Sci&Tech History

There are always something left behind in uncertainty: hope, prejudice, etc. In ancient times, the unexplained phenomena will be labeled as god/goddess area or sometimes, people who have the ability to cure other people or do something unusual will be see as a peacock, dukun, or even a witch. After renaissance, the blank spot was filled by knowledge, some religion authority decreased due to rebellion and shifting to intellectual communities. But after time, the history has showed us that knowledge don’t erase religion. Both of them, run in the same era, with a different path.

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Last week, I have the opportunity to go to Papua, the most east province of Indonesia. There are a lot of things that make me wondered: culture, technology penetration, outsiders, local people and how every elements seems to be messed up without any grand strategy. For instance, internet. In one hand, the local government has fund to support the technology, but on the other hand, people who capable to operate the technology is still very rare. As a way out, they import technology and people as well.

In my opinion, supply push like this bring negative impact. The technology play role as a standardization machine that can choose person who can or can’t work with them. The transformation change from people who have the capital to person who can operate the capital, and yeah, we can use Marx analysis for this.

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The title above is similar with humanizing technology vs technologizing human. Which one become more similar than the other? Are human become more mechanistic or technology become more flexible? In some references, I found stories about fluid technology. Rather occur in a certain shape, technology can be re-shaped by request and culture. On contrary, human are being controlled through presence machine and video security. Like Narciscus story, human fall in love with the image of their self.

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Why do we have to accept new technologies? Who can guarantee that the new device will bring prosperity and welfare to our life? On the other hand, can we avoid change? For instance, traditional tribe who hasn’t wear any cloth yet, is it a matter of democracy–to let other people life as their beliefs, or it is a matter of government careless?

Human history tells us a lot about otherness. Someone will be labeled as a freak if s/he doesn’t wear cloth, like songs, eat rice like the mass do. The same case occurs with technology issue, someone who reject to use internet will lost their network through communication lifestyle. If in the old times, we prefer communicate face to face, nowadays, people choose their finger as their representative. How emotions are described through emoticons such as for sad, for happy, :’( (cry), etc. Do those emoticons really represent our feelings?

Popularity: 12%

Recently issues on e-government has arised. Some regency has succeed in developing e-government, increased number of investment, license and government coordination efficiency. Success stories from Jembrana, Sragen, Denpasar and Kebumen have something in common, all of them have strong leadership. Before the regency implement the technology, burreucracy reformation has been done. The reformation gives the public services that manage citizen identification card and other licenses, power to make decision, cut the possibilities of cheating and corruption.

Relation between control, objectivity and technology can be traced back since it beginning. In ancient time, human tries to defeat the nature through simple tools called technology. Technology is seen as human representation to conquer nature. By time, technology has became part of capital owned by several people. This several people use technology to dominate other. For instance, attendance machine to control labour salary. Technology is assumed to be objective and neutral.

The same assumptions occur in e-gov, online system made the community possible to monitor the system. In this system, hybrid control occur. Man and machine. The technology make the monitor possible, while on the other side, who decide the technology is still human.

Popularity: 16%

Do you have any tendency in buying something? By clustering list of what you have bought by using your credit card, we can get some understanding about people and a certain product. A person who like to buy product A, for example, maybe have some similarities with someone who like watching metal music or literature book. For marketing, this information is used to approach niche market and increase possibility to success.

But in ethical point of view, is mapping credit card a right thing to do? Who have the access to seegoods that we buy?

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Does technology has paradigm? As human creation, technology contains human dreams to be useful and meaningful. But how this purposes are being translated in a wider community? Recently, I am doing research in ICT area. My involvement with this communities make me believe that ICT is a good entry point to reduce inequality among areas in Indonesia. But how to make the ICT works in community with different background? In Jembarana and Sragen, I observed that success factor is on the local leader. ICT is being used as part to support e-government and transparency. It can’t work separately with regulation reformation. In the other side, the technology make transparency possible.

How technology influence human life can be seen in a absent machine. Every morning we arrive at the office, we are asked to put our ID card or finger print on a machine. As a tools, the absent machine is considered as a neutral agent, therefor it is difficult to cheat on them. But by opening the black box, every thing can be reconstructed. The absent machine can be cracked, either technically or socially.

Popularity: 19%

Being in a policy area delivers me into a lot of questions about whether something is good or bad, preference (one is better than another) and regulation to support things we asses as good. One difficulties I face is how can we asses quantitative data with a qualitative point of view? In the the other hand without any quantitative data, how can we verified whether something is good or bad? In physical engineering, these problems are solved by using scientific method involved tools such as thermometer. Good or bad is assessed by seeing its performance. But in social area, good or bad can’t be seen as fast as we want it to, or even, we have to choose to beneficial one community among others.

Dizzling…

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This is not a Chip ‘n Dale, story, this is a story about worm (C. elagans), a tiny nematode that serves as a model organism in so many fields of research.

In much C. elegans work, researchers introduce mutations or otherwise manipulate the genome to see the impact on the developing organism. Large numbers of the worms (which are about one-twentieth of an inch long) are used, and they often have to be examined through a microscope, one by one, to see the effects. Often the work involves sorting the worms into two groups, based, for instance, on if the manipulation resulted in certain cellular changes.

Some efforts have been made to speed up this process. The latest comes from the Georgia Institute of Technology, where scientists have created what amounts to an automatic worm sorter on a chip.

As described by Kwanghun Chung, Matthew M. Crane and Hang Lu in the journal Nature Methods, the sorter is a microfluidic device, with tiny channels and gates fabricated in an organic polymer. The worms are suspended in liquid, which flows into the chip under constant pressure. A first gate allows only one worm through at a time, and the opening of another gate downstream draws the worm into an observation chamber. There it is briefly immobilized through cooling, and imaged using a digital camera through a high-magnification lens.

Computer software then controls the opening of one of two final gates, sending the worm into one receiving chamber or another based on the software’s interpretation of what the camera saw.

The researchers say their system has a high “throughput,” up to several hundred worms per hour, and can reduce the time needed to complete an experiment from months to just days.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/24/science/

24obworm.html?_r=1&ref=science&oref=slogin

Popularity: 25%

I’ve got this cool article from ScienceNow, an alike explanation I found in a book about happiness. The book tells about how our expression when we smiling have a physical reaction to our body. Below is the article from ScienceNow.

The Importance of Being Frightened

By Gisela Telis
ScienceNOW Daily News
16 June 2008

Why do we wrinkle our noses in disgust or widen our eyes with fear? A new study shows that doing so might help keep us alive.

The idea that facial expressions confer a survival advantage was first posited, perhaps not surprisingly, by Charles Darwin. In 1872, 13 years after he published On the Origin of Species, Darwin wrote a lesser-known tome, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. In it, he observed that some human expressions occur across cultures and even in some other animals. He cited the wide-eyed gasp of surprise as an example. Darwin speculated that these emotional faces might serve a biological function, such as getting a good look at an enemy.

Darwin’s hypothesis went untested until 3 years ago, when cognitive neuroscientist Adam Anderson, graduate student Joshua Susskind, and their colleagues at the University of Toronto in Canada decided to apply new technology to the century-old idea. The researchers computer-generated a “classic” fear face: one with raised brows, popping eyes and flaring nostrils. They also mocked up a disgust face: the wrinkled nose, raised lip, and narrowed eyes familiar to anyone who’s smelled rotten eggs or stepped in something foul. The team then asked volunteers to mimic these faces while taking vision and breathing tests.

Emotional faces weren’t just for looks. The team found that a fearful visage improves peripheral vision, speeds up eye movement, and boosts air flow, potentially allowing a person to more quickly sense and respond to danger. Squinty, scrunched-up disgusted faces had the opposite effect, limiting vision and decreasing air flow, ostensibly to keep out substances that might be harmful to the eyes or lungs.

The findings, reported online this week in Nature Neuroscience, are “pretty radical,” says Anderson, because most research on expressions has focused on their function in communication, not their physiological or evolutionary underpinnings. “No one’s ever shown this in a scientific way,” adds neuroscientist Elizabeth Phelps of New York University in New York City. “The best kind of study seems obvious on the one hand, but no one’s demonstrated it before,” says Kevin Ochsner, a cognitive neuroscientist at Columbia University. “This is one of those studies.”

Popularity: 25%