The Technological Imagination of Public Media

Although it has been nearly four decades since Raymond Williams’ book Television: technology and cultural form (Williams, 2003/1975) was first published, I find it helpful to return to this seminal work with a view of reflecting on the future of public media in Canada. Television is often remembered for Williams’ critique of technological determinism in Marshall McLuhan’s theory of media. But the book should also be remembered for a number of other significant contributions, including the prescient chapter titled “Alternative technology, alternative uses?†in which Williams examined some of the innovations in broadcasting technologies being developed at the time. For Williams, these innovations represented at once a risk and an opportunity. The risk was that people in the United States and the United Kingdom who were in a position to shape the implementation of these innovations would remain complacent, allowing their deployment to be ‘sorted out as we go’ (Williams, 2003/1975, p. 140). The opportunity was that changes to broadcasting infrastructure could afford people the chance to address structural inequities and imagine alternative uses. Williams believed that the early stages in implementing new technological innovations represented an opportune moment for putting in place alternative organizational and policy arrangements for television broadcasting

Networks for art work: an analysis of artistic creative engagements with new media standards

The principle objective of this study is to examine the culture of networks that are implicated in the production of culture, specifically as it pertains to artists' design and use of digitally networked information and communication technologies (ICTs) for the production of artworks. The analysis in this study seeks to reveal a better understanding of the working practices that underpin artists' creative engagements with new media while recognising the significance of discursive continuities that inform such engagements. Theoretically, a case is presented for combining several theoretical perspectives into a multilayered conceptual framework for examining the circulation of power as it relates both to artistic creativity and to technological innovation. The former is accomplished through a critical assessment of the production of culture theoretical tradition. In calling upon concepts of discursive conduct as a means of developing relations of power, the concept of maverickness is proposed to understand how certain artists do not necessarily bring about change in an art world but instead dedicate themselves to the production of artistic creativity through a contention among various conventions. The latter is problematised drawing upon theories of mediation to develop a model of the conversion and classification of new media standards into art world conventions. A novel methodological approach is developed based on the development of multiple biographical threads of an individual and of a technology within a single case study of an art world network. Empirically, the thesis contributes insights into the diverse end contingent collective work practices involved in the design and use of ICTs by artists for the production of artworks. The findings suggest that individual artists are able to develop designer roles consistent with their situated understandings of creative conduct for modifying aspects of the ICT infrastructure despite shifting technological and social new media standards. However, in order to coordinate such roles within wider collective social structures, artists also initiate forms of mediation, articulation, and classification work that extend beyond the production of artworks and into attempts at programming art world networks within which such artworks were produced and distributed

Rethinking the distinctions between old and new media: Introduction

Recent approaches to media change have convincingly shown that distinctions between old and new media are inadequate to describe the complexity of present and past technological configurations. Yet, oldness and newness remain powerful ways to describe and understand media change, and continue to direct present-day perceptions and interactions with a wide range of technologies - from vinyl records to AI voice assistants such as Siri and Alexa. How can one refuse rigid definitions of old and new, while at the same time retaining the usefulness and pertinence of these concepts for the study and analysis of media change? This introduction to the special issue entitled “Rethinking the Distinctions between Old and New Media” aims to answers this question by taking up the notion of biography. We argue that the recurrence of oldness and newness as categories to describe media is strictly related to the fact that interactions with media are embedded within a biographical understanding of time, which refers both to the lifecourse of people or objects and to the narratives that are created and disseminated about them. Employing this approach entails considering the history of a medium against the history of the changing definitions that are attributed to it, and more broadly, to considering time not only as such but also against the narratives that makes it thinkable and understandable

Searching for Tasks

In the following report, we detail how we have adapted Tim Ingold’s anthropological conception of task-orientation to investigate phases of digital skill followed by an outline of a pilot research project conducted in February 2020 with eleven research participants to develop individual “task profiles”. The key finding is a processual account of digital skills shows how participants had developed a set of “mediatized skills” that enabled them to weave together various human and technological productive forces in ways that included elements of coping with technology and using application software as tools to achieve tasks

Discrete adipose-derived stem cell subpopulations may display differential functionality after in vitro expansion despite convergence to a common phenotype distribution

BACKGROUND: Complex immunophenotypic repertoires defining discrete adipose-derived stem cell (ASC) subpopulations may hold a key toward identifying predictors of clinical utility. To this end, we sorted out of the freshly established ASCs four subpopulations (SPs) according to a specific pattern of co-expression of six surface markers, the CD34, CD73, CD90, CD105, CD146, and CD271, using polychromatic flow cytometry. METHOD: Using flow cytometry-associated cell sorting and analysis, gating parameters were set to select for a CD73(+)CD90(+)CD105(+) phenotype plus one of the four following combinations, CD34(−)CD146(−)CD271(−) (SP1), CD34(−)CD146(+)CD271(−) (SP2), CD34(+)CD146(+)CD271(−) (SP3), and CD34(−)CD146(+)CD271(+) (SP4). The SPs were expanded 700- to 1000-fold, and their surface repertoire, trilineage differentiation, and clonogenic potential, and the capacity to support wound healing were assayed. RESULTS: Upon culturing, the co-expression of major epitopes, the CD73, CD90, and CD105 was maintained, while regarding the minor markers, all SPs reverted to resemble the pre-sorted population with CD34(−)CD146(−)CD271(−) and CD34(−)CD146(+)CD271(−) representing the most prevalent combinations, followed by less frequent CD34(+)CD146(−)CD271(−) and CD34(+)CD146(+)CD271(−) variants. There was no difference in the efficiency of adipo-, osteo-, or chondrogenesis by cytochemistry and real-time RT-PCR or the CFU capacity between the individual SPs, however, the SP2(CD73+90+105+34-146+271-) outperformed others in terms of wound healing. CONCLUSIONS: Our study shows that ASCs upon culturing inherently maintain a stable distribution of immunophenotype variants, which may potentially disguise specific functional properties of particular downstream lines. Furthermore, the outlined approach suggests a paradigm whereby discrete subpopulations could be identified to provide for a therapeutically most relevant cell product. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13287-016-0435-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users

Search for dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks in √s = 13 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for weakly interacting massive particle dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks is presented. Final states containing third-generation quarks and miss- ing transverse momentum are considered. The analysis uses 36.1 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data recorded by the ATLAS experiment at √s = 13 TeV in 2015 and 2016. No significant excess of events above the estimated backgrounds is observed. The results are in- terpreted in the framework of simplified models of spin-0 dark-matter mediators. For colour- neutral spin-0 mediators produced in association with top quarks and decaying into a pair of dark-matter particles, mediator masses below 50 GeV are excluded assuming a dark-matter candidate mass of 1 GeV and unitary couplings. For scalar and pseudoscalar mediators produced in association with bottom quarks, the search sets limits on the production cross- section of 300 times the predicted rate for mediators with masses between 10 and 50 GeV and assuming a dark-matter mass of 1 GeV and unitary coupling. Constraints on colour- charged scalar simplified models are also presented. Assuming a dark-matter particle mass of 35 GeV, mediator particles with mass below 1.1 TeV are excluded for couplings yielding a dark-matter relic density consistent with measurements