Acoustic power measurements of oscillating flames

The acoustic power of an oscillating flame is measured. A turbulent premixed propane/air flame is situated near a pressure antinode of a standing wave in a laboratory combustion chamber. This standing wave is generated by a piston. The fluctuating heat release of the flame will supply acoustic power to the standing wave as postulated by Rayleigh. This flame acoustic power is obtained by setting up a power balance of the whole combustion chamber.\ud \ud Experiments proved that it is possible to measure quantitatively the acoustic power and the frequency change as a function of relevant parameters. This frequency change is a second phenomenon described by Rayleigh. The acoustic power of the flame as a function of the amplitude of the fluctuating component of the mixture flow velocity at different frequencies can be measured.\ud \ud Measurement techniques are described and results for frequencies ranging from 3 to 120 Hz are given

Garuda 5 (khyung lnga): Ecologies of Potency and the Poison-Medicine Spectrum of Sowa Rigpa’s Renowned ‘Black Aconite’ Formula

This article focuses on ethnographic work conducted at the Men-Tsee-Khang (Dharamsala, India) on Garuda 5 (khyung lnga), a commonly prescribed Tibetan medical formula. This medicine’s efficacy as a painkiller and activity against infection and inflammation is largely due to a particularly powerful plant, known as ‘virulent poison’ (btsan dug) as well as ‘the great medicine’ (sman chen), and identified as a subset of Aconitum species. Its effects, however, are potentially dangerous or even deadly. How can these poisonous plants be used in medicine and, conversely, when does a medicine become a poison? How can ostensibly the same substance be both harmful and helpful? The explanation requires a more nuanced picture than mere dose dependency. Attending to the broader ‘ecologies of potency’ in which these substances are locally enmeshed, in line with Sienna Craig’s Efficacy and the Social Ecologies of Tibetan Medicine (2012), provides fertile ground to better understand the effects of Garuda 5 and how potency is developed and directed in practice. I aim to unpack the spectrum between sman (medicine) and dug (poison) in Sowa Rigpa by elucidating some of the multiple dimensions which determine the activity of Garuda 5 as it is formulated and prescribed in India. I thus embrace the full spectrum of potency— the ‘good’ and the ‘bad,’ the ‘wanted’ and the ‘unwanted’—without presuming the universal validity of biomedical notions of toxicity and side effects

Refusing the Burden of Computation: Edge Computing and Sustainable ICT

This paper asks what we can learn from edge computing about the commitment of Big Tech to diminish its ecological footprint. The text starts with the COVID-19 pandemic being framed as opportunity for more sustainability and unpacks edge computing as one of the elements proposed as a solution, next to working from home. It interrogates the discourse behind these solutions, one of technological fixes that allow ‘business as usual’ to continue, undisturbed by government regulations, outsourcing the burden of environmental responsibility to citizens. The paper draws parallels between edge computing, Big Tech’s approach to sustainability and the history of the Sustainable ICT discourse and proposes that to truly diminish ICT’s footprint, a refusal of the burden of computation and digital enclosure (vendor lock-in) is needed, by collectively building and financing network services

Introduction | Approaching Potent Substances in Medicine and Ritual across Asia

Introduction to themed research articles on Approaching Potent Substances in Medicine and Ritual across Asia

A Paper Archive: Documenting the Live Performance Capitalist Magic

This paper consists of two interrelated layers: (1) it is the documentation of a live performance called Capitalist Magic, and (2) through the process of documentation it has become a new artifact; a paper using montage writing as experimental method to give insight into how new technologies are narrated by those who have a financial stake in their broad adoption, and why there is such an urgent need for counter-narratives. The performance Capitalist Magic is a rite performing a series of magical transformations. Asteroid mining turns into a fun trip to Mars, fear of death into certain immortality, the making redundant of a large part of the work force through Machine Learning enabled automation shape shifts into a post-scarcity future of leisure in which humans are the purring kittens on the warm laps of almighty benevolent AIs. The earth and all its inhabitants morph into an eternal flow of information, safely stored on server farms quietly vanishing into the white luminescence of the cloud. During the performance the author read the text without informing the audience that the speech was a montage of quotes. Montage writing is used as an experimental method to map the different ways in which a new technology is narrated, using publicly available, online materials such as recorded talks and interviews, to generate a short story. The selection of quotes focuses on Silicon Valley’s main tech evangelists trying to build up public trust towards industrial automation and generate enthusiasm in third parties to make use of the infrastructures their companies are rolling out —and will have a monopoly position over if they become a standard. The text focusses on the time between 2010 and 2018, when the use of AI within tech companies surged. The endnotes give information about the financial stakes of the person quoted, including a link to the source material, situating the montage in relation to the performative utterances it borrows from. The resulting montage is a mapping of narratives which were spun to aid in the broad adoption of a new technology. It shows the transformation of something hard to accept —the automation of human labour and a growing consumption of scarce resources— into something that could save humanity from the problems it faces. It shows how the future of technology is shaped by an elite and uniform group of people who promote a type of transhumanism that denies human and planetary limits, with devastating environmental effects. This paper demonstrates the urgent need for counter-narratives, shaped and shared by a diversity of communities, in order to participatively design technologies for sustainable futures. Documenting and archiving a live performance which critically examines the workings of tech evangelism and its negative impact on labour as well as the environment, needs to be critical of its own impact. It may seem trivial, but leaner ways of disseminating information need to be (re)applied across the board, so too in archiving. For this reason, Capitalist Magic is documented in the form of a paper

Integrating Naming and Addressing of Persistent data in Programming Language and Operating System Contexts

There exist a number of desirable transparencies in distributed computing, viz., name transparency: having a uniform way of naming entities in the system, regardless of their type or physical make up; location transparency: having a uniform way of addressing entities, regardless of their physical location; representation transparency: having a uniform way of representing data, which simplifies sharing data between applications written in different highlevel languages and running on different hardware architectures (interoperability) and finally invocation transparency: having a uniform way of invoking operations on entities. The advent of persistency in programming language contexts has created a need for the integration of these four important concepts, viz., naming, addressing, representation and manipulation of data in programming language and operating system contexts. This paper attempts to address the first three transparencies, postponing the fourth to a later paper. First, we make up a list of things that are needed to construct a persistent programming environment and relate this list to existing persistent object models, revealing their inadequacies. We then describe a new model which merges programming language and operating system naming contexts into a global name space which, while enforcing uniformity through the use of globally unique names, still allows the application of personal nicknames. Furthermore, we explain how persistent data is stored and retrieved using a client/server model of interaction, and how it could be acted upon correctly, through the concept of typed data. We conclude by checking how well our model scores on the wish list, listing the current status and future directions for research