Many patent law dilemmas arise from a failure to understand technologies as embedded in broader social, economic and political realities and to contextually analyze these legal phenomena. This narrowness leads to poor legal development, of which the modern medical exception from patentability is one example. Judges have difficulty interpreting it, patentees do not understand its purpose and it does not protect the important medical technologies to which the public would like access. This thesis applies a legal pluralist analysis to examine the emergence of the medical methods exception in order to understand why it was created and legislated. It starts by examining the origins of the exception in the caselaw, and the informal, concurrent norm established by the emerging medical profession in the early 20th century. It then proceeds to examine why the medical profession might have sought and enforced a norm prohibiting its members from patenting, and concludes that this arose from the need of the medical profession to distance itself from the patent law. As a result, professionalizing physicians established an internal normative order that mimicked and in many cases replaced the effect of the formal law. The thesis then proceeds to examine how the form of the informal norm evolved in the period between WWI and WWII, finding that the profession’s norm transformed and broke down concurrently with its efforts to achieve external legitimacy through legislation. That breakdown arose from factors which included growing labour mobility, greater understanding of the benefits of patents, and a growing role of science and industry in medicine that threatened the profession’s access to valuable medical innovation. The thesis concludes with a study of a current case (Myriad Genetics) that applies the thesis’ theoretical framework to a present dispute over the role the law should play in regulating genetic diagnostic tests.

A presente pesquisa investiga a implantação da televisão analógica em cores no Brasil durante o regime militar em 1972, na perspectiva das relações entre Ciência, Tecnologia e Sociedade (CTS). Analisa as justificativas e consequências políticas, econômicas e técnicas da opção pelo sistema PAL alemão, adaptado às condições de telecomunicações no Brasil, resultando no padrão PAL-M. Relata a chegada da televisão ao país, no pré-Segunda Guerra Mundial, em ação conjunta de propaganda política do Estado Novo de Vargas e o III Reich de Hitler. Registra os marcos principais do desenvolvimento do meio no Brasil e suas relações com o poder político: a inauguração da TV Tupi no início da segunda era Vargas e o lançamento do Jornal Nacional da TV Globo no auge da repressão do regime militar. Descreve as propriedades físicas da cor, sua formação no cérebro humano, pelos processos de adição e subtração das cores primárias, e a discussão de filosofia da ciência travada após Goethe contestar a Teoria das Cores de Newton. Registra o nascimento e a evolução da televisão, de especulação científica no século XIX à condição de meio de comunicação global no século XX, quando pousou na Lua. Descreve os padrões de TV analógica em cores e relata o processo de comparação entre eles e a implantação do sistema PAL-M no Brasil. / This research investigates the deployment of analogical color TV in Brazil, under military rule in 1972, in a Science, Technology and Society (STS) approach. Analyzes the reasons and the political and economic consequences of the option for German PAL color TV system, adapted to the Brazils telecommunications conditions, resulting in the standard PAL-M. Reports the arrival of television to the country in pre-World War II, in a political propaganda act sponsored by both Varga´s New State and Hitler\'s Third Reich. Records the major milestones of the development of the medium in Brazil and its connections with political power: the inauguration of TV Tupi early in the second Vargas era and the launch of TV Globo\'s Jornal Nacional at the height of the repression of the military regime. Describes the physical properties of color, its formation in the human brain by processes of addition and subtraction of the primary colors and the discussion of the philosophy of science after Goethe\'s contest of Newton´s Theory of Colors. Records the birth and evolution of television, from a scientific speculation in the nineteenth century to the global communications medium in the twentieth century, when landed on the moon. Describes the analog color TV standards and the process of comparison between them and the deployment of PAL-M in Brazil.

A presente pesquisa investiga a implantação da televisão analógica em cores no Brasil durante o regime militar em 1972, na perspectiva das relações entre Ciência, Tecnologia e Sociedade (CTS). Analisa as justificativas e consequências políticas, econômicas e técnicas da opção pelo sistema PAL alemão, adaptado às condições de telecomunicações no Brasil, resultando no padrão PAL-M. Relata a chegada da televisão ao país, no pré-Segunda Guerra Mundial, em ação conjunta de propaganda política do Estado Novo de Vargas e o III Reich de Hitler. Registra os marcos principais do desenvolvimento do meio no Brasil e suas relações com o poder político: a inauguração da TV Tupi no início da segunda era Vargas e o lançamento do Jornal Nacional da TV Globo no auge da repressão do regime militar. Descreve as propriedades físicas da cor, sua formação no cérebro humano, pelos processos de adição e subtração das cores primárias, e a discussão de filosofia da ciência travada após Goethe contestar a Teoria das Cores de Newton. Registra o nascimento e a evolução da televisão, de especulação científica no século XIX à condição de meio de comunicação global no século XX, quando pousou na Lua. Descreve os padrões de TV analógica em cores e relata o processo de comparação entre eles e a implantação do sistema PAL-M no Brasil. / This research investigates the deployment of analogical color TV in Brazil, under military rule in 1972, in a Science, Technology and Society (STS) approach. Analyzes the reasons and the political and economic consequences of the option for German PAL color TV system, adapted to the Brazils telecommunications conditions, resulting in the standard PAL-M. Reports the arrival of television to the country in pre-World War II, in a political propaganda act sponsored by both Varga´s New State and Hitler\'s Third Reich. Records the major milestones of the development of the medium in Brazil and its connections with political power: the inauguration of TV Tupi early in the second Vargas era and the launch of TV Globo\'s Jornal Nacional at the height of the repression of the military regime. Describes the physical properties of color, its formation in the human brain by processes of addition and subtraction of the primary colors and the discussion of the philosophy of science after Goethe\'s contest of Newton´s Theory of Colors. Records the birth and evolution of television, from a scientific speculation in the nineteenth century to the global communications medium in the twentieth century, when landed on the moon. Describes the analog color TV standards and the process of comparison between them and the deployment of PAL-M in Brazil.

[Truncated abstract] This thesis represents an historical account of the reception and criticism of computer art from its emergence in 1963 to its crisis in 1989, when aesthetic and ideological differences polarise and eventually fragment the art form. Throughout its history, static-pictorial computer art has been extensively maligned. In fact, no other twentieth-century art form has elicited such a negative and often hostile response. In locating the destabilising forces that affect and shape computer art, this thesis identifies a complex interplay of ideological and discursive forces that influence the way computer art has been and is received by the mainstream artworld and the cultural community at large. One of the central factors that contributed to computer art’s marginality was its emergence in that precarious zone between science and art, at a time when the perceived division between the humanistic and scientific cultures was reaching its apogee. The polarising force inherent in the “two cultures” debate framed much of the prejudice towards early computer art. For many of its critics, computer art was the product of the same discursive assumptions, methodologies and vocabulary as science. Moreover, it invested heavily in the metaphors and mythologies of science, especially logic and mathematics. This close relationship with science continued as computer art looked to scientific disciplines and emergent techno-science paradigms for inspiration and insight. While recourse to science was a major impediment to computer art’s acceptance by the artworld orthodoxy, it was the sustained hostility towards the computer that persistently wore away at the computer art enterprise. The anticomputer response came from several sources, both humanist and anti-humanist. The first originated with mainstream critics whose strong humanist tendencies led them to reproach computerised art for its mechanical sterility. A comparison with aesthetically and theoretically similar art forms of the era reveals that the criticism of computer art is motivated by the romantic fear that a computerised surrogate had replaced the artist. Such usurpation undermined some of the keystones of modern Western art, such as notions of artistic “genius” and “creativity”. Any attempt to rationalise the human creative faculty, as many of the scientists and technologists were claiming to do, would for the humanist critics have transgressed what they considered the primordial mystique of art. Criticism of computer art also came from other quarters. Dystopianism gained popularity in the 1970s within the reactive counter-culture and avant-garde movements. Influenced by the pessimistic and cynical sentiment of anti-humanist writings, many within the arts viewed the computer as an emblem of rationalisation, a powerful instrument in the overall subordination of the individual to the emerging technocracy

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The heterogeneous field of posthuman theory allows for an account of community under the convergence of late capitalism and high technology and its spread to a global scale. Spanning bioconservative fears of a potential loss of agency and a human ‘essence’ through advances in technology, ‘transhumanist’ hopes for a biological transformation that would fulfil liberal goals for human development, as well as postmodern, feminist interpretations of the posthuman as instantiating a liberating break with liberal ideology and patriarchal structures, theories of the posthuman offer a productive starting point for exploring the transformations in understandings of human subjectivity and community at the turn of the twenty-first century. Placing the concept of community against a background of past totalitarianism and a possible future of an uncontested globalised neoliberal regime that high technology risks intensifying, the present study enquires into the possibility of a community that would escape the metaphysical logic of mastery subtending both past and present models of community and suggests that problematizing representations of the creation of what a strand in contemporary philosophy terms a non-totalising ‘communauté désoeuvrée’ and implicit proposals not for the revival of community as a teleological ‘oeuvre’, but for its rewriting may be found in works by Maurice G. Dantec, Michel Houellebec, and Antoine Volodine, works which have been labelled posthuman themselves by virtue of their incorporation of posthuman themes or structures that come in the shape of representations and problematisations of high technology and its intersection with late capitalism and narrative structures that mimic or subvert conceptions of subjectivity that can loosely be termed posthuman. These novelists write in a context of an ideological, technological, and commercial constraint that hampers literary and political agency and which is problematized both implicitly and explicitly in the use these writers make of representations of violence and literary strategies such as irony, ambiguity, and hermeticism. These representations and strategies, it will be suggested, could be read as subtle attempts to bypass those constraints and restore the potential of literary production to comment on and even intervene in the creation of community in a posthuman age.

"Undercurrents of Urban Modernism: Water, Architecture, and Landscape in California and the American West" conducts an art-historical analysis of historic waterworks buildings in order to examine cultural values pertinent to aesthetiteics in relationships between water, architecture and landscape in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Visual study of architectural style, ornamental iconography, and landscape features reveals cultural values related to water, water systems, landscape/land use, and urban development. Part 1 introduces a historiography of ideas of "West" and "landscape" to provide a context for defining ways in which water and landscape were conceived in the United States during turn-of-the-century urban development in the American West. Part 2 provides a historical context for California waterworks with a discussion of major U.S. city waterworks from 1799 to 1893 in Philadelphia, Louisville, New York, and New Orleans. Primary architectural styles discussed are Greek Revival, Egyptian Revival, and Roman Revival. Part 3 presents the dissertation's central object of study: waterworks and hydropower architecture for the greater San Francisco Bay Area between 1860 and 1939. From substations to dams, architects who designed waterworks structures drew from historical revival, academic eclecticism, and structural design traditions. The specific waterworks structures anchoring inquiry in this chapter are two round, peripteral, neoclassical water temples built for San Francisco's water supply to mark key underground aqueduct features. I analyze these two temples--the Sunol Water Temple from 1910 and the Pulgas Water Temple from 1939--in formal terms as well as from within broader urban and historical contexts. Part 4 culminates the dissertation with a case study of two dams whose aesthetic features were obscured by unneeded buttresssing when concerns for dam safety arose after a Southern California dam failure had killed several hundred people in 1928. I inquire into a cultural ambivalence stemming that seems to stem from historical conflicts determining the relative aesthetics of "use" and "beauty" in utilitarian waterworks structures. The overall questions in this dissertation inquire into ways in which aesthetic aspects of architectural design of waterworks structures expressed cultural values regarding water, architecture, and landscape in California between 1860 and 1939. / text