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- All Subjects: Technology
- Creators: Dean, W.P. Carey School of Business
- Resource Type: Text
The nineteenth-century invention of smallpox vaccination in Great Britain has been well studied for its significance in the history of medicine as well as the ways in which it exposes Victorian anxieties regarding British nationalism, rural and urban class struggles, the behaviors of women, and animal contamination. Yet inoculation against smallpox by variolation, vaccination’s predecessor and a well-established Chinese medical technique that was spread from east to west to Great Britain, remains largely understudied in modern scholarly literature. In the early 1700s, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, credited with bringing smallpox variolation to Great Britain, wrote first about the practice in the Turkish city of Adrianople and describes variolation as a “useful invention,” yet laments that, unlike the Turkish women who variolate only those in their “small neighborhoods,” British doctors would be able to “destroy this [disease] swiftly” worldwide should they adopt variolation. Examined through the lens of Edward Said’s Orientalism, techno-Orientalism, and medical Orientalism and contextualized by a comparison to British attitudes toward nineteenth century vaccination, eighteenth century smallpox variolation’s introduction to Britain from the non-British “Orient” represents an instance of reversed Orientalism, in which a technologically deficient British “Occident” must “Orientalize” itself to import the superior medical technology of variolation into Britain. In a scramble to retain technological superiority over the Chinese Orient, Britain manufactures a sense of total difference between an imagined British version of variolation and a real, non-British version of variolation. This imagination of total difference is maintained through characterizations of the non-British variolation as ancient, unsafe, and practiced by illegitimate practitioners, while the imagined British variolation is characterized as safe, heroic, and practiced by legitimate British medical doctors. The Occident’s instance of medical technological inferiority brought about by the importation of variolation from the Orient, which I propose represents an eighteenth-century instance of what I call medical techno-Orientalism, represents an expression of British anxiety over a medical technologically superior Orient—anxieties which express themselves as retaliatory attacks on the Orient and variolation as it is practiced in the Orient—and as an expression of British desire to maintain medical technological superiority over the Orient.
Keywords. Supply Chain Management, Social Responsibility, Sustainability, Economics, Supply Management, Blockchain, Intelligent Technology
Paper Type. Conceptual Paper
The challenges that companies face when digitally transforming the supply chain can often be self-inflicted. This paper will address those challenges and provide a structured approach to a successful transformation. It will also share insight from interviews conducted with the CIO and directors of three different companies as well various studies from outside sources. The purpose is to urge business leaders to re-evaluate the way they approach digital transformation in the supply chain to close information gaps and provide value to the whole organization.
Keywords: children, technology, media, apps, families
STEAMtank is a project beneath that falls under the umbrella of InnovationSpace, an initiative of the Design School at Arizona State University. STEAMtank is the product of the product of the honors thesis of Abigail Peters, who envisioned a K-8 STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and math) museum that was hosted on campus at ASU and was free to the community to promote STEAM education for underrepresented communities. STEAMtank is now in its second iteration, with six teams creating six attractions for the museum. Alongside these projects, presented here is a concept design for a museum exhibit focused entirely around chemistry, a particular branch of science that is lacking from all K-8 focused STEAM exhibits in Phoenix.
In arid environments such as Arizona, agricultural producers are burdened by constraints placed on them by inhospitable weather and limited access to water and fertile soil when attempting to grow produce. Farms in the arid Southwest often have to build greenhouses to overcome such constraints; however, such greenhouses may be relatively space, water, and pesticide intensive and often have demanding maintenance needs and overhead costs. In addition, many current agricultural practices exhaust land resources disparagingly, leading to irreversible environmental degradation. In an effort to improve agricultural production for those limited by weather and resource constraints while simultaneously increasing sustainability in land, resource and pesticide use, we have created Valleyponics, a hydroponic growth services company centered around creating a minimal farming footprint. The company uses a consultative services approach, leveraging NASA Veggie Growth System Technology to provide solutions to large businesses by automating their agricultural production processes and minimizing resource use year-round. Valleyponics aims to cultivate consultative partnerships which will allow our clients, their communities, and the environment to flourish.