Posthumous personhood and the affordances of digital media

© 2015 Taylor & Francis. This article identifies and outlines some of the more prominent ways that digital media can extend one’s personhood following death. We consider three examples: when the digital persona of the deceased continues to interact with the living through a human surrogate; the emergence of autonomous and semi-autonomous software enabling the dead to use social media to intervene in current events; and finally the operation of algorithmic presence services like Eterni.me, where artificial intelligence creates a re-enlivened form of the deceased. Situating these examples in relation to sociological, anthropological and cultural literature foundational to ideas of distributed personhood and posthumous symbolic immortality, we suggest that digital codes and computational texts stand as key sites for contemporary forms of ‘distributed personhood’, including posthumous personhood. We then extend this body of literature by examining how the discursive politics of social media contributes to a social and commercial context, which supports ongoing interactions with the dead online. Through this process, we suggest that the persona of the dead, which remains after bodily death, can continue to maintain meaningful posthumous relationships with the living, presenting a new perspective on how we interact with the dead through digital media

Selfies at funerals: Mourning and presencing on social media platforms

In late 2013, the journalist and social commentator Jason Feifer created an Internet sensation when his Tumblr blog Selfies at Funerals went viral (Feifer, 2013a). On October 29, Feifer posted 20 images selected from Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, the result of social media curiosity and a search of the terms #selfie and #funeral on these platforms. The images all featured young people turning their cellphone cameras on themselves during one of lifes most solemn moments (Clark-Flory, 2013, para. 1). Condemnation of these photographs quickly flooded online discussions and mass media outlets, and the debate was typical of wider discourses around the selfie at the time (as noted in the introduction to this issue). However, the funeral selfie was taken as one of the most debased forms, alongside other so-called inappropriate selfies documented by Feifer, such as selfies at serious places and selfies with homeless people. For many public commentators these images typified the superficial nature of young digital media users and epitomized their vanity, conceit, and lack of respect (Jolivet, 2013; Moss, 2013; Wells, 2013). Others suggested that social media had emptied death of meaning, solemnity, and gravitaswith one prominent online publication running the doomsday banner headline Funeral Selfies Are The Latest Evidence Apocalypse Cant Come Soon Enough (The Huffington Post, 2013)

Vat photopolymerization of cemented carbide specimen

Numerous studies show that vat photopolymerization enables near-net-shape printing of ceramics and plastics with complex geometries. In this study, vat photopolymerization was investigated for cemented carbide specimens. Custom-developed photosensitive WC-12 Co (wt%) slurries were used for printing green bodies. The samples were examined for defects using quantitative microstructure analysis. A thermogravimetric analysis was performed to develop a debinding program for the green bodies. After sintering, the microstructure and surface roughness were evaluated. As mechanical parameters, Vickers hardness and Palmqvist fracture toughness were considered. A linear shrinkage of 26–27% was determined. The remaining porosity fraction was 9.0%. No free graphite formation, and almost no η-phase formation occurred. WC grain growth was observed. 76% of the WC grains measured were in the suitable size range for metal cutting tool applications. A hardness of 1157 HV10 and a Palmqvist fracture toughness of 12 MPa $\sqrt{m}$ was achieved. The achieved microstructure exhibits a high porosity fraction and local cracks. As a result, vat photopolymerization can become an alternative forming method for cemented carbide components if the amount of residual porosity and defects can be reduced

Ca2+-binding protein 2 inhibits Ca2+-channel inactivation in mouse inner hair cells

Ca2+ channels mediate excitation-secretion coupling and show little inactivation at sensory ribbon synapses, enabling reliable synaptic information transfer during sustained stimulation. Studies of Ca2+-channel complexes in HEK293 cells indicated that Ca2+-binding proteins (CaBPs) antagonize their calmodulin-dependent inactivation. Although human mutations affecting CABP2 were shown to cause hearing impairment, the role of CaBP2 in auditory function and the precise disease mechanism remained enigmatic. Here, we disrupted CaBP2 in mice and showed that CaBP2 is required for sound encoding at inner hair cell synapses, likely by suppressing Ca2+-channel inactivation. We propose that the number of activatable Ca2+ channels at the active zone is reduced when CaBP2 is lacking, as is likely the case with the newly described human CABP2 mutation

Record Drilling Depth Struck in Greenland

On July 1, 1993, after 5 years of drilling, the Greenland Ice Sheet Project (GISP2) penetrated several meters of silty ice and reached bedrock at a depth of 3053.4 m. It then penetrated 1.5 m into the bedrock, producing the deepest ice core ever recovered (Figure 1). In July 1992, a nearby European ice coring effort, the Greenland Ice Core Project (GRIP), reached an ice depth of 3028.8 m, providing more than 250,000 years of record. Comparisons between these ice core records have already demonstrated the remarkable reproducibility of the upper ∼90% of the records unparalleled view of climatic and environmental change

Interactions between Surround Suppression and Interocular Suppression in Human Vision

Several types of suppression phenomena have been observed in the visual system. For example, the ability to detect a target stimulus is often impaired when the target is embedded in a high-contrast surround. This contextual modulation, known as surround suppression, was formerly thought to occur only in the periphery. Another type of suppression phenomena is interocular suppression, in which the sensitivity to a monocular target is reduced by a superimposed mask in the opposite eye. Here, we explored how the two types of suppression operating across different spatial regions interact with one another when they simultaneously exert suppressive influences on a common target presented at the fovea. In our experiments, a circular target grating presented to the fovea of one eye was suppressed interocularly by a noise pattern of the same size in the other eye. The foveal stimuli were either shown alone or surrounded by a monocular annular grating. The orientation and eye-of-origin of the surround grating were varied. We found that the detection of the foveal target subjected to interocular suppression was severely impaired by the addition of the surround grating, indicating strong surround suppression in the fovea. In contrast, when the interocular suppression was released by superimposing a binocular fusion ring onto both the target and the dichoptic mask, the surround suppression effect was found to be dramatically decreased. In addition, the surround suppression was found to depend on the contrast of the dichoptic noise with the greatest surround suppression effect being obtained only when the noise contrast was at an intermediate level. These findings indicate that surround suppression and interocular suppression are not independent of each other, but there are strong interactions between them. Moreover, our results suggest that strong surround suppression may also occur at the fovea and not just the periphery

Instagrammatics and digital methods: Studying visual social media, from selfies and GIFs to memes and emoji

Visual content is a critical component of everyday social media, on platforms explicitly framed around the visual (Instagram and Vine), on those offering a mix of text and images in myriad forms (Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr), and in apps and profiles where visual presentation and provision of information are important considerations. However, despite being so prominent in forms such as selfies, looping media, infographics, memes, online videos, and more, sociocultural research into the visual as a central component of online communication has lagged behind the analysis of popular, predominantly text-driven social media. This paper underlines the increasing importance of visual elements to digital, social, and mobile media within everyday life, addressing the significant research gap in methods for tracking, analysing, and understanding visual social media as both image-based and intertextual content.In this paper, we build on our previous methodological considerations of Instagram in isolation to examine further questions, challenges, and benefits of studying visual social media more broadly, including methodological and ethical considerations. Our discussion is intended as a rallying cry and provocation for further research into visual (and textual and mixed) social media content, practices, and cultures, mindful of both the specificities of each form, but also, and importantly, the ongoing dialogues and interrelations between them as communication forms

Chitosan particles agglomerated scaffolds for cartilage and osteochondral tissue engineering approaches with adipose tissue derived stem cells

It is well accepted that natural tissue regeneration is unlikely to occur if the cells are not supplied with an extracellular matrix (ECM) substitute. With this goal, several different methodologies have been used to produce a variety of 3D scaffolds as artificial ECM substitutes suitable for bone and cartilage tissue engineering. Furthermore, osteochondral tissue engineering presents new challenges since the combination of scaffolding and co-culture requirements from both bone and cartilage applications is required in order to achieve a successful osteochondral construct. In this paper, an innovative processing route based on a chitosan particles aggregation methodology for the production of cartilage and osteochondral tissue engineering scaffolds is reported. An extensive characterization is presented including a morphological evaluation using Micro-Computed Tomography (μCT) and 3D virtual models built with an image processing software. Mechanical and water uptake characterizations were also carried out, evidencing the potential of the developed scaffolds for the proposed applications. Cytotoxicity tests show that the developed chitosan particles agglomerated scaffolds do not exert toxic effects on cells. Furthermore, osteochondral bilayered scaffolds could also be developed. Preliminary seeding of mesenchymal stem cells isolated from human adipose tissue was performed aiming at developing solutions for chondrogenic and osteogenic differentiation for osteochondral tissue engineering applications.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT)European NoE EXPERTISSUES (NMP3-CT-2004-500283)European STREP Project HIPPOCRATES (NMP3-CT-2003-505758