Redistributive Computing Systems Group

Sep 30

Complicating simplicity: Rube Goldberg Machines connected through the internet

Fig 1. The self-operating napkin (September 1931) \’gold,berg\ adjective. A comically involved, complicated invention, laboriously contrived to perform a simple operation. — Webster’s New World Dictionary In the early 1900s, the cartoonist Rube Goldberg drew a series of mechanical chain-reaction illustrations in a bi-weekly series called “The Inventions of Professor Lucifer G. Butts,” which consolidated as…

New Paper: Rethinking Appropriation in Global HCI (#CHI2024)

Apr 23

Daniel Mwesigwa

New Paper: Rethinking Appropriation in Global HCI (#CHI2024)

In a new CHI 2024 paper titled “Air/time Travel: Rethinking Appropriation in Global HCI and Futures of Electronic Exchange,” we study technology transformations in Africa and other parts of the Majority World [1] (preprint here). We foreground an earlier informal practice of airtime exchange, where people ingeniously traded airtime (phone credits) for cash. In the…

Mar 29

Laura Cortes Rico

Typing Gayogohonǫˀnéha:ˀ

The Gayogohó:nǫˀ Indigenous people (named -mispronounced- Cayuga by the English and American settlers) have a longstanding relationship of more than 13.000 years with the Cayuga Lake region, where the main campus of Cornell University is situated (Cornell University, 2021). This history includes a critical and painful event in 1779 when soldiers from the American armed…

Mar 13

Marina Loukia Zafiris

Akwesasne and the History of Hydropower

Hydropower has long been heralded as “clean,” “green” energy. Yet living in Akwesasne, just a few kilometers away from the Moses-Saunders Power Dam, it seems that almost every one of its approximately 13,000 residents is either sick or has a family member that is sick. And every indication suggests a link to the power dam. How…

Apr 23

Marina Loukia Zafiris

Indigenous Computing

RCS group to co-host Indigenous Computing event April 28th, 1:30 – 4:30 pm, Gates Hall + Zoom! This series of talks explores the intersections of Indigenous world-views and computational technologies. We reflect on ways in which AI systems, quantitative analysis and computing philosophies have and can become culturally supportive instruments embedded in practices of Native…

Jun 30

Marina Loukia Zafiris

DEC_Counts

Editorial Note: Post originally written April 26, 2022. On June 30th, 2022, NYS DEC made the decision to deny Greenidge’s Title V Air Permit. Greenidge has 30 days to request an “administrative adjudicatory hearing” about the application denial. We are sitting at a six month decision delay. New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation still has…

Jun 7

Christopher Paul Csikszentmihalyi

Metrology

An Audience With The Box Nearly two years after I contacted the Cummings Center for the History of Psychology, my schedule finally allowed me to visit the box. The staff invited me to visit while the center was closed to the public, and had a full day of measuring cut out for me, but from what…

Mar 10

Marina Loukia Zafiris

Bitcoin Mining in Upstate NY

Greenidge Generation LLC is one example of a decommissioned industrial plant that has been revitalized into one of the largest cryptocurrency mines in the country. Bitcoin mining facilities devote huge quantities of computational power to solving cryptographic problems, resulting in insane energy grid demands. Old power plants in industrial regions (like those found in New…

Feb 3

Marina Loukia Zafiris

Cracking, Packing and Hijacking

The Foul Play of Political Geometry in Texas Over the past year, I have been working alongside Texans Against Gerrymandering to understand how data science tools could help streamline their efforts in generating public awareness for fair redistricting and political mapping practices in the state of Texas. This blog is essentially a contextual dump of…

Jan 26

Christopher Paul Csikszentmihalyi

Obedience

Obedience Project Obedience the project was born when I moved back to the states after the first wave of Covid, and signed up for Instacart. I’d been living in Portugal, where the “gig economy” is thankfully less ubiquitous. I’d been following Covid since December 2019, and I was pretty concerned about it long before lockdown….