History 323
Friday, January 31, 2003
Thoughts on Things to Come
More people need to post about the film! For some varied responses so far check out ZWANPHONY, Jessica and Christy.
Sunday, January 26, 2003
The Shape of Things to Come
Some questions to ask yourself about the film:
How accurately did it predict the near future? (remember it was made in 1936)
What assumptions does Wells make that lead to inaccurate predictions?
What questions does the film ask about technology? Do we still believe the answers it gives?
Friday, January 24, 2003
survey
Which invention could you not live without? The original survey asked you to choose from among five choices: toothbrush, automobile, personal computer, cell phone and microwave. Results are at: Lemelson-MIT survey results.
Monday, January 20, 2003
Jefferson and Technology
Technology and the Democratic Ideal has a substantial discussion of Jefferson's attitude towards manufacturing. Jefferson's argument that only farmers will be good citizens in a democracy is worth thinking about, particularly because we will see it again in the Berry book.
Sunday, January 19, 2003
network troubles
The course web pages and the pictures on this blog have been unavailable most of this weekend due to server problems. I can't find any specific information, but sometimes the computer whose address is people.clemson.edu goes down and this seems to be one of those times. Hopefully DCIT will have it working again by Tuesday.
The reason the photos don't show up on this blog, which is of course in a completely different location, is that the way I set up the entry in my blog with the photos was to have it call up the photos each time from my Clemson web space, which is what isn't working.
Do you see the unreliability of the internet as a reason not to depend on it, or is it something we can live with?
Update (1/21): I learned today from someone at the help desk that the computer that hosts people.clemson.edu had a hardware failure. They migrated all the files to a different computer so by this morning they were mostly available again. This morning I struggled a long time to figure out why a few of my pages weren't coming up, and finally after a lot of frustration figured out the files that weren't coming up had long file names and that files with short file names were working. I renamed the files I was having trouble with and it worked. I think even that problem is fixed now, but it was an interesting example of how frustrating computers can be.
Saturday, January 18, 2003
Thursday, January 16, 2003
computer humor
Check out This you have to see to believe for an interesting day at tech support (this was linked a while back on Computer News You Can Use).
Textile Heroes
Now you know at least one of the names on Sirrine Hall:
But who was Perkin? (First person to find the answer write about it in your blog and email me and I will link to your blog.)
Monday, January 13, 2003
Weblogs
The weblog assignment has some examples of weblogs and articles about weblogs that may help you figure out what you might want to write. I expect different people to take different approaches--yours can be more oriented towards the reading or a place to discuss issues that come up in class or more oriented to current news. It can be a place where you share information and links that may interest others or more oriented towards giving your opinion. It can be informal but I do want to see thoughtful, educated opinions, not just what you might have said off the top of your head if you hadn't taken this course.
Friday, January 10, 2003
Anti-technology
I'm concerned that in talking about the Joy article today and our concerns about technology I made this sound like an anti-technology course. It isn't; I want it to be a course about how we can make technology serve us better. But to do that, part of what we need to do is to look at what problems technological innovation can cause and figure out how to prevent them. I should have probably have started with another question: what do we particularly want technology to do for us that it doesn't already do? I think we could have come up with a good list and then asked how to we maximize the benefits and minimize the problems.
On Monday we will jump into the history, but I wanted today to set up some of the current and future questions in hopes of showing you that the history is relevant to present and future questions.
Why the Future Doesn't Need Us
I think this is an interesting article partly because Bill Joy is not a grumbling English major but a computer engineer. When he says intelligent robots are possible, he knows as well as anyone. Reactions to the article have been mixed.
Wednesday, January 08, 2003
Cloning human beings
What do you think about the news reports that a fringe organization called the Raelians has claimed to have successfully cloned a human being? There are serious doubts whether this report is true. But it is just a matter of time before human cloning is possible, and it raises a lot of interesting questions. Is government regulation the solution?
Tuesday, January 07, 2003
Welcome
Welcome to the professor's blog for History 323 at Clemson University. This is supposed to be a model for you--I will write my own reflections about the course here. This is also where you will come to find a list of the blogs maintained by other students, which I will add as I get their addresses.
