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

The Participatory Development Toolkit

Christopher Kelty opens up a toolkit from the 1990s to explore the prehistory of apps, platforms, and algorithms

Preface: The Total Archive

Archives make the future. Editors Boris Jardine and Christopher Kelty explore how archives govern us

Preface: Hacks, Leaks, and Breaches

Gabriella Coleman and Christopher Kelty guide readers through Limn Number 8 on Hacks, Leaks, and Breaches

Prototyping prototyping

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Introduction: Ebola’s Ecologies

Andrew Lakoff, Stephen J. Collier and Christopher Kelty ask what the 2014 Ebola outbreak tells us about the history of pandemic preparedness and the blindspots of global health security today

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

Cross-sectional and longitudinal associations between treatment for herpes virus infection and the dispensing of antidementia medicines: An analysis of the Australian pharmaceutical benefits scheme database

Background: Evidence from previous observational studies suggest that infection by herpes simplex virus (HSV) and varicella zoster virus (VZV) increase the risk of dementia. Objective :To investigate if older adults exposed to HSV treatment have lower risk of dementia than the rest of the population. Methods: We used the 10% Australian Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) database from 2013 to 2022 to ascertain the cross-sectional, time-series and longitudinal association between exposure to HSV treatment and the dispensing of antidementia medicines. Participants were men and women aged 60 years or older. We used Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical (ATC) codes to identify medicines dispensed for the treatment of HSV and dementia. Results: During the year 2022 6,868 (1.2%) of 559,561 of participants aged 60 years or over were dispensed antidementia agent. The odds ratio (OR) of being dispensed an antidementia agent among individuals dispensed treatment for HSV was 0.73 (99% CI = 0.56–0.95). Multilevel logistic regression for the 2013–2022 period for those dispensed HSV treatment was 0.87 (99% CI = 0.75–1.00). Split-time span series from 2013 was associated with hazard ratio of 0.98 (99% CI = 0.89–1.07) for individuals dispensed relative to those not dispensed HSV treatment. All analyses were adjusted for age, sex, and the dispensing of medicines for the treatment of diabetes, hyperlipidemia, hypertension, and ischemic heart disease. Conclusions: The dispensing of antiviral medicines for the treatment of HSV and VZV is consistently, but not conclusively, associated with decreased dispensing of antidementia medicines. This suggests that treatment of HSV and VZV infections may contribute to reduce the risk of dementia

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