Search Results

Observing the future

Marian Stamp Dawkins

in Observing Animal Behaviour: design and analysis of quantitative data

New technology in the form of video, GPS trackers, and other equipment has opened up the observation of behaviour in ways that were unimaginable before. It is now possible to follow animals ... More

New technology in the form of video, GPS trackers, and other equipment has opened up the observation of behaviour in ways that were unimaginable before. It is now possible to follow animals continuously for days or months, and to know where and what they are doing even when they have disappeared from view. There is now the possibility of collecting large quantities of data and the problem is how best to analyze it. ‘Observation’ has taken on a whole new meaning and assumed a whole new significance. It is no longer the poor relation of experiment but a major research tool in its own right. The book concludes with a checklist of all the different stages of an observational study: (i) the type of question (about adaptation, causation, development, or evolution) being asked; (ii) what hypothesis is being tested; (iii) what the predictions from this hypothesis are and what would count as evidence both for and against it; (iv) how the observations will be designed to achieve independence, not confounding variables and removing unwanted variation; (v) how the level, units, and type of sampling will be selected and what sort of records will be taken; (vi) how behaviour is to be recorded (paper, video, computer, etc.); (vii) the completeness of the protocol, including sample size, choice of animals; (viii) the ethics of the study; (ix) permissions and agreements with other people involved; (x) the carrying out of a pilot study; (xi) analysis of data; and (xii) presentation of results.Less

Space Cooperation

Nicola Casarini

in Remaking Global Order: The Evolution of Europe-China Relations and its Implications for East Asia and the United States

This chapter examines EU—China space and satellite navigation cooperation, including the strategic implications of this form of collaboration for the United States. This chapter traces the process ... More

This chapter examines EU—China space and satellite navigation cooperation, including the strategic implications of this form of collaboration for the United States. This chapter traces the process leading to the EU—China political agreement on the joint development of Galileo (the EU‐led global navigation satellite system alternative to the dominant US Global Positioning System) and examines the reaction of US policy makers concerned that this form of international collaboration would support China in upgrading its space capabilities and power projection in the region precisely at a time when the Pentagon would perceive Beijing as a potential space competitor. This chapter asks the following: Why did the EU invite China to cooperate in the joint development of Galileo? What would EU and Chinese policy makers like to achieve with this kind of cooperation? And what would be the strategic implications for the United States and its East Asian allies?Less

Control of Distribution

Christopher Hodges

in European Regulation of Consumer Product Safety

The purpose of controlling distribution is to ensure that the product that reaches the hands of the consumer does so in the condition intended by the manufacturer, and in the state in which it left ... More

The purpose of controlling distribution is to ensure that the product that reaches the hands of the consumer does so in the condition intended by the manufacturer, and in the state in which it left him or her. If the justifications for imposition of regulation on distributors is that it should apply in the case of products for which performance and/or safety are critical and may be affected by the conditions in which they are stored or transported, there may be a case for extending regulation to products such as sterile or active implantable medical devices and certain types of mechanical, measuring, testing, or diagnosis equipment. It is argued in this chapter that sterility or other safety aspects can be adequately protected by appropriate packaging and by labeling. An obvious lacuna is that although the GPS duties apply to consumer products, no similar provisions apply for non-consumer products.Less

The Brain in the Wild: Tracking Human Behavior in Natural and Naturalistic Settings

Matthew Rizzo, Scott Robinson, and Vicki Neale

in Neuroergonomics: The brain at work

This chapter discusses the use of a “people tracker” to study human behavior in the real world. Modern technology allows for the development of various “people trackers” using combinations of ... More

This chapter discusses the use of a “people tracker” to study human behavior in the real world. Modern technology allows for the development of various “people trackers” using combinations of accelerometers, GPS, video, and other sensors (e.g., to measure cerebral activity, eye movement, heart rate, skin temperature) to make naturalistic observations of human movement and behavior. These devices can advance the goal of examining human performance, strategies, tactics, interactions, and errors in humans engaged in real-world tasks. Besides various issues of device development and sensor choice and placement, there is also a need to develop taxonomies for classifying likely behavior from sensor output, as well as the need to be able to analyze behavior sequences using new applications of classic ethological techniques.Less

The Boynton Cutoff

Geoffrey E. Hill

in Ivorybill Hunters: Search for Proof in a Flooded Wilderness

This chapter recounts a fall misadventure when Hill and one of his grad students, Mark Liu, take a weekend trip to a new area on the Choctawhatchee River. The two explorers find areas with huge ... More

This chapter recounts a fall misadventure when Hill and one of his grad students, Mark Liu, take a weekend trip to a new area on the Choctawhatchee River. The two explorers find areas with huge cypress trees and signs of Ivory-billed Woodpecker activity. By making some incorrect assumptions about where they were on the river, they get far off track and barely make it back to their vehicles by nightfall. Getting lost in kayaks is used as a metaphor for how searches for Ivory-billed Woodpeckers can wander off course if searchers are not careful about their assumptions.Less

Epilogue How to Be an Ivorybill Hunter

Geoffrey E. Hill

in Ivorybill Hunters: Search for Proof in a Flooded Wilderness

This chapter provides detailed suggestions for how to visit the swamp forests along the Choctawhatchee River to look for Ivory-billed Woodpeckers. The authors suggests going to the area in the winter ... More

This chapter provides detailed suggestions for how to visit the swamp forests along the Choctawhatchee River to look for Ivory-billed Woodpeckers. The authors suggests going to the area in the winter when water levels are higher and insects are fewer. A GPS and a canoe or kayak are essential equipment. The biggest danger is not snakes or alligators; it is the cold flowing water of the river.Less

A Parenthesis: Is Basic Science Useful?

Alvaro De Rújula

in Enjoy Our Universe: You Have No Other Choice

Various opinions on the practical consequences of basic science. Some of the ones mentioned: The GPS, the HyperText Transfer Protocol (http), Sputnik, Hertz’s radio, nuclear reactors and Plato’s ... More

Various opinions on the practical consequences of basic science. Some of the ones mentioned: The GPS, the HyperText Transfer Protocol (http), Sputnik, Hertz’s radio, nuclear reactors and Plato’s views on the subject.Less

Mobile Frontiers: Pokémon after Pearl Harbor

Tara Fickle

in The Race Card: From Gaming Technologies to Model Minorities

This chapter uses the mobile game Pokémon GO as a case study of how video game developers have successfully harnessed the self-centering power of ludo-Orientalism, using augmented reality and GPS ... More

This chapter uses the mobile game Pokémon GO as a case study of how video game developers have successfully harnessed the self-centering power of ludo-Orientalism, using augmented reality and GPS technology to construct virtual spaces ripe for playful exploration as well as economic exploitation. In focusing on Nintendo’s sophisticated marketing and aesthetic strategies to erase all signs of Japanese “cultural odor” from its games, scholarly appraisals of the Pokémon franchise have largely followed the traditional reduction of race to an explicit visual or linguistic feature of games. This chapter instead uses Pokémon GO’s seemingly inadvertent exposure of U.S. racial fault lines as an opportunity to explore how race is not erased but rather embedded in the game’s disorienting technology. It reveals the unacknowledged legacy of Japanese racial ideologies, imperialist ambitions, and atomic history that lurk beneath the game screen. The chapter argues that this illusion of ahistorical universality crucially buttresses the fantasy of Pokémon GO as a truly “free” game, masking the invasive and dehumanizing data mining structures that make it enormously profitable for its developers.Less

Information and the World Question

Jeremy Black

in The Power of Knowledge: How Information and Technology Made the Modern World

This chapter briefly discusses how the United States became the foremost imperial, military, and industrial power in the twentieth century. It also describes the rapidly changing means of information ... More

This chapter briefly discusses how the United States became the foremost imperial, military, and industrial power in the twentieth century. It also describes the rapidly changing means of information acquisition, processing, and representation, which includes forms of surveillance and exploration linked to technological progress. The availability of information in the twentieth century increased with the development of space shuttles, satellites, satellite-linked global positioning systems (GPS), drones, and submarines.Less

Pre-market Assessment: Authorization to Market

Christopher Hodges

in European Regulation of Consumer Product Safety

The purpose of pre-marketing control is to ensure that the product's design, functionality, performance, and safety are sufficiently predictable and that the predicted standard of each of these ... More

The purpose of pre-marketing control is to ensure that the product's design, functionality, performance, and safety are sufficiently predictable and that the predicted standard of each of these aspects is acceptable. There are explicit requirements for many product types that are covered by vertical regulation, and although there are no explicit requirements for products that are subject to the horizontal GPS provisions, the impact of the GPS requirements and of product liability law makes the voluntary adoption of appropriate measures advisable if not essential. The issues that arise in this chapter are first, to find out who has what obligations to generate or collect information; secondly, to identify the information that should be collected; and thirdly, to find out who needs to take responsibility for the accuracy of the information.Less

Making the Invisible Visible: Designing Technology for Nonliterate Hunter-Gatherers

Jerome Lewis

in Subversion, Conversion, Development: Cross-Cultural Knowledge Exchange and the Politics of Design

Hunter-gatherer land-use in the Congo Basin leaves few traces. One consequence is that their presence is invisible on maps and ignored in land-use planning decisions over the areas they inhabit. ... More

Hunter-gatherer land-use in the Congo Basin leaves few traces. One consequence is that their presence is invisible on maps and ignored in land-use planning decisions over the areas they inhabit. Governments do not recognise their rights to land, conservationists exclude them from rich forest areas, logging roads open up remaining areas to extractive outsiders, and global warming changes rainfall patterns and the seasonal events that normally guide people to wild foods. A forestry company in Congo-Brazzaville seeking a ‘green’ label for its timber sought anthropological advice on how to respect the rights of forest people. This chapter describes the challenges and participatory design process that developed in creating icon-driven software on converted military palmpilots. Maps produced using this technology have become a new way for non-literate communities to be heard by powerful outsiders. A community radio station broadcasting uniquely in local languages will facilitate forest people to develop their own understanding of the situations facing them, share insights, observations and analyses in order to better secure their long-term interests. The creative interaction of non-literate users and ICT is spawning new developments, from new software builds to monitor illegal logging or wildlife, to geographic information systems for non-literate users.Less

From ‘where am I?’ to ‘where is that?’ Rethinking navigation

Penny McCall Howard

in Environment, Labour and Capitalism at Sea: Working the Ground' in Scotland

Chapter Four continues the discussion of techniques and technologies with a focus on orientation and navigation. The chapter draws on Tim Ingold’s and James Gibson’s descriptions of orientation as a ... More

Chapter Four continues the discussion of techniques and technologies with a focus on orientation and navigation. The chapter draws on Tim Ingold’s and James Gibson’s descriptions of orientation as a process of movement through the landscape to find affordances. The chapter describes the techniques used locally for finding position from the 1960s onwards: dead-reckoning, and the use of radar, depth sounders, Decca, and GPS. Challenging anthropological accounts of ‘Western’ navigation that assume Westerners always rely on charts and instruments and that these alienate people from direct relations with their environment, the GPS chartplotter shows the perpetual importance of the subjective and experiential aspects of orientation in a digital age. The chapter argues that alienation is instead produced by relations of ownership and exploitation, and that the chartplotter facilitates the centralisation of fishing knowledge with the skipper and the employment of low-waged migrant workers as crew. While authors such as Edwin Hutchins describe navigation as answering the absolute question ‘where am I?’, the chapter proposes that the aim of navigation is usually to answer the relational question ‘where is that?’Less

Galileo Programme: Planning Uncertainty and Imagining the Possible and the Impossible

Javier Benedicto and Adolfo Plasencia

in Is the Universe a Hologram?: Scientists Answer the Most Provocative Questions

The engineer, Javier Benedicto, head of the Galileo Programme Department at ESA, describes in this dialogue the frustration felt by scientists who work in space agencies. The long-term nature of ... More

The engineer, Javier Benedicto, head of the Galileo Programme Department at ESA, describes in this dialogue the frustration felt by scientists who work in space agencies. The long-term nature of their projects means that those who envision and design a space mission are forced to leave the future generation to implement the mission as well as processing the results. He explains that although it is hard to believe, uncertainty also hovers over the Galileo space programme meaning they also have to consider that the impos∫sible could actually occur. He relates how in Galileo they ‘manufacture’ their own notion of ‘universal time’ that will be used worldwide and explains how they are working with this time, which is accurate to a nanofraction of a second. He goes on to explain how they managed to persuade the Russians (Glasnoss), Chinese (Beidou) and North Americans (GPS) to agree to cooperate and, at the same time, make their systems compatible with Galileo’s future GPS system for civilian use.Less

The Global Eye: Satellite, GPS, and the “Geopolitical Aesthetic”

Catherine Zimmer

in Surveillance Cinema

Chapter 3 examines the integration of satellite imaging and GPS into cinematic continuity systems, exemplified by action-thrillers like Enemy of the State and the Bourne and Mission Impossible ... More

Chapter 3 examines the integration of satellite imaging and GPS into cinematic continuity systems, exemplified by action-thrillers like Enemy of the State and the Bourne and Mission Impossible series. Such films incorporate surveillance to visualize “location” such that it serves as a narrative and stylistic pivot upon which the relationships among individual bodies, transnational spaces, and broad global systems are constructed through economies of violence. Building on Jameson’s 1992 analysis of the “geopolitical aesthetic,” this chapter suggests that cinematic narrative has been an integral technology in the production of individuals as visual and visualizable subjects of a world system increasingly characterized by various forms of targeting. The chapter traces this back to the iteration of surveillance and globalization offered in Rising Sun and other early 1990s films. This earlier film situates surveillance as part of a global economic structure presented as an orientalized threat, and is thus historically and generically contiguous with the rhetoric around “global terrorism.” The chapter concludes by showing how the generic development and international distribution of the action-thriller since the 1990s can give insight into the shared logic between the global market economy and the violence enacted on singular bodies in contemporary geopolitical warfare.Less

De-mapping & Reconnoitring Notions of Boundaries – Mutually Said: Blogging & Acting

in Activist Poetics: Anarchy in the Avon Valley

This chapter discusses several topics including veganic garden poetics; a poem by Norman Cameron entitled ‘The Invader’; the origins of Kinsella's Wheatbelt Gothics; the poetic dynamics of local ... More

This chapter discusses several topics including veganic garden poetics; a poem by Norman Cameron entitled ‘The Invader’; the origins of Kinsella's Wheatbelt Gothics; the poetic dynamics of local namings for plants and animals; the poetics of gradients; and GPS and forest destruction.Less

The Politics of Global Coverage: The Navy, NASA, and GPS, 1960–2010

William Rankin

in After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century

The sponsorship of the Global Positioning System by the US Department of Defense in the early 1970s seems perfectly obvious – why wouldn’t the US military want an amazingly precise global navigation ... More

The sponsorship of the Global Positioning System by the US Department of Defense in the early 1970s seems perfectly obvious – why wouldn’t the US military want an amazingly precise global navigation system? But at the time, GPS was opposed by nearly every group that was supposed to benefit from it, both military and civilian. It also departed sharply from the precedents of the US Navy’s global radionavigation systems and the proposals for civilian satellite navigation from NASA. This chapter frames the radicality of GPS as largely an administrative problem of enforcing coordination within the US military, rather than as a self-evident technological improvement. It then explores the geographic and experiential changes brought by GPS in the decades since it first came online in the early 1990s. It was often described as an entirely new kind of infrastructure, and its pointillist logic has had profound implications for everything from surveying and war to national territory and everyday life. The chapter ends by confronting common reactions to GPS, arguing that it should not be seen in moral terms as either good or bad – or even as neutral. Instead, its impact is largely about facilitating new forms of geographic intervention.Less

The Politics in My Pocket

William Rankin

in After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century

The book ends by returning to the connection between new forms of knowledge – and new tools, especially GPS – and the changing politics of space. Taking stock of the complex relationship between ... More

The book ends by returning to the connection between new forms of knowledge – and new tools, especially GPS – and the changing politics of space. Taking stock of the complex relationship between personal pocket-sized technologies, military grand strategy, and globalization, the book does not offer any final answers but instead raises four important questions that should guide our understanding of geographic knowledge. How did the new spatial technologies and new territoriality of the late twentieth century change what it means to be a state? How have technologies like GPS shifted power relations on the ground? How have they shifted the patterns of everyday life? And, most broadly, how does the history of the twentieth century (or the reality of the present day) look different once we accept that there is no simple dichotomy between the global and the territorial?Less