- Lab-grown meat is supposed to be inevitable. The science tells a different story. [The Counter] “It’s a fable driven by hope, not science, and when the investors finally realize this the market will collapse.”
- A world without Sci-Hub. [Palladium] “The cost of individually purchasing all the articles required to complete a typical literature review could easily amount to thousands of dollars.”
- Manufacturing Consensus. [The New Atlantis] “We hear constantly today, and rightly enough, that trust in scientific expertise is under assault. Too often during Covid, the assailants have been the experts themselves.”
No Tech Reader #30
November 23, 2021 by Filed Under: Meat, No Tech Readers, Science
Technologically utopian solutions rest on narrowly defined system boundaries
July 26, 2021 by Filed Under: Random, Science, Technology
Quoted from: Cederlof, Gustav, and Alf Hornborg. “System boundaries as epistemological and ethnographic problems: Assessing energy technology and socio-environmental impact.” Journal of Political Ecology 28.1 (2021): 111-123.
What are the social and environmental impacts of carbon and low-carbon energy technologies in different places and at different times? To answer this question, we are faced with an epistemological dilemma. Before measurement takes place, we need to define where and when the phenomenon we are measuring begins and ends—to define its “system boundaries.” For instance, one liter of semi-skimmed milk, bought in a British supermarket, has an energy content of 380 kcal. However, to think of the milk in terms of energy also evokes the far-reaching social and environmental contexts that bring milk to the market.
Beyond the energy content declared on the milk carton, we can undertake a life cycle assessment (LCA)—expanding the system boundaries—to account for the energy (or the carbon, water, labor, or land) “embodied” in the milk via its production and distribution. We might include the energy content of processed cattle feed, electricity used to run milking machines, cooling tanks, water boilers, and lighting, energy inputs in alkaline and acid detergents, diesel for tractors, and a wide range of other energy technologies used in production.
We might expand the system boundaries further to account for the fuels needed to generate the electricity, run the chemical plant, fuel the milk tanker, power the dairy plant, and so on. Arguably, we should also account for the energy expended in the production of the electricity generator, the milking machine, the milk tanker and the tractor, fencing and the batteries storing energy to electrify it. But if an electricity generator and a battery are somehow embodied in a liter of milk, we have culturally come far away from what we normally understand milk to be. Where, then, should we draw the system boundaries around an object in order to gauge its social and environmental impact?
Does covid cause brain damage?
“The latest in the long succession of attempts at maximizing people’s fear of covid is the claim that it causes brain damage. And not just in those who have spent time in the ICU, in everyone, even if all they had was a mild cold. The claim is currently doing the rounds on social media (apparently alarmist propaganda only counts as misinformation if it’s going against the dominant narrative). The assertion comes from a paper that’s recently been published in EClinicalMedicine (a daughter journal of The Lancet). The paper is actually quite illuminating about the current state of medical research, so I thought it would be interesting to go through it in some detail…”
“To me, the main lesson here is that we currently live in a world where junk science goes unquestioned and gets published in peer-reviewed journals as long as it feeds in to the dominant narrative. If this study had been claiming, say, that face masks didn’t work, then it would remain stuck at the pre-print stage forever, or, if it ever did get published, it would immediately have been retracted. It has become blatantly obvious over the past year and a half that it is not primarily the quality of studies that determines where and whether they get published, but rather their acceptability to the powers that be.”
Read more: Does covid cause brain damage?, Sebastian Rushworth, July 26, 2021.
The Making of an Indigenous Scanning Tunneling Microscope
Pankaj Sekhsaria investigates the culture of innovation in nanotechnology laboratories in India. He found the very first Indian Scanning Tunneling Microscope (STM), which was built in 1988, only seven years after the first one, for which the inventors were awarded a 1986 Nobel Prize. Sekhsaria shows how the making of this first Indian STM can be seen as a succesful application of what he calles “technological jugaad”.
Jugaad is an Indian word that does not have an easy equivalent in English, although “tinkering” and “bricolage” come close: it means reconfiguring materialities to overcome obstacles and find solutions; it can also mean working the system to one’s advantage and thus sometimes has negative connotations related to gambling and corruption.
A table-top STM placed on the inflated tube of a car tyre that acts as a vibration isolating device. Picture by Pankaj Sekhsaria.
Sekhsaria traces the history of this technology and describes how “discarded refrigerators, stepper motors from junked computers, tubes from car tyres, bungee cords, Viton rubber tubing, weights from the grocers’ shop, aluminum vessels generally used in the kicthen and bobbins from sewing machines were only some of the components that went into the making of the first prototype and the other probe microscopes that followed”.
It is important to emphasize that there is nothing second-rate about this STM and the research it allowed. The research group has published its findings with STM in top-tier, international journals, and the doctoral graduates involved found postdoc positions in the most prestigious laboratories in both Europe and the United States. Pankaj Sekhsaria highlighted that while these Indian nanoscientists followed their own very “Indian” style of working around scarce resources, still they were able to produce superb, internationally recognized research.
Quoted from: “Good fortune, Mirrors, and Kisses”, Wiebe E. Bijker, in Technology and Culture, Volume 54, Number 3, July 2013. Pankaj Sekhsaria’s research paper is online and well worth a read: “The making of an indigenous scanning tunneling microscope“, in Current Science, Volume 104, Number 9, 10 May 2013.
Related articles:
