Monthly Archive for October, 2011

Editing Services Now Available

Published on October 31, 2011 in Journal and Newsletter. 0 Comments

The International Journal of Technology, Knowledge and Society is pleased to offer editing services for authors who would like to have their work professionally edited.  The services offered can help authors at the point of initial submission or during the revision stage, before the final submission of their paper. Please contact journals@techandsoc.com for more information.

The editing process

  1. Email journals@techandsoc.com to express your interest in having your paper edited.
  2. The Commissioning Editor of the Journal will review your paper and provide you with a quote.
  3. Once you accept the quote, the Commissioning Editor will assign a copyeditor to your paper.
  4. Within 7-14 business days of your confirmed payment, you will receive a copy of your edited paper via email.

Disclaimer

Please note that this service is not mandatory for publication in a Common Ground journal. Using this service does not guarantee acceptance for publication, nor are you obliged to submit your edited manuscript to a Common Ground journal.

Request More Information

For more information or to request a quote, please email journals@techandsoc.com.

How Google Translate Works

Published on October 31, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From “Is That A Fish In Your Ear: Translation and the Meaning of Everything,” David Bellos; Particular (£20), From The Independent

Using software originally developed in the 1980s by researchers at IBM, Google has created an automatic translation tool that is unlike all others. It is not based on the intellectual presuppositions of early machine translation efforts – it isn’t an algorithm designed only to extract the meaning of an expression from its syntax and vocabulary.

In fact, at bottom, it doesn’t deal with meaning at all. Instead of taking a linguistic expression as something that requires decoding, Google Translate (GT) takes it as something that has probably been said before.

It uses vast computing power to scour the internet in the blink of an eye, looking for the expression in some text that exists alongside its paired translation.

The corpus it can scan includes all the paper put out since 1957 by the EU in two dozen languages, everything the UN and its agencies have ever done in writing in six official languages, and huge amounts of other material, from the records of international tribunals to company reports and all the articles and books in bilingual form that have been put up on the web by individuals, libraries, booksellers, authors and academic departments.

To Read More…

Image: David Levy

Sewed At Night / Without A Light

Published on October 28, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

By George Wilkinson, 3 Quarks Daily

The points of leaves and twigs on which the spider begins her work are few, and she fills the air with a beautiful ciruiting. Man should be content with as few points to tip with the fine Web of his Soul, and weave a tapestry empyrean full of symbols for his spiritual eye.

 –Keats, letter to Reynolds

The webs of orb spiders are truly fascinating structures. Although the details of their construction are adjusted to local conditions, members of a given species create highly characteristic patterns. It is thought that orb webs arose once in the spider lineage, aided by two interacting innovations: extreme behavioral stereotypy, leading to regularly spaced radial lines and sticky spirals; and the ability to suspend webs on frames of structural threads, allowing spinning of webs just about anywhere.

The web is an extended phenotype of the spider. It modifies and interacts with the environment, and in turn influences spider health, since an effective web leads to a well-fed spider. Since web construction requires a complex sequence of actions by the animal, it is also an external display of the spider’s health. There is a fascinating literature on the effects of pesticides and drugs of abuse on spider webs.

To Read More…

Photo: A normal orb web (top) and a web constructed by a spider treated with benzadrine (via 3QuarksDaily)

Call for Book Reviewers

Published on October 28, 2011 in Book and Newsletter. 0 Comments Tags: .

Common Ground Publishing is seeking distinguished peer reviewers to evaluate book manuscripts submitted to the Technology and Society Book Series.

As part of our commitment to intellectual excellence and a rigorous review process, Common Ground sends book manuscripts that have received initial editorial approval to peer reviewers to further evaluate and provide constructive feedback. The comments and guidance that these reviewers supply is invaluable to our authors and an essential part of the publication process.

Common Ground recognizes the important role of referees by acknowledging book reviewers as members of the Technology and Society Book Series Editorial Review Board for a period of at least one year. The list of members of the Editorial Review Board will be posted on our website. In addition, Common Ground also offers a US$200 voucher for each completed review which meets the standards set out by the Commissioning Editor at the commencement of assignment. Vouchers may be used in the Common Ground Bookstore or for registration at one of our international conferences.

If you would like to referee book manuscripts submitted to Technology and Society please email:

  1. a brief description of your professional credentials
  2. a list of your areas of interest and expertise
  3. a copy of your CV with current contact details

If we feel you are qualified and we require refereeing for manuscripts within your purview, we will contact you.

Marcus Breen, Common Ground Author, to Present Keynote at 2012 Conference

Published on October 26, 2011 in Conference, Headline, News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

The Technology, Knowledge, and Society Conference is happy to welcome Dr. Marcus Breen as a Plenary Speaker at the 2012 Conference in Los Angeles.

Marcus Breen is an Associate Dean and Head of the School of Communications and Media at Bond University, Queensland, Australia.  He has worked as a researcher, an academic, a consultant and a journalist. He moved from Melbourne, Australia where he was teaching at The University of Melbourne, to teach in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1996. Since then, he has also taught in the Department of Communication Studies at Northeastern University, Boston. His academic specialization is political economy and policy in the Information and Communication Technology industries.

Dr. Breen’s work background includes consulting and advisory experience with Gartner, Multimedia Victoria -State Government of Victoria, Austrade – Federal Government of Australia, Center for International Research on Communication and Information Technologies and numerous clients. As a journalist he worked for Billboard, The Hollywood Reporter, The Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Music Business International, News Corporation. His most recent book is Uprising: The Internet’s Unintended Consequences, Common Ground Publishing (2011)

To read more about all of our Plenary Speakers, visit our website.

Recently Published: Technology Journal

Published on October 24, 2011 in Journal. 0 Comments

technology

The latest issue of The International Journal of Technology, Knowledge and Society includes:

Pedagogy Leads Technology

Published on October 22, 2011 in Book and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Pedagogy Leads Technology: Online Learning and Teaching in Higher Education: New Technologies, New Pedagogies edited by Arianne Jennifer Rourke and Kathryn Sara Coleman is now available as part of the Technology and Society series.

This book highlights research and practice where pedagogy effectively utilises as well as leads the technology in teaching, learning and assessment in higher education. The examples provided, not only highlight how teaching practice can become research, an important focus for 21st century academics, but also provides exemplary case studies and theoretical perspectives on the importance of a student-centred approach to adopting technology for teaching and learning.

This book presents leading research from around the world, grouped into the following four themes:

  1. Interactive Technologies for Learning
  2. Learning through Online Communities
  3. Online Collaborative Learning
  4. Reflecting on Reflective Practice

 

Arthur C. Clarke Predicting the Future in 1964

Published on October 18, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

From a 1964 BBC Horizon Program


Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, British science fiction author known for his numerous stories including 2001: A Space Odyssey, reports on his views of what the year 2000 will look like.

Technology Journal, Volume 7, Issue 2 now available

Published on October 16, 2011 in Journal and Newsletter. 0 Comments

technology_frontThe second issue of Volume 7 of The International Journal of Technology, Knowledge and Society has now been published.

Volume 7, Issue 2 contains:

Continue reading ‘Technology Journal, Volume 7, Issue 2 now available’

Technology Community Member Marcus Breen Reviewed in tripleC

Published on October 14, 2011 in Book, News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Christian Fuchs, tripleC

Marcus Breen’s book Uprising. The Internet’s unintended consequences is about proletarianization in the age of the Internet. Cultural Studies, Political Economy and Critical Theory inform Breen’s approach. His book is a work in the field of Critical Media and Communication Studies. Breen draws on the approaches of thinkers like Walter Benjamin, Edward P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, Oskar Negt & Alexander Kluge, Thorstein Veblen, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, or Raymond Williams.

In chapters 1 and 2, the notion of proletarianization is explained and defined in a cultural context. Breen connects the concept of proletarians to the subaltern, the underclass, the lack of means of subsistence, irrationality, the abject and transgressive knowledge on the Internet. Internet proletarians are consequence of the negative dialectic of the Enlightenment in the age of the Internet. Due to the Internet, proletarian subculture would today become more visible. The context of proletarianization today would be neoliberal capitalism.

Chapters 3, 4 and 5 explain that the (up)rising of the underclass on the Internet is an unintended consequence of capitalism and the Internet. This development is the other, negative side and consequence of bourgeois life in capitalist society. Chapter 6 connects Internet proletarianization to the concepts of rationality and irrationality. The notion of unbounded irrationality is introduced. Chapter 7 discusses US IT policy as context of proletarianization.

Chapters 8 and 9 outline specific examples of Internet proletarianization – online pornography and online Jihadism. Political studies of the Internet tend to focus on movements that nicely fit into the liberal worldview, that researchers positively identify with and that fit the picture of a liberal civil society and a pluralistic public sphere. Typical examples are the ecological movement, the movement for democratic globalization, the feminist movement, the human rights movement, or the anti-war movement. The darker side of movements, like fascist movements’ or religious fundamentalists’ use of the Internet, has been much less analyzed by Internet Research, which tells us more about the state of Internet Research than about the state of society.  One of the reasons might be that these groups do not allow easy identification for liberals. Ignoring them allows to optimistically focus on stressing the participatory and democratic potentials of the Internet and absolves Internet researcher of having to think about alternatives to capitalism.  Breen’s two examples are well chosen because they give attention to phenomena that have thusfar not been much studied.

To Read More…

Learn More About Uprising by Marcus Breen