S.NET once stood for Society for the Study of Nanoscience and Emerging Technologies and then the name started changing with the most recent being, Society of the Studies of New and Emerging Technologies. As I noted in my 2017 end-of-year comments (Dec. 30, 2017 posting), the nano blogosphere is also shifting as nanotechnology is being absorbed into and enables other scientific and technical efforts.
S.NET is celebrating its 10th year at their annual meeting, which will be held in Maastricht (Netherlands). Here’s their call for papers,
2018 Annual S.NET Meeting
Image: Geert Budenaerts, Wikimedia
CALL for PAPERS.
The 10th annual S.NET meeting will take place June 25-27, 2018 at the Faculty of Arts and Social Science, Maastricht University, The Netherlands. The theme is Anticipatory Technologies: Data and Disorientation.
Invitation
S.NET invites contributions to the tenth annual meeting of The Society for the Study of New and Emerging Technologies (S.NET), to be held at Maastricht University, the Netherlands, on June 25 – 27, 2018. The three-day conference will assemble scholars, practitioners and policy makers from around the world interested in the development and implications of emerging technologies.
About S.NET
S.NET is an international association that promotes intellectual exchange and critical inquiry about the advancement of new and emerging technologies in society. The aim of the association is to advance critical reflection from various perspectives on developments in a broad range of new and emerging fields, including, but not limited to, nanoscale science and engineering, biotechnology, synthetic biology, cognitive science, ICT and Big Data, and geo-engineering. Current S.NET board members are: Michael Bennett (chair), Marianne Boenink, Ana Delgado, Clare Shelley-Egan, Chris Toumey, Poonam Pandey, Christopher Coenen, Colin Milburn, Kornelia Konrad, Nora Vaage, Maria Belen Albornoz, and Ryan LaBar.
Conference Theme: Anticipatory technologies – data and disorientation
Any effort on new and emerging technologies unavoidably deals with the non-existing and the speculative. The future is permanently mobilized to promote decisions and policies regarding the science, technology and society nexus. Anticipatory technologies like predictive policing and preventive medicine promise to give us better epistemic access and practical control over the future. The basic irony, however, is that anticipatory technologies do not only increase data but also disorientation. Is the disorientation vis-á-vis the future in spite of the astonishing growth of data, or can it be a result of that growth? Does the growing control over future events in terms of risk make people more acutely aware of what they don’t control? Contributions are invited that explore existing ways in which the future is mobilized, technologically mediated, and economically exploited; that map the manifold ways it is contested both in discourse and in action; and that reflect on the extent to which new technologies ironically undermine our faith in the future.
Key note speakers
Prof Cyrus Mody is an historian of recent science and technology and has published on the history of nanotechnology and micro-electronics. He studies the commercialization of academic research, countercultural science and technology, and the longue durée of responsible research and innovation. He worked at Rice University, Texas, the NSF Center for Nanotechnology in Society and now has a chair at Maastricht University.
Prof Marjolein van Asselthas a strong profile on governance, risk and uncertainty in both academic and policy circles. Currently she is member of the Dutch Safety Board and was a member of the Scientific Council for Government Policy for many years. She has a Governance chair at Maastricht University.
Third key note speaker to be announced.
Themes, topics and conference strands for the 10th Annual Meeting
S.NET encompasses communities, perspectives, and methodologies from across the social sciences, humanities and natural sciences, and welcomes contributions from technology developers and other practitioners. The program committee invites contributions from the full breadth of disciplines, methodologies, and perspectives, as well as from applied, participatory, and practical approaches to studying these emerging fields. Regionally or internationally comparative perspectives are especially welcome. Possible themes and topics have been organized into one overarching conference theme and six ‘strands’. While applicants are asked to indicate the strand relevant to the topic of their paper, submissions dealing with themes or topics outside the present strands are also welcome.
R&D practices and the dynamics of new and emerging sciences and technologies
Research networks & collaborations, ways of organizing research & development, emerging research fields, practices of ‘doing’ new and emerging fields of science and technology, including historical and philosophical studies of these practices.
Innovation and the use of new and emerging sciences and technologies
Innovation networks and systems, commercialization, implications for industry structures, translation from lab to practice, application and use of products and other innovations, critical analyses of growth and consumption, including economic, social and cultural approaches of innovation processes.
Governance of newly emerging sciences and technologies
Regulations, anticipatory governance practices, risk assessment, risk concerns, (constructive) TA, forms of public participation and engagement, including critical evaluation of forms of governance.
Visions and cultural imaginaries of newly emerging sciences and technologies
Promises, expectations, visions, science fiction, imagination, socio – technical change, moral change, role of media, including assessments of such visions and analyses of their role in innovation processes.
Publics and their relations to newly emerging science s and technologies
Science communication, risk communication, public engagement, participation and discourses on NEST, science museums, informal science learning initiatives, including critical evaluation of such initiatives and the notion of ‘publics’.
Politics and ethics of new and emerging sciences and technologies
Responsible innovation, (in)equality, equity, development, global and social distribution of benefits and risks, sustainability, ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ impacts of emerging technologies, including theoretical perspectives on NEST and global developments.
How to apply
S.NET encourages proposals for individual papers, posters, traditional panels, roundtable discussions and other innovative formats. Abstracts should be approximately 250 words in length. Proposals for panel sessions should include a general introduction and abstracts of the separate contributions. Proposals should include the theme or strand to which the abstract/panel session is submitted. If an abstract fits more strands, or does not fit the existing strands, simply note that in your submission. The deadline for abstract submissions is March 2, 2018; send your abstract in PDF form to 2018snet@gmail.com. All submitters will be notified about the results of the review process by the end of April 2018. Details of the submission process are available online: www.maastrichtsts.nl/snet.
The local organizing committee
Tsjalling Swierstra, Harro van Lente, Nora Vaage, Conor Douglas, Danielle Shanley, Darian Meacham, Cindy van Montfoort, Jacqueline Graff.
Location
Maastricht is an ancient Roman city of some 120.000 inhabitants in the south of The Netherlands and has a beautiful medieval inner-city. Generally known as the venue of the Treaty of Maastricht, it has a distinctly international orientation. Maastricht can easily be reached by plane, train and car. Maastricht University is internationally oriented; its students come from all over the world. The Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASoS) is located in the centre of Maastricht.
You never know where you’re going to find nanotechnology. Most recently I found it in a review of the first few episodes of the animated US tv series, Futurama. Alasdair Wilkins recently offered a few thoughts about a recent ‘nanotechnology-influenced’ episode Benderama. From Wilkins’s June 24, 2011 commentary,
“Benderama” is an example of an episode type that pretty much only Futurama is capable of doing: taking an outlandish but vaguely plausible scientific idea and letting that guide the story. Some all-time great episodes have come from this approach: “The Farnsworth Parabox” did this with alternate universes, Bender’s Big Score used time paradoxes (or the lack thereof), and “The Prisoner of Benda” focused on mind-switching. This time around, the topic is the grey goo scenario of nanotechnology, as Bender gains the ability to create two smaller duplicates of himself, who in turn can each create two smaller duplicates of themselves, who in turn…well, you get the idea. Also, the crew deals with Patton Oswalt’s hideous space giant, who can only take so much mockery of his appearance.
The business about smaller duplicates creating smaller duplicates is very reminiscent of Waldo, the story by Robert Heinlein which according to Colin Milburn influenced the part about creating smaller and smaller hands in Richard Feynman’s famous 1959 talk, There’s plenty of room at the bottom. From a transcript of Feynman’s talk (scroll down 3/4 of the way),
A hundred tiny hands
When I make my first set of slave “hands” at one-fourth scale, I am going to make ten sets. I make ten sets of “hands,” and I wire them to my original levers so they each do exactly the same thing at the same time in parallel. Now, when I am making my new devices one-quarter again as small, I let each one manufacture ten copies, so that I would have a hundred “hands” at the 1/16th size.
The ‘grey goo’ scenario was first proposed by K. Eric Drexler in his 1986 book, The Engines of Creation. He has distanced himself from some of his original assertions about ‘grey goo’ and there is still debate as to the plausibility of the scenario.
From a more technical perspective, Feynman, Heinlein and Benderama present a top-down engineering scenario where one continually makes things smaller and smaller as opposed to the increasingly popular bottom-up engineering scenario where one mimics biological processes in an effort to promote self-assembly.
I’m not sure I’d call the science in the episode, ‘outlandish but plausible’ as it seems old-fashioned to me both with regard to the science and the humour. Still the episode seems to offer some gentle fun on a topic that usually lends itself to ‘end of the earth’ scenarios so it’s nice to see the change in tone.
I signed up for an online workshop on how to host and produce a Nano Science Café that the Nanoscale Informal Science Education Network (NISE Net) holds. It started this Monday and so far we’ve been introducing ourselves (approximately 80 people are signed up) and people are sharing ideas about how to hold these events successfully. Most of the participants are located in the US although there are two Canucks (me and someone from Ontario). Of course, not everyone has introduced themselves yet.
There’s a blog posting by Larry Bell about NISE Net’s increasing focus on nano’s societal implications,
Just about a year ago NISE Net launched an expanded collaboration with the Center for Nanotechnology in Society and you’ll hear more about upcoming activities in the months ahead. The conversation started when staff from seven science centers brought cart demos and stage presentations to the S.NET conference in Seattle on Labor Day weekend last year. S.NET is a new professional society for the study of nanoscience and emerging technologies in areas of the social sciences and humanities. I was a little naive and thought the participants were all social scientists, but learned that many were historians, political scientists, philosophers, and ethicists and really not social scientists.
I’m not entirely certain what to make of either NISE Net’s interest or S.NET (Society for the Study of Nanoscience and Emerging Technologies) since this first meeting seems to have be focused primarily on hands-on demos and public outreach initiatives. There will be a 2nd annual S.NET meeting in 2010 (from the conference info.),
Second Annual Conference of the Society for the Study of Nanoscience and Emerging Technologies
Darmstadt, Germany – Sept 29 to Oct 2, 2010
(Wednesday afternoon 2pm through Saturday afternoon 4pm)
The plenary speakers and program committee lists a few names I’ve come across,
This year’s plenary speakers are Armin Grunwald, Richard Jones [has written a book about nanotechnology titled Soft Machines and maintains a blog also titled Soft Machines], Andrew Light, Bernard Stiegler, and Jan Youtie.
Program Committee
Diana Bowman (Public Health and Law, University of Melbourne, Australia)
Julia Guivant (Sociology and Political Science, Santa Catarina, Brazil)
David Guston (Political Science/Center for Nanotechnology in Society, Arizona State University, USA) [guest blogged for Andrew Maynard at 2020 Science]
Barbara Herr Harthorn (Feminist Studies, Anthropology, Sociology/Center for Nanotechnology in Society,University of California Santa Barbara, USA)
Colin Milburn (English, University of California Davis, USA)[has proposed a nanotechnology origins story which pre-dates Richard Feynman’s famous speech, There’s plenty of room at the bottom]
Cyrus Mody (History, Rice University, United USA)
Alfred Nordmann (Philosophy, nanoOffice, NanoCenter, Technische Universität Darmstadt and University of South Carolina – chair)
Ingrid Ott (Economics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany – co-chair)
Arie Rip (Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Twente, Netherlands) [read a nano paper where he introduced me to blobology and this metaphor for nanotechnology ‘furniture of the world’]
Ursula Weisenfeld (Business Administration, Leuphana Universität, Lüneburg, Germany)
This looks promising and I wish the good luck with the conference.
As far conferences go, there’s another one for the Association of Science and Technology Centers (ASTC) in Hawaii, Oct 3 – 5, 2010, which will feature some NISE Net sessions and workshops . You can check out the ASTC conference details here.
Here’s the monthly NISE Net nano haiku,
Vocabulary
Kit kit kit kit kit kit kit
There are no nodes now.
by Anders Liljeholm of the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. Those of you who may not remember that our regional hubs used to be call nodes (or those looking to brush up on their NISE Net vocabulary in general) can check out the NISE Net Glossary in the nisenet.org catalog.
There’s plenty of room at the bottom, Richard Feynman’s December 29, 1959 talk for the American Physical Society is considered to be the starting point or origin for nanotechnology and this December marks its 50th anniversary. Chris Toumey, a cultural anthropologist at the University of South Carolina NanoCenter, has an interesting commentary about it (on Nanowerk) and he poses the question, would nanotechnology have existed without Richard Feynman’s talk? Toumey answers yes. You can read the commentary here.
In contrast to Toumey’s speculations, there’s Colin Milburn (professor at University of California, Davis) who in his essay, Nanotechnology in the Age of Posthuman Engineering: Science Fiction as Science, suggests that nanotechnology originated in science fiction. You can read more about Milburn, find the citations for the essay I’ve mentioned, and/or download three of his other essays from here.
Ting Xu and her colleagues at the US Dept. of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have developed a new technique for self-assembling nanoparticles. From the news item on Physorg.com,
“Bring together the right basic components – nanoparticles, polymers and small molecules – stimulate the mix with a combination of heat, light or some other factors, and these components will assemble into sophisticated structures or patterns,” says Xu. “It is not dissimilar from how nature does it.”
TechDirt featured a clip from This hour has 22 minutes, a satirical Canadian comedy tv programme, which pokes fun at the scaremongering which features mightily in discussions about copyright. You can find the clip here on YouTube.
I’ve been meaning to mention this tiny item from Fast Company (by Noah Robischon) about China’s social media. From the news bit,
The major players in the U.S. social media world can be counted on one hand: Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn. Not so in China, where the country’s 300 million online users have a panoply of popular social networks to choose from–and Facebook doesn’t even crack the top 10.
Go here to see the infographic illustrating China’s social media landscape.
