Talking about bodies online: Viagra,YouTube, and the politics of public(ized) sexualities

The development of Viagra in the late 1990s ushered in a new age of conversation about sex and sexuality, as men's bodily abilities were put on display for all to discuss. In 2005, the video-sharing technology YouTube was launched. Taken together, these technological innovations – both biomedical and representational – have produced debate around sex, sexualized and gendered bodies, and sexual health. This article interrogates Viagra-related representations posted on YouTube and analyzes sexuopharmaceuticals as a set of intertextualities that create space for both normative discourses and social critiques. Three analytic themes illustrate how Viagra-related YouTube videos (1) reinforce a regime of self-care within a wider context of individualized responsibility for one's sexual health, (2) highlight the values attached to the pharmasexed gendered body for men and women in the age of Viagra, and (3) provide disruptions, in the form of criticism, to the assumption that healthy bodies and relationships need pharmasexual enhancement. The article concludes by suggesting that social networking sites such as YouTube are managed public spaces through which one can interrogate the intertextualities that link discourses related to bodies and sexual health to the virtual and material spaces of everyday life.     

科技手段与书画鉴定

在当今的器物学鉴定工作中,不少高科技的鉴定技术已经成功地应用于文物年代的分期断代和真伪鉴别上。但在古代书画鉴定工作中,由于其特殊性和复杂性,目前仍停留在传统的鉴定方法上。本文就运用一些必要的科学手段来证实鉴定结果进行了深入的探讨     

论先秦时期湖北地区的技术发展与文明

文章利用了新的考古资料,从新的视角出发,对先秦时期湖北地区的技术发展与当地文明的关系作了进一步的探讨,使人们对当时的技术成就的认识更为系统全面。     

邾国故城一件青铜带钩的保护及其错金技术特征

2018年山东省邹城市邾国故城西岗墓地一号战国墓出土了一件锈蚀严重的带钩,为了全面了解其材质特征和保存状况,对其进行了X光探伤、X射线荧光光谱分析(XRF)、X射线衍射分析(XRD)和扫描电镜—能谱仪分析(SEM-EDS)。结果显示这是一件较为罕见的错金嵌绿松石青铜带钩。为了揭示其艺术价值和科学价值,在科技检测基础上开展了保护工作。在保护过程中,通过对带钩和金丝形貌特征的显微观察可知,金丝的横截面形态既有倒三角形也有倒梯形,而且较宽的金丝是由单根细金丝折弯盘绕而成。这些独特的错金技术特征在以往公开发表的资料中尚未见报道,说明古代错金技术存在多种具体实现方式,这为错金银工艺研究提供了新的珍贵资料。     

The technology of Stone Age colonization: an empirical,regional-scale examination of Clovis unifacial stone tool reduction,allometry, and edge angle from the North American Lower Great Lakes region

There is now broad consensus that the appearance of Clovis in Northeastern North America (Great Lakes, New England) represents a colonization pulse into recently deglaciated landscapes. Due to the increased resource uncertainty that comes with colonizing unfamiliar landscapes, it was hypothesized that the majority tool component of Clovis assemblages, unifacial stone tools, should have been knapped on tool blanks possessing the design properties of longevity and functional flexibility to facilitate exploration mobility and guard against the absence of toolstone sources in the new landscape. These properties are optimized by large, flat flakes, possessing large surface area relative to flake thickness. Since discarded and, at times, exhausted unifacial stone tools do not preserve the original dimensions of the blank upon which they were created – necessary items for a true test of blank morphology selection – this study presents a set of predictions for inferring whether Clovis unifacial stone tool blanks were selected for the properties of longevity and functional flexibility based on evidence that Clovis people actually capitalized on those properties. Due to the nature of Clovis unifacial stone tools, tool size was of necessity used as a proxy for tool reduction, on the grounds that smaller tools are more likely to have been resharpened than larger tools, at least in the case of unifacial flake tools. The results showed that less resharpened tools possessed flatter, less spherical shapes than the more resharpened tools, which possessed more globular, spherical shapes, suggesting Clovis foragers exploited the retouch potential afforded by the larger, flatter blanks. Edge angles showed no relationship with tool reduction, suggesting that Clovis foragers exploited the functional flexibility afforded by flatter blanks by adjusting the edge angle to be either higher or lower as needed. These results are consistent with the notion that human colonizers, who did not know the abundance or location of stone outcrops prior to settling an unfamiliar territory, not only “geared up” before leaving a stone source, but geared up as efficiently as possible by carefully selecting the blanks they chose to carry. Broader implications for such careful unifacial stone tool blank selection are discussed.     

空鼓病害壁画灌浆加固技术研究

壁画空鼓病害是最为严重的壁画病害类型之一,如何科学解决壁画空鼓病害是目前迫切需要解决的主要问题,对保护人类优秀文化遗产具有重要意义。本工作在室内模拟实验和现场试验研究的基础上,结合对西藏布达拉宫等处古建筑空鼓病害壁画的修复加固治理,系统总结了空鼓病害壁画灌浆加固的基本原则、材料与修复工艺,重点讨论了灌浆孔与锚固孔位置选择的标准、注浆管的埋设,水灰比与灌浆量的控制,壁画支顶防护的作用,灌浆结合锚固补强的技术要求,补色的标准与原则,灌浆效果的评价及灌浆设备的研制与开发等关键的技术问题。结果表明,壁画灌浆结合锚固补强技术是解决空鼓病害壁画的主要措施之一。     

A biface and blade core efficiency experiment: implications for Early Paleoindian technological organization

Early Paleoindians often are described as highly mobile hunter–gatherers who employed lithic technologies designed to minimize stone transport costs. We experimentally reduced blade and bifacial cores and found both reduction strategies to be equally efficient for the production of useable flake blanks. Further, when compared to similar core reduction experiments, the results of this study showed no significant differences in core efficiency between bifacial, prismatic blade, and wedge-shaped blade core reduction. Biface and blade cores with initial weights greater than 1000 g produced useable flakes as efficiently as informal cores. However, bifacial and blade core efficiency decreased with initial core weight. When considered in terms of Early Paleoindian technological organization, differences in core efficiencies suggest that Folsom groups employed core reduction strategies designed to minimize stone transport costs, but Clovis groups did not.     

Small nation,big ships winter navigation and technological nationalism in a peripheral country, 1878–1978

Finland is the only country in the world where all ports freeze over during a typical winter. Over the century 1878–1978, Finland developed a winter-seafaring system that broke the winter isolation and eliminated seasonal variation in shipping. By using diverse archival sources, we deconstruct the dominant narrative of Finnish winter seafaring through which national as well as technological development is often presented as natural, inevitable and straightforward. We reinterpret the Finnish winter navigation system as a tangible, historical experience and show that technological solutions in this domain cannot be understood outside the context of a decades-long process of nation-building. Finally, we argue that winter navigation became a central imaginary for Finland as a western, industrial and modern nation. As such, the Finnish winter-seafaring system presents a case of technological nationalism in which a small, peripheral country sought to integrate itself into a modern international order.     

Sex in the digital city: location-based dating apps and queer urban life

It is well established that digital technology and code mediate bodies in space. The collapse of any supposed physical/digital divide has been amply documented to the extent that everyday life is now widely theorised in terms of hybridisation. What is less clear is what comes next for those participating in this hybridisation. This article examines what Kitchin and Dodge term the ‘social contour of software’ via queer male locative media users who collectively negotiate digital hybridisation in their everyday lives. Using qualitative interviews with 36 non-heterosexual men using apps such as Grindr and Tinder in London, UK, I explore how locative media refigures conceptualisations of community, technological efficiency and boundaries between private and public space. The study finds that users express ambivalence about their membership of queer ‘communities’, and are also unconvinced by online sociality. Apps expedite searches for new partners but prove deceptively time-consuming. Public and private space are being hybridised by locative technology, but common codes of conduct are slower to develop, leaving users unsure of how to navigate physical encounter. This article concludes that schema for queer men’s lives are increasingly promulgated digitally but may be uneasily embodied in everyday practice.     

The Chinese developmental state during the Cold War: the making of the 1956 twelve-year science and technology plan

Abstract

In 1956, the government of the People’s Republic of China made a 12-year plan for scientific and technological developments (‘The Long-term Plan for the Development of Science and Technology for 1956–1967’), often credited as a visionary blueprint for its nuclear weapons programs and industrialization. Yet, this study suggests that the plan was not the logical manifestation of a unified national leadership, but rather the result of political contestations and compromises among the Communist party-state leaders, especially between Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, and between the state and the scientific–technological elite. It further indicates that the making of Chinese science and technology policy was shaped by the cold war geopolitics, national developmental aspirations and transnational influences, especially from the Soviet Union and the USA.