scholarly journals Waking Life: The Destiny of Cinema’s Dreamscape; or the Question of Old and New Mediations

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-72
Author(s):  
Markos Hadjioannou

In light of the current transition from celluloid to digital cinema, this paper will explore the relation between old and new technologies as a means for understanding medium specificity as an activity of mediation. While the ongoing debate in screen studies aims at clarifying the extent of digital technology’s effects, it seems that the new technology is either being interpreted as inducing a rupture in film history clearly distinct from celluloid, or as directly repeating strategies, goals, forms, and impulses specific to an indexical and analogical visual culture. Indeed, the desire to acknowledge points of divergence or close interaction between technological forms is unquestionably useful; but my own approach to the technological change takes into account both the differences and similarities of forms as a means of exploring medium specificity. This will be a matter of dealing with the new as not new or old, but new and old – as simultaneously distinct and interactively interrelated, so that each medium acquires a space of its own without fixed boundaries. Rather than merge the one form into the other, the ontological explication of a medium may take account of its specific technological base while simultaneously paying attention to previous technologies that reside in it intact yet affected by the contextual possibilities of the new. Newness, thus understood, becomes a complex concurrency of differences and similarities that shift the borders of distinct forms in unexpected and continually renewable ways. With this in mind, I will discuss an example of digital mediation through Richard Linklater’s Waking Life (2001), with a focus on the digital’s power for a creative interpretation of reality’s experience.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wei Zhang ◽  
Hsiao-Hui Lee

To stay competitive, high-technology manufacturers not only frequently source new technologies from their suppliers, but also financially support the development of these new technologies into component products or production tools. We consider a manufacturer that can either source a new but immature technology from a financially constrained supplier, or source a mature technology from an existing supplier if and only if the development of the new technology fails. To support the new technology, the manufacturer can choose to inject capital in the form of an equity or loan. The investment strategy not only affects the new supplier’s development effort and the probability of technical success (PTS), but also affects the existing supplier’s effort to improve the mature technology, which presents the manufacturer with a trade-off. Following the debt financing literature, we find that a loan contract is associated with a cost-shifting effect and often leads to a higher PTS. However, because the manufacturer not only maintains an investment but also a procurement relationship with the new supplier, we find a profit-sharing effect associated with an equity investment, which does not exist in the traditional equity issuance literature. In particular, we show that the profit-sharing effect can dominate the cost-shifting effect and lead to a higher PTS when the new supplier’s technological capability is sufficiently high. Nonetheless, we also show that the strategy that derives a higher PTS does not necessarily generate a higher payoff for the manufacturer. On the one hand, a loan can be preferred even when it leads to a lower PTS because the cost-shifting effect allows the manufacturer to offer a sufficiently low procurement payment while maintaining a sufficiently high PTS. On the other hand, when the existing supplier is very capable of reducing its costs, a loan can over-incentivize the new supplier to exert excessive effort and backfire. This paper was accepted by Charles Corbett, operations management.


2014 ◽  
Vol 613 ◽  
pp. 43-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zbigniew Pilat ◽  
Jacek Szulc

Activities in the field of increasing the productivity of the production lines for welding thick metal sheets are focused in two directions. On the one hand, new technologies are being developed for welding, deeper weld penetration and faster welding process. On the other hand are focused on automation of these operations, which have the effect of reducing cost and increasing efficiency. Improved are also the working conditions of people employed in the welding processes. In both these directions the hybrid welding Plasma-GMAW could fulfill all requirements as a new technology. The article gives the concept model of the complete robotized welding cell, in which this method will be implemented and tested.


Leonardo ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 33 (5) ◽  
pp. 361-365 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara Becker

In current discourses of technoscience, body, nature, and even life are often described as code, text, or information. On the one hand, classical dichotomies (body/mind, subject/object, man/machine) and their restrictions are dissolving; on the other hand, this discourse often reveals a hidden desire to ignore both the fragility and the sense-giving capacity of materiality. In this paper, the proper dynamic of materiality is explored by looking in particular at what it means to be in a permanent touch with the world with the body. Against this background, efforts at denying or transforming the body in the context of new technologies can be interpreted as the wish to control or avoid the unpredictable and unconscious dimensions of human existence.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (5) ◽  
pp. 75
Author(s):  
Carmen-Valentina Radulescuu ◽  
Maria-Loredana Popescu ◽  
Mihaela Diana Oancea Negescu ◽  
Dumitru Alexandru Bodislav

Recently, many articles deal with Internet and mobile phones that have penetrated all sectors of the economy, including agriculture, in the light of their benefits. Various reports, including the World Bank, describe the main benefits of new information and communication technologies and promote their greater integration into the wider economy to increase efficiency by completing other production factors and fostering innovation, for example, drastically reducing transaction costs. The article analyzes recent literature but also presents novelty elements that emerged from questions such as the risks associated with new technologies considering that there are not enough studies in the field confirming, on the one hand, the benefits but also the losses caused by them. Keyword: New technology, agriculture, innovation


MRS Bulletin ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 22 (10) ◽  
pp. 5-6
Author(s):  
Horst D. Simon

Recent events in the high-performance computing industry have concerned scientists and the general public regarding a crisis or a lack of leadership in the field. That concern is understandable considering the industry's history from 1993 to 1996. Cray Research, the historic leader in supercomputing technology, was unable to survive financially as an independent company and was acquired by Silicon Graphics. Two ambitious new companies that introduced new technologies in the late 1980s and early 1990s—Thinking Machines and Kendall Square Research—were commercial failures and went out of business. And Intel, which introduced its Paragon supercomputer in 1994, discontinued production only two years later.During the same time frame, scientists who had finished the laborious task of writing scientific codes to run on vector parallel supercomputers learned that those codes would have to be rewritten if they were to run on the next-generation, highly parallel architecture. Scientists who are not yet involved in high-performance computing are understandably hesitant about committing their time and energy to such an apparently unstable enterprise.However, beneath the commercial chaos of the last several years, a technological revolution has been occurring. The good news is that the revolution is over, leading to five to ten years of predictable stability, steady improvements in system performance, and increased productivity for scientific applications. It is time for scientists who were sitting on the fence to jump in and reap the benefits of the new technology.


Author(s):  
Timur Ergen

This chapter brings together arguments from economics, sociology, and political economy to show that innovation processes are characterized by a dilemma between the advantages of aligned expectations—including greater coordination and investment—and those of diversity, including superior openness to new technological possibilities. To illustrate the argument, the chapter discusses a historical case involving one of the largest coordinated peace-time attempts to hasten technological innovation in the history of capitalism, namely the US energy technology policies of the 1970s and 1980s. Close examination of the commercialization of photovoltaics and synthetic fuel initiatives illustrates both sides of the dilemma between shared versus diverse expectations in innovation: coordination but possible premature lock-in on the one hand, and openness but possible stagnation on the other. The chapter shows that even the exploration and interpretation of new technologies may be as much a product of focused investment as of trial-and-error search.


2021 ◽  
Vol 139 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-58
Author(s):  
Orietta Da Rold

Abstract In this essay, I offer a brief history of manuscript cataloguing and some observations on the innovations this practice introduced especially in the digital form. This history reveals that as the cataloguing of medieval manuscripts developed over time, so did the research needs it served. What was often considered traditional cataloguing practices had to be mediated to accommodate new scholarly advance, posing interesting questions, for example, on what new technologies can bring to this discussion. In the digital age, in particular, how do digital catalogues interact with their analogue counterparts? What skills and training are required of scholars interacting with this new technology? To this end, I will consider the importance of the digital environment to enable a more flexible approach to cataloguing. I will also discuss new insights into digital projects, especially the experience accrued by the The Production and Use of English Manuscripts 1060 to 1220 Project, and then propose that in the future cataloguing should be adaptable and shareable, and make full use of the different approaches to manuscripts generated by collaboration between scholars and librarians or the work of postgraduate students and early career researchers.


Energies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (11) ◽  
pp. 3147
Author(s):  
Kiyoung Kim ◽  
Namdoo Kim ◽  
Jongryeol Jeong ◽  
Sunghwan Min ◽  
Horim Yang ◽  
...  

Many leading companies in the automotive industry have been putting tremendous effort into developing new powertrains and technologies to make their products more energy efficient. Evaluating the fuel economy benefit of a new technology in specific powertrain systems is straightforward; and, in an early concept phase, obtaining a projection of energy efficiency benefits from new technologies is extremely useful. However, when carmakers consider new technology or powertrain configurations, they must deal with a trade-off problem involving factors such as energy efficiency and performance, because of the complexities of sizing a vehicle’s powertrain components, which directly affect its energy efficiency and dynamic performance. As powertrains of modern vehicles become more complicated, even more effort is required to design the size of each component. This study presents a component-sizing process based on the forward-looking vehicle simulator “Autonomie” and the optimization algorithm “POUNDERS”; the supervisory control strategy based on Pontryagin’s Minimum Principle (PMP) assures sufficient computational system efficiency. We tested the process by applying it to a single power-split hybrid electric vehicle to determine optimal values of gear ratios and each component size, where we defined the optimization problem as minimizing energy consumption when the vehicle’s dynamic performance is given as a performance constraint. The suggested sizing process will be helpful in determining optimal component sizes for vehicle powertrain to maximize fuel efficiency while dynamic performance is satisfied. Indeed, this process does not require the engineer’s intuition or rules based on heuristics required in the rule-based process.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 217-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Andre Søraa ◽  
Eduard Fosch-Villaronga

AbstractIn this article, we investigate the relation between gender and exoskeleton development through the lens of intersectionality theory. Exoskeleton users come in a wide variety of shapes, sizes, and genders. However, it is often the case that wearable robot engineers do not develop such devices primarily on the premise that the product should fit as many end users as possible. Instead, designers tend to use the one-size-fits-all approach – a design choice that seems legitimate from the return of an investment viewpoint but that may not do as much justice to end users. Intended users of exoskeletons have a series of user criteria, including height, weight, and health condition, in the case of rehabilitation. By having rigid inclusion criteria for whom the intended user of the technology can be, the exclusion criteria will grow in parallel. The implications and deep-rootedness of gender and diversity considerations in practices and structural systems have been largely disregarded. Mechanical and robot technology were historically seen as part of a distinct male sphere, and the criteria used today to develop new technology may reflect the biases that existed in another time that should no longer be valid. To make this technology available for all, we suggest some tools to designers and manufacturers to help them think beyond their target market and be more inclusive.


Electronics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (10) ◽  
pp. 1208
Author(s):  
Francisco Alonso ◽  
Mireia Faus ◽  
Cristina Esteban ◽  
Sergio A. Useche

Technological devices are becoming more and more integrated in the management and control of traffic in big cities. The population perceives the benefits provided by these systems, and, therefore, citizens usually have a favorable opinion of them. However, emerging countries, which have fewer available infrastructures, could present a certain lack of trust. The objective of this work is to detect the level of knowledge and predisposition towards the use of new technologies in the transportation field of the Dominican Republic. For this study, the National Survey on Mobility was administered to a sample of Dominican citizens, proportional to the ONE census and to sex, age and province. The knowledge of ITS topics, as well as the use of mobile applications for mobility, are scarce; however, there was a significant increase that can be observed in only one year. Moreover, technology is, in general, positively assessed for what concerns the improvement of the traffic field, even though there is a lack of predisposition to provide one’s personal data, which is necessary for these devices. The process of technological development in the country must be backed up by laws that protect the citizens’ privacy. Thus, technologies that can improve road safety, mobility and sustainability can be implemented in the country.


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