2084: The Fantasy Compact

<p>For the last two decades, social media has increasingly dominated our day to day interactions. We have evolved into digitized creatures able to communicate on a daily basis to a broad and varied audience, comprised of people we know, people we hardly know, and people we have never met. Through images, tweets, status updates and posts, everyone has an ability to view and harness a variety of opinions, emotions, stories and ideas at a moment’s notice. It’s in those instances when a person resonates with a certain moment or place they are in, that they create a narrative through a caption or a hashtag that’s attached to an image which allows everyone who views it to read a story of someone’s experience. This digital/virtual age poses new questions for interior architecture, a practice that generally orients itself in the realm of physical, built space. It is the intent of this research to offer a new kind of design approach, more relevant to our current digitized lives, to see what it might offer for urban interior speculations. Through exploring ways of tapping into this narrative and ‘flipping the script’, we can explore a new kind of design tactic that brings forward the power that social media narratives can have on the built environment and interior strategies. The city of Los Angeles will be used as a testing grounds for narrative urban interior tactics, to see how it could offer the city whimsical and outlandish interventions that respond to the people currently interacting with certain sites in it. As a nod to George Orwell’s 1984 future speculations, this project is a counterpoint that offers an optimistic, open and free speculation tool by providing a constant dialogue between the public and designer through the forum of Instagram. This project teases out the ideas that narrative can create instinctual, intuitive and thought-provoking designs that can be spectacles, attractors, events or counterparts that open up a potential to talk about interior in a new realm, where it can contribute on larger scales like the urban setting. Urban interior tactics provide outcomes that even in an exterior setting can still create moments of interiority around them as well as within them that bring together two conditions in a propositional manner as opposed to being opposites. In order to translate the narratives into conceptual design outcomes, drawing and model making will be used as the primary exploratory tools. This offers the audience different means of perception to be gauged through putting it back out into the forum it was derived from, allowing for three final outcomes that respond more accurately to how people react to open narrative as a design tool.</p>

2084: The Fantasy Compact

<p>For the last two decades, social media has increasingly dominated our day to day interactions. We have evolved into digitized creatures able to communicate on a daily basis to a broad and varied audience, comprised of people we know, people we hardly know, and people we have never met. Through images, tweets, status updates and posts, everyone has an ability to view and harness a variety of opinions, emotions, stories and ideas at a moment’s notice. It’s in those instances when a person resonates with a certain moment or place they are in, that they create a narrative through a caption or a hashtag that’s attached to an image which allows everyone who views it to read a story of someone’s experience. This digital/virtual age poses new questions for interior architecture, a practice that generally orients itself in the realm of physical, built space. It is the intent of this research to offer a new kind of design approach, more relevant to our current digitized lives, to see what it might offer for urban interior speculations. Through exploring ways of tapping into this narrative and ‘flipping the script’, we can explore a new kind of design tactic that brings forward the power that social media narratives can have on the built environment and interior strategies. The city of Los Angeles will be used as a testing grounds for narrative urban interior tactics, to see how it could offer the city whimsical and outlandish interventions that respond to the people currently interacting with certain sites in it. As a nod to George Orwell’s 1984 future speculations, this project is a counterpoint that offers an optimistic, open and free speculation tool by providing a constant dialogue between the public and designer through the forum of Instagram. This project teases out the ideas that narrative can create instinctual, intuitive and thought-provoking designs that can be spectacles, attractors, events or counterparts that open up a potential to talk about interior in a new realm, where it can contribute on larger scales like the urban setting. Urban interior tactics provide outcomes that even in an exterior setting can still create moments of interiority around them as well as within them that bring together two conditions in a propositional manner as opposed to being opposites. In order to translate the narratives into conceptual design outcomes, drawing and model making will be used as the primary exploratory tools. This offers the audience different means of perception to be gauged through putting it back out into the forum it was derived from, allowing for three final outcomes that respond more accurately to how people react to open narrative as a design tool.</p>

Hierarchy and control of ageing-related methylation networks

DNA methylation provides one of the most widely studied biomarkers of ageing. Since the methylation of CpG dinucleotides function as switches in cellular mechanisms, it is plausible to assume that by proper adjustment of these switches age may be tuned. Though, adjusting hundreds of CpG methylation levels coherently may never be feasible and changing just a few positions may lead to biologically unstable state. A prominent example of methylation-based age estimators is provided by Horvath’s clock, based on 353 CpG dinucleotides, showing a high correlation (not necessarily causation) with chronological age across multiple tissue types. On this small subset of CpG dinucleotides we demonstrate how the adjustment of one methylation level leads to a cascade of changes at other sites. Among the studied subset, we locate the most important CpGs (and related genes) that may have a large influence on the rest of the sub-system. According to our analysis, the structure of this network is way more hierarchical compared to what one would expect based on ensembles of uncorrelated connections. Therefore, only a handful of CpGs is enough to modify the system towards a desired state. When propagation of the change over the network is taken into account, the resulting modification in the predicted age can be significantly larger compared to the effect of isolated CpG perturbations. By adjusting the most influential single CpG site and following the propagation of methylation level changes we can reach up to 5.74 years in virtual age reduction, significantly larger than without taking into account of the network control. Extending our approach to the whole methylation network may identify key nodes that have controller role in the ageing process.

Literacy of Virtual Era Democracy in Al-Ma'soem Islamic Boarding School Sumedang Regency

Since the 1998 reformation, the freedom of expression and political participation of citizens has been real and dynamic. Understanding and awareness of the importance of democracy as political education, especially in the Virtual Age, is increasingly becoming a challenge. The Santri, as the next generation, have a strategic role in the continuation of democratization in Indonesia. The method of activities on Virtual Era Democracy Literacy is carried out through the Online method with Problem Based Learning and Brainstorming techniques, through assistance of Community Service Program. The results of the activity show that the Literacy of Virtual Era Democracy provides benefits in increasing insight and understanding of democracy, especially in the virtual era. The Santri felt happy and enthusiastic about this activity, because online experiences provided a new atmosphere in the digital era. Changing the attitudes and new behavior in the digital domain regarding democracy need to be discussed continuously as an adaptation to new habits. Key Word: Literation, democracy, virtual , santri

Geopolitics of Catholic Pilgrimage: On the Double Materiality of (Religious) Politics in the Virtual Age

This article explores geopolitical aspects of Catholic pilgrimage in Europe. By exploring the representations of pilgrimage on Catholic social media, it shows that the increasing influence of the virtual is accompanied by a particular reassertion of the material aspects of pilgrimage. Two types of Catholic pilgrimage emerge, each with a particular spatial and political orientation. The first type of pilgrimage is predominantly politically conservative, but also spatially static, focusing on objects, be they human bodies or sacred sites. The second type is politically progressive, but also spatially dynamic, stressing pilgrimage as movement or a journey. The classic Turnerian conceptualization of a pilgrimage as a three-phase kinetic ritual thus falls apart, with liminality appropriated by the progressive type and aggregation almost entirely taken over by the conservative, apparitional pilgrimage. As a result, pilgrimage has once again become a geopolitical reflection of the broader ideological contestation both within Christianity and beyond.