Science, Technology, and Society

Victoria Feng, Architecture and Behavior at Colby: How our built environment affects the way we learn and socialize

Ben Hannon, Development of a Standardized and Functional Tactical Emergency
Medical Support Training Program

Dan Hussey, What Is High Fructose Corn Syrup and What Does It Do?  It depends on
whom you ask.

Kelly Kneeland, Controlling the Maine Environment: Three Attempts to Alter the Natural World

Nick Kondiles, License and Regulation, Please: New Standards for the Practice of In
Vitro Fertilization

Neal Kopser, G.S. Callendar’s Following

Matt Lapine, Water Quality Monitoring Technology in Maine Communities: Where Human Understanding Meets Ecological Change

Eoin McCarron, Electromagnetic Disturbances  from Natural and Nuclear Sources:
History and Public Policy

Charlie Spatz, Building with Waste: Fly Ash in the 20th and 21st Centuries

Sarah Large. Clouds: Myth, History, and Science

History as Data Science: Using Computational Analysis to Explore the Archives of the National Security State

Professor Matthew Connelly, Department of History, Columbia University

Monday, April 29 at 7:00 pm in Parker-Reed Room, SSW

The scope of official secrecy is rapidly expanding. The sheer scale of the national security state, the growth of electronic media, and the power that still comes from compartmentalizing information means that the government is only releasing a tenth as many pages of classified information as it produces. Hundreds of millions of secret documents are piling up, raising doubts about how we will be able to reconstruct the past and ensure government accountability. But historians are now teaming up with data scientists to analyze the millions of documents that are being released. Since these were among the first official documents produced and stored on computers, we can use techniques like natural language processing and machine-learning. It may now be possible to make out the broad patterns of official secrecy, attribute authorship to anonymous documents, and perhaps even predict the content of redacted text. But the political and ethical questions remain: what does the public need to know, and when do they need to know it?

Matthew Connelly is professor of history at Columbia University. His publications include A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (2002), and Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (2008). He has written research articles in Comparative Studies in Society and History, The International Journal of Middle East Studies, The American Historical Review, The Revue francaise d’histoire d’Outre-mer, and Past & Present. He has also published commentary on international affairs in The Atlantic Monthly, The Wilson Quarterly, and The National Interest. He directs the University Seminar on Big Data and Digital Scholarship, the dual masters program with the LSE in International and World History, and the Hertog Global Strategy Initiative, a research program on the history and future of planetary threats. He received his B.A. from Columbia (1990) and his Ph.D. from Yale (1998).

Friday, March 7 at 7:00 pm in Diamond 122

Anthropology talk of Interest: Body Tinkering and Moral Thinking in Experimental Transplant Science

Please join us to listen to Lesley Sharp speak about her experience as an anthropologist among bioengineers. The event is sponsored by the Department of Anthropology and will be in Diamond 122 on March 7th at 7pm.

Comedy Performance
Nov. 1 (Thurs.)
7 pm
Page Commons
Baratunde Thurston, Comedian, Author, Satirist, www.colby.edu/comedy

For the PDF of the flyer: dominyflyer