Conceiving Open Systems

This Article tells the story of the contest over the meaning of open systems from 1980 to 1993, a contest to create a simultaneously moral and technical infrastructure within the computer industry

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From Open Content Repositories to Open Sensemaking Communities

The Open Content movement is concerned with enabling students and educators to access material, in order to then learn from it, and reuse it either in one’s studies or one’s own courses. The core efforts to date has focused on enabling access, e.g. building the organizational/political will to release and license content, and in developing open infrastructures for educators to then publish and reassemble it. The key challenge in the next phase of the open content movement is to improve the support for prospective students to engage with and learn from the material, and with each other though peer learning support, in the absence of formally imposed study timetables and assessment deadlines. This paper reports on tools for e-learning and collaborative sensemaking developed at the UK Open University which are now being considered as candidates for open content learning support

Competition and extinction explain the evolution of diversity in American automobiles

One of the most remarkable aspects of our species is that while we show surprisingly little genetic diversity, we demonstrate astonishing amounts of cultural diversity. Perhaps most impressive is the diversity of our technologies, broadly defined as all the physical objects we produce and the skills we use to produce them. Despite considerable focus on the evolution of technology by social scientists and philosophers, there have been few attempts to systematically quantify technological diversity and therefore the dynamics of technological change remain poorly understood. Here we show a novel Bayesian model for examining technological diversification adopted from paleontological analysis of occurrence data. We use this framework to estimate the tempo of diversification in American car and truck models produced between 1896 and 2014 and to test the relative importance of competition and extrinsic factors in shaping changes in macroevolutionary rates. Our results identify a four-fold decrease in the origination and extinction rates of car models and a negative net diversification rate over the last thirty years. We also demonstrate that competition played a more significant role in car model diversification than either changes in oil prices or gross domestic product. Together our analyses provide a set of tools that can enhance current research on technological and cultural evolution by providing a flexible and quantitative framework for exploring the dynamics of diversification

Anthropology of/in Circulation: The Future of Open Access and Scholarly Societies

In a conversation format, seven anthropologists with extensive expertise in new digital technologies, intellectual property, and journal publishing discuss issues related to open access, the anthropology of information circulation, and the future of scholarly societies. Among the topics discussed are current anthropological research on open source and open access; the effects of open access on traditional anthropological topics; the creation of community archives and new networking tools; potentially transformative uses of field notes and materials in new digital ecologies; the American Anthropological Association’s recent history with these issues, from the development of AnthroSource to its new publishing arrangement with Wiley-Blackwell; and the political economies of knowledge circulation more generally

Vibration durability testing of Nickel Cobalt Aluminum Oxide (NCA) lithium-ion 18650 battery cells

This paper outlines a study undertaken to determine if the electrical performance of Nickel Cobalt Aluminum Oxide (NCA) 3.1 Ah 18650 battery cells can be degraded by road induced vibration typical of an electric vehicle (EV) application. This study investigates if a particular cell orientation within the battery assembly can result in different levels of cell degradation. The 18650 cells were evaluated in accordance with Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) J2380 standard. This vibration test is synthesized to represent 100,000 miles of North American customer operation at the 90th percentile. This study identified that both the electrical performance and the mechanical properties of the NCA lithium-ion cells were relatively unaffected when exposed to vibration energy that is commensurate with a typical vehicle life. Minor changes observed in the cell’s electrical characteristics were deemed not to be statistically significant and more likely attributable to laboratory conditions during cell testing and storage. The same conclusion was found, irrespective of cell orientation during the test

Robot life: simulation and participation in the study of evolution and social behavior.

This paper explores the case of using robots to simulate evolution, in particular the case of Hamilton's Law. The uses of robots raises several questions that this paper seeks to address. The first concerns the role of the robots in biological research: do they simulate something (life, evolution, sociality) or do they participate in something? The second question concerns the physicality of the robots: what difference does embodiment make to the role of the robot in these experiments. Thirdly, how do life, embodiment and social behavior relate in contemporary biology and why is it possible for robots to illuminate this relation? These questions are provoked by a strange similarity that has not been noted before: between the problem of simulation in philosophy of science, and Deleuze's reading of Plato on the relationship of ideas, copies and simulacra

Faqs about open access: The political economy of publishing in anthropology and beyond

Editores: Ainhoa Montoya, Marta Pérez, Grégory Dallemagne & Víctor del ArcoTraducido por Ainhoa Montoya, Marta Pérez, Grégory Dallemagne, Víctor del Arco y Manuela Burns.Pre-publicación del Taller Preguntas frecuentes sobre open access: la economía política en torno a las publicaciones en antropología y en otras ciencias sociales (Open Access in Antrophology and beyond), celebrado en Madrid los días 16 y 17 de octubre de 2014. Organizado por el Grupo de Investigación en Antropología de Orientación Pública (GIAOP) de la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid