Making Experts: An Ethnographic Study of “Makers” in FabLabs in Japan

“Makers” around the world cohere in a digital and physical network of technology hobbyists. “Makers are open-source hardware enthusiasts who use machines like 3D printers and laser cutters - manufacturing tools that have only recently become accessible to laypeople - to make things. “Makers share a vision for a world where everyone would be able to make almost anything, supplanting top-down economic systems and channels of production. This ethnographic research examines a subset of the “maker” community: “makers” in “FabLabs” in Japan. These “FabLabs” are small workshops that house the machines that “makers” need and make them open to the public. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Japan, this dissertation argues that the network of people, spaces, and machines remains coherent not because of common cultural forces like capitalist ambition, religion, geographic proximity, or even nationality. Rather, the coherence is more precisely understood - in the frame of science and technology studies - by examining the cohesive force of newly invented rituals and “active” ideas that engender hope and spur action toward a shared vision. Furthermore, the FabLab community in Japan exemplifies a novel culture of expertise wherein laypeople call on experts as-needed to accomplish their personal ambitions, flipping the usual understanding of expertise as a guarded product of insular cultural systems. I examine this unique culture of expertise and outline types of expertise developing from this dynamic, disparate, and impressively coherent FabLab network in Japan. Drawing on my ethnographic observations, I argue that laypeople, still bounded by political-economic forces in Japan, nevertheless are exercising a degree of agency that was previously the domain only of experts in manufacturing. This action by laypeople is what activates sufficient cohesive activity to sustain the community in the absence of more traditional social cohesive forces

Emotional over- and under-eating in early childhood are learned not inherited

Emotional overeating (EOE) has been associated with increased obesity risk, while emotional undereating (EUE) may be protective. Interestingly, EOE and EUE tend to correlate positively, but it is unclear whether they reflect different aspects of the same underlying trait, or are distinct behaviours with different aetiologies. Data were from 2054 five-year-old children from the Gemini twin birth cohort, including parental ratings of child EOE and EUE using the Child Eating Behaviour Questionnaire. Genetic and environmental influences on variation and covariation in EUE and EOE were established using a bivariate Twin Model. Variation in both behaviours was largely explained by aspects of the environment completely shared by twin pairs (EOE: C = 90%, 95% CI: 89%-92%; EUE: C = 91%, 95% CI: 90%-92%). Genetic influence was low (EOE: A = 7%, 95% CI: 6%-9%; EUE: A = 7%, 95% CI: 6%-9%). EOE and EUE correlated positively (r = 0.43, p < 0.001), and this association was explained by common shared environmental influences (BivC = 45%, 95% CI: 40%-50%). Many of the shared environmental influences underlying EUE and EOE were the same (rC = 0.50, 95% CI: 0.44, 0.55). Childhood EOE and EUE are etiologically distinct. The tendency to eat more or less in response to emotion is learned rather than inherited

Environmental influences on the composition and structure of the freshwater mussels in shallow lakes in the Cuiabá River floodplain

The maintenance of the freshwater mussels' community in lakes is determined by abiotic factors at the local scale and at regional scale by interspecific relations between the larvae of bivalves and fish host. Whereas the distribution pattern at local scale, our goal was to understand the abundance and community composition of bivalves and relate the environmental agents structuring this community. We sampled 20 lakes in the floodplain of the Cuiabá River using a standardized method of sampling. To evaluate the effect of environment on the community we applied multivariate inferential analyses. We found 1.143 individuals alive belonging into six species distributed at the family Hyriidae, Mycetopodidae, Sphaeridae and Corbiculidae. The results showed that in the Pantanal the bivalve assemblage structure is influenced locally by organic matter and particle size, variables that reflect the intense interactions between water-sediment. However it is important to emphasize that these environmental characteristics are the result of the dynamics of this system which is dependent on the flood pulse, a regional factor