Culture and Code: The Evolution of Digital Architecture and the Formation of Networked Publics

Culture and Code traces the construction of the modern idea of the Internet and offers a potential glimpse of how that idea may change in the near future. Developed through a theoretical framework that links Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim’s theory of the sociotechnical imaginary to broader theories on publics and counterpublics, Culture and Code offers a way to reframe the evolution of Internet technology and its culture as an enmeshed part of larger socio-political shifts within society. In traveling the history of the modern Internet as detailed in its technical documentation, legal documents, user created content, and popular media this dissertation positions the construction of the idea of the Internet and its technology as the result of an ongoing series of intersections and collisions between the sociotechnical imaginaries of three different publics: Implementors, Vendors, and Users. These publics were identified as the primary audiences of the 1989 Internet Engineering Task Force specification of the four-layer TCP/IP model that became a core part of our modern infrastructure. Using that model as a continued metaphor throughout the work, Culture and Code shows how each public’s sociotechnical imaginary developed, how they influenced and shaped one another, and the inevitable conflicts that arose leading to a coalescing sociotechnical imaginary that is centered around vendor control while continuing to project the ideal of the empowered user

SHIFTING SPACES IN DIGITAL RHETORIC: EPHEMERA IN THE AGE OF INFINITE MEMORY

ABSTRACT SHIFTING SPACES IN DIGITAL RHETORIC: EPHEMERA IN THE AGE OF INFINITE MEMORY By Geoffrey Gimse The storage capacity of digital systems has expanded at an incredible rate over the past decade. This new and growing space and the rapidly evolving technologies that surround it have become an intrinsic component of the digital creative process, and yet they remain relatively unexamined. The methods by which creative works are offloaded from the human mind, abstracted into data objects, and ultimately placed into an external storage medium are an excellent starting point for this type of critical analysis. This paper seeks to set the groundwork for such an examination by outlining the relationship between storage, memory, and the data algorithms that shape today’s digital systems. By examining digital memory and the storage of text and image from both a software and hardware perspective, it becomes apparent that as storage capacity increases, the relative impermanence and malleability of the objects created within that system also increases. Thus arises an interesting paradox: our ever-growing capacity to store and recall texts ultimately results in the works themselves becoming more ephemeral in nature

Classification of Marine Vessels using Sonar Data and a Neural Network

A submarine navigator have to keep track of surrounding ships in order to avoid collision and to gain a tactical advantage. This is currently done manually by a sonar operator, trained to listen through the water and identify ship-types by the sound they emit. This project presents a review and implementation of different solutions to the problem of audio classification. The goal of this work was to build a system capable of helping submarine navigators identify surrounding obstacles and ships based on the sound recorded by the sonar on board the submerged submarine. The research aims to uncover the best combination of techniques that can be used for this classification task. This project concerns both the field of signal analysis and artificial intelligence as the system comprises of two parts. The first being a method of extracting informative features from sonar data captured by the submarine. The second part is to feed the processed data into a neural network (NN) and provide a classification of the ship's type. In this project a system have been developed in order to experiment with a variety of feature extraction techniques and neural network structures to find a solution suitable for the submarine sonar classification problem. The system have been able to place 97.3\% of the ships in the correct category when using the highest scoring combination of a feature extraction technique and a neural network. The best found combination was the Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients feature extraction technique and a standard feed-forward neural network

Ancient or Modern? : an Analysis of Layout and Variant Readings in Unprovenanced Post-2002 “Dead Sea Scrolls” Fragments

Scholars have raised concern regarding the authenticity of several unprovenanced post-2002 “Dead Sea Scrolls” fragments. In addition to addressing suspicious physical and scribal features, a theory of textual correspondence between the fragments and modern editions of the Hebrew Bible has been proposed. This theory is twofold: It argues 1) that there is a correspondence in line to line layout, and 2) that readings suggested in the critical apparatus by the editors of the modern editions seem to have been imported to the fragments. This thesis intends to aid scholars in determining the fragmentsʼ authenticity by testing the theory of textual correspondence through a systematic analysis of several unprovenanced fragments. Twenty-seven fragments from the Schøyen Collection and the Museum of the Bible Collection have been selected for this analysis. Ten of them are already referred to as modern forgeries in relevant literature, six of which confirm the theory of textual correspondence. It therefore seems probable that textual correspondence is in some cases a characteristic of modern forgery. As seven of the remaining seventeen fragments also show textual correspondence to modern editions of the Hebrew Bible, there is good reason to question the authenticity of these fragments as well. This thesis therefore argues that further research must be done in order to determine the authenticity of all published unprovenanced “Dead Sea Scrolls” fragments

The Language of Lone Wolf Terrorists An in-depth study of the use of personal pronouns and identity terms in lone wolf terrorist manifestos

Master´s thesis in English (EN501)This thesis examines the manifestos written by four lone wolf terrorists, Elliot Rodger, Dylann Roof, Christopher Harper-Mercer, and Patrick Crusius before they carried out mass killings in the United States. By conducting an analysis of these perpetrators’ use of the personal pronouns I, me, us, we, you, they, and them, this thesis looks at their presentation of themselves, their actions, and the perceived threats against which they are fighting. Additionally, an examination of the identity terms Black, Hispanic, White, Asian, Jewish, Muslim, Christian, woman, man, and immigrant will further investigate ideological perceptions of the different identity groupings among the lone wolves examined here and the far-right activists who inspired them. Many of the authors are driven by self-entitlement and a sense of white superiority, and their language serves to describe themselves as martyrs and present their victims as the real aggressors. Further, the use of online forums as a platform to spread their ideologies and communicate with others with similar mindsets will be investigated as it is an essential element in the radicalization of the perpetrators and a factor in their influencing of others. Key words: Lone wolf terrorists, manifesto, Critical Discourse Analysis, pronouns, identity terms, ince

Approximating the vanishing capillarity limit of two-phase flow in multi-dimensional heterogeneous porous medium

International audienceNeglecting capillary pressure effects in two-phase flow models for porous media may lead to non-physical solutions: indeed, the physical solution is obtained as limit of the parabolic model with small but non-zero capillarity. In this paper, we propose and compare several numerical strategies designed specifically for approximating physically relevant solutions of the hyperbolic model with neglected capillarity, in the multi-dimensional case. It has been shown in [Andreianov&Canc'es, Comput. Geosci., 2013, to appear] that in the case of the one-dimensional Buckley-Leverett equation with distinct capillary pressure properties of adjacent rocks, the interface may impose an upper bound on the transmitted flux. This transmission condition may reflect the oil trapping phenomenon. We recall the theoretical results for the one-dimensional case which are used to motivate the construction of multi- dimensional finite volume schemes. We describe and compare a coupled scheme resulting as the limit of the scheme constructed in [Brenner & Canc'es & Hilhorst, HAL preprint no.00675681, 2012) and two IMplicit Pressure - Explicit Saturation (IMPES) schemes with different level of coupling

Applications of the DFLU flux to systems of conservation laws

The DFLU numerical flux was introduced in order to solve hyperbolic scalar conservation laws with a flux function discontinuous in space. We show how this flux can be used to solve systems of conservation laws. The obtained numerical flux is very close to a Godunov flux. As an example we consider a system modeling polymer flooding in oil reservoir engineering

On the upstream mobility scheme for two-phase flow in porous media

When neglecting capillarity, two-phase incompressible flow in porous media is modelled as a scalar nonlinear hyperbolic conservation law. A change in the rock type results in a change of the flux function. Discretizing in one-dimensional with a finite volume method, we investigate two numerical fluxes, an extension of the Godunov flux and the upstream mobility flux, the latter being widely used in hydrogeology and petroleum engineering. Then, in the case of a changing rock type, one can give examples when the upstream mobility flux does not give the right answer.Comment: A preprint to be published in Computational Geoscience

A theory of L1L^1-dissipative solvers for scalar conservation laws with discontinuous flux

We propose a general framework for the study of $L^1$ contractive semigroups of solutions to conservation laws with discontinuous flux. Developing the ideas of a number of preceding works we claim that the whole admissibility issue is reduced to the selection of a family of "elementary solutions", which are certain piecewise constant stationary weak solutions. We refer to such a family as a "germ". It is well known that (CL) admits many different $L^1$ contractive semigroups, some of which reflects different physical applications. We revisit a number of the existing admissibility (or entropy) conditions and identify the germs that underly these conditions. We devote specific attention to the anishing viscosity" germ, which is a way to express the "$\Gamma$-condition" of Diehl. For any given germ, we formulate "germ-based" admissibility conditions in the form of a trace condition on the flux discontinuity line $x=0$ (in the spirit of Vol'pert) and in the form of a family of global entropy inequalities (following Kruzhkov and Carrillo). We characterize those germs that lead to the $L^1$-contraction property for the associated admissible solutions. Our approach offers a streamlined and unifying perspective on many of the known entropy conditions, making it possible to recover earlier uniqueness results under weaker conditions than before, and to provide new results for other less studied problems. Several strategies for proving the existence of admissible solutions are discussed, and existence results are given for fluxes satisfying some additional conditions. These are based on convergence results either for the vanishing viscosity method (with standard viscosity or with specific viscosities "adapted" to the choice of a germ), or for specific germ-adapted finite volume schemes