Grazing the digital commons : artist-made softwares, politicised technologies and the creation of new generative realms

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences.The growth of the free software movement from the mid-1980s to the present day has contributed vast amounts of creative labour and technical innovation to what has become known as the digital commons. In many instances it has been 'the greater good' rather than commercial gain which has driven this research and production. Artists have played a significant role in the research, development, creative application and socialisation of various technologies, yet their recent contributions to cultural software have not been widely documented and critically examined outside of the media arts field. This thesis focuses on the recent work of the leading art group Mongrel, and their development of a powerful software platform called Netmonster. By drawing on current theoretical ideas from sociology including the qualities of immaterial labour in advanced capitalism, and the social and power dynamics of network society, I have built a framework to consider the social role and potential of cultural software. My research begins by outlining early developments in the history of computing, emphasising social and political factors shaping the technologies, and the ideas and goals of their inventors. This is followed by a discussion of the creative power of the digital commons, the collaborative labour processes involved in the free software movement, examples of innovative social technologies which are being produced, and the kinds of opportunities which can be opened up through the adoption of these tools and processes. The research concludes with an in-depth study of the Netmonster software. Netmonster is a ’poetic structure for producing network visualisations'. I draw upon my own participant-observer experiences of using Netmonster as a research and art-making tool in 2005 to explain and illustrate its features. According to Mongrel, Netmonster was created for 'the online resourcing and collaborative construction of the networked image’. A responsive, immediate and sensuous space for projects based on networked collaboration — the future of generative social software'. My research concludes that the digital commons is a thriving site of creative and affective production which flows through and animates the networks of 'informational capitalism'. Although the digital commons is increasingly a site of contestation as attempts are made by various forces to restrict, commodify or enclose it, it continues to grow and diversify, adding new nodes of generative activity to itself, and in the process transforming the nature of network society itself

Incompatible and contradictory retrodictions in the history approach to quantum mechanics

We illustrate two simple spin examples which show that in the consistent histories approach to quantum mechanics one can retrodict with certainty incompatible or contradictory propositions corresponding to non-orthogonal or, respectively, orthogonal projections

Relativistic Spontaneous Localization: A Proposal

A new proposal for a Lorentz-invariant spontaneous localization theory is presented. It is based on the choice of a suitable set of macroscopic quantities to be stochastically induced to have definite values. Such macroscopic quantities have the meaning of a time-integrated amount of a microscopically defined quantity called stuff related to the presence of massive particles

Laser pulse annealing of ion-implanted GaAs

GaAs single-crystals wafers are implanted at room temperature with 400-keV Te + ions to a dose of 1×10^15 cm^–2 to form an amorphous surface layer. The recrystallization of this layer is investigated by backscattering spectrometry and transmission electron microscopy after transient annealing by Q-switched ruby laser irradiation. An energy density threshold of about 1.0 J/cm^2 exists above which the layer regrows epitaxially. Below the threshold the layer is polycrystalline; the grain size increases as the energy density approaches threshold. The results are analogous to those reported for the elemental semiconductors, Si and Ge. The threshold value observed is in good agreement with that predicted by the simple model successfully applied previously to Si and Ge

FlowSort-GDSS:a novel group multi-criteria decision support system for sorting problems with application to FMEA

Failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) is a well-known approach for correlating the failure modes of a system to their effects, with the objective of assessing their criticality. The criticality of a failure mode is traditionally established by its risk priority number (RPN), which is the product of the scores assigned to the three risk factors, which are likeness of occurrence, the chance of being undetected and the severity of the effects. Taking a simple "unweighted" product has major shortcomings. One of them is to provide just a number, which does not sort failures modes into priority classes. Moreover, to make the decision more robust, the FMEA is better tackled by multiple decision-makers. Unfortunately, the literature lacks group decision support systems (GDSS) for sorting failures in the field of the FMEA. In this paper, a novel multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) method named FlowSort-GDSS is proposed to sort the failure modes into priority classes by involving multiple decision-makers. The essence of this method lies in the pair-wise comparison between the failure modes and the reference profiles established by the decision-makers on the risk factors. Finally a case study is presented to illustrate the advantages of this new robust method in sorting failures