Suchergebnisse

It is well known that computers were once people rather than machines. While today the focus is often on the hardware, computing as a project bridges the social and the technical; the computing team is the exemplar. This research note explores the evolution of the computing team from an early vantage point: the mathematical team that finished the calculations that delivered the atomic bomb. While the outcome was deplorable, the computing team worked under adverse conditions, and they worked on the world's largest mathematical problem of its day without computer hardware. Instead, Feynman and Frankel's team at Los Alamos first relied on scientists' wives, who volunteered for the project with pencil and paper, then on adding machines powered by the Women's Army Corps professional female computers, and finally on more advanced calculators run by Special Engineering Detachment specialists (high school graduates with an aptitude for maths) assigned by the US Army. In a few short months, the team's composition and the necessary computational logic were polished and refined to solve the necessary calculations. To tell the story, this research note relies on Richard Feynman's eyewitness account, Los Alamos from Below (1980, 1985), which details the growth of a computing team that faced and solved their problems with ad hoc volunteers, a general lack of resources and equipment failure. This team's problem-solving led to the conventional use of de-bugging subroutines in complex computation. In retrospect, they embody the epitome of modern computing practices, both social and technical-an enduring legacy of the 'House That Dick Built'.

We take a fictocritical approach, shifting between critical and creative discourses, to centre on the process of creating a memory piece, a collaboration in textile narrative between a creative writer and a textile artist. The basis of the memory dress is a green-and-white-checked empire
line cotton pinafore. The writer, here called M, bought the garment at Sydney's Saturday Paddington Markets because of its colour, empire line and its label which was 'Frank', her father's name. The textile artist, here called D, works with recycled fabrics to create wearable artworks and
textile sculptures on life-sized mannequins. In her sewing process, each figure she creates emerges with a personality. These personalities are recorded in short fictional histories, or 'backstories'. The memory piece, Miss Liberty's Pinafore, traces the collaborative process of making life
fictions between M's fabric scraps, her childhood memories and writing, and D's creative costuming. Miss Liberty's Pinafore could not exist without an analysis of the metaphorical capacity of fabric and dress, the affects resonant between cloth, memory and identity, and the process of making
art.

Abstract
Clothing size works as an arbiter of the body ideal. The level of complexity required of clothing measurement systems centres on the problem that clothing must fit closely to the body, whereas manufactured products, like a chair, can be designed to suit a wide range of people, clothing has, by its very nature, less ability to be flexible. Clothing size systems should be developed after undertaking anthropometric surveys of the population and using statistical analysis to construct a set of reasonable standards. Here we argue that social factors in lifestyle, demographics and consumption have radically altered women's body size and shape. Yet, systems in Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom have measured only a tiny per cent of the female population that fall within a vanity-size shape, as reflected in the marketing of clothing by global brands and high fashion houses, resulting in the size zero debates. This review of the chequered history of women's clothing size systems has resulted in the inconsistent sizing in the marketplace, as well as a structural unsuitability for the women's bodies for whom the clothing was designed. Recently, the challenge to ad hoc or vanity-sizing systems appears in social media forums from women who pioneer as models wearing 'plus sized' or rather, 'right sized' fashionable garments. Social media offers a platform to represent larger women via online access, to purchase right sized fashion and to view themselves no longer as outliers, as this fresh perspective informs contemporary social images of the female body.

Abstract
An American First Lady, argues Karin Vasby Anderson, 'influences conceptions of American womanhood' and by 'virtue of their husband's elections[,] First Ladies become sites for the symbolic negotiation of female identity'. The process of negotiation in female identity appears in various forms after women assume political power, for example: Golda Meir in Israel, Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom, Indira Gandhi in India and most recently, Australia's first female Prime Minister, Julia Gillard (2010–13). While the position of First Lady is unique to American politics, the ways in which Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama each rejected a 'suitably feminine' image provides an important lesson for all women in power. Therefore, we argue here that this analysis of two Democratic American First Ladies and their employment or disregard of fashion informs the gender-based and race-based issues affecting women in political leadership through their choices in dress. When 'dressing up' both Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama struggled with issues of individual identity, subjectivity and power, and negotiated their First Lady roles in their fashion.