4S-2025 Panel • Why are (P)AM systems not truly passive?

Between September 2nd and 5th, the University of Washington at Seattle, WA, USA, the 50th Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) took place, with the theme “Reverberations.”  Laura represented the Redistributed Computing Systems Group (with an assist by Chris) with a paper “Why are Passive Acoustic Monitoring systems not truly passive?,”…

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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…

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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…

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