Journal articles on the topic 'Hardware Write Blocker Device'

In digital forensics, maintaining the integrity of digital exhibits is an essential aspect of the entire investigation and examination process, which is established using the technique of hashing. Lack of knowledge, while handling digital exhibits, might lead to unintentional alteration of computed hash, rendering the exhibit unacceptable in the court of Law. The hash value of a physical drive does not solely depend upon the data files present in it but also its file-system. Therefore, any change to the file-system might result in the change of the disk hash, even when the data files within it remain untouched. In this paper, our objective is to study the role of file-system in modification of the hash value. We examine and analyse the changes in the file-system of a NTFS formatted USB storage device, which leads to modification in its hash value when the device is plugged-in to the computer system without using write-blocker. The outcome of this research would justify the importance of write blockers while handling digital exhibits and also substantiate that the alteration in hash value of a storage device might not be an indication that data within the device has been tampered with.

This paper describes the recent advancements in the development of nanoelectronic SONOS nonvolatile semiconductor memory (NVSM) devices and technology, which are employed in both embedded applications, such as microcontrollers, and 'stand-alone', high-density, memory applications, such as cell phones and memory 'sticks'. Multi-dielectric devices, such as the MNOS devices, were among the first NVSM; however, over the ensuing years the double polysilicon, floating-gate device has become the dominant semiconductor NVSM technology. Today, however, questions arise as to future scaling and cost effectiveness of floating gate technology – questions, which have sparked renewed interest in SONOS technology. The latter offers a single polysilicon device structure with reduced lithography steps together with compact cell layouts - compatible with 'standard' CMOS technology for cost effectiveness. In addition, SONOS technology offers performance features, such as reduced erase and write voltage levels to ease the design of peripheral memory circuits with a decrease in electric fields and localized charge storage for improved reliability and multi-bit storage, and ease of memory testing. A special feature of SONOS technology is radiation hardness, which makes this technology ideal for advanced Space and Military systems. SONOS devices use ultra-thin tunnel oxides (2nm) and operate with 'modified' Fowler-Nordheim and 'direct' tunneling in both erase and write (program) modes. A thicker tunnel oxide SONOS device (5nm), called the NROM™ device, uses 'hot electron injection for programming and 'hot hole band-to-band tunneling' for erase. The NROM™ device provides spatially isolated, two-bit storage with the possibility of multi-level charge (MLC) storage at each bit location. This paper describes the physical electronics for these device structures and their erase/write, retention and endurance characteristics. In addition, several novel SONOS device structures are discussed as potential candidates for future NVSM.

In this work we proposed the development of an alternative device as a motivating element to learn computer science and robotics using the Raspberry PI and Arduino boards. The connections of all hardware used to build the device called Betabot are presented and are also reported the technologies used for programming the Betabot. An environment for writing programs to run at Betabot was developed. With this environment it is possible to write programs in the Python programming language, using libraries with functions specific to the device. With the Betabot using a webcam and through image processing search for patterns like faces, circles, squares and colors. The device also has functions to move servos and motors, and capture values returned by some kindsof sensors connected to communication ports. From this work, it was possible to develop a device that is easy to be manipulated and programmed, which can be used to support the teaching of computer science and robotics.

This paper introduces the method of design a USB On-The-Go (OTG) mass storage module according to USB 2.0 specification, which bases on embedded systems LM3S9B90. This module’s hardware system and software system is described, focusing on the implementation of USB host system. The module realizes USB OTG function, not only can realize functions of read and write USB mass storage devices, but also can exchange data with USB host as a USB mass storage device, can be used as an extension of USB system and has good application value.

This paper describes the integration of field-induced magnetic switching (FIMS) and thermally assisted switching (TAS) magnetic random access memories in FPGA design. The nonvolatility of the latter is achieved through the use of magnetic tunneling junctions (MTJs) in the MRAM cell. A thermally assisted switching scheme helps to reduce power consumption during write operation in comparison to the writing scheme in the FIMS-MTJ device. Moreover, the nonvolatility of such a design based on either an FIMS or a TAS writing scheme should reduce both power consumption and configuration time required at each power up of the circuit in comparison to classical SRAM-based FPGAs. A real-time reconfigurable (RTR) micro-FPGA using FIMS-MRAM or TAS-MRAM allows dynamic reconfiguration mechanisms, while featuring simple design architecture.

A successful design which used FPGA to do Positive/Zero/Negative Justification for adapting E1 (2.048Mbit/s) to SDH C-12 is presented. Gray code is adopted to realize the sampling of write pointer in reading clock domain and induct frequency doubling technology to deduct/insert reading clock, and a positioning counting device is set to complete the positioning insert of specified bytes. Asynchronous FIFO and Ping-Pong operation technique are both adopted. The design realizes stimulation, placement and routing under Quartus II 9.0 circumstances. It is a reusable hardware module which increases performance when compared to existing solutions.

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) offer a bio-plausible and potentially power-efficient alternative to conventional deep learning. Although there has been progress towards implementing SNN functionalities in custom CMOS-based hardware using beyond Von Neumann architectures, the power-efficiency of the human brain has remained elusive. This has necessitated investigations of novel material systems which can efficiently mimic the functional units of SNNs, such as neurons and synapses. In this paper, we present a magnetoelectric–magnetic tunnel junction (ME-MTJ) device as a synapse. We arrange these synapses in a crossbar fashion and perform in situ unsupervised learning. We leverage the capacitive nature of write-ports in ME-MTJs, wherein by applying appropriately shaped voltage pulses across the write-port, the ME-MTJ can be switched in a probabilistic manner. We further exploit the sigmoidal switching characteristics of ME-MTJ to tune the synapses to follow the well-known spike timing-dependent plasticity (STDP) rule in a stochastic fashion. Finally, we use the stochastic STDP rule in ME-MTJ synapses to simulate a two-layered SNN to perform image classification tasks on a handwritten digit dataset. Thus, the capacitive write-port and the decoupled-nature of read-write path of ME-MTJs allow us to construct a transistor-less crossbar, suitable for energy-efficient implementation of in situ learning in SNNs. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Harmonizing energy-autonomous computing and intelligence’.

The security usage and management of removable storage devices has become a vital problem for enterprises and individuals. However, the required strict security policies for preventing unauthorized access to sensitive data raise the decrease of usability and flexibility. The main problem rests on the binding between security and application domains which stifles the initiative of the devices on themselves. This paper presents TRS, an efficient active architecture that binds a feather-weight virtual machine (FVM) to the removable storage device. It is designed based on an inside-bound smart card as well as the chip operation system (COS) which builds a trust channel between the FVM and the device. The FVM is set up by a trust chain and provides isolated usage environment for process accessing the device which prevents the obtained data from leakage. Finally, we implement a USB flash disk we call as UTrustDisk based on the hardware structure of Amordisk which is a security product of Nationz Technologies Inc. The results show the average overhead of read and write is 7.5% and 11.5%.

Data retention in stored-charge based memories, such as Flash and EEPROMs, decreases with increasing temperature. Compensation for this shortening of retention time can be accomplished by refreshing the data using periodic erase-write refresh cycles, although the number of these cycles is limited by oxide integrity. An alternate approach is to use refresh cycles consisting of a rewrite only cycles, without the prior erase cycle. The viability of this approach requires that this refresh cycle induces less damage than an erase-write cycle. This paper studies the effects of repeated refresh cycles on oxide integrity in a high temperature environment and makes comparisons to the damage caused by erase-write cycles. The experiment consisted of running a large number of refresh cycles on a selected byte. The control group was other bytes which were not subjected to refresh only cycles. The oxide integrity was checked by performing repeated erase-write cycles on each of the two groups to determine if the refresh cycles decreased the number of erase-write cycles before failure. Data was collected from multiple parts, with different numbers of refresh cycles, and at temperatures ranging from 25C to 190C. The experiment was conducted on microcontrollers containing embedded EEPROM memories. The microcontrollers were programmed to test and measure their own memories, and to report the results to an external controller. This greatly simplified the hardware setup, since only six wires were required to operate and test the memories of 77 microcontrollers. It also allowed data collection from the microcontrollers while the experiment was in progress. Data is presented showing that refresh cycles do not have a significant impact on oxide integrity. This result shows that the refresh cycle approach will not degrade the oxide and suggests that it will provide a mechanism to extend data retention at high temperatures without affecting device reliability. The data also showed a bimodal distribution of the number of erase-write cycles necessary to damage the oxide. Although the cause of this distribution is not yet understood, it may provide an additional means to significantly improve EEPROM reliability through appropriate screening.

The market for applications developed for mobile devices is growing as the hardware capabilities increase while costs drop. At the same time, the inability to write code once becomes a noticeable problem resulting in the time consuming task of porting an application to a variety of mobile devices, which is true for languages like Java that have been designed to be portable across a range of hardware platforms. As a result, porting a Java application written for one device to another is often a tedious and time-consuming task for developers. This paper presents an intelligent CASE tool that assists the porting of Java mobile applications by automatically generating Java code fragments for the target SDK. SeqFinder automatically generates all minimal method invocation sequences that lead to an object of a specific type, thus relieving the programmer of manually searching the manufacturer-provided SDK Java archives. However, this tool is not applicable only to the Java ME platform and has been used as a fast type-browser for J2SE/J2EE applications.

We report the operational characteristics of ultra-small-scaled SONOS (below 50 nm gate width and length) and SiO 2/ SiO 2 structural devices with 0.5 um gate width and length where trapping occurs in a very narrow region. The experimental work summarizes the memory characteristics of retention time, endurance cycles, and speed in SONOS and SiO 2/ SiO 2 structures. Silicon nitride has many defects to hold electrons as charge storage media in SONOS memory. Defects are also incorporated during growth and deposition in device processing. Our experiments show that the interface between two oxides, one grown and one deposited, provides a remarkable media for electron storage with a smaller gate stack and thus lower operating voltage. The exponential dependence of the time on the voltage is reflected in the characteristic energy. It is ~0.44 eV for the write process and ~0.47 eV for the erase process in SiO 2/ SiO 2 structural device which is somewhat more efficient than those of SONOS structure memory.

Flash memory is widely used in solid state drives (SSD), smartphones and so on because of their non-volatility, low power consumption, rapid access speed, and resistance to shocks. Due to the hardware features of flash memory that differ from hard disk drives (HDD), a software called FTL (Flash Translation Layer) was presented. The function of FTL is to make flash memory device appear as a block device to its host. However, due to the erase before write features of flash memory, flash blocks need to be constantly availed through the garbage collection (GC) of invalid pages, which incurs high-priced overhead. In the previous hybrid mapping schemes, there are three problems that cause GC overhead. First, operation of partial merge causes more page copies than operation of switch merge. However, many authors just concentrate on reducing operation of full merge. Second, the availability between a data block and a log block makes the space availability of the log block lower, and it also generates a very high-priced operation of full merge. Third, the space availability of the data block is low because the data block, which has many free pages, is merged. Therefore, we propose a new FTL named DSFTL (Dynamic Setting for FTL). In this FTL, we use many SW (sequential write) log blocks to increase operation of switch merge and to decrease operation of partial merge. In addition, DSFTL dynamically handles the data blocks and log blocks to reduce the operations of erase and the high-priced operation of full merge. Additionally, our scheme prevents the data block with many free pages from being merged to increase the space availability of the data block. Our extensive experimental results prove that our proposed approach (DSFTL) reduces the count of erase and increases the operation of switch merge. As a result, DSFTL decreases the garbage collection overhead.

Because the development of the Internet of Things (IoT) requires technology that transfers information between objects without human intervention, the core of IoT security will be secure authentication between devices or between devices and servers. Software-based authentication may be a security vulnerability in IoT, but hardware-based security technology can provide a strong security environment. Physical unclonable functions (PUFs) are hardware security element suitable for lightweight applications. PUFs can generate challenge–response pairs(CRPs) that cannot be controlled or predicted by utilizing inherent physical variations that occur in the manufacturing process. In particular, the pulsewidth-based memristive PUF (pm-PUF) improves security performance by applying different write pulse widths and bank structures. Bloom filters (BFs) are probabilistic data structures that answer membership queries using small memories. Bloom filters can improve search performance and reduce memory usage and are used in areas such as networking, security, big data, and IoT. In this paper, we propose a structure that applies Bloom filters based on the pm-PUF to reduce PUF data transmission errors. The proposed structure uses two different Bloom filter types that store different information and that are located in front of and behind the pm-PUF, reducing unnecessary access by removing challenges from attacker access. Simulation results show that the proposed structure decreases the data transmission error rate and reuse rate as the Bloom filter size increases; the simulation results also show that the proposed structure improves pm-PUF security with a very small Bloom filter memory.

This is desktop application which can assist people with basic tasks using natural language. Virtual Voice Assistants can go online and search for an answer to a user’s question. Actions can be triggered using text or voice. Voice is the key. A virtual voice assistant is a personal assistant which uses natural language processing (NLP) , voice recognition and speech synthesis to provide a service through a particular application. Natural Language Processing in short is called as NLP. It is basically a branch of artificial intelligence which mainly deals with the interaction between personal computers and human beings using the natural language. The main objective of NLP is to read, convert, understand, and make use of the human languages in a manner that is valuable. Voice recognition is a hardware device or computer software program with the potential to decode the voice of human beings. Voice recognition is usually used to operate a gadget, execute commands, or write without making use of any mouse, keyboard, or press any buttons. Artificial production of human speech is called as Speech Synthesis. A system used for this purpose is called a speech computer or speech synthesizer and can be implemented in many products of software’s and hardware’s.

Fourier algorithm can be effective utilized in the Microcomputer relay protection to filter out Harmonic component in the AC signal .but the drawback is that not filter attenuation DC component. it may be affect the computation accuracy of the entire system .and it is also reduce the efficiency of the system. In this paper ,we combined with the actual project ,on the basis of analysis of the full-wave Fourier algorithm ,for the problem of it can not filter decaying a periodic component ,we proposed an improved algorithm, and combined with MATLAB simulation ,the results show that the improved algorithm has the advantages of high accuracy and the algorithm is simple. In the microcomputer relay protection of the power system need to handle all kinds of signals, provide the necessary information for the implementation of protection. however, With the rapid development of computer technology and the continuous research of computer algorithms, a lot of actual power system protection device has been widely used in our life, on the one hand, these devices reduce the complexity of building hardware circuit, on the other hand ,it can make full use of the filter function about some algorithms have itself. The most important is that it can avoid the problem of instability and low efficiency with some filter circuit. But, this characteristic need the algorithms has a high precision [2,3]. The algorithm is set up in the microcomputer protection is a mathematical model for achieve some specific function. and write the corresponding computer applications according to this model. Then do some specific mathematical operations with these digital signals will achieve the purpose of protection. At present, the widely used full wave Fourier algorithm has a function of filtering DC component and harmonic component[4],but it can not filtering the decaying DC component in the system. It will be cause a certain interference and influence to the whole system in the practical application, the result is that led to the precision of the operation drop and lose the meaning of the protecting. In this paper, combined with specific engineering example give an improved calculation method. Through example of simulation has proved that using this algorithm can accurately figure out fundamental component and harmonic component, and it has the advantage of algorithm simple and high accuracy [5].

Internet of Things (IoT) is regarded as a next-generation wave of Information Technology (IT) after the widespread emergence of the Internet and mobile communication technologies. IoT supports information exchange and networked interaction of appliances, vehicles and other objects, making sensing and actuation possible in a low-cost and smart manner. On the other hand, cyber-physical systems (CPS) are described as the engineered systems which are built upon the tight integration of the cyber entities (e.g., computation, communication, and control) and the physical things (natural and man-made systems governed by the laws of physics). The IoT and CPS are not isolated technologies. Rather it can be said that IoT is the base or enabling technology for CPS and CPS is considered as the grownup development of IoT, completing the IoT notion and vision. Both are merged into closed-loop, providing mechanisms for conceptualizing, and realizing all aspects of the networked composed systems that are monitored and controlled by computing algorithms and are tightly coupled among users and the Internet. That is, the hardware and the software entities are intertwined, and they typically function on different time and location-based scales. In fact, the linking between the cyber and the physical world is enabled by IoT (through sensors and actuators). CPS that includes traditional embedded and control systems are supposed to be transformed by the evolving and innovative methodologies and engineering of IoT. Several applications areas of IoT and CPS are smart building, smart transport, automated vehicles, smart cities, smart grid, smart manufacturing, smart agriculture, smart healthcare, smart supply chain and logistics, etc. Though CPS and IoT have significant overlaps, they differ in terms of engineering aspects. Engineering IoT systems revolves around the uniquely identifiable and internet-connected devices and embedded systems; whereas engineering CPS requires a strong emphasis on the relationship between computation aspects (complex software) and the physical entities (hardware). Engineering CPS is challenging because there is no defined and fixed boundary and relationship between the cyber and physical worlds. In CPS, diverse constituent parts are composed and collaborated together to create unified systems with global behaviour. These systems need to be ensured in terms of dependability, safety, security, efficiency, and adherence to real‐time constraints. Hence, designing CPS requires knowledge of multidisciplinary areas such as sensing technologies, distributed systems, pervasive and ubiquitous computing, real-time computing, computer networking, control theory, signal processing, embedded systems, etc. CPS, along with the continuous evolving IoT, has posed several challenges. For example, the enormous amount of data collected from the physical things makes it difficult for Big Data management and analytics that includes data normalization, data aggregation, data mining, pattern extraction and information visualization. Similarly, the future IoT and CPS need standardized abstraction and architecture that will allow modular designing and engineering of IoT and CPS in global and synergetic applications. Another challenging concern of IoT and CPS is the security and reliability of the components and systems. Although IoT and CPS have attracted the attention of the research communities and several ideas and solutions are proposed, there are still huge possibilities for innovative propositions to make IoT and CPS vision successful. The major challenges and research scopes include system design and implementation, computing and communication, system architecture and integration, application-based implementations, fault tolerance, designing efficient algorithms and protocols, availability and reliability, security and privacy, energy-efficiency and sustainability, etc. It is our great privilege to present Volume 21, Issue 3 of Scalable Computing: Practice and Experience. We had received 30 research papers and out of which 14 papers are selected for publication. The objective of this special issue is to explore and report recent advances and disseminate state-of-the-art research related to IoT, CPS and the enabling and associated technologies. The special issue will present new dimensions of research to researchers and industry professionals with regard to IoT and CPS. Vivek Kumar Prasad and Madhuri D Bhavsar in the paper titled "Monitoring and Prediction of SLA for IoT based Cloud described the mechanisms for monitoring by using the concept of reinforcement learning and prediction of the cloud resources, which forms the critical parts of cloud expertise in support of controlling and evolution of the IT resources and has been implemented using LSTM. The proper utilization of the resources will generate revenues to the provider and also increases the trust factor of the provider of cloud services. For experimental analysis, four parameters have been used i.e. CPU utilization, disk read/write throughput and memory utilization. Kasture et al. in the paper titled "Comparative Study of Speaker Recognition Techniques in IoT Devices for Text Independent Negative Recognition" compared the performance of features which are used in state of art speaker recognition models and analyse variants of Mel frequency cepstrum coefficients (MFCC) predominantly used in feature extraction which can be further incorporated and used in various smart devices. Mahesh Kumar Singh and Om Prakash Rishi in the paper titled "Event Driven Recommendation System for E-Commerce using Knowledge based Collaborative Filtering Technique" proposed a novel system that uses a knowledge base generated from knowledge graph to identify the domain knowledge of users, items, and relationships among these, knowledge graph is a labelled multidimensional directed graph that represents the relationship among the users and the items. The proposed approach uses about 100 percent of users' participation in the form of activities during navigation of the web site. Thus, the system expects under the users' interest that is beneficial for both seller and buyer. The proposed system is compared with baseline methods in area of recommendation system using three parameters: precision, recall and NDGA through online and offline evaluation studies with user data and it is observed that proposed system is better as compared to other baseline systems. Benbrahim et al. in the paper titled "Deep Convolutional Neural Network with TensorFlow and Keras to Classify Skin Cancer" proposed a novel classification model to classify skin tumours in images using Deep Learning methodology and the proposed system was tested on HAM10000 dataset comprising of 10,015 dermatoscopic images and the results observed that the proposed system is accurate in order of 94.06\% in validation set and 93.93\% in the test set. Devi B et al. in the paper titled "Deadlock Free Resource Management Technique for IoT-Based Post Disaster Recovery Systems" proposed a new class of techniques that do not perform stringent testing before allocating the resources but still ensure that the system is deadlock-free and the overhead is also minimal. The proposed technique suggests reserving a portion of the resources to ensure no deadlock would occur. The correctness of the technique is proved in the form of theorems. The average turnaround time is approximately 18\% lower for the proposed technique over Banker's algorithm and also an optimal overhead of O(m). Deep et al. in the paper titled "Access Management of User and Cyber-Physical Device in DBAAS According to Indian IT Laws Using Blockchain" proposed a novel blockchain solution to track the activities of employees managing cloud. Employee authentication and authorization are managed through the blockchain server. User authentication related data is stored in blockchain. The proposed work assists cloud companies to have better control over their employee's activities, thus help in preventing insider attack on User and Cyber-Physical Devices. Sumit Kumar and Jaspreet Singh in paper titled "Internet of Vehicles (IoV) over VANETS: Smart and Secure Communication using IoT" highlighted a detailed description of Internet of Vehicles (IoV) with current applications, architectures, communication technologies, routing protocols and different issues. The researchers also elaborated research challenges and trade-off between security and privacy in area of IoV. Deore et al. in the paper titled "A New Approach for Navigation and Traffic Signs Indication Using Map Integrated Augmented Reality for Self-Driving Cars" proposed a new approach to supplement the technology used in self-driving cards for perception. The proposed approach uses Augmented Reality to create and augment artificial objects of navigational signs and traffic signals based on vehicles location to reality. This approach help navigate the vehicle even if the road infrastructure does not have very good sign indications and marking. The approach was tested locally by creating a local navigational system and a smartphone based augmented reality app. The approach performed better than the conventional method as the objects were clearer in the frame which made it each for the object detection to detect them. Bhardwaj et al. in the paper titled "A Framework to Systematically Analyse the Trustworthiness of Nodes for Securing IoV Interactions" performed literature on IoV and Trust and proposed a Hybrid Trust model that seperates the malicious and trusted nodes to secure the interaction of vehicle in IoV. To test the model, simulation was conducted on varied threshold values. And results observed that PDR of trusted node is 0.63 which is higher as compared to PDR of malicious node which is 0.15. And on the basis of PDR, number of available hops and Trust Dynamics the malicious nodes are identified and discarded. Saniya Zahoor and Roohie Naaz Mir in the paper titled "A Parallelization Based Data Management Framework for Pervasive IoT Applications" highlighted the recent studies and related information in data management for pervasive IoT applications having limited resources. The paper also proposes a parallelization-based data management framework for resource-constrained pervasive applications of IoT. The comparison of the proposed framework is done with the sequential approach through simulations and empirical data analysis. The results show an improvement in energy, processing, and storage requirements for the processing of data on the IoT device in the proposed framework as compared to the sequential approach. Patel et al. in the paper titled "Performance Analysis of Video ON-Demand and Live Video Streaming Using Cloud Based Services" presented a review of video analysis over the LVS \& VoDS video application. The researchers compared different messaging brokers which helps to deliver each frame in a distributed pipeline to analyze the impact on two message brokers for video analysis to achieve LVS & VoS using AWS elemental services. In addition, the researchers also analysed the Kafka configuration parameter for reliability on full-service-mode. Saniya Zahoor and Roohie Naaz Mir in the paper titled "Design and Modeling of Resource-Constrained IoT Based Body Area Networks" presented the design and modeling of a resource-constrained BAN System and also discussed the various scenarios of BAN in context of resource constraints. The Researchers also proposed an Advanced Edge Clustering (AEC) approach to manage the resources such as energy, storage, and processing of BAN devices while performing real-time data capture of critical health parameters and detection of abnormal patterns. The comparison of the AEC approach is done with the Stable Election Protocol (SEP) through simulations and empirical data analysis. The results show an improvement in energy, processing time and storage requirements for the processing of data on BAN devices in AEC as compared to SEP. Neelam Saleem Khan and Mohammad Ahsan Chishti in the paper titled "Security Challenges in Fog and IoT, Blockchain Technology and Cell Tree Solutions: A Review" outlined major authentication issues in IoT, map their existing solutions and further tabulate Fog and IoT security loopholes. Furthermore, this paper presents Blockchain, a decentralized distributed technology as one of the solutions for authentication issues in IoT. In addition, the researchers discussed the strength of Blockchain technology, work done in this field, its adoption in COVID-19 fight and tabulate various challenges in Blockchain technology. The researchers also proposed Cell Tree architecture as another solution to address some of the security issues in IoT, outlined its advantages over Blockchain technology and tabulated some future course to stir some attempts in this area. Bhadwal et al. in the paper titled "A Machine Translation System from Hindi to Sanskrit Language Using Rule Based Approach" proposed a rule-based machine translation system to bridge the language barrier between Hindi and Sanskrit Language by converting any test in Hindi to Sanskrit. The results are produced in the form of two confusion matrices wherein a total of 50 random sentences and 100 tokens (Hindi words or phrases) were taken for system evaluation. The semantic evaluation of 100 tokens produce an accuracy of 94\% while the pragmatic analysis of 50 sentences produce an accuracy of around 86\%. Hence, the proposed system can be used to understand the whole translation process and can further be employed as a tool for learning as well as teaching. Further, this application can be embedded in local communication based assisting Internet of Things (IoT) devices like Alexa or Google Assistant. Anshu Kumar Dwivedi and A.K. Sharma in the paper titled "NEEF: A Novel Energy Efficient Fuzzy Logic Based Clustering Protocol for Wireless Sensor Network" proposed a a deterministic novel energy efficient fuzzy logic-based clustering protocol (NEEF) which considers primary and secondary factors in fuzzy logic system while selecting cluster heads. After selection of cluster heads, non-cluster head nodes use fuzzy logic for prudent selection of their cluster head for cluster formation. NEEF is simulated and compared with two recent state of the art protocols, namely SCHFTL and DFCR under two scenarios. Simulation results unveil better performance by balancing the load and improvement in terms of stability period, packets forwarded to the base station, improved average energy and extended lifetime.

AbstractPhysical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) address the inherent limitations of conventional hardware security solutions in edge-computing devices. Despite impressive demonstrations with silicon circuits and crossbars of oxide memristors, realizing efficient roots of trust for resource-constrained hardware remains a significant challenge. Hybrid organic electronic materials with a rich reservoir of exotic switching physics offer an attractive, inexpensive alternative to design efficient cryptographic hardware, but have not been investigated till date. Here, we report a breakthrough security primitive exploiting the switching physics of one dimensional halide perovskite memristors as excellent sources of entropy for secure key generation and device authentication. Measurements of a prototypical 1 kb propyl pyridinium lead iodide (PrPyr[PbI3]) weak memristor PUF with a differential write-back strategy reveals near ideal uniformity, uniqueness and reliability without additional area and power overheads. Cycle-to-cycle write variability enables reconfigurability, while in-memory computing empowers a strong recurrent PUF construction to thwart machine learning attacks.

The technology is shrinking in recent days which leads to growing concerns related to various design metrics. Leakage power tends to grow with the array size as most of the Static Random Access Memory (SRAM) cells operate in standby mode. The data to be written into the SRAM become difficult as the supply voltage decreases. So, stability in write mode requires enhancement. As SRAM is used for the on-chip computations, the faster write operation is required. The half-select issue in SRAM design needs to be eliminated so that bit interleaving architecture can be employed for the SRAM array enabling the protection from soft errors. A new Proposed 10 Transistor Bit-Interleaved SRAM cell has been designed addressing the above concerns. Employment of high-threshold voltage devices in read path and absence of NMOS device in one of the inverters reduces leakage power. Cut-off switch enables faster write operation and enhanced write stability. Cross point selection in write mode eliminates the half-select issue observed by carrying 1000 Monte-Carlo simulations. It has lower leakage power while holding 0 compared to 8 Transistor, Fully Differential 8 Transistor and Write Assist Low Power 11 Transistor SRAM cells at the worst fast-fast process corner for 0.9 V supply voltage. Write 1 Power Delay Product is lower than 8 Transistor, Fully Differential 8 Transistor and Write Assist Low Power 11 Transistor SRAM cells at slow-slow corner at 0.9V supply voltage. All the design metrics have been evaluated by performing post-layout simulation in Cadence Virtuoso in 45-nm technology.

Some restaurants are to develop the concept by placing the gazebo-gazebo that were located far apart. With a large area and a place to eat with the amount that more and more the restaurant must provide the waitresses in considerable amounts. Often when the waiter is still busy serving the other guests, then there will be visitors restaurants that can not be served well. In addition, the number of waiters that too many would economically burden the employers because it would result in expenditure will be even greater. Then it can be developed an information system involving hardware and software to apply the reservation system that can be done from the tables or places to eat at a restaurant. Systems built using hardware and software. The hardware is built by using the AVR microcontroller device comprising an IC (Integrated Circuit) which is supported by the power supply, as well as some passive and active components. Software on a microcontroller using C language development tool using CodeVision of AVR. While the computer software using Visual Basic 6.0 programming language. Food ordering system that created it can improve services for consumers in terms of booking. Buyers can make a reservation at the dinner table without going through the waitress who had approached the table and write whatever menu you want to order. Additional bookings can also be done through the table without leaving the place or the waiter.

No single tool is more fundamental to writing—and more unexamined—than the computer keyboard. Most of us in the West never consider that the standard QWERTY key layout, i.e. the staggered key design and the selection of keys available, is anything but the received, traditional means of text input. And as such, keyboard/device manufacturers wield a unique form of power: they dictate the kind of words we can create. They further decide, however unconsciously, the motions our fingers take when we write; the staggered layout was necessary for the proper functioning of mechanical typewriters, but has no necessity for computers (let alone mobile devices), yet continues to be replicated, despite the fact that it is responsible for repetitive stress injuries that could be eliminated or reduced with an improved ergonomic design. QWERTY may even shape the meaning of words that we type. Furthermore, considering the global reach of QWERTY against the backdrop of language diversity, and particularly the approximately 300 non-Latin scripts in existence, the hegemony of default QWERTY keyboards hints at the ongoing impacts of the colonial legacy within digital technologies. Thus, to make computing, and the Internet, more equitable and humane, we must reimagine our keyboard layouts, the characters they include, and our modes of human-computer interaction. Our paper presents this case, employing data analyses of hardware and software keyboard usage statistics.

Big data is nothing but unstructured and structured data which is not possible to process by our traditional system its not only have the volume of data also velocity and verity of data, Processing means ( store and analyze for knowledge information to take decision), Every living, non living and each and every device generates tremendous amount of data every fraction of seconds, Hadoop is a software frame work to process big data to get knowledge out of stored data and enhance the business and solve the societal problems, Hadoop basically have two important components HDFS and Map Reduce HDFS for store and mapreduce to process. HDFS includes name node and data nodes for storage, Map-Reduce includes frame works of Job tracker and Task tracker. Whenever client request Hadoop to store name node responds with available free memory data nodes then client will write data to respective data nodes then replication factor of hadoop copies the blocks of data with other data nodes to overcome fault tolerance Name node stores the meta of data nodes. Replication is for back-up as hadoop HDFS uses commodity hardware for storage, also name node have back-up secondary name node as only point of failure the hadoop. Whenever clients want to process the data, client request the name node Job tracker then Name node communicate to Task tracker for task done. All the above components of hadoop are frame works on-top of OS for efficient utilization and manage the system recourses for big data processing. Big data processing performance is measured with bench marks programs in our research work we compared the processing i.e. execution time of bench mark program word count with Hadoop Map-Reduce python Jar code, PIG script and Hive query with same input file big.txt. and we can say that Hive is much faster than PIG and Map-reduce Python jar code Map-reduce execution time is 1m, 29sec Pig Execution time is 57 sec Hive execution time is 31 sec

“As the old technologies become automatic and invisible, we find ourselves more concerned with fighting or embracing what’s new”—Dennis Baron, From Pencils to Pixels: The Stage of Literacy Technologies What constitutes a computer, as we have come to expect it? Are they necessarily monolithic “beige boxes”, connected to computer monitors, sitting on computer desks, located in computer rooms or computer labs? In order for a device to be considered a true computer, does it need to have a keyboard and mouse? If this were 1991 or earlier, our collective perception of what computers are and are not would largely be framed by this “beige box” model: computers are stationary, slab-like, and heavy, and their natural habitats must be in rooms specifically designated for that purpose. In 1992, when Apple introduced the first PowerBook, our perception began to change. Certainly there had been other portable computers prior to that, such as the Osborne 1, but these were more luggable than portable, weighing just slightly less than a typical sewing machine. The PowerBook and subsequent waves of laptops, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and so-called smart phones from numerous other companies have steadily forced us to rethink and redefine what a computer is and is not, how we interact with them, and the manner in which these tools might be used in the classroom. However, this reconceptualization of computers is far from over, and is in fact steadily evolving as new devices are introduced, adopted, and subsequently adapted for uses beyond of their original purpose. Pat Crowe’s Book Reader project, for example, has morphed Nintendo’s GameBoy and GameBoy Advance into a viable electronic book platform, complete with images, sound, and multi-language support. (Crowe, 2003) His goal was to take this existing technology previously framed only within the context of proprietary adolescent entertainment, and repurpose it for open, flexible uses typically associated with learning and literacy. Similar efforts are underway to repurpose Microsoft’s Xbox, perhaps the ultimate symbol of “closed” technology given Microsoft’s propensity for proprietary code, in order to make it a viable platform for Open Source Software (OSS). However, these efforts are not forgone conclusions, and are in fact typical of the ongoing battle over who controls the technology we own in our homes, and how open source solutions are often at odds with a largely proprietary world. In late 2001, Microsoft launched the Xbox with a multimillion dollar publicity drive featuring events, commercials, live models, and statements claiming this new console gaming platform would “change video games the way MTV changed music”. (Chan, 2001) The Xbox launched with the following technical specifications: 733mhz Pentium III 64mb RAM, 8 or 10gb internal hard disk drive CD/DVD ROM drive (speed unknown) Nvidia graphics processor, with HDTV support 4 USB 1.1 ports (adapter required), AC3 audio 10/100 ethernet port, Optional 56k modem (TechTV, 2001) While current computers dwarf these specifications in virtually all areas now, for 2001 these were roughly on par with many desktop systems. The retail price at the time was $299, but steadily dropped to nearly half that with additional price cuts anticipated. Based on these features, the preponderance of “off the shelf” parts and components used, and the relatively reasonable price, numerous programmers quickly became interested in seeing it if was possible to run Linux and additional OSS on the Xbox. In each case, the goal has been similar: exceed the original purpose of the Xbox, to determine if and how well it might be used for basic computing tasks. If these attempts prove to be successful, the Xbox could allow institutions to dramatically increase the student-to-computer ratio in select environments, or allow individuals who could not otherwise afford a computer to instead buy and Xbox, download and install Linux, and use this new device to write, create, and innovate . This drive to literally and metaphorically “open” the Xbox comes from many directions. Such efforts include Andrew Huang’s self-published “Hacking the Xbox” book in which, under the auspices of reverse engineering, Huang analyzes the architecture of the Xbox, detailing step-by-step instructions for flashing the ROM, upgrading the hard drive and/or RAM, and generally prepping the device for use as an information appliance. Additional initiatives include Lindows CEO Michael Robertson’s $200,000 prize to encourage Linux development on the Xbox, and the Xbox Linux Project at SourceForge. What is Linux? Linux is an alternative operating system initially developed in 1991 by Linus Benedict Torvalds. Linux was based off a derivative of the MINIX operating system, which in turn was a derivative of UNIX. (Hasan 2003) Linux is currently available for Intel-based systems that would normally run versions of Windows, PowerPC-based systems that would normally run Apple’s Mac OS, and a host of other handheld, cell phone, or so-called “embedded” systems. Linux distributions are based almost exclusively on open source software, graphic user interfaces, and middleware components. While there are commercial Linux distributions available, these mainly just package the freely available operating system with bundled technical support, manuals, some exclusive or proprietary commercial applications, and related services. Anyone can still download and install numerous Linux distributions at no cost, provided they do not need technical support beyond the community / enthusiast level. Typical Linux distributions come with open source web browsers, word processors and related productivity applications (such as those found in OpenOffice.org), and related tools for accessing email, organizing schedules and contacts, etc. Certain Linux distributions are more or less designed for network administrators, system engineers, and similar “power users” somewhat distanced from that of our students. However, several distributions including Lycoris, Mandrake, LindowsOS, and other are specifically tailored as regular, desktop operating systems, with regular, everyday computer users in mind. As Linux has no draconian “product activation key” method of authentication, or digital rights management-laden features associated with installation and implementation on typical desktop and laptop systems, Linux is becoming an ideal choice both individually and institutionally. It still faces an uphill battle in terms of achieving widespread acceptance as a desktop operating system. As Finnie points out in Desktop Linux Edges Into The Mainstream: “to attract users, you need ease of installation, ease of device configuration, and intuitive, full-featured desktop user controls. It’s all coming, but slowly. With each new version, desktop Linux comes closer to entering the mainstream. It’s anyone’s guess as to when critical mass will be reached, but you can feel the inevitability: There’s pent-up demand for something different.” (Finnie 2003) Linux is already spreading rapidly in numerous capacities, in numerous countries. Linux has “taken hold wherever computer users desire freedom, and wherever there is demand for inexpensive software.” Reports from technology research company IDG indicate that roughly a third of computers in Central and South America run Linux. Several countries, including Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina, have all but mandated that state-owned institutions adopt open source software whenever possible to “give their people the tools and education to compete with the rest of the world.” (Hills 2001) The Goal Less than a year after Microsoft introduced the The Xbox, the Xbox Linux project formed. The Xbox Linux Project has a goal of developing and distributing Linux for the Xbox gaming console, “so that it can be used for many tasks that Microsoft don’t want you to be able to do. ...as a desktop computer, for email and browsing the web from your TV, as a (web) server” (Xbox Linux Project 2002). Since the Linux operating system is open source, meaning it can freely be tinkered with and distributed, those who opt to download and install Linux on their Xbox can do so with relatively little overhead in terms of cost or time. Additionally, Linux itself looks very “windows-like”, making for fairly low learning curve. To help increase overall awareness of this project and assist in diffusing it, the Xbox Linux Project offers step-by-step installation instructions, with the end result being a system capable of using common peripherals such as a keyboard and mouse, scanner, printer, a “webcam and a DVD burner, connected to a VGA monitor; 100% compatible with a standard Linux PC, all PC (USB) hardware and PC software that works with Linux.” (Xbox Linux Project 2002) Such a system could have tremendous potential for technology literacy. Pairing an Xbox with Linux and OpenOffice.org, for example, would provide our students essentially the same capability any of them would expect from a regular desktop computer. They could send and receive email, communicate using instant messaging IRC, or newsgroup clients, and browse Internet sites just as they normally would. In fact, the overall browsing experience for Linux users is substantially better than that for most Windows users. Internet Explorer, the default browser on all systems running Windows-base operating systems, lacks basic features standard in virtually all competing browsers. Native blocking of “pop-up” advertisements is still not yet possible in Internet Explorer without the aid of a third-party utility. Tabbed browsing, which involves the ability to easily open and sort through multiple Web pages in the same window, often with a single mouse click, is also missing from Internet Explorer. The same can be said for a robust download manager, “find as you type”, and a variety of additional features. Mozilla, Netscape, Firefox, Konqueror, and essentially all other OSS browsers for Linux have these features. Of course, most of these browsers are also available for Windows, but Internet Explorer is still considered the standard browser for the platform. If the Xbox Linux Project becomes widely diffused, our students could edit and save Microsoft Word files in OpenOffice.org’s Writer program, and do the same with PowerPoint and Excel files in similar OpenOffice.org components. They could access instructor comments originally created in Microsoft Word documents, and in turn could add their own comments and send the documents back to their instructors. They could even perform many functions not yet capable in Microsoft Office, including saving files in PDF or Flash format without needing Adobe’s Acrobat product or Macromedia’s Flash Studio MX. Additionally, by way of this project, the Xbox can also serve as “a Linux server for HTTP/FTP/SMB/NFS, serving data such as MP3/MPEG4/DivX, or a router, or both; without a monitor or keyboard or mouse connected.” (Xbox Linux Project 2003) In a very real sense, our students could use these inexpensive systems previously framed only within the context of entertainment, for educational purposes typically associated with computer-mediated learning. Problems: Control and Access The existing rhetoric of technological control surrounding current and emerging technologies appears to be stifling many of these efforts before they can even be brought to the public. This rhetoric of control is largely typified by overly-restrictive digital rights management (DRM) schemes antithetical to education, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Combined,both are currently being used as technical and legal clubs against these efforts. Microsoft, for example, has taken a dim view of any efforts to adapt the Xbox to Linux. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who has repeatedly referred to Linux as a cancer and has equated OSS as being un-American, stated, “Given the way the economic model works - and that is a subsidy followed, essentially, by fees for every piece of software sold - our license framework has to do that.” (Becker 2003) Since the Xbox is based on a subsidy model, meaning that Microsoft actually sells the hardware at a loss and instead generates revenue off software sales, Ballmer launched a series of concerted legal attacks against the Xbox Linux Project and similar efforts. In 2002, Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft simultaneously sued Lik Sang, Inc., a Hong Kong-based company that produces programmable cartridges and “mod chips” for the PlayStation II, Xbox, and Game Cube. Nintendo states that its company alone loses over $650 million each year due to piracy of their console gaming titles, which typically originate in China, Paraguay, and Mexico. (GameIndustry.biz) Currently, many attempts to “mod” the Xbox required the use of such chips. As Lik Sang is one of the only suppliers, initial efforts to adapt the Xbox to Linux slowed considerably. Despite that fact that such chips can still be ordered and shipped here by less conventional means, it does not change that fact that the chips themselves would be illegal in the U.S. due to the anticircumvention clause in the DMCA itself, which is designed specifically to protect any DRM-wrapped content, regardless of context. The Xbox Linux Project then attempted to get Microsoft to officially sanction their efforts. They were not only rebuffed, but Microsoft then opted to hire programmers specifically to create technological countermeasures for the Xbox, to defeat additional attempts at installing OSS on it. Undeterred, the Xbox Linux Project eventually arrived at a method of installing and booting Linux without the use of mod chips, and have taken a more defiant tone now with Microsoft regarding their circumvention efforts. (Lettice 2002) They state that “Microsoft does not want you to use the Xbox as a Linux computer, therefore it has some anti-Linux-protection built in, but it can be circumvented easily, so that an Xbox can be used as what it is: an IBM PC.” (Xbox Linux Project 2003) Problems: Learning Curves and Usability In spite of the difficulties imposed by the combined technological and legal attacks on this project, it has succeeded at infiltrating this closed system with OSS. It has done so beyond the mere prototype level, too, as evidenced by the Xbox Linux Project now having both complete, step-by-step instructions available for users to modify their own Xbox systems, and an alternate plan catering to those who have the interest in modifying their systems, but not the time or technical inclinations. Specifically, this option involves users mailing their Xbox systems to community volunteers within the Xbox Linux Project, and basically having these volunteers perform the necessary software preparation or actually do the full Linux installation for them, free of charge (presumably not including shipping). This particular aspect of the project, dubbed “Users Help Users”, appears to be fairly new. Yet, it already lists over sixty volunteers capable and willing to perform this service, since “Many users don’t have the possibility, expertise or hardware” to perform these modifications. Amazingly enough, in some cases these volunteers are barely out of junior high school. One such volunteer stipulates that those seeking his assistance keep in mind that he is “just 14” and that when performing these modifications he “...will not always be finished by the next day”. (Steil 2003) In addition to this interesting if somewhat unusual level of community-driven support, there are currently several Linux-based options available for the Xbox. The two that are perhaps the most developed are GentooX, which is based of the popular Gentoo Linux distribution, and Ed’s Debian, based off the Debian GNU / Linux distribution. Both Gentoo and Debian are “seasoned” distributions that have been available for some time now, though Daniel Robbins, Chief Architect of Gentoo, refers to the product as actually being a “metadistribution” of Linux, due to its high degree of adaptability and configurability. (Gentoo 2004) Specifically, the Robbins asserts that Gentoo is capable of being “customized for just about any application or need. ...an ideal secure server, development workstation, professional desktop, gaming system, embedded solution or something else—whatever you need it to be.” (Robbins 2004) He further states that the whole point of Gentoo is to provide a better, more usable Linux experience than that found in many other distributions. Robbins states that: “The goal of Gentoo is to design tools and systems that allow a user to do their work pleasantly and efficiently as possible, as they see fit. Our tools should be a joy to use, and should help the user to appreciate the richness of the Linux and free software community, and the flexibility of free software. ...Put another way, the Gentoo philosophy is to create better tools. When a tool is doing its job perfectly, you might not even be very aware of its presence, because it does not interfere and make its presence known, nor does it force you to interact with it when you don’t want it to. The tool serves the user rather than the user serving the tool.” (Robbins 2004) There is also a so-called “live CD” Linux distribution suitable for the Xbox, called dyne:bolic, and an in-progress release of Slackware Linux, as well. According to the Xbox Linux Project, the only difference between the standard releases of these distributions and their Xbox counterparts is that “...the install process – and naturally the bootloader, the kernel and the kernel modules – are all customized for the Xbox.” (Xbox Linux Project, 2003) Of course, even if Gentoo is as user-friendly as Robbins purports, even if the Linux kernel itself has become significantly more robust and efficient, and even if Microsoft again drops the retail price of the Xbox, is this really a feasible solution in the classroom? Does the Xbox Linux Project have an army of 14 year olds willing to modify dozens, perhaps hundreds of these systems for use in secondary schools and higher education? Of course not. If such an institutional rollout were to be undertaken, it would require significant support from not only faculty, but Department Chairs, Deans, IT staff, and quite possible Chief Information Officers. Disk images would need to be customized for each institution to reflect their respective needs, ranging from setting specific home pages on web browsers, to bookmarks, to custom back-up and / or disk re-imaging scripts, to network authentication. This would be no small task. Yet, the steps mentioned above are essentially no different than what would be required of any IT staff when creating a new disk image for a computer lab, be it one for a Windows-based system or a Mac OS X-based one. The primary difference would be Linux itself—nothing more, nothing less. The institutional difficulties in undertaking such an effort would likely be encountered prior to even purchasing a single Xbox, in that they would involve the same difficulties associated with any new hardware or software initiative: staffing, budget, and support. If the institutional in question is either unwilling or unable to address these three factors, it would not matter if the Xbox itself was as free as Linux. An Open Future, or a Closed one? It is unclear how far the Xbox Linux Project will be allowed to go in their efforts to invade an essentially a proprietary system with OSS. Unlike Sony, which has made deliberate steps to commercialize similar efforts for their PlayStation 2 console, Microsoft appears resolute in fighting OSS on the Xbox by any means necessary. They will continue to crack down on any companies selling so-called mod chips, and will continue to employ technological protections to keep the Xbox “closed”. Despite clear evidence to the contrary, in all likelihood Microsoft continue to equate any OSS efforts directed at the Xbox with piracy-related motivations. Additionally, Microsoft’s successor to the Xbox would likely include additional anticircumvention technologies incorporated into it that could set the Xbox Linux Project back by months, years, or could stop it cold. Of course, it is difficult to say with any degree of certainty how this “Xbox 2” (perhaps a more appropriate name might be “Nextbox”) will impact this project. Regardless of how this device evolves, there can be little doubt of the value of Linux, OpenOffice.org, and other OSS to teaching and learning with technology. This value exists not only in terms of price, but in increased freedom from policies and technologies of control. New Linux distributions from Gentoo, Mandrake, Lycoris, Lindows, and other companies are just now starting to focus their efforts on Linux as user-friendly, easy to use desktop operating systems, rather than just server or “techno-geek” environments suitable for advanced programmers and computer operators. While metaphorically opening the Xbox may not be for everyone, and may not be a suitable computing solution for all, I believe we as educators must promote and encourage such efforts whenever possible. I suggest this because I believe we need to exercise our professional influence and ultimately shape the future of technology literacy, either individually as faculty and collectively as departments, colleges, or institutions. Moran and Fitzsimmons-Hunter argue this very point in Writing Teachers, Schools, Access, and Change. One of their fundamental provisions they use to define “access” asserts that there must be a willingness for teachers and students to “fight for the technologies that they need to pursue their goals for their own teaching and learning.” (Taylor / Ward 160) Regardless of whether or not this debate is grounded in the “beige boxes” of the past, or the Xboxes of the present, much is at stake. Private corporations should not be in a position to control the manner in which we use legally-purchased technologies, regardless of whether or not these technologies are then repurposed for literacy uses. I believe the exigency associated with this control, and the ongoing evolution of what is and is not a computer, dictates that we assert ourselves more actively into this discussion. We must take steps to provide our students with the best possible computer-mediated learning experience, however seemingly unorthodox the technological means might be, so that they may think critically, communicate effectively, and participate actively in society and in their future careers. About the Author Paul Cesarini is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Communication & Technology Education, Bowling Green State University, Ohio Email: pcesari@bgnet.bgsu.edu Works Cited http://xbox-linux.sourceforge.net/docs/debian.php>.Baron, Denis. “From Pencils to Pixels: The Stages of Literacy Technologies.” Passions Pedagogies and 21st Century Technologies. Hawisher, Gail E., and Cynthia L. Selfe, Eds. Utah: Utah State University Press, 1999. 15 – 33. Becker, David. “Ballmer: Mod Chips Threaten Xbox”. News.com. 21 Oct 2002. http://news.com.com/2100-1040-962797.php>. http://news.com.com/2100-1040-978957.html?tag=nl>. http://archive.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/02/08/13/020813hnchina.xml>. http://www.neoseeker.com/news/story/1062/>. http://www.bookreader.co.uk>.Finni, Scott. “Desktop Linux Edges Into The Mainstream”. TechWeb. 8 Apr 2003. http://www.techweb.com/tech/software/20030408_software. http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/29439.html http://gentoox.shallax.com/. http://ragib.hypermart.net/linux/. http://www.itworld.com/Comp/2362/LWD010424latinlinux/pfindex.html. http://www.xbox-linux.sourceforge.net. http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/27487.html. http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/26078.html. http://www.us.playstation.com/peripherals.aspx?id=SCPH-97047. http://www.techtv.com/extendedplay/reviews/story/0,24330,3356862,00.html. http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,61984,00.html. http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/about.xml http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/philosophy.xml http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupdate/stories/main/0,14179,2869075,00.html. http://xbox-linux.sourceforge.net/docs/usershelpusers.html http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/fun.games/12/16/gamers.liksang/. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Cesarini, Paul. "“Opening” the Xbox" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0406/08_Cesarini.php>. APA Style Cesarini, P. (2004, Jul1). “Opening” the Xbox. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 7, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0406/08_Cesarini.php>

IntroductionSupermarkets are functionally challenging environments for people with vision impairments. A supermarket is likely to house an average of 45,000 products in a median floor-space of 4,529 square meters and many visually impaired people are unable to shop without assistance, which greatly impedes personal independence (Nicholson et al.). The task of selecting goods in a supermarket is an “activity that is expressive of agency, identity and creativity” (Sutherland) from which many vision-impaired persons are excluded. In response to this, a number of proof of concept (demonstrating feasibility) and prototype assistive technologies are being developed which aim to use smart phones as potential sensorial aides for vision impaired persons. In this paper, I discuss two such prototypic technologies, Shop Talk and BlindShopping. I engage with this issue’s list theme by suggesting that, on the one hand, list making is a uniquely human activity that demonstrates our need for order, reliance on memory, reveals our idiosyncrasies, and provides insights into our private lives (Keaggy 12). On the other hand, lists feature in the creation of spatial inventories that represent physical environments (Perec 3-4, 9-10). The use of lists in the architecture of assistive technologies for shopping illuminates the interaction between these two modalities of list use where items contained in a list are not only textual but also cartographic elements that link the material and immaterial in space and time (Haber 63). I argue that despite the emancipatory potential of assistive shopping technologies, their efficacy in practical situations is highly dependent on the extent to which they can integrate a number of lists to produce representations of space that are meaningful for vision impaired users. I suggest that the extent to which these prototypes may translate to becoming commercially viable, widely adopted technologies is heavily reliant upon commercial and institutional infrastructures, data sources, and regulation. Thus, their design, manufacture and adoption-potential are shaped by the extent to which certain data inventories are accessible and made interoperable. To overcome such constraints, it is important to better understand the “spatial syntax” associated with the shopping task for a vision impaired person; that is, the connected ordering of real and virtual spatial elements that result in a supermarket as a knowable space within which an assisted “spatial practice” of shopping can occur (Kellerman 148, Lefebvre 16).In what follows, I use the concept of lists to discuss the production of supermarket-space in relation to the enabling and disabling potentials of assistive technologies. First, I discuss mobile digital technologies relative to disability and impairment and describe how the shopping task produces a disabling spatial practice. Second, I present a case study showing how assistive technologies function in aiding vision impaired users in completing the task of supermarket shopping. Third, I discuss various factors that may inhibit the liberating potential of technology assisted shopping by vision-impaired people. Addressing Shopping as a Disabling Spatial Practice Consider how a shopping list might inform one’s experience of supermarket space. The way shopping lists are written demonstrate the variability in the logic that governs list writing. As Bill Keaggy demonstrates in his found shopping list Web project and subsequent book, Milk, Eggs, Vodka, a shopping list may be written on a variety of materials, be arranged in a number of orientations, and the writer may use differing textual attributes, such as size or underlining to show emphasis. The writer may use longhand, abbreviate, write neatly, scribble, and use an array of alternate spelling and naming conventions. For example, items may be listed based on knowledge of the location of products, they may be arranged on a list as a result of an inventory of a pantry or fridge, or they may be copied in the order they appear in a recipe. Whilst shopping, some may follow strictly the order of their list, crossing back and forth between aisles. Some may work through their list item-by-item, perhaps forward scanning to achieve greater economies of time and space. As a person shops, their memory may be stimulated by visual cues reminding them of products they need that may not be included on their list. For the vision impaired, this task is near impossible to complete without the assistance of a relative, friend, agency volunteer, or store employee. Such forms of assistance are often unsatisfactory, as delays may be caused due to the unavailability of an assistant, or the assistant having limited literacy, knowledge, or patience to adequately meet the shopper’s needs. Home delivery services, though readily available, impede personal independence (Nicholson et al.). Katie Ellis and Mike Kent argue that “an impairment becomes a disability due to the impact of prevailing ableist social structures” (3). It can be said, then, that supermarkets function as a disability producing space for the vision impaired shopper. For the vision impaired, a supermarket is a “hegemonic modern visual infrastructure” where, for example, merchandisers may reposition items regularly to induce customers to explore areas of the shop that they wouldn’t usually, a move which adds to the difficulty faced by those customers with impaired vision who work on the assumption that items remain as they usually are (Schillmeier 161).In addressing this issue, much emphasis has been placed on the potential of mobile communications technologies in affording vision impaired users greater mobility and flexibility (Jolley 27). However, as Gerard Goggin argues, the adoption of mobile communication technologies has not necessarily “gone hand in hand with new personal and collective possibilities” given the limited access to standard features, even if the device is text-to-speech enabled (98). Issues with Digital Rights Management (DRM) limit the way a device accesses and reproduces information, and confusion over whether audio rights are needed to convert text-to-speech, impede the accessibility of mobile communications technologies for vision impaired users (Ellis and Kent 136). Accessibility and functionality issues like these arise out of the needs, desires, and expectations of the visually impaired as a user group being considered as an afterthought as opposed to a significant factor in the early phases of design and prototyping (Goggin 89). Thus, the development of assistive technologies for the vision impaired has been left to third parties who must adopt their solutions to fit within certain technical parameters. It is valuable to consider what is involved in the task of shopping in order to appreciate the considerations that must be made in the design of shopping intended assistive technologies. Shopping generally consists of five sub-tasks: travelling to the store; finding items in-store; paying for and bagging items at the register; exiting the store and getting home; and, the often overlooked task of putting items away once at home. In this process supermarkets exhibit a “trichotomous spatial ontology” consisting of locomotor space that a shopper moves around the store, haptic space in the immediate vicinity of the shopper, and search space where individual products are located (Nicholson et al.). In completing these tasks, a shopper will constantly be moving through and switching between all three of these spaces. In the next section I examine how assistive technologies function in producing supermarkets as both enabling and disabling spaces for the vision impaired. Assistive Technologies for Vision Impaired ShoppersJason Farman (43) and Adriana de Douza e Silva both argue that in many ways spaces have always acted as information interfaces where data of all types can reside. Global Positioning System (GPS), Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), and Quick Response (QR) codes all allow for practically every spatial encounter to be an encounter with information. Site-specific and location-aware technologies address the desire for meaningful representations of space for use in everyday situations by the vision impaired. Further, the possibility of an “always-on” connection to spatial information via a mobile phone with WiFi or 3G connections transforms spatial experience by “enfolding remote [and latent] contexts inside the present context” (de Souza e Silva). A range of GPS navigation systems adapted for vision-impaired users are currently on the market. Typically, these systems convert GPS information into text-to-speech instructions and are either standalone devices, such as the Trekker Breeze, or they use the compass, accelerometer, and 3G or WiFi functions found on most smart phones, such as Loadstone. Whilst both these products are adequate in guiding a vision-impaired user from their home to a supermarket, there are significant differences in their interfaces and data architectures. Trekker Breeze is a standalone hardware device that produces talking menus, maps, and GPS information. While its navigation functionality relies on a worldwide radio-navigation system that uses a constellation of 24 satellites to triangulate one’s position (May and LaPierre 263-64), its map and text-to-speech functionality relies on data on a DVD provided with the unit. Loadstone is an open source software system for Nokia devices that has been developed within the vision-impaired community. Loadstone is built on GNU General Public License (GPL) software and is developed from private and user based funding; this overcomes the issue of Trekker Breeze’s reliance on trading policies and pricing models of the few global vendors of satellite navigation data. Both products have significant shortcomings if viewed in the broader context of the five sub-tasks involved in shopping described above. Trekker Breeze and Loadstone require that additional devices be connected to it. In the case of Trekker Breeze it is a tactile keypad, and with Loadstone it is an aftermarket screen reader. To function optimally, Trekker Breeze requires that routes be pre-recorded and, according to a review conducted by the American Foundation for the Blind, it requires a 30-minute warm up time to properly orient itself. Both Trekker Breeze and Loadstone allow users to create and share Points of Interest (POI) databases showing the location of various places along a given route. Non-standard or duplicated user generated content in POI databases may, however, have a negative effect on usability (Ellis and Kent 2). Furthermore, GPS-based navigation systems are accurate to approximately ten metres, which means that users must rely on their own mobility skills when they are required to change direction or stop for traffic. This issue with GPS accuracy is more pronounced when a vision-impaired user is approaching a supermarket where they are likely to encounter environmental hazards with greater frequency and both pedestrian and vehicular traffic in greater density. Here the relations between space defined and spaces poorly defined or undefined by the GPS device interact to produce the supermarket surrounds as a disabling space (Galloway). Prototype Systems for Supermarket Navigation and Product SelectionIn the discussion to follow, I look at two prototype systems using QR codes and RFID that are designed to be used in-store by vision-impaired shoppers. Shop Talk is a proof of concept system developed by researchers at Utah State University that uses synthetic verbal route directions to assist vision impaired shoppers with supermarket navigation, product search, and selection (Nicholson et al.). Its hardware consists of a portable computational unit, a numeric keypad, a wireless barcode scanner and base station, headphones for the user to receive the synthetic speech instructions, a USB hub to connect all the components, and a backpack to carry them (with the exception of the barcode scanner) which has been slightly modified with a plastic stabiliser to assist in correct positioning. Shop Talk represents the supermarket environment using two data structures. The first is comprised of two elements: a topological map of locomotor space that allows for directional labels of “left,” “right,” and “forward,” to be added to the supermarket floor plan; and, for navigation of haptic space, the supermarket inventory management system, which is used to create verbal descriptions of product information. The second data structure is a Barcode Connectivity Matrix (BCM), which associates each shelf barcode with several pieces of information such as aisle, aisle side, section, shelf, position, Universal Product Code (UPC) barcode, product description, and price. Nicholson et al. suggest that one of their “most immediate objectives for future work is to migrate the system to a more conventional mobile platform” such as a smart phone (see Mobile Shopping). The Personalisable Interactions with Resources on AMI-Enabled Mobile Dynamic Environments (PRIAmIDE) research group at the University of Deusto is also approaching Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) by exploring the smart phone’s sensing, communication, computing, and storage potential. As part of their work, the prototype system, BlindShopping, was developed to address the issue of assisted shopping using entirely off-the-shelf technology with minimal environmental adjustments to navigate the store and search, browse and select products (López-de-Ipiña et al. 34). Blind Shopping’s architecture is based on three components. Firstly, a navigation system provides the user with synthetic verbal instructions to users via headphones connected to the smart phone device being used in order to guide them around the store. This requires a RFID reader to be attached to the tip of the user’s white cane and road-marking-like RFID tag lines to be distributed throughout the aisles. A smartphone application processes the RFID data that is received by the smart phone via Bluetooth generating the verbal navigation commands as a result. Products are recognised by pointing a QR code reader enabled smart phone at an embossed code located on a shelf. The system is managed by a Rich Internet Application (RIA) interface, which operates by Web browser, and is used to register the RFID tags situated in the aisles and the QR codes located on shelves (López-de-Ipiña and 37-38). A typical use-scenario for Blind Shopping involves a user activating the system by tracing an “L” on the screen or issuing the “Location” voice command, which activates the supermarket navigation system which then asks the user to either touch an RFID floor marking with their cane or scan a QR code on a nearby shelf to orient the system. The application then asks the user to dictate the product or category of product that they wish to locate. The smart phone maintains a continuous Bluetooth connection with the RFID reader to keep track of user location at all times. By drawing a “P” or issuing the “Product” voice command, a user can switch the device into product recognition mode where the smart phone camera is pointed at an embossed QR code on a shelf to retrieve information about a product such as manufacturer, name, weight, and price, via synthetic speech (López-de-Ipiña et al. 38-39). Despite both systems aiming to operate with as little environmental adjustment as possible, as well as minimise the extent to which a supermarket would need to allocate infrastructural, administrative, and human resources to implementing assistive technologies for vision impaired shoppers, there will undoubtedly be significant establishment and maintenance costs associated with the adoption of production versions of systems resembling either prototype described in this paper. As both systems rely on data obtained from a server by invoking Web services, supermarkets would need to provide in-store WiFi. Further, both systems’ dependence on store inventory data would mean that commercial versions of either of these systems are likely to be supermarket specific or exclusive given that there will be policies in place that forbid access to inventory systems, which contain pricing information to third parties. Secondly, an assumption in the design of both prototypes is that the shopping task ends with the user arriving at home; this overlooks the important task of being able to recognise products in order to put them away or to use at a later time.The BCM and QR product recognition components of both respective prototypic systems associates information to products in order to assist users in the product search and selection sub-tasks. However, information such as use-by dates, discount offers, country of manufacture, country of manufacturer’s origin, nutritional information, and the labelling of products as Halal, Kosher, containing alcohol, nuts, gluten, lactose, phenylalanine, and so on, create further challenges in how different data sources are managed within the devices’ software architecture. The reliance of both systems on existing smartphone technology is also problematic. Changes in the production and uptake of mobile communication devices, and the software that they operate on, occurs rapidly. Once the fit-out of a retail space with the necessary instrumentation in order to accommodate a particular system has occurred, this system is unlikely to be able to cater to the requirement for frequent upgrades, as built environments are less flexible in the upgrading of their technological infrastructure (Kellerman 148). This sets up a scenario where the supermarket may persist as a disabling space due to a gap between the functional capacities of applications designed for mobile communication devices and the environments in which they are to be used. Lists and Disabling Spatial PracticeThe development and provision of access to assistive technologies and the data they rely upon is a commercial issue (Ellis and Kent 7). The use of assistive technologies in supermarket-spaces that rely on the inter-functional coordination of multiple inventories may have the unintended effect of excluding people with disabilities from access to legitimate content (Ellis and Kent 7). With de Certeau, we can ask of supermarket-space “What spatial practices correspond, in the area where discipline is manipulated, to these apparatuses that produce a disciplinary space?" (96).In designing assistive technologies, such as those discussed in this paper, developers must strive to achieve integration across multiple data inventories. Software architectures must be optimised to overcome issues relating to intellectual property, cross platform access, standardisation, fidelity, potential duplication, and mass-storage. This need for “cross sectioning,” however, “merely adds to the muddle” (Lefebvre 8). This is a predicament that only intensifies as space and objects in space become increasingly “representable” (Galloway), and as the impetus for the project of spatial politics for the vision impaired moves beyond representation to centre on access and meaning-making.ConclusionSupermarkets act as sites of hegemony, resistance, difference, and transformation, where the vision impaired and their allies resist the “repressive socialization of impaired bodies” through their own social movements relating to environmental accessibility and the technology assisted spatial practice of shopping (Gleeson 129). It is undeniable that the prototype technologies described in this paper, and those like it, indeed do have a great deal of emancipatory potential. However, it should be understood that these devices produce representations of supermarket-space as a simulation within a framework that attempts to mimic the real, and these representations are pre-determined by the industrial, technological, and regulatory forces that govern their production (Lefebvre 8). Thus, the potential of assistive technologies is dependent upon a range of constraints relating to data accessibility, and the interaction of various kinds of lists across the geographic area that surrounds the supermarket, locomotor, haptic, and search spaces of the supermarket, the home-space, and the internal spaces of a shopper’s imaginary. These interactions are important in contributing to the reproduction of disability in supermarkets through the use of assistive shopping technologies. The ways by which people make and read shopping lists complicate the relations between supermarket-space as location data and product inventories versus that which is intuited and experienced by a shopper (Sutherland). Not only should we be creating inventories of supermarket locomotor, haptic, and search spaces, the attention of developers working in this area of assistive technologies should look beyond the challenges of spatial representation and move towards a focus on issues of interoperability and expanded access of spatial inventory databases and data within and beyond supermarket-space.ReferencesDe Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Print.De Souza e Silva, A. “From Cyber to Hybrid: Mobile Technologies As Interfaces of Hybrid Spaces.” Space and Culture 9.3 (2006): 261-78.Ellis, Katie, and Mike Kent. Disability and New Media. New York: Routledge, 2011.Farman, Jason. 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New York: Routledge, 2006. 391-98.Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1991.López-de-Ipiña, Diego, Tania Lorido, and Unai López. “Indoor Navigation and Product Recognition for Blind People Assisted Shopping.” Ambient Assisted Living. Ed. J. Bravo, R. Hervás, and V. Villarreal. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2011. 25-32. May, Michael, and Charles LaPierre. “Accessible Global Position System (GPS) and Related Orientation Technologies.” Assistive Technology for Visually Impaired and Blind People. Ed. Marion A. Hersh, and Michael A. Johnson. London: Springer-Verlag, 2008. 261-88. Nicholson, John, Vladimir Kulyukin, and Daniel Coster. “Shoptalk: Independent Blind Shopping Through Verbal Route Directions and Barcode Scans.” The Open Rehabilitation Journal 2.1 (2009): 11-23.Perec, Georges. Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. Trans. and Ed. John Sturrock. London: Penguin Books, 1997.Schillmeier, Michael W. J. Rethinking Disability: Bodies, Senses, and Things. 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IntroductionThe American artist Ryan Trecartin makes digital videos that centre on the self-presentations common to video-sharing sites such as YouTube. Named by New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl as “the most consequential artist to have emerged since the 1980s” (84), Trecartin’s works are like high-octane domestic dramas told in the first-person, blending carnivalesque and horror sensibilities through multi-layered imagery, fast-paced editing, sprawling mise-en-scène installations and heavy-handed digital effects. Featuring narcissistic young-adult characters (many of whom are played by the artist and his friends), Trecartin’s scripted videos portray the self as fundamentally performed and kaleidoscopically mediated. His approach is therefore exemplary of some of the key concepts of automediality, which, although originating in literary studies, address concerns relevant to contemporary art, such as the blurring of life-story, self-performance, identity, persona and technological mediation. I argue that Trecartin’s work is a form of automedial art that combines camp personas with what Sianne Ngai calls the “zany” aesthetics of neoliberalism—the 24/7 production of affects, subjectivity and sociability which complicate distinctions between public and private life.Performing the Script: The Artist as Automedial ProsumerBoth “automedia” and “automediality” hold that the self (the “auto”) and its forms of expression (its “media”) are intimately linked, imbricated within processes of cultural and technological mediation. However, whereas “automedia” refers to general modes of self-presentation, “automediality” was developed by Jörg Dünne and Christian Moser to explicitly relate to the autobiographical. Noting a tendency in literary studies to under-examine how life stories are shaped by their mediums, Dünne and Moser argued that the digital era has made it more apparent how literary forms are involved in complex processes of mediation. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, in response, called for an expansion of autobiography into “life writing,” claiming that automediality is useful as a theoretical frame for contemplating the growth of self-presentation platforms online, shifting from the life-narrative genre of autobiography towards more discursive and irresolute forms of first-person expression (4). One’s life story, in this context, can be communicated obliquely and performatively, with the choice of media inextricably contributing to the subjectivity that is being produced, not just as a tool for rendering a pre-existent self. Lauren Berlant conceives of life writing as a laboratory for “theorizing ‘the event’” of life rather than its narration or transcription (Prosser 181). Smith and Watson agree, describing automediality as the study of “life acts” that operate as “prosthetic extension[s] of the self in networks” (78). Following this, both “automedia” and “automediality” can be understood as expanding upon the “underlying intermedial premises” (Winthrop-Young 188) of media theory, addressing how technologies and mediums do not just constitute sensory extensions of the body (Mcluhan) but also sensory extensions of identity—armed with the potential to challenge traditional ideas of how a “life” is conveyed. For Julie Rak, “automedia” describes both the theoretical framing of self-presentation acts and the very processes of mediation the self-presenter puts themselves through (161). She prefers “automedia” over “automediality” due to the latter’s tendency to be directed towards the textual products of self-presentation, rather than their processes (161). Given Trecartin’s emphasis on narrative, poetic text, performativity, technology and commodification, both “automedia” and “automediality” will be relevant to my account here, highlighting not just the crossovers between the two terms but also the dual roles his work performs. Firstly, Trecartin’s videos express his own identity through the use of camp personas and exaggerated digital tropes. Secondly, they reflexively frame the phenomenon of online self-presentation, aestheticizing the “slice of life” and “personal history” posturings found on YouTube in order to better understand them. The line between self-presenter and critic is further muddied by the fact that Trecartin makes many of his videos free to download online. As video artist and YouTuber, he is interested in the same questions that Smith and Watson claim are central to automedial theory. When watching Youtube performers, they remind themselves to ask: “How is the aura of authenticity attached to an online performance constructed by a crew, which could include a camera person, sound person, director, and script-writer? Do you find this self-presentation to be sincere or to be calculated authenticity, a pose or ‘manufactured’ pseudo-individuality?” (124). Rather than setting out to identify “right” from “wrong” subjectivities, the role of both the automedia and automediality critic is to illuminate how and why subjectivity is constructed across distinct visual and verbal forms, working against the notion that subjectivity can be “an entity or essence” (Smith and Watson 125).Figure 1: Ryan Trecartin, Item Falls (2013), digital video stillGiven its literary origins, automediality is particularly relevant to Trecartin’s work because writing is so central to his methods, grounding his hyperactive self-presentations in the literary as well as the performative. According to Brian Droitcour, all of Trecartin’s formal devices, from the camerawork to the constructed sets his videos are staged in, are prefigured by the way he uses words. What appears unstructured and improvised is actually closely scripted, with Trecartin building on the legacies of conceptual poetry and flarf poetry (an early 2000s literary genre in which poetry is composed of collages of serendipitously found words and phrases online) to bring a loose sense of narrativization to his portrayals of characters and context. Consider the following excerpt from the screenplay for K-Corea INC. K (Section A) (2009)— a work which centres on a CEO named Global Korea (a pun on “career”) who presides over symbolic national characters whose surnames are also “Korea”:North America Korea: I specialize in Identity Tourism, ?Agency...I just stick HERE, and I Hop Around–HEY GLOBAL KOREA!?Identifiers: That’s Global, That’s Global, That’s GlobalFrench adaptation Korea: WHAT!?Global Korea: Guys I just Wanted to show You Your New Office!Health Care, I don’t Care, It’s All WE Care, That’s WhyWE don’t Care.THIS IS GLOBAL!Identified: AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHGlobal Korea: Global, Global !!Identified: AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHFigure 2: Ryan Trecartin, K-Corea INC. K (Section A) (2009), digital video stillTrecartin’s performers are guided by their lines, even down to the apparently random use of commas, question marks and repeated capital letters. As a consequence, what can be alienating on the page is made lively when performed, his words instilled with the over-the-top personalities of each performer. For Droitcour, Trecartin’s genius lies in his ability to use words to subliminally structure his performances. Each character makes the artist’s poetic texts—deranged and derivative-sounding Internet-speak—their own “at the moment of the utterance” (Droitcour). Wayne Koestenbaum similarly argues that voice, which Trecartin often digitally manipulates, is the “anxiety point” in his works, fixing his “retardataire” energies on the very place “where orality and literacy stage their war of the worlds” (276).This conflict that Koestenbaum describes, between orality and literacy, is constitutive of Trecartin’s automedial positioning of the self, which presents as a confluence of life narrative, screenplay, social-media posing, flarf poetry and artwork. His videos constantly criss-cross between pre-production, production and postproduction, creating content at every point along the way. This circuitousness is reflected by the many performers who are portrayed filming each other as they act, suggesting that their projected identities are entangled with the technologies that facilitate them.Trecartin’s A Family Finds Entertainment (2004)—a frenetic straight-to-camera chronicle of the coming-out of a gay teenager named Skippy (played by the artist)—was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, after which time his work became known around the world as an example of “postproduction” art. This refers to French curator and theorist Nicholas Bourriaud’s 2001 account of the blurring of production and consumption, following on from his 1997 theory of relational aesthetics, which became paradigmatic of critical art practice at the dawn of Web 2.0. Drawing from Marcel Duchamp and the Situationists, in Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, Bourriaud addressed new forms of citation, recycling and détournement, which he saw as influenced by digital computing, the service economies and other forms of immaterial social relations that, throughout the 1990s, transformed art from a subcultural activity to a key signifier and instrument of global capitalism.Because “word processing” was “indexed to the formal protocol of the service industry, and the image-system of the home computer […] informed and colonized from the start by the world of work” (78), Bourriaud claimed that artists at the start of the twenty-first century were responding to the semiotic networks that blur daily and professional life. Postproduction art looked like it was “issued from a script that the artist projects onto culture, considered the framework of a narrative that in turn projects new possible scripts, endlessly” (19). However, whereas the artists in Bourriaud’s publication, such as Plamen Dejanov and Philippe Parreno, made art in order to create “more suitable [social] arrangements” (76), Trecartin is distinctive not only because of his bombastic style but also his apparent resistance to socio-political amelioration.Bourriaud’s call for the elegant intertextual “scriptor” as prosumer (88)—who creatively produces and consumes, arranges and responds—was essentially answered by Trecartin with a parade of hyper-affective and needy Internet characters whose aims are not to negotiate new social terrain so much as to perform themselves crazy, competing with masses of online information, opinions and jostling identities. Against Bourriaud’s strategic prosumerism, Trecartin, in his own words, chases “a kind of natural prosumerism synonymous with existence” (471). Although his work can be read as a response to neoliberal values, unlike Bourriaud, he refuses to treat postproduction methods as tools to conciliate this situation. Instead, his scripted videos present postproduction as the lingua franca of daily life. In aiming for a “natural prosumerism,” his work rhetorically asks, in paraphrase of Berlant: “What does it mean to have a life, is it always to add up to something?” (Prosser 181). Figure 3: Ryan Trecartin, A Family Finds Entertainment (2004), digital video stillPluralist CampTrecartin’s scripts direct his performers but they are also transformed by them, his words acquiring their individualistic tics, traits and nuances. As such, his self-presentations are a long way from Frederic Jameson’s account of pastiche as a neutral practice of imitation—“a blank parody” (125) that manifests as an addiction rather than a critical judgement. Instead of being uncritically blank, we could say that Trecartin’s characters have too much content and too many affects, particularly those of the Internet variety. In Ready (Re’Search Wait’S) (2009-2010), Trecartin (playing a character named J.J. Check, who wants to re-write the U.S constitution) states at one point: “Someone just flashed an image of me; I am so sure of it. I am such as free download.” Here, pastiche turns into a performed glitch, hinting at how authentic speech can be composed of an amalgam of inauthentic sources—a scrambling of literary forms, movie one-liners, intrusive online advertising and social media jargon. His characters constantly waver between vernacular clichés and accretions of data: “My mother accused me of being accumulation posing as independent free will,” says a character from Item Falls (2013)What makes Trecartin’s video work so fascinating is that he frames what once would have been called “pastiche” and fills it with meaning, as if sincerely attuned to the paradoxes of “anti-normative” posturing contained in the term “mass individualism.” Even when addressing issues of representational politics, his dialogue registers as both authentic and insipid, as when, in CENTER JENNY (2013), a conversation about sexism being “the coolest style” ends with a woman in a bikini asking: “tolerance is inevitable, right?” Although there are laugh-out-loud elements in all of his work—often from an exaggeration of superficiality—there is a more persistent sense of the artist searching for something deeper, perhaps sympathetically so. His characters are eager to self-project yet what they actually project comes off as too much—their performances are too knowing, too individualistic and too caught up in the Internet, or other surrounding technologies.When Susan Sontag wrote in 1964 of the aesthetic of “camp” she was largely motivated by the success of Pop art, particularly that of her friend Andy Warhol. Warhol’s work looked kitsch yet Sontag saw in it a genuine love that kitsch lacks—a sentiment akin to doting on something ugly or malformed. Summoning the dandy, she claimed that whereas “the dandy would be continually offended or bored, the connoisseur of Camp is continually amused, delighted. The dandy held a perfumed handkerchief to his nostrils and was liable to swoon; the connoisseur of Camp sniffs the stink and prides himself on his strong nerves” (292).As an artistic device, camp essentially wallows in all the bad fetishisms that Frankfurt School theorists lamented of capitalism. The camp appropriator, does, however, convey himself as existing both inside and outside this low culture, communicating the “stink” of low culture in affecting ways. Sontag viewed camp, in other words, as at once deconstructive and reconstructive. In playing appearances off against essences, camp denies the self as essence only to celebrate it as performance.In line with accounts of identity in automediality and automedia theory, camp can be understood as performing within a dialectical tension between self and its representation. The camp aesthetic shows the self as discursively mediated and embedded in subjective formations that are “heterogeneous, conflictual, and intersectional” (Smith and Watson 71). Affiliated with the covert expression of homosexual and queer identity, the camp artist typically foregrounds art as taste, and taste as mere fashion, while at the same time he/she suggests how this approach is shaped by socio-political marginalization. For Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the criticality of camp is “additive and accretive” rather than oppositional; it is a surplus form that manifests as “the ‘over’-attachment to fragmentary, marginal, waste or leftover products” (149).Trecartin, who identifies as gay, parodies the excesses of digital identity while at the same time, from camp and queer perspectives, he asks us to take these identifications seriously—straight, gay, transsexual, bisexual, inter-sexual, racial, post-racial, mainstream, alternative, capitalist or anarchist. This pluralist agenda manifests in characters who speak as though everything is in quotation marks, suggesting that everything is possible. Dialogue such as “I’m finally just an ‘as if’”, “I want an idea landfill”, and “It reminds me of the future” project feelings of too much and not enough, transforming Warhol’s cool, image-oriented version of camp (transfixed by TV and supermarket capitalism) into a hyper-affective Internet camp—a camp that feeds on new life narratives, identity postures and personalities, as stimuli.In emphasising technology as intrinsic to camp self-presentation, Trecartin treats intersectionality and intermediality as if corresponding concepts. His characters, caught between youthhood and adulthood, are inbetweeners. Yet, despite being nebulous, they float free of normative ideals only in the sense that they believe everybody not only has the right to live how they want to, but to also be condemned for it—the right to intolerance going hand-in-hand with their belief in plurality. This suggests the paradoxical condition of pluralist, intersectional selfhood in the digital age, where one can position one’s identity as if between social categories while at the same time weaponizing it, in the form of identity politics. In K-Corea INC. K (Section A) (2009), Global Korea asks: “Who the fuck is that baby shit-talker? That’s not one of my condiments,” which is delivered with characteristic confidence, defensiveness and with gleeful disregard for normative speech. Figure 4: Ryan Trecartin, CENTER JENNY (2013), digital video stillThe Zaniness of the Neoliberal SelfIf, as Koestenbaum claims, Trecartin’s host of characters are actually “evolving mutations of a single worldview” (275), then the worldview they represent is what Sianne Ngai calls the “hypercommodified, information saturated, performance driven conditions of late capitalism” (1). Self-presentation in this context is not to be understood so much as experienced through prisms of technological inflection, marketing spiel and pluralist interpretative schemas. Ngai has described the rise of “zaniness” as an aesthetic category that perfectly encapsulates this capitalist condition. Zany hyperactivity is at once “lighthearted” and “vehement,” and as such it is highly suited to the contemporary volatility of affective labour; its tireless overlapping of work and play, and the networking rhetoric of global interconnectedness (Ngai, 7). This is what Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello have termed the “connexionist” spirit of capitalism, where a successful career is measured by one’s capacity to be “always pursuing some sort of activity, never to be without a project, without ideas, to be always looking forward to, and preparing for, something along with other persons, whose encounter is the result of being always driven by the drive for activity” (Chiapello and Fairclough 192).For Ngai, the zany—epitomized by Jim Carrey’s character in Cable Guy (1996) or Wile E. Coyote from the Looney Tunes cartoons—performs first and asks questions later. As such, their playfulness is always performed in a way that could spin out of control, as when Trecartin’s humour can, in the next moment, appear psychotic. Ngai continues:What is essential to zaniness is its way of evoking a situation with the potential to cause harm or injury […]. For all their playfulness and commitment to fun, the zany’s characters give the impression of needing to labor excessively hard to produce our laughter, straining themselves to the point of endangering not just themselves but also those around them. (10)Using sinister music scores, anxiety-inducing editing and lighting that references iconic DIY horror films such as the Blair Witch Project (1999), Trecartin comically frames the anxieties and over-produced individualism of the global neoliberalist project, but in ways that one is unsure what to do with it. “Don’t look at me—look at your mother, and globalize at her,” commands Global Korea. Set in temporary (read precarious) locations that often resemble both domestic and business environments, his world is one in which young adults are incessantly producing themselves as content, as if unstable market testers run riot, on whose tastes our future global economic growth depends.Michel Foucault defined this neoliberal condition as “the application of the economic grid to social phenomena” (239). As early as 1979 he claimed that workers in a neoliberal context begin to regard the self as an “abilities-machine” (229) where they are less partners in the processes of economic exchange than independent producers of human capital. As Jodi Dean puts it, with the totalization of economic production, neoliberal processes “simultaneously promote the individual as the primary unit of capitalism and unravel the institutions of solidaristic support on which this unit depends” (32). As entrepreneurs of the self, people under neoliberalism become producers for whom socialization is no longer a byproduct of capitalist production but can be the very means through which capital is produced. With this in mind, Trecartin’s portrayal of the straight-to-camera format is less a video diary than a means for staging social auditions. His performers (or contestants), although foregrounding their individualism, always have their eyes on group power, suggesting a competitive individualism rather than the countering of normativity. Forever at work and at play, these comic-tragics are ur-figures of neoliberalism—over-connected and over-emotional self-presenters who are unable to stop, in fear they will be nothing if not performing.ConclusionPortraying a seemingly endless parade of neoliberal selves, Trecartin’s work yields a zany vision that always threatens to spin out of control. As a form of Internet-era camp, he reproduces automedial conceptions of the self as constituted and expanded by media technologies—as performative conduits between the formal and the socio-political which go both ways. This process has been described by Berlant in terms of life writing, but it applies equally to Trecartin, who, through a “performance of fantasmatic intersubjectivity,” facilitates “a performance of being” for the viewer “made possible by the proximity of the object” (Berlant 25). Inflating for both comic and tragic effect a profoundly nebulous yet weaponized conception of identity, Trecartin’s characters show the relation between offline and online life to be impossible to essentialize, laden with a mix of conflicting feelings and personas. 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