Chris Leslie

Prince of Songkla University · Faculty of Liberal Arts

One way to make the history of computing relevant is to explain how different histories are in competition with each other and how they support quite different technology policy. The prevalent history that the US military created the Internet hides the international spirit of goodwill and cooperation that made a particular implementation of Interne...

The well-known restrictions on exports of computing equipment to the USSR and its allies at the end of the cold war had a curious history. Although the legacy of CoCom is that it seems natural to restrict technology from potential belligerents, it is difficult to determine the policy’s efficacy. Started as a corollary to the plan to rebuild Europe...

The memex has been hailed as an inspiration by many innovators since it was first described in 1945. Allowing users to combine and annotate information from diverse sources stored in microfilm and to create links between related items, the memex is said to predict today’s information devices. In this way, the memex is presented a cultural imperativ...

Participation in science and engineering after the nineteenth century has largely been skewed toward men, computing being no different. However, the history of diversity in computing offers an unexpected insight. Some might assume that there has been a smooth progression from originally a few women in computing to a slightly more representative pro...

This book illuminates how science fiction studies can support diversity, equity, and inclusion in science and engineering. Shortly before science fiction got its name, a new paradigm connected whiteness and masculinity to the advancement of civilization. In order to show how science fiction authors supported the social construction of these gender...

Founded in 1992, IFIP Working Group 9.7 is dedicated to three themes in the history of computing: pedagogy, regional/transnational histories, and public engagement. The synergies among the three suggest a novel aspect of the working group. For instance, local museums and archives can improve the stories about regional histories. What is more, educa...

Participation in science and engineering after the nineteenth century has largely been skewed toward men, computing being no different. However, the history of diversity in computing offers an unexpected insight. Some might assume that there has been a smooth progression from originally a few women in computing to a slightly more representative pro...

The idealism that Fredrich Engels seeks to defeat in Dialectics of Nature today pervades online discourse and pedagogies of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). The deterministic view that STEM is dedicated to unleashing the inherent power in objects for the service of privileged societies fails to understand the basic principl...

Critical reading of primary texts from the history of science can help students understand that the development of scientific knowledge is not an inevitable process separate from society – a key, social constructivist insight of the interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies (STS). A critical reading pedagogy based in STS leads stude...

Modernist author Gertrude Stein attended medical school and conducted research when the now discredited theory that humanity was easily divisible into a small number of biological races and two genders reigned supreme. Stein's education connects her to scientists working to maintain the hierarchy of races, primarily in the field of medicine. Althou...

The need to encourage creative, critical thinking in the science or engineering classroom is as pressing as it is anywhere else. The classic text by Neil Postman, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, proposed an inquiry‐based methodology that would better prepare students to face global challenges in a changing world. Asserting that there is more tha...

The history of computing is a strikingly interdisciplinary field. It is not only that it joins two fields. What is more, the two disciplinary components, history and computing, are diverse in themselves. In addition, work in the history of technology is also conducted in an interdisciplinary manner, such as under the aegis of gender studies or scie...

At the end of 2017, the Christmas special of Doctor Who, a long-running television program on the British Broadcasting Corporation, concluded with the body of the title character transforming from male to female. The transformation of the Doctor was not a new idea; since 1966, the program's fictional setting stipulated that the main character's imp...

The well-known restrictions of exports of computing equipment to the USSR and its allies at the end of the cold war had a curious history. Although the legacy of CoCom is that it seems natural to restrict technology from potential belligerents, it is difficult to determine the policy's efficacy. Started as a corollary to the plan to rebuild Europe...

Recent filmmakers have made an effort to depict the struggles and opportunities for women in the history of science and technology. These dramatizations are interesting on their own, but they have implications for critics and creators of speculative fiction as well. Typical mass media depicts strong female characters as popping up almost like fully...

The work of the three women writers analyzed in this article--Isabel M. Lewis, Clare Winger Harris, and Leslie F. Stone--was recognized when they were writing in the early twentieth century, but by the time academic attention included science fiction in the 1970s, their work had been forgotten. Although today, the fiction writers Harris and Stone h...

Some of the earliest users of the Internet described their activities as predicting a widespread communication medium that would cross national boundaries even before the technical capability was possible. An analysis of conversations on Human-Nets, an early ARPANet mailing list, shows how users were concerned about providing a forum for open discu...

This book contains revised selected papers presented at the IFIP WG 9.7 International Conference on the History of Computing, HC 2016, held in Brooklyn, NY, USA, in May 2016. The 13 full papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers cover a wide range of topics related to the history of c...

The popular understanding of the invention of the Internet is that it was the work of researchers in the United States working in relative isolation. However, the Internet is about connection, and so its success required the independently developed networks of the international community. By analyzing early network development in politically isolat...

The history of science and technology has an important place in the education of STEM professionals, particularly when it comes to helping to support their desire to successfully invent, innovate, and disseminate new ideas. History, considered as one of the liberal arts, should be thought of as describing the different possibilities that had to be...

Starting around the time of Shakespeare’s birth, a group ofnaturalists engaged in a collective enterprise to enumerate and distinguish strange varieties in the new world, including what were thought to be monsters and supernatural beings. Although this controversy would lead to the idea that human races were distinct species in the nineteenth centu...

One way to make the history of computing relevant is to explain how different histories are in competition with each other and how they support quite different technology policy. The prevalent history that the US military created the Internet hides the international spirit of goodwill and cooperation that made a particular implementation of Interne...

Writers of science fiction at the end of the 1960s witnessed the end of a dream: while the earliest visions of space travel were of individuals or private corporations leaving Earth, the Apollo method for reaching the Moon involved a large-budget collaboration between the U.S. government, private industry, and universities, an alliance known as big...

"A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in English ... " Thesis (Ph. D.) -- City University of New York, 2007. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 306-324) and index.

Metacognitive awareness is a goal of the critical thinking classroom. By making students aware of the thought process needed to accomplish classroom activities, metacognition turns to awareness about how and why that process is desirable. This helps learners to understand how new knowledge builds on what they already know, to recognise how new know...

This essay is concerned with popular and biomedical accounts of the appearance of pellagra at the turn of the last century. Many of these accounts portrayed the disease as communicable despite early evidence to the contrary, which suggested it was attributable to nutritional factors. The nonspecific nature of its symptom profile, along with the eno...