Quite who would receive the award should the Internet triumph remains unclear at this point, though Tim Berners-Lee, the “founder” of the ‘Net may well be in the running. The peace prize is historically awarded to “the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations and the abolition or reduction of standing armies and the formation and spreading of peace congresses.” Interest in the prize has surged since the notable triumph of Barack Obama in 2009.

The shortlist for 2010 includes 38 organisations or groups and 199 individuals; others nominated include a Russian human rights group and a Chinese dissident. Although the panel does not disclose the nominees, the nominators (who include other Laureates, professors, government officials and the panel themselves) sometimes reveal their choices.

The chosen recipient will be revealed in October, with the prize formally awarded in December.

Discover more about the Nobel Prize on Intute, and take a look at our hot topic features covering the history and awards.

CALL FOR PAPERS AND PERFORMANCES

DRHA 2010 Conference: Sunday 5th September – Wednesday 8th September 2010 at Brunel University, West London. www.drha2010.org.uk

CONFERENCE THEME: Sensual Technologies: Collaborative Practices of Interdisciplinarity

The conference’s overall theme will be the exploration of the collaborative relationship between the body and sensual/sensing technologies across various disciplines. In this respect it will offer an interrogation of practices that are indebted to the innovative exchange between the sensual, visceral and new technologies.

At the same time, the aim is to look to new approaches offered by various emerging fields and practices that incorporate new and existing technologies. Specific examples of areas for discussion could include:

• Delineation of new collaborative practices and the interchange of knowledge
• Collaborative interdisciplinary practices of embodiment and technology
• Integration/deployment of digital resources in new contexts
• Connections and tensions that exist between the Arts, Humanities and Science
• Notions of the ’solitary’ and the ‘collaborative’ across the Arts, Humanities, and Sciences
• eScience in the Arts and Humanities
• Use of digital resources in collaborative creative work, teaching, learning and scholarship
• Open source and second generation Web infrastructure
• Digital media in time and space
• Music and technology: composition and performance
• Dance and interactive technologies
• Taking inspiration from SET: imaging, GPS and mobile technologies
• Evaluating the experience among providers and users / performers and audiences
• Interface Design and HCI
• Performative Practices in SecondLife or other virtual platforms
• New critical paradigms for the conference’s theme

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:

• Richard Coyne – Professor of Architectural Computing at the University of Edinburgh.
• Christopher Pressler: Director of Research and Learning Resources and Director of the Centre for Research Communications, University of Nottingham.
• Thecla Schiphorst: Media Artist/Designer and Faculty Member in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology. Simon Fraser University , Vancouver, Canada.
• STELARC, Chair in Performance Art at Brunel University and Senior Research, Fellow in the MARCS Labs at the University of Western Sydney.

Professor Stelarc

(Image from a photo on Flickr by tomcorsan, licensed under Creative Commons).

The DRHA (Digital Resources for the Humanities and Arts) conference is held annually at various academic venues throughout the UK. This year’s conference is hosted by Brunel University, West London. It will take place from Sunday 5th September to Wednesday 8th September 2010. It will be held across various innovative spaces, including the newly expanded Boiler House laboratory facilities, housed in the Antonin Artaud Building, and state of the art conference facilities plus high standard accommodation.

SUBMISSIONS:
We invite original papers, panels, installations, performances, workshop sessions and other events that address the conference theme, with particular attention to the ‘Sensual Technologies’ focus. We encourage proposals for innovative and non-traditional session formats.

DRHA 2010 will include a SecondLife roundtable/discussion event, led by performance artist Stelarc, which will enable international participants to present performative work via Second Life. For this event, we particular encourage submission of Machinima works that can be screened as part of this panel.

Short presentations, for example work-in-progress, are invited for poster presentations.

Anyone wishing to submit a performance or installation should visit http://www.drha2010.org.uk for information about the spaces and technical equipment and support available.

All proposals – whether papers, performance or other – should reflect the critical engagement at the heart of DRHA 2010.

The deadline for submissions will be 31 March 2010.

Abstracts should be between 600 – 1000 words.

Letters of acceptance will be sent by 15th of May 2010, when the conference registration will be opened.

Please see http://www.drha2010.org.uk for all relevant information and online submission.

Best wishes,

Franziska Schroeder

DRHA 2010 Programme Chair
School of Music and Sonic Arts
Queen’s University Belfast
www.sarc.qub.ac.uk
www.music.qub.ac.uk

It would appear that music has become an enjoyable and constructive way in which to engage the public in matters of science and scientific philosophy; to that end John Boswell has created the Symphony of Science in an attempt to make the philosophies of astronomers and physicists such as Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan more easily understandable and accessible.

To date, Boswell has created 4 full-length videos which capture these great minds in musical form, and he plans to create many more over the coming months. Subjects covered include the Cosmos, general philosophy of science, the Universe, and other grand concepts.

The videos are all available from the Symphony of Science website and via Boswell’s account on YouTube.

Our Place in the Cosmos

Recently, astronomers have suggested that the ‘Star of Wonder’ or the Star of Bethlehem was really a planetary conjunction. On the Internet, the teaching of amateur astronomy and considerations of the future impact of space exploration are increasingly supported by interactive sites and tools – the sort of resources discussed in Intute’s recent Advent Calendar. For amateur astronomers of all ages in North America, there is perhaps no better popularizer of naked eye astronomy than the Director of Miami’s Space Transit Planetarium, Jack Horkheimer. Horkheimer’s five-minute star-gazing show has been running weekly on PBS since 1976, is now on YouTube, and is typically ended by his signature closing line, “Keep Looking Up!” (http://www.jackstargazer.com/).

YouTube video Jack Horkheimer’s Star Gazer episode for 25-31 January 2010

The Library of Congress has listed some of the best examples of interactive astronomy sites, including the Aladin Sky Atlas, which lets users visualize digitized astronomical images, superimpose entries from astronomical catalogues, and consult the Simbad database, the VizieR service and other star archives. Several other sites deliver research results in public outreach efforts, such as Hubble’s dedicated site; NASA’s Extragalactic Database; PlanetQuest, a project searching for Earth-like planets; the Cassini mission to Saturn and Titan; the International Space Station; and of course, the Mars rovers. The European Space Agency provides an interactive three-dimensional map of our galaxy, called Explore the Milky Way. Perhaps most famous of these endeavours is Berkeley’s SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) project, which since 1999 has asked people to participate with their computers in the search for intelligent life in space.  SETI is now recognized as a landmark event in the history of the Internet and the history of space exploration, both brand new fields of history in their own right. Eventually, these new fields, so defined now by the sciences, will overlap significantly with the social sciences and humanities. As astronomy expands into space exploration, online interactivity may provide the first human keys to inevitable intrusions into these projects by politics, economics, law, philosophy, history, literature, art – and yes – religion.

Intute has many reviews related to the histories of astronomy, space exploration and the Internet, including:

• Greek astronomy
• Astronomiae historia : history of astronomy
• Starry Messenger
• Cosmic Evolution : From Big Bang to Humankind
• Electronic Publications for Astronomers
• International Astronomical Union
• SETI@home: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence at Home
• Star Gazer
• History of space exploration
• NASA History Division
• Ars astronautica
• History of the Internet

The site is beautifully presented in the form of an interactive timeline. You can move between historical periods of 50 years and choose articles that catch your interest – clicking on them initially shows a short summary of the content, and you can them proceed through to view the original paper – all for free!

Visit the Trailblazing website today!

At present, there are guides to research in the following areas:

• Crime and Punishment in 19th-century Britain
  
• The History of British Healthcare
  
• British News Media History
  

• British Electoral History
  
• The History of Ireland and its relations with Britain
  

The development of these research guides has been funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), who have also funded the digitisation of several important historical collections as part of their Digitisation Programme. These include the British Library Newspaper Collection, the British Cabinet Papers 1915-1978, the John Johnson Collection of Ephemera, the Nineteenth-Century British Pamphlets Collection, and many more besides. The full list of digitised primary source collections made available via the JISC can be found at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/digitisation.

Charles Darwin famously had difficulties in convincing people that human beings descend from apes. We now accept that in an extremely far past, our ancestors had ape-like characteristics. In a very distant past, I wish to stress. What about a different human species that become extinct only 20,000 years ago or less, as it seems the case of Homo floresiensis? Contemporary palaeoanthropologists are facing the same disbelief today as that faced by Darwin and best known for the emblematic attack to the theory of evolution as it was worded by Bishop Wilberforce on the 30th of June 1860 at Oxford (some background on this in three pages, respectively by J. R. Lucas; J. H. Brooke; and the Natural History Museum). The 7th of May issue of Nature reports on new evidence supporting the case of Homo floresiensis being a separate human species. A study of the fossilised foot of Homo floresiensis, and one on insular dwarfism in hippos have re-heated the debate. Of particular interest seems to me the second paper, since it proves that the brain of mammals can shrink far more than expected if necessary, and in the case of the bovid Myotragus this was up to 50%. Of course, the human brain being such a distinctive feature of human beings, thinking that evolution could have experimented until fairly recently in reducing its size can make people uncomfortable. It should be remembered however, that the human brain increased in size until the Neandertals, and decreased in anatomically modern humans (see my paper for an extended discussion and references) and therefore we already knew that bigger was not better in this particular case. So much is unknown about the human brain that nothing should surprise us.

Evolution is very much a hot topic for archaeological research in 2009, and I am very happy of this. Recent researches are offering new understandings on a variety of themes, and posing new questions as well. Hopefully these researches will also demonstrate once for all that archaeology is also, and very much so, a science. For a comprehensive choice of the Internet’s best websites on archaeological sciences check out our database. For a full list of resources ordered by headings, see the home page.

Genetic study sheds light on African people

Both reports use scientific techniques to reach conclusions relevant to archaeology and evolutionary theories feature prominently in both. In 2009 the world is celebrating the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of his book “On the Origins of Species”, and therefore the occasion of talking of evolution and archaeology could not be missed.
Although it might seem incredible, Africa has been neglected in the past genetic research in spite of the fact that our own species originated there. Sarah Tishkoff and her team are spearheading research in that field by collecting over a decade 3,194 blood samples from 113 African populations, several located in remote areas. I want to stress that the samples have been collected ethically by asking appropriate permissions and engaging with local communities. In the past, either the rights of remote communities or the research were often sacrificed as if data had to be easy to acquire, and it is therefore most welcome to hear about a successful study of this magnitude having waived neither. The study has evidenced 14 ancestral genetic clusters by using genetic markers from the Marshfield panel of markers. The genetic clusters appear to correspond to linguistic clusters of populations, however a larger study also including material culture and cultural and social practices has not been undertaken. This is something that should concern archaeologists as linking archaeological data to linguistic and genetic data will be necessary to reconstruct properly the development and relationship of different cultures. Tree maps showing the evolution of species and cultures are popular among geneticists and could be adopted and actually shared by archaeologists. The genetic data is somehow limited to longer scales, and therefore is suitable to show the higher variability of African genes since Africa has been inhabited by our species at least for 200,000 years and the out-of-Africa migration probably did not start earlier than 100,000 years ago (non-African populations are more homogeneous having had less time to differentiate). Genetic markers cannot provide much detail of shorter periods and interactions, and the current incomplete use of markers reduces the threshold even further. The opportunity for archaeology to fill in the blanks and provide a detailed picture is obvious. Tishkoff herself noted how language and culture do not always overlap the genetic data (e.g. Khoesan-speakers and Pygmies share the language despite genetic differences), and in all these . Among the other results of the study worth mentioning is the confirmation that the San bushmen of South Africa were one of the first groups to split having one of the most diverse nuclear DNA and confirming previous mitochondrial and Y chromosome studies. Furthermore, it appears that the migration of modern humans out of Africa started in East Africa, located approximately in the area between Sudan (ancient Nubia) and Ethiopia, near the Red Sea. Although the vicinity of Egypt might make the headlines (and indeed crossing continents in the area of the then not existing Suez Canal must have been the primary route out of Africa), I would like to stress how the movement of peoples out of Africa (long range) probably also involved crossing the waters of the Red Sea. The data have been also compared to datasets from African Americans to verify if it was possible to trace back the roots of African-Americans, but the recent genetic mixing of the latter make it currently impossible. Tishkoff casts doubts on ancestry-tracing kits purporting to trace ethnic origins, and this is in line with what was discussed with Keri Brown in one of our own podcasts. Readers interested in genetic studies of human populations might wish to follow also Dienekes’ Anthropology Blog, which announces new papers and collects abstracts.

The second research project presented was a study of human health across European and Mediterranean populations by Richard H. Steckel, Clark Spencer Larsen, Paul W. Sciulli (Ohio State University) and Phillip L. Walker (University of California). A related study of North America had been completed some time ago; other unrelated and small-scale projects such as the “Global Project on the History of Leprosy” also exist. Once again, scientific data provide the best results looking at longer periods, with traditional archaeology still being the primary source of information for short periods. The results demonstrate that the health of European people deteriorated about 3,000 years ago, when agriculture was introduced. It even worsened further during the Classical period and it only reverted course in the last few centuries, most likely thanks to advances in medicine. However, in North America the general heath of the population decreased from the 1950s, and the phenomenon has been associated by the researchers to the increasing incidence of obesity. Leprosy and tuberculosis increased to due the vicinity of livestock to humans and dental health decreased significantly after switching to a grain-based diet rich in sugars and poorer in nutrients. The researchers interpret the data suggesting that the nomadic hunter-gatherers were more likely to suffer from violence and its effects, and access to food was irregular, and therefore people had to choose between health and safety (from violence and famine). I would prefer to stress instead the social character of humans: interacting with different people is a hard-wired necessity for humans, and clearly agriculture and urbanisation helped in that. This is also demonstrated by the almost constant increase of the world population. There is no doubt that an inverse correlation between human health and wealth can be recognised (also considering the case of contemporary North America), and this defies evolutionary theories to some degree, but then the subject here is human beings and we all know that it is a unique subject. Not only humans are affecting their own health, they are also affecting the planet’s health by producing considerable environmental damage. Yet, they seem extremely successful, unchallenged in nature, and unlikely to disappear any time soon. Applying evolutionary theories, one could say that humans have traded in their health and more for other advantages, benefiting from the trade ultimately. This long-term evolutionary thinking, as in the preceding case, can be enriched by archaeology, and therefore it is hoped that archaeologists will be up to the challenge.

See also a second post on this topic.

Credits: Picture created by Andrea Vianello reusing parts of a photograph taken by Nick Lawes and published under a Creative Commons licence in Flickr.

Entrants are required to pick one of five traditional copyright-free tunes and write their own words that introduce a particular theme in the history of science. A minimum of two and a maximum of eight verses are required.

Entries will be judged on their historical content and choice of topic, on their wit and imaginative use of language and rhyme schemes, and on their fit to the original tune. One £100 first prize will be awarded, together with two £50 runners-up prizes. There will also be two £50 prizes for the best amateur performance of a song. More than one entry can be submitted but a maximum of one prize per person in each category can be won.

The deadline for entries is Friday 17 April 2009.

Further details can be found on the Society’s website.

The Prize was established in 1997 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the British Society for the History of Science, and is named after the mathematician, astronomer and philosopher of science Herbert Dingle, a founder member. Its value is £300.

Nominations for the Prize are invited from both individuals and publishers. Nominations should be sent to Geoffrey Cantor at geoffrey.cantor@yahoo.com by 20 February 2009. Please include full publication details with nominations.

Publishers should send four copies of each of their nominated book(s) to: BSHS Executive Secretary, 3 Rectory Court, Elm Grove Lane, Norwich, NR3 3LH, UK, to arrive by 20 March 2009.

Further details of the prize can be found on the Society’s website.