Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2009. / "September 2009." Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 121-126). / It is commonly accepted that media and communication technologies play pivotal roles in the complex processes of what is broadly termed "globalization." The increasing speed, volume, and scale of transnational circulation has been one of the most dramatic development in the media landscape, creating what Appadurai has dubbed global "mediascapes" that are reshaping the way we understand cultural formation. While the rise of massive global commercial media enterprises leads to renewed discussion of the dominance of the "West" upon the "Rest," the increasing portability, transmitability, and reproducibility of media has helped to generate a grassroots globalization of migrant populations who circulate and engage with media from the "homeland," creating deterritorialized social imaginaries that transcend national boundaries. In examining the flourishing online fandom around the circulation of East Asian television drama, however, the established models of transnational media audiences prove insufficient. With the emergence of internet technologies, these mediascapes have now become networked, increasing the visibility and complexity of transnational media flows and the audiences around them. No longer are we seeing transnational media flows through only commercial markets or diasporic audiences seeking to connect with a virtual "home." In the online circulation of East Asian television dramas, fans with a broad range of cultural, ethnic, and national backgrounds are consciously working to shape audience engagement with these transnational television texts through fansubbing, content aggregation and curation, and the production of vast reservoirs of information, discourse, and meta-data that is constantly being expanded. More importantly, they are doing so publicly, collaboratively, and outside the domain of commercial television markets. enabling individuals to participate in the selection, (re)production, and circulation of texts and images that shape the very social imaginaries they inhabit. This work draws on insights from work on globalization, diasporic media use, fan and audience studies, and new media and employs various ethnographic, textual, and theoretical strategies and stances in an effort to illuminate key dimensions of these collaborative grassroutes of transnational media. What manner of cultural encounters are taking place within the interplay between diasporic conditions and fan practices? How do the circulation and consumption practices afforded by new media technologies inform, and can in turn be informed by, the conditions of global media audienceship? From there we may begin to remap some of complex social, technological, and textual entanglements of cultural negotiation in an increasingly global media age. / by Xiaochang Li. / S.M.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2018. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages [69]-[75]). / Since the early twentieth century, mice have emerged as the standard mammalian model organism for biomedical research. When pain relief is provided during experimentation, it typically comes in the form of transient and sometimes ineffective analgesics or anesthesia. This thesis proposes an alternative to the current method of research in the form of an engineered mouse model in which pain sensing can be ablated before an experiment. An ERT2-inducible Cre recombinase under the Wntl promoter was designed to be combined with a floxed Nav1.7 ion channel mouse model. When a 4- hydrotamoxifan class small molecule is fed to the mouse, Cre recombinase expression in the peripheral nervous system will disrupt function of the ion channel involved in inflammatory and mechanosensory pain. Additional designs for floxed Nav1.6 ion channel and Nax ion-like channel were made to explore disruption of peripheral cancer-induced neuropathic pain. In parallel with mouse model development, a survey was conducted to understand the potential for adoption of this new animal model by researchers. The survey was sent to IACUC members questioning if this model was needed, as well as how it may be regulated under the existing protocol approval framework. Results indicated that there is a both a need and desire for further refinement strategies within animal research, and that this inducible painfree mouse model could be categorized as alternative analgesic upon sufficient characterization and peer-reviewed publications. Additional input was provided that will shape testing done on the generated animals to assure that this model can mitigate animal suffering while still recapitulating important biological processes investigated in biomedical research. / by Deborah Anne Najjar. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (v. 2, leaves 126-137). / Ambient street media are the media of our everyday lives in cities. Manifested in bits and fragments on the surfaces of the streetscape, these media often escape our notice - tuned out as visual clutter or dismissed as unimportant. Yet, attentive viewing and analysis reveal much about the local culture of communication and expression. This thesis blends empirical and theoretical methodologies in a year-long photographic study that takes a fresh look at the concepts and realities of "media," "the city," and "the everyday," and sets several disciplines in interaction with one another. Ambient street media include news racks, traffic and street signs, storefronts, sandwichboards, graffiti, stickers, murals, and flyers. This is in contrast to conventional notions of "the media" as one-to-many communication modalities consumed primarily in the domestic space, particularly television, radio, major newspapers, and the Internet. Studies of media in everyday life typically address these mass media, passing over ambient street media for any detailed examination. By examining both the explicit and implicit facets of street communications, this study elevates their importance in a number of disciplines, from cultural studies to urban design and planning. For example, we find much to counter postmodern anxieties about cities. / (cont.) While evidence of globalization and the prioritization of government and corporate interests over those of local entities and autonomous individuals are easily found, the ecology of street media includes a vibrant array of individual communications. Currently, much of the media made by individuals are unauthorized to appear where they do. But in the commercial area of Central Square, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, they are accorded a high degree of tolerance by local authorities, making this a unique laboratory in which to see what happens when streetscape surfaces are accessible to many. The streetscape can be viewed as a communication medium in itself, special for its direct accessibility and affordability as well as the immediacy with which messages posted there can be received. Urban planners who seek to design spaces that give people a sense of place are encouraged to more equitably apportion space among government, commercial, and individual interests and add surfaces that are more accommodating to a wider array of inscriptions. / by Rekha Murthy. / S.M.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2016. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 113-118). / Digital fabrication aims to bring the programmability of the digital world into the physical world and has the potential to radically transform the way we make things. We are are developing a novel digital fabrication technique where a small basis set of discrete part types, called "digital materials", are reversibly joined into large assemblies with embedded functionality. Objects constructed this way may be programmed with exotic functional behavior based on the composition of their constituent parts. In this thesis I build an end-to end computer-aided design (CAD), simulation, and manufacturing (CAM) pipeline for digital materials that respects the discretization of the parts in its underlying software representation. I propagate the same abstract geometric "cell" representation of parts from the design workflow into simulation and path planning. I develop a dynamic model for simulating anisotropic, multimaterial assemblies of cells with embedded mechanical and electronic functionality based on local interactions. I demonstrate the similarities between my mechanical model and the Timoshenko Beam Element. I note an advantage of my model for simulating flexural joints is its non-linear treatment of angular displacements - allowing for large angular deformations to be simulated without costly remeshing. I implement this model in software and demonstrate its potential for parallelization by calculating each cell-cell interaction in a separate core of the GPU. I compare my simulation results with a professional multiphysics software package. I demonstrate that my tool facilitates rapid exploration of the design space around functional digital materials with several examples. / by Amanda Paige Ghassaei. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2006. / Leaf 77 blank. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 74-76). / On March 23rd 1969 Boston's public television station WGBH broadcast a program titled The Medium is the Medium. The program was a half-hour long compilation of short videos by six artists. The six pieces ranged from electronically manipulated imagery set to the music of the Beatles to an attempt at communication between four separate locations through audio-visual technology. As the narrator, David Oppenheim, the cultural executive producer for the Public Television Laboratory, intones at the beginning of the show, "what happens when artists explore television?" What happened was a program unlike anything seen before. The Medium is the Medium was the result of the pairing of artists with engineers. This pairing was the brainchild of the Rockefeller Foundation, which decided to bring these two together in what was the Artists-in-Television program. Founded in 1967 it gave seed grants to two public broadcasting stations, WGBH in Boston and KQED in San Francisco. These grants enabled the stations to begin residency programs matching artists with members of their production staffs. Several of the artists in the program had made films but most were coming to this type of time-based art work for the first time. The Artists-in Television program gave these artists the opportunity to expand their ideas into an art from involving television technologies. It offered those working in more traditional media the technology and expertise to try their hands at a nascent art form, video. / by James A. Nadeau. / S.M.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2017. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references. / As cities become increasingly dense in the coming decades, they must turn to novel technologies and frameworks to address the imminent environmental, mobility, and public health issues that will arise with this population shift. The overwhelming use of single occupancy vehicles in the United States - they account for 76% of all trips - is a major contributor to pollution, traffic, and sedentary lifestyles. However, 50% of trips in the U.S. are less than 3 miles, and could likely be replaced by a more sustainable and space-efficient mode of transportation, such as bicycling, if effective policies and incentives were implemented. This thesis presents a blockchain-based financial incentives system where cyclists can leverage their activity and location data to receive financial compensation from organizations that would like to sponsor cycling activity. For example, an insurance company may want to reward its customers with lower premiums for partaking in healthy commuting behavior. A city government may wish to encourage cycling activity to mitigate urban congestion and pollution. A local business may sponsor bicycling activity in its vicinity to increase sales. The system presented in this thesis allows these organizations to internalize the positive externalities of cycling that have not historically been recognized or rewarded. This incentives system uses GPS data from sensors affixed to bicycles frames and powered by the cyclists themselves. The use of blockchain technology makes transactions in the marketplace secure, seamless, trustworthy, and transparent. Users are able to reveal "just enough" information about themselves to participate in the decentralized marketplace, instead of exposing their entire profile to a central entity. This market-driven system facilitates better matching between individuals and incentives, and delivers those incentives in a more timely, effective manner than current incentives programs. This thesis also envisions expanding this platform to include additional bicycle-based sensors that cyclists can leverage to collect and sell data, monetizing their commuting habits, and contributing to a scalable and stable solution for increasing the use of sustainable transportation in cities. / by Caroline Adair Jaffe. / S.M.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2017. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 117-123). / Imagine traveling to a destination and, once you are there, hearing only car horns or seeing only a green sky. This project is an augmented reality experience in which you see and hear your current city while you are in another location through an immersive helmet. The multimodal experience includes augmented sounds and images that are generated by a semantic segmentation of your visual field. The segmentation produces overlaid sonic textures and superimposed visuals, modeling a newly perceived reality. The system presents cases where it is possible to imagine another place deeply and to become accustomed to a new location before being there physically. Moreover, one of the purposes of this thesis is to study the immersion of your current location but with distinct sounds and visuals from another location, for example, seeing colors and hearing sounds from Mexico City as if you were in Boston. The panoptic system aims to enhance human cognition and perception by using artificial intelligence through an immersive augmented reality device. Another goal is to augment your vision by knowing and understanding your surroundings. By using a Deep Learning model, the user's view is a "diminished" or an "augmented" reality, in which it is possible to manipulate and control physical reality in real time reality. In addition, the purpose is to offer a helpful, immersive, subjective - rather than a detached, observational - experience. / by Thomas Sanchez Lengeling. / S.M.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2018. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. "Some pages in the original document contain text that runs off the edge of the page"--Disclaimer Notice page. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 199-204). / Conversational agents and intelligent toys are present in children's homes. This raises questions as to the impact of Al on their development. In this context, we explore how to educate the children that are growing up with Al and best prepare them for the future. Our prior studies showed that young people consider intelligent agents as friendly and trustworthy, and sometimes even defer to them when making decisions [16, 73]. This thesis explores how children, who are 7 to 14 years old, develop a better understanding of Al concepts and change their perception of smart agents by programming and teaching them with the Cognimates platform we developed. Variations between children of different nationalities and SES backgrounds are discussed together with the influence of their collaboration and communication skills. / by Stefania Druga. / S.M.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2018. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 74-75). / In recent years, maker and coding movements have gained significant traction in learning communities around the world. To meet the needs of these movements, various forms of physical and digital construction kits have begun to emerge. Often times these construction kits facilitate creation in only one domain, either in the physical or virtual world, but not both. For my Master's thesis, I propose a new system, called the ScratchBit, that attempts to merge both physical and virtual making into a single cohesive experience. I am coining a new term, blended making, to describe the style of making that this system will enable. Blended making is the process of engaging in construction in both the physical and virtual world -- and with interplay between the two. Some examples could be designing a physical costume that allows the wearer to become an actor in a digital story, or creating a set of custom LEGO handlebars to control a flying bicycle video game on the screen. The ScratchBit is designed to enable young learners to engage in blended making. With an emphasis on composability, the ScratchBit allows almost any material -- such as cardboard, dolls, sneakers, or even swing sets - to be transformed into a physical interface for projects created with the Scratch visual programming language. This thesis presents analyses of projects that children created using the ScratchBit and discusses how these analyses influenced the iterative design of the ScratchBit. In addition to documenting and commenting on the iterative design process, this thesis also presents classifications of the types of ScratchBit projects that children created and guidelines for designing systems that support blended making. / by Kreg Hanning. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2010. / This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. / Cataloged from student submitted PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 93-97). / Discussions of music reproduction technology have generally focused on what Jonathan Sterne calls "tympanic" reproduction: the recording and playback of sounds through microphones and speakers. While tympanic reproduction has been very successful, its success has limited the ways in which music reproduction is popularly imagined and discussed. This thesis explores the history of "re-performance," an alternative mode of reproduction epitomized by the early twentieth-century player piano. It begins with a discussion of nineteenth-century piano recorders and the historical role of material representation in the production of music. It continues with the advent of player pianos in the early twentieth century that allowed users to "interpret" prerecorded material, blurring the line between performance and reproduction and inspiring popular reflection on the role of the mechanical in music. It concludes with the founding of the American Piano Company laboratory in 1924 and the establishment of a mechanically founded rhetoric of fidelity. Bookending this history is an account of a performance and recording session organized by Zenph Studios, a company that processes historical tympanic recordings to produce high-resolution data files for modern player pianos. Zenph's project appears futuristic from the perspective of tympanic reproduction, but is more readily understood in terms of the history of re-performance, suggesting a need for renewing critical attention on re-performative technologies. Contemporary developments in music reproduction such as music video games and sampling may make new sense considered in the context of re-performance. This alternative history aims to provide a ground on which such analysis could be built. / by Nicholas Patrick Seaver. / S.M.