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Announcing a new book from the MIT Press: Eden Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile (MIT Press, 2011) In Cybernetic Revolutionaries, Eden Medina tells the history of two intersecting utopian visions, one political and one technological. The first was Chile’s experiment with peaceful socialist change under Salvador Allende; the second was the simultaneous attempt to build a computer system that would manage Chile’s economy. Neither vision was fully realized—Allende’s government ended with a violent military coup; the system, known as Project Cybersyn, was never completely implemented—but they hold lessons for today about the relationship between technology and politics. Drawing on extensive archival material and interviews, Medina examines the cybernetic system envisioned by the Chilean government—which was to feature holistic system design, decentralized management, human-computer interaction, a national telex network, near real-time con...

Call for Papers for an Issue of the Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics: Principles of Quantum Gravity GUEST EDITORS Dean Rickles (University of Sydney) Karen Crowther (University of Sydney) This issue proposes to examine the foundations of quantum gravity research by considering the existence, nature, and role of principles of quantum gravity. Contributing authors should examine, from a general perspective, what characteristic properties we can expect to constrain and guide the construction of quantum gravity theories (e.g. in the way that the equivalence principle guided GR and renormalizability guided early QFTs). There have been several suggestions made in the literature: holography, background independence, relative locality, minimal length (role of Planck scale), duality, asymptotic safety, etc... It is difficult to see how progress can be made in quantum gravity without some such principles operating. However, these have yet to be closely and systematical...

The University of Kent is pleased to announce a fully-funded PhD scholarship (fees plus £13.5K/year) on twentieth-century British science. The project title is: The face(s) of science: a social history of scientists, c. 1945-70 . Full details are at: http://www.kent.ac.uk/history/postgraduate/funding.html (see under ‘University of Kent Scholarships’).  Individual enquiries welcome – address to me. Please forward this to any students who may be interested. Dr Charlotte Sleigh School of History University of Kent www.kent.ac.uk/history

The deadline for submitting abstracts for the 2012 3 Societies Conference is Monday 19 December.   The conference will be held in Philadelphia, 11-14 July. Submit your paper and session proposals at http://www.pachs.net/hss/application The CFP is at http://www.hssonline.org/3societies2012.html

Deadline, Dec 31, 2011 -- Career Development Award, 20th Century History of Medicine or Biomedical Sciences, for turning the dissertation into a publishable monograph Jack D. Pressman-Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Development Award in 20th Century History of Medicine or Biomedical Sciences This award honors Jack D. Pressman, Ph.D., a distinguished historian of medicine and Associate Professor of the History of the Health Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco at the time of his early and unexpected death in June 1997. The award and stipend of $1,000 is given yearly for outstanding work in twentieth-century history of medicine or medical biomedical sciences, as demonstrated by the completion of the Ph.D. and a proposal to turn the dissertation into a publishable monograph. The Ph.D. must have been completed and the degree granted within the last five years (i.e., 2007-2011). The application must include a curriculum vitae, the dissertation abstract, a one-page ...