Futures in the making: Practices to anticipate 'ubiquitous computing'

Kinsley, S. 2012, The definitive, peer-reviewed and edited version of this article is published in Environment and Planning A, 2012, Vol. 44, Issue 7, pp. 1554 – 1569 doi:10.1068/a45168. This a post-print, author-produced version of an article accepted for publication in Environment and Planning A. Copyright © 2012 PionThis paper addresses the discourse for a proactive thinking of futurity, intimately concerned with technology, which comes to an influential fruition in the discussion and representation of ‘ubiquitous computing’. The imagination, proposal, or playing out of ubiquitous computing environments are bound up with particular ways of constructing futurity. This paper charts the techniques used in ubiquitous computing development to negotiate that futurity. In so doing, it engages with recent geographical debates around anticipation and futurity. The discussion accordingly proceeds in four parts. First, the spatial imagination engendered by the development of ubiquitous computing is explored. Second, particular techniques in ubiquitous computing research and development for anticipating future technology use, and their limits, are discussed through empirical findings. Third, anticipatory knowledge is explored as the basis for stable means of future orientation, which both generates and derives from the techniques for anticipating futures. Fourth, the importance of studying future orientation is situated in relation to the somewhat contradictory nature of anticipatory knowledges of ubicomp and related forms of spatial imagination

Anticipating ubiquitous computing: Logics to forecast technological futures

Copyright © 2011 Elsevier. NOTICE: This is the author’s version of a work accepted for publication by Elsevier. Changes resulting from the publishing process, including peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting and other quality control mechanisms, may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Geoforum, 2011, Vol. 42, Issue 2, pp. 231 – 240 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2010.12.005Visions of the future predict spaces apparently teaming with ever more novel and pervasive technologies. Significant amongst such forecasts is the notion of ‘ubiquitous computing’ (ubicomp), understood as an affordance or capacity tied (in)to people, places and things. This article stages an encounter between the futurity of ubicomp and recent debates in geography around anticipation. So, first, the future orientation in ubicomp research and development (R&D) is investigated as a mode of anticipation. ‘Knowledges’, and ‘logics’ of anticipation are subsequently, and second, discussed as the conceptual apparatus that constructs and perpetuates the ‘proximate future’ of ubicomp. This analysis connects recent discussion about ‘anticipation’ in social sciences research with the methods of ubicomp research, which fits with an emergent agenda around futurity in human geography. Third, the conceptual articulation of ‘anticipatory logic’ is applied to the analysis of empirical investigations of ubicomp R&D to identify the specific logics of anticipation at play. This article accordingly examines the logics of anticipation that both support and destabilise the certainty with which the future is imagined within ubicomp. In conclusion, the multiple ways of anticipating a future world and the ways in which they discipline understandings of futurity are framed as a politics of anticipation

Memory programmes: the industrial retention of collective life

This is a postprint of an article published in Cultural Geographies © 2015 copyright SAGE Publications. Cultural Geographies is available online at: http://cgj.sagepub.com/This article argues that in software, we have created quasi-autonomous systems of memory that influence how we think about and experience life as such. The role of mediated memory in collective life is addressed as a geographical concern through the lens of ‘programmes’. Programming can mean ordering, and thus making discrete, and scheduling, making actions routine. This article addresses how programming mediates the experience of memory via networked technologies. Materially recording knowledge, even as electronic data, renders thought mentally and spatially discrete and demands systems to order it. Recorded knowledge also enables the ordering of spatiotemporal experience both as forms of history, thus the sharing of culture, and as the means of imagining futures. We increasingly retain information about ourselves and others using digital media. We volunteer further information recorded by electronic service providers, search engines and social media. Many aspects of our collective lives are now gathered in cities (via closed-circuit television, cellphone networks and so on) and retained in databases, constituting a growing system of memory of parts of life otherwise forgotten or unthought. Using examples, this article argues that in software, we have created industrialised systems of memory that influence how we think about living together

Synthesis, Characterization and Cell Viability of Novel Tripodal Amines

Cancer, over the years, has become a much more prevalent focus for the scientific community. Organizations and laboratories all over the world have spent countless hours searching for a cure, trying to learn more about what makes cancer so powerful and what is the best way to stop its growth. Iron-chelation drugs were already on the market, and it was shown that they did have the ability to act as both iron-chelators and anticancer drugs. Most of these iron-chelating drugs are not as effective at killing cancer cells as the medical field desires. Novel iron-chelating tris-indolyl derivatives, GSO2, GSO4 and GSO6, were synthesized and tested for their potential anti-cancer properties. These compounds were characterized using both melting points and NMR. Apoptosis was the chosen method for cell death of the PC3 cells. The compounds, GSO2 and GSO4 did show promising results when tested on human prostate cancer cell lines. The success of these compounds does sanction further research into apoptosis of other human cancer cell lines

Representing 'things to come': Feeling the visions of future technologies

Kinsley, S. 2010, The definitive, peer-reviewed and edited version of this article is published in Environment and Planning A, 2010, Vol. 42, Issue 11, pp. 2771 – 2790 doi:10.1068/a42371. This a post-print, author-produced version of an article accepted for publication in Environment and Planning A. Copyright © 2010 PionVisions of the future pervade the development of computing technologies. This paper addresses the production of embodied anticipation inherent to video representations of technological futures. The focus of inquiry is videos produced by HP Labs and Microsoft to illustrate future worlds of technological experience. The principal concern is that these videos, as visual content and artefacts, are performative in their evocation of bodily attunement to prospective technology use. In the first section I analyse the visually oriented logics that situate the videos. In the second section I investigate the evocation of prospective interaction with technologies by drawing upon and developing conceptualisations of affect and the technological unconscious. I argue there is a politics of anticipation of technical futures, understood as the multiple ways in which technological futurity is encoded and, in particular, the relation this has to embodied understandings of the world

Service-Learning: An Education Strategy for Preventing School Violence

Recent headlines provide ample testimony of dramatic, heart-stopping incidents of youth violence - at every socioeconomic level, in every age group, and across rural, suburban and urban areas. What were once seen as isolated outbursts have multiplied in such a way that they no longer can be thought of as random incidents. Many factors underlie violent behavior in schools. Easy access to guns, violent movies and video games, poor and even destructive parenting, social upheaval in schools, minority status and, not least, violence in the home arc all potential enablers of violent behavior on the part of students. But these are only the external, publicly discussed causes