ne of my premises is that most American socialists and feminists see deepened dualisms of mind and body, animal and machine, idealism and materialism in the social practices, symbolic formula-tions, and physical artefacts associated with 'high technology' and scientific culture.

the goal of topic modeling is to automatically discover the topics from a collection of documents.

Topic modeling enables us to organize and summarize electronic archives at a scale that would be impos-sible by human annotation.

probabilis-tic topic modeling, a suite of algorithms that aim to discover and annotate large archives of documents with thematic information

Yet, this utopian fantasy of the West Coast depends upon its blindness towards - and dependence on - the social and racial polarisation of the society from which it was born

Despite these fantasies, white people in California remain dependent on their darker-skinned fellow humans to work in their factories, pick their crops, look after their children and tend their gardens

natural rights of man

In many cyberpunk novels, this asocial libertarianism is portrayed by the central character of the hacker, who is a lone individual fighting for survival within the virtual world of information

For instance, the MUD program which allows real-time Net conferencing was invented by a group of students who wanted to play fantasy games over a computer network.

the Net's development was almost completely dependent on the much reviled American federal government.

At this crucial juncture, a loose alliance of writers, hackers, capitalists and artists from the West Coast of the USA have succeeded in defining a heterogeneous orthodoxy for the coming information age: the Californian Ideology.

Who would have thought that such a contradictory mix of technological determinism and libertarian individualism would becoming the hybrid orthodoxy of the information age?

Crucially, influenced by the theories of Marshall McLuhan, these technophiliacs thought that the convergence of media, computing and telecommunications would inevitably create the electronic agora - a virtual place where everyone would be able to express their opinions without fear of censorship

The radical hippies were liberals in the social sense of the word.

Unlike their parents, the hippies refused to conform to the rigid social conventions imposed on organisation men by the military, the universities, the corporations and even left-wing political parties.

On 15 May 1969, Governor Ronald Reagan ordered armed police to carry out a dawn raid against hippie protesters who had occupied People's Park near the Berkeley campus of the University of California.

they want information technologies to be used to create a new 'Jeffersonian democracy' where all individuals will be able to express themselves freely within cyberspace.

Bestiality has a new status in this cycle of marriage exchange.

The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism.

It is also an effort to contribute to socialist-feminist culture and theory in a postmodemist, non-naturalist mode and in the utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender, which is perhaps a world without genesis, but maybe also a world without end.

ontology

chimeras

I am making an argument for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings.

IRONIC

These eventsinclude the restructuring of capitalism with its emphasis on deregulationand liberalization; the failed restructuring of statism unable to adapt itselfto informationalism; the inuence of libertarian ideology arising from thecountercultural social movements of the 1960s; and the development of anew media system, enclosing cultural expressions in a global/local, inter-active hypertext.

The state in the information age is anetwork state, a state made out of a complex web of power-sharing, andnegotiated decision-making between international, multinational, national,regional, local, and non-governmental, political institutions

. On the other hand, its legitimacy is undermined by thepolitics of scandal and its dependence on media politics

Politics becomes a horse race, and a tragicomedy motivated bygreed, backstage manoeuvres, betrayals, and, often, sex and violence –agenre increasingly indistinguishable from TV scripts.

hile there is oligopolistic concen-tration of multimedia groups, there is, at the same time, marketsegmentation, and the rise of an interactive audience, superseding the uni-formity of the mass audience.

last 20 years a dra-matic surge of inequality, social polarization, and social exclusion in theworld at large, and in most countries, particularly, among advancedsocieties, in the USA and in the UK

oncecapitalism comes under decisive challenge and/or plunges into a structuralcrisis derived from its internal contradictions

This isnot a network of enterprises. It is a network made from either Žrms orsegments of Žrms, and/or from internal segmentation of Žrms.

Most jobs arein fact not global, but all economies are under the inuence of the move-ments of their globalized core.

First, it is informational, that is, the capacity of generating knowledge andprocessing/managing information determine the productivity and com-petitiveness of all kinds of economic units, be they Žrms, regions, or coun-tries.

Questions such as this can and do fill diary writers with anxietiesand often enough lead to discontinuation of diaries.

‘chapter’ derives from the Latin caput, meaning head(as of the human body

s account-keeping.

While it is true that these were all at root regional and/or classdialects, their status as chirographically controlled nationallanguages has made them different kinds ofdialects or languagefrom those which are not written on a large scale.

By separating the knower from the known (Havelock 1963),writing makes possible increasingly articulate introspectivity,opening the psyche as never before not only to the externalobjective world quite distinct from itself but also to the interiorself against whom the objective world is set.

People had tobe persuaded that writing improved the old oral methodssufficiently to warrant all the expense and troublesome techniquesit involved.

The Nigerian novelist ChinuaAchebe describes how in an Ibo village the one man who knewhow to read hoarded in his house every bit of printed material thatcame his way—newspapers, cartons, receipts (Achebe 1961, pp.120–1). It all seemed too remarkable to throw away.

Chinesecharacter writing, like many other writing systems, is intrinsicallyélitist: to master it thoroughly requires protracted leisure.

It is perhaps also theleast aesthetic of all major writing systems: it can be beautifullydesigned, but never so exquisitely as Chinese characters

he completelyphonetic alphabet favors left-hemisphere activity in the brain, andthus on neurophysiological grounds fosters abstract, analyticthought.

The Greek alphabet wasdemocratizing in the sense that it was easy for everyone to learn.

o becomesignificantly learned in the Chinese writing system normally takessome twenty years. Such a script is basically time-consuming andélitist.

All pictographic systems, even with ideographs and rebuses,require a dismaying number of symbols

The tightest control of all is achieved by thealphabet, although even this is never quite perfect in all instances.

either in words or in a totalhuman context, humanly understood.) A script in the sense of truewriting, as understood here, does not consist of mere pictures, ofrepresentations of things, but is a representation of an utterance,of words that someone says or is imagined to say

properly interiorized, doesnot degrade human life but on the contrary enhances it.

This writing providesfor consciousness as nothing else does.

Writing heightens consciousness

Grammar rules live in the unconscious in the sense that you canknow how to use the rules and even how to set up new ruleswithout being able to state what they are.

The paradox lies in the fact that the deadness of thetext, its removal from the living human lifeworld, its rigid visualfixity, assures its endurance and its potential for being resurrectedinto limitless living contexts by a potentially infinite number ofliving readers

A text stating what the whole world knows is falsewill state falsehood forever, so long as the text exists. Texts areinherently contumacious

Drum technology was providing storage at a lower cost per bit, butits speed was two orders of magnitude slower, closer to the speeds of theCard-Programmed Calculator (

The UNIVAC and the IBM 701 inaugurated the era of commercialstored-program computing. Each had its drawbacks, but overall they metthe expectations of the customers who ordered them.

Whether to code each decimal digit in binary or operate entirely in thebinary system internally remained an unsettled question.

Thenineteen installations were enough to prevent UNIVAC from completelytaking over the market and to begin IBM’s transition to a company thatdesigned and built large-scale electronic digital computers.

Eventually, however, customers applied the 701 to the same kinds of jobsthe UNIVAC was doing: logistics for a military agency,financial reports,actuarial reports, payrolls (for North American Aviation), and evenpredicting the results of a presidential election for network television.(In 1956, the 701 correctly predicted Eisenhower’s reelection.)

True to that perception, nearly all of the 19 modelsinstalled were to U.S. Defense Department or military aerospacefirms.76Initial rental fees were $15,000 a month

Although automating those four tasks could have been donewith a smaller computer, GE chose a UNIVAC in anticipation of the daywhen more sophisticated work would be done. These tasks would involvelong-range planning, market forecasting based on demographic data,revamping production processes to reduce inventories and shippingdelays, and similar jobs requiring a more ambitious use of corporateinformation.

‘the push-button age isalready obsolete; the buttons now push themselves

he UNIVAC was thefirst step intoan age of‘‘automation,’

he word‘‘UNIVAC’’was synonymous with computer, as‘‘Thermos’’was for vacuum bottles. That ended when IBM took thelead in the business

UNIVAC 2, installed at the Pentagon for the Air Comptroller, wasintended for use in Project SCOOP

Itwas the use of tape in place of punched cards.

Many design features that later became commonplacefirst appearedin the UNIVAC: among them were alphanumeric as well as numericprocessing, an extensive use of extra bits for checking, magnetic tapesfor bulk memory, and circuits called‘‘buffers’’that allowed high-speedtransfers between the fast delay line and slow tape storage units

Grace Murray Hopper and colleagues seated at a UNIVAC console, ca. 1960.Reels of UNIVAC tape are visible on both sides of the control panel. (

The Information Age had dawned.

Census alsohelped make electronic computing’s transition from the university tothe private sector

The UNIVAC’s logical structure meant that it could dothose things and more. That knowledge drove them and their companythrough the late 1940s to enter the commercial area, with whateventually became the UNIVAC.

Von Neumann’sinternational reputation as a mathematician also gave the idea moreclout than it might have had coming solely from Eckert and Mauchly,neither of whom were well-known outside the Moore School. Althoughthe term‘‘von Neumann Architecture’’is too entrenched to besupplanted

thedisclosure did not articulate the design concepts that later wouldbecome known as the stored-program principle.3

is often cited as the founding document of modern computing.26

The 604 and its successor, the IBM 605,became the mainstays of scientific computing at many installations untilreliable commercial computers became available in the mid 1950s. It wasone of IBM’s most successful products during that era: over 5,000 werebuilt between 1948 and 1958.

wo years later IBMreplaced it with the 604, which not only used tubes but also incorporatedthe sequencing capability pioneered by the Aberdeen machines.

He installed this switch between themultiplier, tabulator, and summary punch. Its function was to allow shortsequences of operations (up to 12) to be performed on a single cardbefore the next card was read.10

More relevant is the‘‘architecture’’of the entire room—including thepeople in it—that comprised a punched-card installation, since it wasthat room, not the individual machines, that the electronic computereventually replaced.

ts purpose was tocalculatefiring tables for the U.S. Army,

MIT’s Project

similar to a cyclotron

Eckert andMauchly’s computer, the UNIVAC, was a technical masterpiece but waseclipsed in the market by computers made by Remington-Rand’scompetitor, IBM. So one could say that they were indeed foolish intheir underestimation of the difficulties of commercializing their inven-tion. What was not foolish was their vision, not only of how to design andbuild a computer but also of how a society might benefit from largenumbers of them

each computer would figure out which cable to send it down next so that it would get to its destination. That's what the Internet does. It delivers packets - anywhere in the world, normally well under a second.

And in 1991 the World Wide Web was released to the public and, on a personal note, Richard T. Griffiths (famous for his phrase 'a user friendly interface is a secretary') got kicked into Word Perfect and was launched into cyber-space.

In 1987 the first subscription based commercial internet company, UUNET was founded.

The effect of the creation of NSFNet was dramatic. In the first place it broke the capacity bottleneck in the system. Secondly, it encouraged a surge in Internet use. It had taken a decade for the number of computer hosts attached to 'the Net' to top the thousand mark. By 1986 the number of hosts had reached 5000 and a year later the figure had climbed to hosts 28,000. Thirdly, the exclusion of commercial users from the back-bone had had the (intended) consequence of encouraging the development of private Internet providers.

Finally, NSFNet agreed to provide the 'backbone' for the US Internet service, and provided five 'supercomputers' to service the envisaged traffic. The first computers provided a network capacity of 56,000 bytes per second but the capacity was upgraded in 1988 to 1,544,000,000 bytes per second.

but the system is even cleverer because when we type in these addresses, the computer is sending/receiving a coded sequence of numbers as 132.229.XX.XX

First, there were more computer 'hosts' linked to the net than had originally been envisaged (in 1984 the number of hosts topped 1000 for the first time) and, second, the volume of traffic per host was much larger (mainly because of the phenomenal success of e-mail). Increasingly predictions were voiced that the entire system would eventually grind to a halt.

ARPANET is still the backbone to the entire system. When, in 1982 it finally adopts the TCP/IP the Internet is born... a connected set of networks using the TCP/IP standard.

AT&T Bell laboratories

n 1972, they successfully employed a new program to allow the sending of messages over the net, allowing direct person-to-person communication that we now refer to as e-mail.

When dealing with a 'simple' network like ARPANET it is difficult to see what the real advantage of this process was.

The final requirement was to design a protocol to allow the computers to send and receive messages and data, known as an interface message processor (IMPs).

Santa Barbara

For example, the system would not be reliant on a single routing and, if files were broken-up before transfer, it would be more difficult to eavesdrop... both useful security advantages. The inadequacy of the telephone network for running programs and transferring data was revealed in 1965 when, as an experiment, computers in Berkeley and MIT were linked over a low speed dial-up telephone-line to become the first "wide area network" (WAN) ever created.

Although the advanced computing would come to dominate its work, the initial focus of ARPA's activities were on space, ballistic missiles and nuclear test monitoring.

ButifthechannelcapacityIislessthan)RQ[S:T,theentropyofthesourcefromwhichitacceptsmessages,thenitisimpossibletodevisecodeswhichreducetheerrorfrequencyaslowasonemayplease

Thatis,onecanmaximizetherateoftransmittingusefulinformationbyusingpropercoding(

theuncertaintyinthereceivedsignalsifthemessagessentbeknown,orthespuriouspartofthereceivedsignalinformationwhichisduetonoise.

Fromthewaythisequivocationiscalculated,wecanseewhatitssignificanceis.Itmeasurestheaverageuncertaintyinthemessagewhenthesignalisknown.

Uncertaintywhicharisesbyvirtueoffreedomofchoiceonthepartofthesenderisdesirableuncertainty.

fnoiseisintroduced,thenthereceivedmessagecontainscertaindistortions,certainerrors,certainex-traneousmaterial,thatwouldcertainlyleadonetosaythatthereceivedmessageexhibits,becauseoftheeffectsofthenoise,anincreaseduncertainty.

Thebesttransmitter,infact,isthatwhichcodesthemessageinsuchawaythatthesignalhasjustthoseoptimumstatisticalcharacteristicswhicharebestsuitedtothechanneltobeused—whichinfactmaximizethesignal(oronemaysay,thechannel)entropyandmakeitequaltothecapacityIofthechannel.

asequenceofnumbers;thesenumbersthenbeingsentoverthechannelasthesignal.

thecapacityofIofthechannelisdefinedtobeHJEbitspersecond

Thereismore“information”ifyouselectfreelyoutofasetoffiftystandardmessages,thanifyouselectfreelyoutofasetoftwenty-five.

Thissortofconsiderationleadsatoncetothenecessityofcharacterizingthestatisticalnatureofthewholeensembleofmessageswhichagivenkindofsourcecanandwillproduce.Andinformation,asusedincommunicationtheory,doesjustthis.

arereallycontrolledbythestatisticalstructureofthelanguage.

Thatinforma-tionbemeasuredbyentropyis,afterall,naturalwhenwerememberthatinformation,incommunicationtheory,isassociatedwiththeamountoffreedomofchoicewehaveinconstructingmessages.Thusforacommunicationsourceonecansay,justashewouldalsosayitofathermodynamicensemble,

Supposethattwopersonschoosesamplesindifferentways,andstudywhattrendstheirstatisticalpropertieswouldshowasthesamplesbecomelarger.Ifthesituationisergodic,thenthosetwopersons,howevertheymayhavechosentheirsamples,agreeintheirestimatesofthepropertiesofthewhole.Ergodicsystems,inotherwords,exhibitaparticularlysafeandcomfortingsortofstatisticalregularity.

“Constantinoplefishingnastypink.”

Forasthesuccessivesymbolsarechosen,thesechoicesare,atleastfromthepointofviewofthecommunicationsystem,governedbyprobabilities;andinfactbyprobabilitieswhicharenotindependent,butwhich,atanystageoftheprocess,dependupontheprecedingchoices.

Theremarksthusfarrelatetoartificiallysimplesituationswheretheinformationsourceisfreetochooseonlybetweenseveraldefinitemessages—likeamanpickingoutoneofasetofstandardbirthdaygreetingtelegrams.

Forthreerelaysarecapableofrespondingto
or8choices,whichsymbolicallymightbewrittenas000,001,011,010,100,110,101,111,inthefirstofwhichallthreerelaysareopen,andinthelastofwhichallthreerelaysareclosed.Andthelogarithmtothebase2of
is3,sothatthelogarithmicmeasureassignsthreeunitsofinformationtothis

Itdoubtlessseemsqueer,whenonefirstmeetsit,thatinformationisdefinedasthelogarithmofthenumberofchoices.

Theconceptofinformationappliesnottotheindividualmessages(astheconceptofmeaningwould),butrathertothesituationasawhole,theunitinformationindicatingthatinthissituationonehasanamountoffreedomofchoice,inselectingamessage,whichitisconvenient-toregardasastandardorunitamount.

Butthisdoesnotmeanthattheengineeringaspectsarenecessarilyirrelevanttothesemanticaspects.

Theseunwantedadditionsmaybedistortionsofsound(intelephony,forexample)orstatic(inradio),ordistortionsinshapeorshadingofpicture(television),orerrorsintransmission(telegraphyorfacsimile),etc.Allofthesechangesinthetransmittedsignalarecallednoise

Thereceiverisasortofinversetransmitter,changingthetransmittedsignalbackintoamessage,andhandingthismessageontothedestination.WhenItalktoyou,mybrainistheinformationsource,yoursthedestination;myvocalsystemisthetransmitter,andyourearandtheassociatedeighthnerveisthereceiver

artofthesignificanceofthenewtheorycomesfromthefactthatlevelsBandC,above,canmake,useonlyofthosesignalaccuracieswhichturnouttobepossiblewhenanalyzedatLevelA.

Insomeconnectionsitmaybedesirabletouseastillbroaderdefinitionofcommunication,namely,onewhichwouldincludetheproceduresbymeansofwhichonemechanism(sayautomaticequipmenttotrackanairplaneandtocomputeitsprobablefuturepositions)affectsanothermechanism(sayaguidedmissilechasingthisairplane)

Yet, in the application of science to the needs and desires of man, it would seem to be a singularly unfortunate stage at which to terminate the process, or to lose hope as to the outcome.

It is a suggestive thought, but it hardly warrants prediction without losing touch with reality and immediateness.

Is it not possible that we may learn to introduce them without the present cumbersomeness of first transforming electrical vibrations to mechanical ones, which the human mechanism promptly transforms back to the electrical form?

Technical difficulties of all sorts have been ignored, certainly, but also ignored are means as yet unknown which may come any day to accelerate technical progress as violently as did the advent of the thermionic tube.

sets a reproducer in action, photographs the whole trail out, and passes it to his friend for insertion in his own memex

When the user is building a trail, he names it, inserts the name in his code book, and taps it out on his keyboard. Before him are the two items to be joined, projected onto adjacent viewing positions.

It affords an immediate step, however, to associative indexing, the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another. This is the essential feature of the memex.

A special button transfers him immediately to the first page of the index.

Deflection to the left gives him the same control backwards.

It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk.

It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, "memex" will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility.

The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it.

truly significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential.

Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial.

Now, for many, this appears to be approaching an end. What are the scientists to do next?

The destination is the person (or thing) for whom the message is intended.

rnachines

The receiver ordinarily performs the inverse operation of that done by the transmitter, reconstructing the message from the signal.

The channel is merely the medium used to transmit the signal from transmitter to receiver.

Although this definition must be generalized considerably when we consider the influence of the statistics of the message and when we have a continuous range of messages, we will in all cases use an essentially logarithmic measure.

messages.

selected from a set

These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem.

The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point

These, together with the billions of othertrajectories that accompany them, will furnish agreat cache of bones from which to reconstructthe skeleton of a new science.

but“Freud”is moredeeply ingrained in our collective subconscious

his population is highlyenriched in documented victims of repression,such as Pablo Picasso (s= 0.12), the Bauhausarchitect Walter Gropius (s= 0.16), and HermannMaas (s< 0.01), an influential Protestant ministerwhohelpedmanyJewsflee(7).

The writers became fa-mous about a decade after the actors, but rose forlonger and to a much higher peak (8 × 10−7)

Thus, people are getting morefamous than ever before but are being forgottenmore rapidly than ever.

As a result, the most famous people alivetoday are more famous—in books—than theirpredecessors. Yet this fame is increasingly short-lived: The post-peak half-life dropped from 120to 71 years during the 19th century.

The age of peak celebrity has been con-sistent over time: about 75 years after birth

In the future, everyone will be famous for7.5 minutes”–Whatshisname

We forget faster.

But there have been changes. The amplitudeof the plots is rising every year: Precise dates areincreasingly common.

America is the world’s leading exporter of bothregular and irregular verbs.

Both were irregular in Middle English,were mostly regular by 1800, and subsequentlybacktracked and are irregular again today.

Using this technique, we estimated the num-ber of words in the English lexicon as 544,000 in1900, 597,000 in 1950, and 1,022,000 in 2000.The lexicon is enjoying a period of enormousgrowth: The addition of ~8500 words/year hasincreased the size of the language by over 70%during the past 50 years (Fig. 2A).

Not only must lexicographers avoid addingwords that have fallen out of fashion, they mustalso weed obsolete words from earlier editions.This is an imperfect process.

“darkmatter”undocumented in standard references

Not all common 1-grams are English words.Many fell into three nonword categories: (i) 1-gramswith nonalphabetic characters (“l8r”,“3.14159”),(ii) misspellings (“becuase”,“abberation”), and(iii) foreign words (“sensitivo”).

For instance, in 1861, the 1-gram“slavery”appeared in the corpus 21,460 times, on 11,687

he corpus cannot be read by a human. If youtried to read only English-language entries fromthe year 2000 alone, at the reasonable pace of 200words/min, without interruptions for food or sleep,it would take 80 years.

We survey the vast terrain of‘culturomics,’focusing on linguistic and cultural phenomena that were reflected in the English language between1800 and 2000. W

(Indeed, a 1996 study by Michael Wenger and David Payne found that hypertext did not impose a greater cognitive load on readers than linear text, a result that DeStefano and LeFevre note in passing.

It’s more like an interregnum, or the crouch before a leap.

And of course we have to be surprised, delighted, puzzled, even disturbed. We have to enjoy ourselves. If we can do that, digital reading will expand the already vast interior space of our humanity.

A new generation of digital writers is building on video games, incorporating their interactive features—and cognitive sparks—into novelistic narratives that embrace the capabilities of our screens and tablets

Proust and the Squid

Maybe I’m just the kind of person who likes building situation models, but I don’t think I’m alone in this. If there were no pleasure in reading things that don’t make sense, who would read the Surrealists?

this engagement led to increased understanding, the way puzzling over a difficult poem yields more than reading quickly through an easy one.

The cognitive load imposed by hypertext doesn’t correspond in a straightforward way to the number of choices presented at a decision point, or to the total number of links in a hypertext.

They concluded that this expectation was, generally speaking, correct, and Carr cited it in his 2011 book The Shallows, as evidence that the Internet is making us stupid.

Students asked to read a text on-screen thought they could do it faster than students asked to read the same text in print, and did a worse job of pacing themselves in a timed study period. Not surprisingly, the on-screen readers then scored worse on a reading comprehension test.

“fast and shallow reading of short texts such as news, e-mails, and forum notes.”

the quantity of information available to the wired reader poses a different and more serious problem.

we have been wandering off all along. When we read, the eye does not progress steadily along the line of text; it alternates between saccades—little jumps—and brief stops, not unlike the movement of the mouse’s cursor across a screen of hypertext.

In Carr’s view, the “endless, mesmerizing buzz” of the Internet imperils our very being: “One of the greatest dangers we face,” he writes, “as we automate the work of our minds, as we cede control over the flow of our thoughts and memories to a powerful electronic system, is ... a slow erosion of our humanness and our humanity.

Thus,withautomation,for example,the newpatternsof humanassociationtendtoeliminate jobsitistrue.