIINCFeIII(CN)5], [L15CoIIINCFeII(CN)5]-, and [L15CoIIINCFeIII(CN)5] (L14 = 6-methyl-1,4,8,11-tetraazacyclotetradecan-6- amine, L15 = 10-methyl-1,4,8,12-tetraazacyclopentadecan-10-amine) are prepared and characterized both structurally and spectroscopically. In each complex, the pendant amine is trans to the bridging CN ligand, as determined by spectroscopy and X-ray crystallography: Na(trans-[L14CoIIINCFeII(CN)5]).8H2O, monoclinic space group P2(1)/c, a = 15.58(1) A, b = 19.797(4) A, c = 19.830(6) A, beta = 91.62(4) degrees, Z = 8; trans-[L14CoIIINCFeIII(CN)5].4H2O, monoclinic space group P2(1)/m, a = 9.9690(9) A, b = 13.316(1) A, c = 10.1180(8) A, beta = 90.720(6) degrees, Z = 2; [L15CoIIINCFeIII(CN)5].4H2O, triclinic space group P1, a = 9.454(1) A, b = 9.778(1) A, c = 9.865(2) A, alpha = 60.37(1) degrees, beta = 62.60(1) degrees, gamma = 65.82(1) degrees, Z = 1. A precursor to the 14-membered macrocyclic complexes is prepared for the first time, and its crystal structure is also reported: trans-I [CoL14Cl](ClO4)2, orthorhombic space group Pbca, a = 11.833(3) A, b = 13.363(2) A, c = 26.015(2) A, Z = 8. These compounds form part of a novel series of discrete CN-bridged dinuclear compounds. The mixed-valent CoIII-FeII compounds exhibit metal-to-metal charge-transfer (MMCT) transitions in the region 510-530 nm