2O世纪3O年代科技兴农试验：定县猪种改良

五四新化运动后,科学主义、科技兴国的思想在中国渐为流传,但如何付诸实践,这是一个尚待探索的问题。20世纪二三十年代,晏阳初先生在定县进行的平民教育运动体现了他利用科学技术改造中国农村的志向、总体构想和实践,真正体现了“五四”之后中国知识分子开始把国外先进的科学技术应用于农村的开拓精神。我们选择了猪种改良这个角度,考察平教会是如何踏踏实实地进行科技下乡、改造农村落后面貌的。我们认为,晏阳初的这一思想和实践具有重要的历史价值。     

Late Pleistocene Technology at Rose Cottage Cave: A Search for Modern Behavior in an MSA Context

Recent excavations at Rose Cottage Cave, located in the Free State, South Africa, have revealed both a transitional assemblage, dated to ca. 20,000 bp, and a final Middle Stone Age (MSA) assemblage, dated to ca. 28,000 bp. Preliminary analysis of these assemblages was undertaken to determine if the current European model of a cultural revolution for the emergence of the Upper Palaeolithic can be applied to the southern African evidence. Examination of these assemblages revealed that differences occurred between the transition in Europe and that in southern Africa in both the chronology of the transition and the degree to which this complete cultural package is linked to the emergence of Late Stone Age (LSA) technology. The methods of lithic production, the chronology of the MSA/LSA transition, and the associated behavioral characteristics were examined and results indicated that the technological change which occurred during the MSA/LSA transition was not a dramatic innovation in technology but, rather, a shift in the emphasis of production from a level of technology already in place and demonstrate a level of continuity between the MSA and the LSA. As a gradual occurrence, the MSA/LSA transition does not seem to fit the time frame for the European Upper Palaeolithic; it both occurs at a later period and takes longer to transpire. In addition, the origins of symbolic use of lithics appear to lie within the MSA, indicating that a more complex set of behavioral adaptation was occurring in the late Pleistocene in southern Africa, and that the MSA/LSA transition in this region does not adequately conform to the model of a revolutionary shift in behavior and technology that is proposed for the Middle/Upper Palaeolithic transition in Europe     

Digital extraction: Blockchain traceability in mineral supply chains

Digital data — including technologically-mediated data generated by blockchain-enabled traceability — is performing an increasingly integral role in extractive operations, but scarce attention has been paid to the structuring effect of these digital technologies or the socio-economic spatiality of data-driven mining operations. Drawing on extensive qualitative research (interviews, participant observation, and two sets of survey data among actors relevant to these mineral supply chains), this article advances the notion of “digital extraction” to describe the collection, analysis, and instrumentalization of digital data generated under the banner of blockchain-based due diligence, chain of custody certifications, and various transparency mechanisms, situated alongside and in support of mineral extraction. The article mobilizes concepts from political geography and political ecology to argue that digital technologies of traceability in extractive processes potentially create new forms of control and exclusion or exacerbate existing social, political, and territorial dispossession through asymmetric relations of power and knowledge in mineral supply chains. Despite industry efforts to make mineral supply chains more sustainable by resorting to digital certification and traceability, the strategic uses of uncertainty, ignorance, and ambiguity undergirding blockchain-enabled traceability systems fail to challenge existing inequalities in resource use and access or fulfill the promise of transparency and accountability.     

植物覆盖技术保护潮湿地区土遗址探讨

潮湿地区降雨量大,土遗址普遍风化严重,室外保护难度大,表面防风化技术还不成熟。基于土遗址表面普遍生长有茂盛植被的现象,充分发挥植物对遗址的保护作用,减少不利影响,采用植物覆盖技术保护遗址十分必要且可行。本工作通过调查植物对遗址影响和植物覆盖技术保护实践的分析,论证了植物覆盖技术的可行性,提出针对封土、墙体等不同遗址,充分考虑遗址风化程度和保存状态,选用适合植物物种实施植物覆盖技术,植物物种选择应首选当地适宜优势物种,应充分评估植物对土遗址的不利影响。研究结果表明,植物覆盖技术保护遗址十分必要且可行。     

Project-based community participatory action research using geographic information technologies

The paper investigates the effects of a project-based community participation course in which students chose research topics relevant to a local community. Specifically, the students undertook the following projects: (1) creating a virtual 3D model of a local government office, (2) creating interactive digitized versions of mountain trails using geotourism, (3) determining optimal locations for trash recycling bins using network analysis, and (4) assessing the water quality of a local river. Geographic information technologies, such as GIS and Google Earth, were employed as analytical and visualization tools. The answers to a questionnaire, course evaluations, reflective journals, and interviews found that participants positively evaluated their learning experiences. In addition, the projects received favorable reviews from community members and professional geographers.     

Cultural implications of international volunteer tourism: US students’ experiences in Cameroon

ABSTRACT

A popular trend is for US colleges to organise short-term, self-funded trips for students to volunteer for several weeks in poverty-stricken communities in the global South. To explore the cultural implications of short-term, international volunteer projects, I undertake an ethnographic study of college students of who travel to a small village in Cameroon to improve the quality of drinking water and community health. I examine whether the volunteer tourism can serve as a unique opportunity to see beyond the African stereotypes to recognise the historical and structural context in which Africa continues to suffer. Although a trip such as this can be a disruptive event for students to critically evaluate the global privileges of Westerners, students tend to experience Cameroon through the lens of popular stereotypes about Africa and Western paternalism. The encounters with Africans in the absence of sufficient education about postcolonial Africa can affirm the stereotypes and cultural superiority formed in USA because students negotiate their actual experience in ways to confirm their perception of Africa. Therefore, seminars and workshops about the fundamental aspects about global inequality can help educate volunteers about the postcolonial context of foreign aid of Western countries for the Third World, and White privilege.     

郭陈氏节孝牌坊的加固修复

为消除郭陈氏节孝坊坍塌、剥离脱落险情,取用改性环氧树脂6101对断裂、空臌、剥离部位进行粘接加固和灌浆补强,对大面积的剥离块体配合使用钢筋悬臂梁技术。结果表明,经加固处理后,病害得到了有效根治,牌坊恢复了整体性。说明改性环氧粘结和钢筋悬臂梁相结合的保护技术非常适合阙、牌坊、碑等纪念性建筑的修复保护。     

Design als ‘mediating interface’ Zur Zeugen‐ und Zeichenhaftigkeit des Radioapparates

Design as Mediating Interface: Historical Evidence and Symbolic Enunciation of the Radio Set. – Based on a case study on the invention of the radio station scale in the late 1920's and early 1930's, this article pleads for an interdisciplinary look at the importance of design as a mediating interface in the production‐consumption junction. In this cultural history perspective on technology, the material artifact matters both as a witness of and a sign for the symbolic meaning and appropriation of the technical object, which transgresses the functional logic of instrumental rationality. In presenting five different perspectives on design offering some alternative looks for a cultural history of technology, this theoretically inspired essay wants to sound the critical potential of a multilayered semantic approach to the radio apparatus as a prominent representation of a radical innovation in media technology.     

The politics of donating technological artifacts: techno-nationalism and the donations of the world’s first jet engines

The Smithsonian Institution’s aviation collection includes two early jet engines, both of which were given to the museum by foreign donors. The first, a prototype of Britain’s first jet engine, which flew during World War II, was donated by the British state in 1949. The second, a replica of Germany’s first jet engine, which flew in late August 1939, was donated by Germany’s leading museum, the Deutsches Museum, in 1980. The two are today presented as equivalent artifacts, yet the paths followed by the two objects to the American museum were anything but equivalent. Recovering the political and historical contexts that informed each of these two donations shows how what was apparently the same action fulfilled two very different agendas. Unlike the British donation, which was calculated to support Britain’s (at that time solitary) claim to having invented the jet engine, the German donation supported a narrative of dual invention, which had become the internationally agreed standard story between 1949 and 1980. This dual-inventor narrative allowed the German museum to forward a more subtle goal than promoting a national inventor; that of depoliticizing and normalizing Germany’s aerospace tradition internationally despite the fact that German aviation had been a locus for German nationalism and National Socialist largess. Reflecting on these two donations raises questions about how technology – particular historical claims about technology made in museums – have contributed to the construction of national identities.