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In a two-minute clip from the docuseries Moon Machines, two women in white smocks pass a needle back and forth through a matrix of eyelet openings.[1] Sitting under task lamps in a Raytheon facility outside of Boston, they are making “core memory” for the Apollo Guidance Computer. They thread the wire through the ferrite cores…
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The abandoned sites of dyeing pits in the village of Zomkalga in northern-central Burkina Faso show the long-standing economic significance of an indigo industry that was developed by the Maranse in the first half of the 18th century[1] and that flourished from the second half of the 18th century in the Yatenga.[2] The pits, below-ground…
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The interested bystander is a familiar presence in narratives of information exchange in the early modern period. The observations of expatriates writing home, officials on government-sponsored tours, merchants and traders were constant and often significant components to stories about dissemination of techniques across distant geographies. At the same time, espionage, importing (or exporting) workers and…
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“My marriage is made of gold,” says an elderly weaver from East Godavari. This is a defining statement about a life lived in handloom weaving.[1] It seemed like a non sequitur in a conversation about the effects of the 2008 economic downturn on handloom weaving—a contrast to words of despair and drudgery regarding the presence…
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In 1968, the Public Affairs Office at Kennedy Space Center (KSC), headed by Gordon Harris, released an informational publication––more of a short monograph written by Harris himself––called “The Kennedy Space Center Story.” Chapter one, entitled “A National Resource,” situates the Spaceport in the specific environmental and historical context of its location on the east coast…
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Technology regulations, at their core, are based on an idea of what a technology does or what its uses are. Of course, these ideas and the resulting regulations are the product of negotiations, conflicts, and compromises between different people with different stakes. What happens to regulation when people can’t even agree on what the technology…
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