how technological infrastructures and artifacts like cars, bicycles

This essay explores the geography of postmodern science in nonacademic settings, focusing on two research breakthroughs by Monsanto scientists, in 1985-1986 and 1989-1991, that created plants resistant to the company's herbicide, glyphosate. The essay follows this new knowledge as it was mobilized into refereed publications and patents, comparing and contrasting the two forms of scientific discourse that resulted. The patents are then traced further as they were challenged, interpreted, and transformed in patent offices and courtrooms across time and space, specifically in the United States, Canada, and Europe. Whereas the crucial peer-reviewed knowledge claims remained fixed, the patent knowledge claims morphed and became fragmented, spatially and temporally. Analyzing lawsuits that Monsanto launched in Britain, Canada, and the United States, the essay shows how the company used spatial-epistemic fragmentation to modify the patents' meanings in desired ways in particular locations, sometimes with significant social and epistemic consequences. The essay concludes by reflecting more broadly on the expansion of biotechnology patenting as a form of nondisinterested knowledge production and how this trend has shaped the path and characteristics of postmodern science in this realm.

Scientific knowledge is essential to understand problems confronting society, and the mass media have become the main source of this knowledge for most people. However, the mass media filter scientific information, leading sometimes to what has been termed “the construction of ignorance.” This article offers a case study of this process. It explains how Canada’s leading newspaper, the Globe and Mail , has depicted oil depletion theory (or “peak oil” theory). By contrasting the history of oil depletion theory with its representation in the Globe and Mail since the turn of the millennium, the article reveals the contours of this constructed ignorance. Comparison with coverage of meteorological and climate change science further refines the analysis. Finally, the article investigates the underlying causes for the Globe and Mail ’s treatment of peak oil theory and how it relates to the Canadian context.

With the advent of modernity, the sharing of resources and infrastructures rapidly expanded beyond local communities into regional, national, and even transnational space -- nowhere as visibly as in Europe, with its small-scale political divisions. This volume views these shared resource spaces as the seedbeds of a new generation of technology-rich bureaucratic and transnational commons. Drawing on the theory of cosmopolitanism, which seeks to model the dynamics of an increasingly interdependent world, and on the tradition of scholarship inspired by the late Elinor Ostrom, the book develops a new theory of cosmopolitan commons that provides a framework for merging the study of technology with such issues as risk, moral order, and sustainability at levels beyond the nation-state. After laying out the theoretical framework, the book presents case studies that explore the empirical nuances: airspace as transport commons, radio broadcasting, hydropower, weather forecasting and genetic diversity as information commons, transboundary air pollution, and two capstone studies of interlinked, temporally layered commons: one on overlapping within the North Sea for freight, fishing, and fossil fuels; and one on for transport, salmon fishing, and clean water in the Rhine.Contributors:Hakon With Andersen, Nil Disco, Paul N. Edwards, Arne Kaijser, Eda Kranakis, Kristiina Korjonen-Kuusipuro, Tiago Saraiva, Nina WormbsThe hardcover edition does not include a dust jacket.

This chapter contains sections titled: Airspace as a Geophysical and Ecological Space, Founding an Airspace Commons: The 1919 Paris Treaty and ICAN, Beyond ICAN: The Governance Web of Europe's Airspace Commons, Cooperative Commerce: European Airline Pools, The Quest for Seamless European Air Travel, Managing Airspace Risks, Conflict and Rule Evasion, Conclusion: Reflections on the “Good Miracle”, Acknowledgments, Notes

Things owned in common -or jointly -as the case may be, abound.They abound today as they did in earlier times, in urban as well as in rural settings, and in high tech artefacts like Wikipedia as well as in traditional symbols.Usually such commonly held goods do not create any noteworthy problems for those who share an interest in them.But in some cases they do represent an intrinsically difficult situation for stakeholders: their governance and the distribution of benefits begin to pose a social dilemma.Unless the stakeholders find ways of overcoming the problems, the resource will stop yielding benefits.Such dilemmas appear in cases where the resource is subtractable (one appropriator's benefits diminish the benefits available for other appropriators), and where it is difficult or impossible to exclude any particular appropriator.Elinor Ostrom used traditional commons in irrigation water, pasture, and forestry to study how communities were able to overcome such dilemmas, in part through the creation of appropriate institutions for resource management.She suggested eight design principles that could assist in constructing such management institutions (Ostrom 1990(Ostrom , 2005)).Technology did not enter into Ostrom's principles.Yet it is clear today that technological developments often alter the conditions of exploitation of resources, necessitating changes in management strategies, even though it is not always clear which strategies offer the best solution.Technology has, for example, changed fishing practices to such an extent that a dilemma of global depletion of fish stocks, not present a century ago, has now become a pressing concern.Moreover, technology creates new resources, or allows existing resources to be used in quite

Adrian Johns’s study of intellectual property (IP) battles combines a cyclical view of history with a Kuhnian model of transformative paradigm shifts. He explores copyright and patents, focusing on publishing, telecommunications (radio, telephone, internet), and analog and digital media. Johns examines sites of struggle, contention, and negotiation—conceptual and geographical—that have defined the meaning and limits of IP since the early modern era. He relates changing IP trends to major cultural shifts and questions of political authority and state power. He shows that IP concepts and struggles have been rooted principally in commerce and capitalism, and that what constitutes “piracy” is ever contested and contestable. This review suggests the need for further research into the consequences of long-term accretion of IP rights. This accretion, combined with the growing complexity of knowledge and artifacts (computers and cell phones embody hundreds of patents), poses new challenges to the viability of patent systems.

Looking Into the Mirror of Time:Reflections on the Life and Work of Edwin T. Layton Jr., 1928-2009 Eda Kranakis (bio) Looking into the mirror of time, back to the fall of 1975, the first reflection I see in my mind's eye is the image of Ed Layton's guardian angel—Albrecht Dürer's Melencolia—looking down from his office wall at the University of Minnesota. That autumn he was a newly appointed professor at the university, and I was a new Ph.D. student intent on studying the history of technology. It seems long ago, and it seems like yesterday. Ed explained to me that the angel depicted the essence of the historian's life: the quest for knowledge combined with the inevitable loneliness of scholarly work. Looking back from thirty-five years, I see that Dürer's print also captures some of the deepest characteristics of Ed Layton as a scholar. On one level, this Northern Renaissance masterpiece expresses the great humanistic spirit that pervaded his life and teaching. On another level, the angel's paraphernalia—from mathematical shapes to measuring instruments and [End Page 543] workmen's tools—convey his love of technology, science, and mathematics, which directed the corpus of his scholarly work. And on still another level, the image's Neoplatonic, allegorical character reflects Ed's philosophical side, his unrelenting desire to discover the deeper, simpler truths and structures beneath the complex surface of historical events. Ed was as much philosopher as historian, which partly explains the enduring impact of his contributions to the history of technology. Ed Layton was not only a great humanist and brilliant scholar and teacher; he was also a leader of the Society for the History of Technology's institutional and intellectual development, serving on all the major prize committees, on the executive council, and finally as vice president and president between 1983 and 1986. For more than two decades he was an advisory editor for Technology and Culture or a key member of the SHOT editorial committee. In 1971 he received the society's Dexter Prize for The Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility and the American Engineering Profession, cited as "a model of research and synthesis in the social history of technology," and nineteen years later he was awarded the Leonardo da Vinci Medal. Through his intellectual contributions, Ed influenced our understanding of technological knowledge, the interaction of science and technology, issues related to engineering design, ethics, and ideology, and the nature and history of engineering professionalization. Yet the scope of his interests ranged much further. Indeed, few have matched the depth and breadth of his knowledge of human culture and society from ancient times to the present. In his last year of life, despite declining health, he was still reading voraciously in subjects as diverse as ancient and medieval music, cosmic physics, poetry, film, astronomy, and naval history. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Edwin Thomas Layton Jr. rose above a childhood that left him with a sense of abandonment. His father and namesake was an Annapolis-trained naval officer who became the head of intelligence for the U.S. Pacific Fleet, reaching the rank of rear admiral, and who gained fame posthumously from his book And I Was There (1985), which recounted events leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor. Ed had only limited personal interaction with his father, however. Layton senior was sent overseas when his son was less than one year old, and his parents soon divorced, both of them eventually remarrying and founding new families. At the age of seven, when his mother remarried, Ed was left without explanation to be raised by his grandmother. His mother remained emotionally aloof, and, though he tried several times throughout his life to establish a personal relationship with his father, he was rebuffed. Still, Ed always took a keen interest in naval affairs. He joined the U.S. Navy Reserve while still a teenager, leaving only when he got his first full-time teaching position, and later presented talks on naval intelligence relating to his father's career. Ed's psyche also bore the imprint of growing up during the Great...

Modern transportation technologies have conflicting political potentials: regarded as tools of nation-building,1 they are also depicted as engines of transnational integration, weakening national control over borders and identities.2 How these opposing potentials play out depends on national geographies, regulatory structures, and political, technological and economic criteria. Post-1918 Europe presents a unique case for study in this regard. Nowhere else do so many states exist within such a small area; the nationalist and integrationist aspects of transport development have therefore often conflicted. Europe is also significant because the integration process that emerged after the Second World War begs the question of what role transport played in this shift. If transportation is an engine of integration, then evidence supporting this view should be visible within the European context.

699 was expanded all around the globe, it was largely the result of government investment and domestic capital. From 1945 to 1978, a process the authors term “domestication” led to further decline in the role of international finance. In the context of growing nationalism and decolonization, governments sought to gain control of utilities and oust foreign investors. By 1978, there was virtually no direct foreign investment in the electric light and power industry. Over the last couple of decades there has been a resurgence in foreign investment, largely due to widespread deregulation and privatization. In their conclusion, the authors caution that these new patterns are not inevitable.Wars, financial crises, and nationalist policies have deterred global investments in the past.Whether this resurgence in international financing will continue remains to be seen. One of the greatest strengths of this work is its presentation of large amounts of data. The authors describe the activities of hundreds of manufacturers, banks, utilities, holding companies, and financiers, all of this evidencing the extensive research that went into their book. The emphasis on data seems to come at a cost, however, as important social implications are addressed only briefly. Consider the question of whether foreign-owned utilities provided a different level of service to consumers than utilities financed domestically. If money was raised abroad but the utility was managed locally, did the foreign financing influence the course of electrification? Did international capital flows contribute to the oligopolistic structure of the electrical supply industry, and did this affect access to electricity? Exploration of such matters would have made this work relevant to an even wider range of audiences. Overall, Global Electrification is a significant contribution that will be highly valuable to historians with many specialties, including historians of technology.

Roughnecks, Rock Bits, and Rigs: The Evolution of Oil Well Drilling Technology in Alberta, 183-1970. By Sandy Gow. (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2005. 674 p., ill., bibl., app., isbn 1-55238-067-x $44.95). An article from journal Scientia Canadensis (Natural Science in the New World: The Descriptive Enterprise), on Érudit.