Stéphane Dalbera’s Post

Very glad and more than a little bit proud with two achievements over the past week: the publication of my latest article and my youtube debut! My paper is called "The Product of Practices: How Natural History and Mathematical Physics Gave Meaning to Cartography’s Depth Contour Lines". It deals with the question of how innovative way to visualize phenomena appeared in the natural sciences, taking a case study from the eighteenth century. Spoiler alert: cutting across the boundaries between different sciences was key. The paper was published in 'Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society' and is freely available for the first 50 people who follow this link: https://lnkd.in/dV9za_Tw. If that does not work, drop me a line! I already announced my talk last week but here is the link: https://lnkd.in/deG6p9rJ. In the talk, "From the Rivers to the Seas: Aims and Practices of Early Modern Depth Measurements", I build on the paper to figure out how these innovative visual techniques were used to measure the depths of seas, and what kinds of practical aims the people who used those lines had in mind.

My solo paper "Matroid Products in Tropical Geometry" has just been accepted by Research in the Mathematical Sciences! Check out the preprint on arXiv (id 2306.14771).

One common misconception about the information age is that it is merely a new industrial revolution. However, this is a significant under-appreciation of the true scope of the significance of information science. Information science has revised many images, symbols, and narratives of sociality. The resulting transformation is similar to what Charles Taylor calls a new "social imaginary." I find that much of the scholarship, particularly in jurisprudence, misses that. It's time we recognize and appreciate the true magnitude of its impact. #InformationScience #DigitalTransformation

Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler’s “Calculating empires” (2023) Must-read for my Digital Humanities students, and also worth your time: “A visualization of large-scale research exploring the coevolution of technical and social structures over five centuries. The objective is to place the contemporary period within a longer trajectory of ideas, devices, infrastructures, and systems of power. It traces technological patterns of colonialism, militarization, and automation (…) providing a way to view our technological present within a deeper historical context.” https://lnkd.in/dYB-FCM9

On this day in tech history (September 20th): 1878: Thomas Edison patents the phonograph 💽, a device capable of recording and playing back sound. [Source: Britannica] 1954: The FORTRAN programming language 💻 is invented at IBM. FORTRAN is the first widely used high-level programming language, and it is still used today in scientific and engineering applications. [Source: Computer History Museum] 1983: The RSA encryption algorithm 🔐 is patented. RSA is one of the most widely used encryption algorithms in the world, and it is used to protect data in transit and at rest. [Source: Britannica] 1998: The first e-mail ✉️ from China is sent to its connection in Germany. This event marked the beginning of China's integration into the global internet. [Source: Facts.net] 2012: The discovery of the Higgs boson 🔬, often referred to as the "God particle," is announced by scientists at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. The Higgs boson is a fundamental particle that is thought to play a role in giving other particles their mass. [Source: Britannica] #TechHistoryWithRowshan #TechHistory #September20 #Phonograph #FORTRAN #RSA #Email #HiggsBoson

The top three list of scientific thinking here reminds me of C. S. Peirce's theories, especially the fourth way of the fixation of belief, the fallibilism, and the community of inquiry. https://lnkd.in/gFnwCgis

Mental maps can be used in qualitative studies of people, places, and spaces in various social science fields. This extensive review unpicks the method and offers guidelines for future research. https://lnkd.in/gPvK6ndM

- To a rationalist with a calculator, every conundrum is a utilitarian choice. - Many of humanity's technological and scientific advancements have come from working in [artificial] environments. - [the abstractionist] is closing off all paths. Basically he is turning a canonical open world problem into a closed world problem so that his utilitarian math-based solutions seem like the only way forward. - The real world is dominated by feedback, game theory, context, uncertainty, and long event series that don't come with an "undo" button. - the next time someone tries to force you to confess to moral intuitions you don't actually have, consider that they might have actually convinced themselves that their notebooks or laboratory environments have more similarity with the real world than they have any legitimate reason to. The impulse of the technocrat. From a post (tweet) by Alexandros Marinos : https://lnkd.in/gVFaq3BX

PDF Rigidity Theory and Applications Brigitte Servatius, Herman Servatius (auth.), M. F. Thorpe, P. M. Duxbury (eds.) digsell https://lnkd.in/egRGEedX Although rigidity has been studied since the time of Lagrange (1788) and Maxwell (1864), it is only in the last twenty-five years that it has begun to find applications in the basic sciences. The modern era starts with Laman (1970), who made the subject rigorous in two dimensions, followed by the development of computer algorithms that can test over a million sites in seconds and find the rigid regions, and the associated pivots, leading to many applications. This workshop was organized to bring together leading researchers studying the underlying theory, and to explore the various areas of science where applications … Read More » https://lnkd.in/eudNm59M