A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. Selected for the 2023 National Book Foundation's Science + Literature Program. "A brilliant and empathetic guide to the far corners of global capitalism." --Jenny Odell, author of How to Do Nothing From FSGO x Logic: stories about rural China, food, and tech that reveal new truths about the globalized world In Blockchain Chicken Farm, the technologist and writer Xiaowei Wang explores the political and social entanglements of technology in rural China. Their discoveries force them to challenge the standard idea that rural culture and people are backward, conservative, and intolerant. Instead, they find that rural China has not only adapted to rapid globalization but has actually innovated the technology we all use today. From pork farmers using AI to produce the perfect pig, to disruptive luxury counterfeits and the political intersections of e-commerce villages, Wang unravels the ties between globalization, technology, agriculture, and commerce in unprecedented fashion. Accompanied by humorous “Sinofuturist” recipes that frame meals as they transform under new technology, Blockchain Chicken Farm is an original and probing look into innovation, connectivity, and collaboration in the digitized rural world. FSG Originals × Logic dissects the way technology functions in everyday lives. The titans of Silicon Valley, for all their utopian imaginings, never really had our best interests at heart: recent threats to democracy, truth, privacy, and safety, as a result of tech’s reckless pursuit of progress, have shown as much. We present an alternate story, one that delights in capturing technology in all its contradictions and innovation, across borders and socioeconomic divisions, from history through the future, beyond platitudes and PR hype, and past doom and gloom. Our collaboration features four brief but provocative forays into the tech industry’s many worlds, and aspires to incite fresh conversations about technology focused on nuanced and accessible explorations of the emerging tools that reorganize and redefine life today.

Multiscale modeling is becoming essential for accurate, rapid simulation in science and engineering. This book presents the results of three decades of research on multiscale modeling in process engineering from principles to application, and its generalization for different fields. This book considers the universality of meso-scale phenomena for the first time, and provides insight into the emerging discipline that unifies them, meso-science, as well as new perspectives for virtual process engineering. Multiscale modeling is applied in areas including: multiphase flow and fluid dynamics chemical, biochemical and process engineering mineral processing and metallurgical engineering energy and resources materials science and engineering Jinghai Li is Vice-President of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), a professor at the Institute of Process Engineering, CAS, and leader of the EMMS (Energy-minimizing multiscale) Group. Wei Ge, Wei Wang, Ning Yang and Junwu Wang are professors at the EMMS Group, part of the Institute of Process Engineering, CAS. Xinhua Liu, Limin Wang, Xianfeng He and Xiaowei Wang are associate professors at the EMMS Group, part of the Institute of Process Engineering, CAS. Mooson Kwauk is an emeritus director of the Institute of Process Engineering, CAS, and is an advisor to the EMMS Group.

This book provides a structured introduction of the key concepts and techniques that enable in-/near-memory computing. For decades, processing-in-memory or near-memory computing has been attracting growing interest due to its potential to break the memory wall. Near-memory computing moves compute logic near the memory, and thereby reduces data movement. Recent work has also shown that certain memories can morph themselves into compute units by exploiting the physical properties of the memory cells, enabling in-situ computing in the memory array. While in- and near-memory computing can circumvent overheads related to data movement, it comes at the cost of restricted flexibility of data representation and computation, design challenges of compute capable memories, and difficulty in system and software integration. Therefore, wide deployment of in-/near-memory computing cannot be accomplished without techniques that enable efficient mapping of data-intensive applications to such devices,without sacrificing accuracy or increasing hardware costs excessively. This book describes various memory substrates amenable to in- and near-memory computing, architectural approaches for designing efficient and reliable computing devices, and opportunities for in-/near-memory acceleration of different classes of applications.

Some years—1789, 1929, 1989—change the world suddenly. Or do they? In 2020, a pandemic converged with an economic collapse, inequalities exploded, and institutions weakened. Yet these crises sprang not from new risks but from known dangers. The world—like many patients—met 2020 with a host of preexisting conditions, which together tilted the odds toward disaster. Perhaps 2020 wasn’t the year the world changed; perhaps it was simply the moment the world finally understood its deadly diagnosis. In The Long Year, some of the world’s most incisive thinkers excavate 2020’s buried crises, revealing how they must be confronted in order to achieve a more equal future. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor calls for the defunding of police and the refunding of communities; Keisha Blain demonstrates why the battle against racism must be global; and Adam Tooze reveals that COVID-19 hit hardest where inequality was already greatest and welfare states weakest. Yarimar Bonilla, Xiaowei Wang, Simon Balto, Marcia Chatelain, Gautam Bhan, Ananya Roy, and others offer insights from the factory farms of China to the elite resorts of France, the meatpacking plants of the Midwest to the overcrowded hospitals of India. The definitive guide to these ongoing catastrophes, The Long Year shows that only by exposing the roots and ramifications of 2020 can another such breakdown be prevented. It is made possible through institutional partnerships with Public Books and the Social Science Research Council.

Xiaowei is a first generation Chinese-American high school student. In issue 3 of her perzine she details the Anytown conference with the NCCJ (National Conference for Community and Justice), and her summer travels. She goes to Hangzhou, Shanghai, Tianjin, and Tokyo. She saw Evander Holyfield at a Sun Yue concert, interviews with Xiao Rong about his punk band Brain Failure and free speech in China, and describes the Chinese punk rock and skateboarding scenes. She also includes a poem about her experiences overseas and photographs of the trip.

Cerebellar ataxias (CAs) are a group of motor disorders associated with Purkinje cell (PC) degeneration for which no effective therapeutic treatment exists. Many studies have suggested that modulation of the body's endocannabinoid system may be of use in treatment of diseases involving changes to neuronal excitability. For example, hyperexcitability has been proposed as a mechanism underlying PC degeneration in CAs. In this thesis, electrophysiological, and also biochemical approaches have been used to investigate cannabinoid CBl receptor-mediated signalling in the cerebellum. This work was extended to an animal model of CA to investigate potential therapies; for example, exploiting exogenous cannabinoid effects as a putative means to modulate neuronal firing to protect against hyperexcitability-induced neuronal degeneration in the cerebellum. Intracellular patch-clamp recordings of mlPSCs at IN-PC synapses and extracellular multi- electrode array (MEA) recordings of spontaneous excitatory firing of PCs in the acute cerebellar slice preparation were combined. These studies demonstrated that the standard synthetic CBl receptor ligands (the agonist WIN55 and the antagonist AM251) modulate presynaptic GABA transmission at IN-PC synapses, which in turn affects PC output. Interestingly, results from C57BI/6 mice support the project's initial hypothesis by showing that exogenous CBl receptor antagonists act to increase GABA transmission at IN-PC synapses, which could protect against hyperexcitability-induced cerebellar PC degeneration and so offer therapeutic potential. This study also investigated the functional effects of another class of CBl ligand, the allosteric CBl receptor antagonist PSNCBAM1, for the first time. Whole-cell patch-clamp mlPSC recordings were used to demonstrate ligand- dependent effects of PSNCBAM-l at IN-PC synapses. Finally, work was extended to a pre- clinical animal model of CA, the ducky du2J mutant mouse strain which has deficits in the Ca2+ channel auxiliary u2o-2 subunit and which exhibits defective Ca2+ channel function. Electrophysiological recordings (patch-clamp & MEA) demonstrated that CBl receptor signalling was attenuated in +/du2J and du2J/du2J mice. Receptor binding methods (saturation and GTPyS binding assays) indicated that deficiency in CBl signalling may be due to attenuation of the intrinsic efficacy of CBl receptor ligands to activate G-protein in both du2J mutants, but not a gross reduction in CBl receptor expression. Results from du2J mutants suggest that Ca2+ channel defect ultimately causes impaired CBl receptor- mediated signalling in ataxic conditions. Not only is the attenuated CBl receptor-mediated signalling a novel finding, but it also prompts the important question 'is attenuated endocannabinergic signalling a common feature in human and mouse model ataxias?'