For nearly a decade, beginning in the mid-1970s, a debate unfolded among physicists and engineers over how best to include effects from Einstein's general theory of relativity in the new military technology now known as the Global Positioning System (GPS). Although some exchanges were published...
On April 5th, 2000, President William Clinton stepped to the microphone at the White House Conference on the New Economy and told those gathered that the United States was experiencing “an economic transformation as profound as that that led us into the industrial revolution.” The...
Einstein’s ascent to worldwide celebrity was, in large part, not his own doing. The 1919 confirmation of the German Einstein’s theory of general relativity by British astronomers soon after the end of the First World War made him an emblem of how science could rise...
Why do so many U.S. scientists continue to lean on the language of apolitical science, even as political leaders display less and less interest in scientists’ claims to expertise, or even the existence of facts? In a new book, Freedom’s Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle...
When we think of the importance of the atomic bomb to the Truman presidency, we think of Truman’s weighty decision regarding the use of the weapon on Japan. But historians have known for decades that the narrative of “the decision to use the bomb” is...
A popular image persists of Albert Einstein as a loner, someone who avoided the hustle and bustle of everyday life in favor of quiet contemplation. Yet Einstein was deeply engaged with politics throughout his life; indeed, he was so active politically that the FBI kept...
Chinese writing is character-based, the one major world script that is neither alphabetic nor syllabic. Over the past two centuries, Chinese script has encountered presumed alphabetic universalism at every turn, whether in the form of Morse Code, Braille, stenography, Linotype, punch cards, word processing, or...
Erika Lorraine Milam (History, Princeton) Wednesday, May 10, 2017 / 4:00 PM McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Human nature contains the seeds of humanity’s destruction. Or so it seemed to popular consumers of evolutionary theory in the late 1960s who maintained that the essential quality distinguishing...
Stuart "Bill" Leslie" (History of Science & Technology, Johns Hopkins University) Thursday, March 2, 2017 / 4:00 PM HSSB 4080 Southern California’s smartest defense intellectuals preferred to hang out in some of its toniest beach communities, at RAND in Santa Monica, Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu, and Nortronics...
Lee Vinsel (Stevens Institute of Technology) Thursday, February 16, 2017 / 4:00 PM HSSB 4080 Our culture is obsessed with innovation. Innovation is thought to be the goal of business, policy-making, philanthropy, education, even play. Yet, the vast majority of human activity aims not at creating or...
Asif Siddiqi (History, Fordham University) Wednesday, May 13, 2015 / 4:00 PM HSSB 4020 Secrecy was endemic in Soviet society and culture. Information that we might consider benign in the Western context was off-limits to most of the general populace throughout the existence of the Soviet Union. Controls...
Paul Edwards (History and School of Information, University of Michigan) Thursday, February 19, 2015 / 4:00 PM McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Why does climate change remain controversial despite an overwhelming scientific consensus? Across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, constantly changing, poorly standardized data practices created...
Lisa Cartwright (Professor of Art and Communication, UC San Diego) Thursday, October 30, 2014 / 2:00 PM 2135 SSMS This talk draws on a multi-year sensory ethnography by Lisa Cartwright and Steven Rubin, who since 2009 have been documenting the everyday work experience and human-technology interaction...
Fred Turner (Communication, Stanford University) Thursday, May 1 / 4:00 PM SSMS 2135 In the early 1960s, young bohemians swayed together under the swirling lights of psychedelic slide shows, surrounded by walls of amplified sound, in dance halls and art galleries from Greenwich Village to San Francisco. For...
David A. Kirby (Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine; University of Manchester) Tuesday, December 3 / 1:00 PM 2135 SSMS Before 1968, censor boards in the US and UK dictated which aspects of science they considered appropriate for movies and which scientific subjects they considered...
Christine Borgman (Information Studies, UCLA) Friday, October 25 / 2:00 PM SSMS 2135 Knowledge sharing in science includes sharing research data. Research funding agencies have focused on increasing the supply of data by requiring data management plans and data sharing. Policy makers have paid surprisingly little...
Sarah Dry (author, independent scholar) Rob Iliffe (History, University of Sussex) Thursday, May 30 / 3:30 PM McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB Isaac Newton generated a huge amount of manuscript material during a long and active life. This rich and daunting archive includes millions of words...
Katrina Daly-Thompson (Applied Linguistics, UCLA) Friday, April 26 / 12:00 PM IHC Research Seminar Room, 6056 HSSB This timely talk reflects on discourses of identity that pervade local talk and texts in Zimbabwe, a nation beset by political and economic crisis. As she explores questions of culture that...
Dr. Henry Lowood (Curator, History of Science & Technology Collections, Stanford) Tuesday, February 12 / 4:00 PM 1009 SSMS Social Science and Media Studies Building Shortly before the release of id Software’s computer game, DOOM, at the end of 1993, id released a news release announcing the...
[vc_row css_animation="" row_type="row" use_row_as_full_screen_section="no" type="full_width" angled_section="no" text_align="left" background_image_as_pattern="without_pattern"][vc_column][vc_column_text]Conveners W. Patrick McCray, History pmccray@history.ucsb.edu Lisa Parks, Film and Media Studies lisa.parks@ucsb.edu The relationship between technology and society remains a central problem for today’s citizens, policy makers, technologists, entrepreneurs, and politicians. Too often, these issues, as addressed by scholars, become nebulous and...