Code

The programmability of smartphones is a crucial feature, since it transforms a cell phone into a pocket-sized computer. Since 2008, when popular operating system providers allowed independent developers to write application software (Apps), the number of Apps has spurred and led many commentators in popular discourse to quickly embrace a new App revolution. Despite the hype, there is a serious dearth of empirical studies exploring the politics and practices of how software is written for smartphones. From the perspective of the Social Shaping of Technology, which emphasizes that the development of any technological artefact is negotiated amid relevant groups, we explore how expert users, in particular, independent developers, are negotiating the development of smartphones by creating Apps. Due to the inherent qualities of software and the practices of user participation, we argue that App development has the potential of increasing user participation not only at the usage stage, but also with respect to the process of design and development. Based on semi-structured interviews with 20 developers from 12 different countries, we identify how this newly emerging group is negotiating the development of smartphones and discover the structural limitations that the group is encountering in the process.

Matlab and Psychophysics Toolbox Introduction (in German), extended version (2009, past version was 2007)
aimed at students, not experts

Not a paper but class material; put in this section because academia.edu provides nicer stats for papers than for teaching material.

Einführung in Matlab und die Psychophysics Toolbox.

The article addresses the relationship between open and closed texts. The aim of the
study is to analyze the specifics of relationship between the open and closed text in the general context of communication between the author and the reader. While supporting mainly U. Eco’s concept in our article, we furnish it with the analysis to four approaches of openness/closedness, which we have singled out. Openness/closedness is conceptualized in several ways; firstly, as an ontological perspective reflecting the opposition between communication parameters, specifically the text-as-process and the text-as-outcome; secondly, as interpretation procedures that are commonly applied to the articulation of all texts, regardless of their form and content; thirdly, as the ontological and technological potential of works’ physical unfinishedness that invites the recipient to engage in a co-authorship (e.g., ‘the work-in-movement’ and hypertext); and fourthly, as the ability of a text to provoke multiple or unambiguous interpretations. We also demonstrate that the way of text’s functioning is determined not only by the addressee's attitude to it, but text itself, in return, stimulates this attitude, predisposing to it by its specificity (as informative or artistic, kitsch or art, hypertext or linear text, digital or analog). However, as we explain in the conclusion, the dialectic of openness/closedness can affect the distinctness of these dichotomies: The text can use its openness manipulatively, which turns it into a closed text.

This paper is concerned with the changing nature of space. More and more of the spaces of everyday life come loaded up with software, lines of code that are installing a new kind of automatically reproduced background and whose nature is only now starting to become clear. This paper is an attempt to map out this background. The paper begins by considering the nature of software. Subsequently, a simple audit is undertaken of where software is chiefly to be found in the spaces of everyday life. The next part of the paper notes the way in which more and more of this software is written to mimic corporeal intelligence, so as to produce a better and more unobtrusive fit with habitation. The paper then sets out three different geographies of software and the way in which they are implicated in the reproduction of everyday life before concluding with a consideration of the degree to which we might consider the rise of software as an epochal event or something much more modest.

The objective of this paper is to outline the
implementation of the Walking Skeleton Strategy in the
environment of the test driven development. It is often observed
that the project build is time consuming which, delays the
project accomplishment, this paper will help us understand how
the implementation of Walking Skeleton Strategy is time and
cost effective by automating the project build, deploy and test
end-to-end.

The weight enumerator of a binary doubly even self-dual code is an isobaric polynomial in the two generators of the ring of invariants of a certain group of order 192. The aim of this note is to study the ring of coefficients of that polynomial, both for standard and joint weight enumerators.

This essay studies the source code of an artwork from a software studies perspective. By examining code that come close to the approach of critical code studies (Marino, 2006), I trace the network artwork, Pupufu (Lin, 2009) to understand various real-time approaches to social media platforms (MSN, Twitter and Facebook). The focus is not to investigate the functionalities and efficiencies of the code, but to study and interpret the program level of code in order to trace the use of various technological methods such as third-party libraries and platforms’ interfaces. These are important to understand the socio-technical side of a changing network environment. Through the study of code, including but not limited to source code, technical specifications and other materials in relation to the artwork production, I would like to explore the materiality of code that goes beyond technical implementation, and to consider the things that have been inscribed in the level of code socially. I argue that examining code is a way to understand socio-technical relations.

Keywords: Code; software; socio-technical; non-human

In an interview recorded in 1994, Andre-Georges Haudricourt described himself as a “passe-muraille,” a person capable of walking through walls (Bertrand 2002: 251). The passe-muraille , best known to French readers from the short story of that name by Marcel Ayme, is both marvelous and disquieting, a transgressive being – in both senses of the word – who refuses to acknowledge the barriers that contain and channel the movements of others. Haudricourt clearly had this complex of senses in mind when he chose the word to characterize his atypical career in French academia: an agronomy graduate who subsequently studied under Marcel Mauss, Haudricourt went on to conduct important research in such diverse fields as ethnoscience, phonological theory and the history of agriculture, often to the discomfiture of his more sessile colleagues. For much of the past century, to say nothing of the present one, there has been a great deal of talk about the desirability of interdisciplinarity, and of breaking down the walls that impede communication between adjoining academic fields. The discipline of anthropology, as conceived (and exemplified) by Franz Boas, was to be just such a wall-less meeting place, where ethnologists, archaeologists, linguists, and physical anthropologists would collaboratively grapple with the complexities of human diversity (see, e.g. Boas 1899). Boas's vision took institutional form as the “four-field” or “Boasian” anthropology departments of many North American universities, where course offerings, faculty recruitment, and even the composition of internal committees conform to the principle of an asymmetrical confederation of canton-like subdisciplines, with social-cultural anthropology as the primus inter pares .

The year 538 A.D. became the turning point in the history of the Roman Empire since so many aspects on political, administrative and economical levels were already switched off that when Justinian declared himself to be a theologian from this year and no longer a soldier, he crossed the barrier of his mandate between what is purely civil obligation and what is religious obligation, similarly to Constantine before, and entered in competition with the papal function and this role is evidence of Justinian’s ongoing caesaro-papism. The quest for unification of the empire by unification of the church, the fever for church-building projects with his wife Theodora, the persecution of enemies of the church and heretics, his disdain with the Sabbath although his second name was Sabbatini, his support for suppressing any eschatological fever in line with the church fathers and Oecumenius and yet trying to build the ‘Kingdom of God’ on earth, all this indicate the problem 538 was for the Roman...

Dans cet article, l'auteur a tenté de distinguer les notions de paysage et de territorialité en montrant qu'elles ne se réclamaient pas des mêmes fondements épistémologiques. La notion de paysage procède du « vu » tandis que la notion de territorialité procède du « vécu ». Il s'est efforcé de faire la distinction à travers une approche de type sémiologique. La géographie classique a surtout exploré la géographie du paysage, alors qu'actuellement elle s'efforce de dégager une géographie de la territorialité. La territorialité pouvant être définie comme l'ensemble des relations entretenues par l'individu, en tant que membre d'une société, avec son environnement sensu lato. La géographie de la territorialité est en train de s'élaborer et tend à compléter, sinon à remplacer, la géographie du paysage.