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theodorasutton · 5 years

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Digital Anthropology and Formula 1

This blogpost starts with my entry to the DHL competition, which offers my own way into Formula 1, through the drama and personalities of the sport. After my entry, I’ve written my ideas for researching Formula 1 from the perspective of digital anthropology.

My Formula 1 Moment

A few months ago I entered a Formula 1 competition to describe my best F1 moment. I wrote a really heartfelt description and went to submit it, only to find out it was about 5 times too long. I cut it down, submitted, but knew it wasn’t any good. I decided to share the original version and describe my way into the sport which I absolutely never expected myself to like - here it is:

March, 2018. My boyfriend had been watching the Formula 1. The qualifying had ended, and now there was a press conference.

I had never been interested in sport, certainly not one that was so clinical and confusing as Formula 1. For me, all the drivers blurred into one, some seemed to wear red, others wore white, and all of them seemed strangely keen to wear logo embellished headgear. Here they were, three of them, herded behind some microphones, giving stilted answers to press questions. Distracted and on my phone, I was impatient for the end of the program so that we could watch something interesting. "I can assure you we don't have a party mode,” one of them was saying. "I used the same mode from Q2 to the end of Q3. There was no extra mode, no extra button I engaged in." "What were you doing before, then?” The guy in red asked him, taking a sip from his drink and smiling mischievously. "I was waiting to put a good lap in…” The guy in white said, “to wipe the smile off your face,” he added under his breath, with an extra dash of sass. Was he angry, or was he joking? It was hard to tell. The two of them seemed to be rigid with tension, but keen to put on a good show for the cameras. The guy in white patted the guy in red’s arm, insisting that he was only joking. The awkwardness was palpable, and the exchange had my full attention. The other guy in red, sitting on the right, however, seemed to be daydreaming. Who was this guy in white, who my boyfriend told me was winning everything? What planet had he landed from, that gave him the ability to win races with robotic precision? The guy in red with the mischievous smile seemed to be the underdog, and was endearing. The daydreaming one was pure comedy. “Do they have brawls in the bars after a race?” I asked. “I don’t know,” my boyfriend said. “I’m not sure they can drink. They have to maintain almost no body fat.” I frowned. “I hope the guy in red punches the guy in white,” I said. I envisioned him chucking TVs out of swanky hotel windows. I live for the drama. This was the moment that got me into Formula 1. For the first time I saw inside the machines that zoomed predictably around faraway racetracks. I started to realise that Formula 1 wasn’t just lap times, numbers on a screen, and a choice between hard or soft tyres; it was fundamentally about the people. There were egos, eye watering pay checks, glamorous locations, and a whole lot of pressure. There were feuds, confrontations, and tears. It wasn’t until much later that I realised the physical toll of driving a Formula 1 car, and the gym regime that accustomed drivers’ bodies to immense forces while going round the track. I had thought drivers were just pressing buttons inside a machine, but these were athletes putting their lives on the line. Lewis wasn’t always so sassy. He usually spoke with the measured words of a religious guru, emphasising gratitude and hard work. Meditating, praying, exercising, and listening to the right song before a race were apparently what helped him achieve his super-human results. We jubilantly listened to a Christina Aguilera where he was rumoured to perform a hilarious and cringeworthy rap. “Imagine all the other drivers teasing him with it,” I said. It took me a while to realise that Sebastian was a four-time world champion. His voice was low and disinterested while he gave clamouring journalists a run through of his race. In Bahrain, in 2019, Lewis seemed to make him spin on the track through pure intimidation. After races, we watched eagerly for the private moment when the top three drivers would meet in the break room, wipe the sweat off their faces, shake hands, and grimace after two hours of ruthless competition. Was the loser completely crushed? What would they say to one another now that they were face to face? But it was Kimi who became the most entertaining of the three from the press conference that day. Often giving nonsensical answers to journalists (that started with the sound “bwoah”) or pretending to not hear them, he, too, was mischievous and clearly hated any kind of ceremony that stopped him either driving very fast, or going home. His elusiveness made me increasingly curious, and I searched for entertaining stories, finding ones about him napping on piles of tyres, drunkenly diving off a stage with no crowd to catch him, or screaming “gloves and steering wheel!” to a bewildered pit crew. Since that moment in March 2018 I’ve learned more about what really makes Formula 1 tick. I’ll be honest, I still switch off when people start talking about technical specs. But I love to watch the drivers, team principles, and pundits, when they find a way to say everything with just a look in their eyes, or a quiet dig at a competitor. I love it when there’s gossip and wild predictions, and memes to be made. I never thought I would love a sport like I love Formula 1 now, but it was the people - and Lewis’ sass - that got me where I am now.

Digital Anthropology and Formula 1

Through getting my head around F1, I’ve unsurprisingly thought about it in terms of my own research into digital anthropology - or how technology is part of our social world today. I truly know nothing about sport, so I may be wrong, but it seems that F1 is the most technologically mediated sport there is. Rather than athletes who test their physical capabilities, the drivers’ abilities are mediated through a machine, which could be working well, or could be crawling round the track. That machine has been built from the ground up, bolt by bolt, by engineers constantly trying to improve on the vision of the four-wheeled vehicle. They don’t simply drive the same car at each race, it’s continuously evolving and being tinkered with by the team and its engineers in-between weekends.

F1 car aerodynamics Rather than watching the race directly, the teams themselves watch a row of television screens. For starters, the circuit is too big to see in one go, and the noises are too loud to expose your ears to. To experience F1, even for those participating, necessitates cameras and microphones and screens. But the teams are not only watching footage of the race, but endless numbers dancing in front of their eyes, listing speed for each sector, tyre wear, temperatures, and predictions. What secret software do they rely upon to give them an advantage over others - what algorithms are at work, invisibly measuring and shaping the race? Do they have the problem of too much data - data saturation or InfoObesity - where they can learn no more, or they struggle to store, protect, or analyse the information flying at them?

Renault’s Pit Wall, Singapore GP

Pit wall display screen, from Reddit

While the celebrity drivers of F1 plummet themselves around a track several centimetres away from the tarmac - sometimes losing up to 3 litres of water and 4kg in one race - F1 is equally a mathematical sport. This interplay of bodies and technology, personality and data, is fascinating. If I were to design a research project on F1, it would ask how these aspects of the sport are reconciled. What relationship do the teams have with their technology? Are strategies based more on digital information - “The computer says we should do this, so we’ll do it"? Or do they put their faith in people like Hamilton, knowing that his judgment in split seconds would prevail?

Masculinity and aggression would be important themes. Comparing Formula 1 to my limited knowledge of football or rugby, where frustration can be taken out with shouting, running, tumbling, or even brief fights, I wonder if F1 is more of a restrained, poised sport, played behind a veil of respectability, where resentment comes out not physically, but in catty, underhand plays, spies, cutting people out, or perhaps insistently pronouncing your name wrong. My suggestion that Hamilton might throw some TVs out of a window was an attempt to understand where that necessary frustration ends up. A clip of Ricciardo screaming with his helmet still on, Verstappen shoving Ocon, or Schumacher marching furiously up the pit lane towards Coulthard, pulls back the curtain. Behind the scenes, what dastardly behaviour lurks? I also wonder how the teams would take failure differently if they were all women. After both Red Bull cars were taken out of the same race, I remember saying to my boyfriend that “I wouldn’t want to be in a room full of those angry Red Bull workers.” When Haas repeatedly have outbursts on their radios, they seem to be transgressing an invisible rule of Formula 1, that anger is a private matter. What other invisible rules are there that shape team behaviour, and create friction between them?

Haas team principle Gunther Steiner’s outburst at Sochi, for which he was fined $7500

At the same time, while teams seem keen to control their presentation, moments of intense emotion, and authentic reactions of the drivers and pit crew, give fans something to go on. How does Formula 1 balance its primary purpose - the need to be entertaining, with the teams' clear desire to maintain professionalism and secrecy? In 2017, F1 released YouTube videos of the post race driver briefings, which featured drivers sat in rows like bored schoolboys. The videos are extremely entertaining, mostly due to the comedic camerawork and Grosjean attempting to get other drivers into trouble - but the uploads have since stopped, possibly because it was too much of an invasion into the meetings. Netflix’s 2019 series “Formula 1: Drive to Survive” gave us a behind the scenes look, and helped us meet the personalities in F1 and empathise with their stories and struggles. In the recent On The Marbles podcast, Lee McKenzie explains that one reason why AutoSport is going out of print is the on-brand messages from the teams are too bland and repetitive for the price of the magazine. My own entry to the DHL competition displays my feeling that the sport needs drama to continue. This tension plays out everywhere. As the stewards continue to penalise small errors in driving, they curtail more of the scrappy, fight-y racing that the drivers seem to enjoy as much as the spectators, resulting in races that are “boring” and “processional.” Rather than relying on printed interviews, fans may be turning to social media to connect more closely with the characters in the sport. Through Instagram, Reddit, and YouTube, fans create memes based on the funniest moments on and off track, some of which endure for months.

Left: A fan’s take on Haas’ “I think Ericsson hit us”. Right: The radio message to Kimi Raikkonen when his drink was not connected The McLaren driver Lando Norris, only 19 years old, posts stories on his Instagram most days, and welcomes the playful Internet world of memes and ridiculousness in a way that breaks with the usual “robotic monotony” of drivers. It turns out that in his spare time, when he’s not racing in real life, he enjoys racing Verstappen on a video game. In this way, through following them on Instagram, fans can see relationships between the drivers - in a recent example, Ricciardo and Leclerc teased each other on their own respective Instagram accounts during a shared flight. Technology is playing a role, then, not only in the broadcasting of sport, but in the way that fans can relate to F1 and its personalities, by viewing mundane and everyday moments that span much further than the race weekend.

Left: Ricciardo’s selfie with sleeping teammate Verstappen Middle: Norris’ Instagram, teasing his teammate Sainz Right: Leclerc jokes about a misspelling of his name

Research Outline

Taking an academic view of Formula 1 Absolutely Totally Seriously, I would propose viewing it through the idea of Rationality. Rationality has come up in my work on digital detoxing, where in a “Disenchanted” modern world, we perceive that technological progress explains the world down to neat facts and figures. We can bend the world to our own ends, since everything becomes calculable. To act rationally would be to do things for the intended goal, without the need for guesswork or fate.

Interpreting Formula 1 in these terms, the sport splits into its Rational and Irrational aspects. On the one hand, teams design machines using cutting edge technology, and sensors and numbers tell them how to optimise the car to be more likely to win. On the other hand, the teams are made of people, who are emotional, or rather irrational - who might in fact be the key ingredient for winning (like the magical je ne sais quoi of Lewis Hamilton or Ayrton Senna), or who might require motivating, might cause problems, or make mistakes.

I would hypothesise that the teams themselves prefer a rational view of F1. They want everything to be predictable, structured, cool, calm and collected. However, in order to survive, in order to entertain, the sport requires Irrationality - drama, friction, emotion, personality. Also under this heading would be fate, luck, the driver’s own headspace and personal life. A research project of Formula 1 would look at how the teams manage tension between these two aspects - and I would aim to answer questions through an ethnography of team culture.

My research questions would be something like this.

How do the teams incorporate digital technology into their work, and do Formula 1 teams rely more on technology, or on human skill?

What norms are there around emotion in Formula 1, and how is emotion managed by the teams?

How do Formula 1 teams balance the need to be entertaining with the need to win, and how is social media changing their relationship to this?

I better get back to my thesis.

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thecloudlight-blog · 7 years

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New Post has been published on Cloudlight

New Post has been published on https://cloudlight.biz/microsoft-is-surprisingly-comfy/

Microsoft Is Surprisingly Comfy

There were iPhones on the level here at Build. Big pics on the screens showed Surface computer systems coated up aspect with the aid of fact with iPhones. Microsoft developer equipment is coming for iOS and Android. And Apple’s iTunes is coming to the Windows Store.

The corporation that when held a mock funeral for the iPhone—whole with devoted

“iPhone trashcans”—now has a very different mindset about the business enterprise of Jobs. The Microsoft whose antique CEO Steve Ballmer in 2007 famously anticipated the iPhone had “no chance; no chance at all” of getting marketplace share, now comfortably accepts and embraces a global where the iPhone and Android dominate personal computing.

Microsoft talked loads right here at its Build 2017 developer conference about extending Windows reports over to iOS and Android gadgets. And it’s not just about fortifying Windows. Microsoft says it now not simplest wants to connect to those overseas working structures, but by using bringing over functionality from Windows 10 (in conjunction with the content material) it hopes to “make the ones different gadgets better,” as one Microsoft rep stated in a press briefing the day prior to this.

The builders here at Build cheered when Microsoft announced XAML Standard 1.0,

Which presents a single markup language to make person interfaces that work on Windows, iOS, and Android. In one demo, the business enterprise confirmed how a corporation sales app can be prolonged to an iOS tool so someone ought to keep capturing an ability customer’s statistics on a cellular device. Windows no longer best despatched over the patron information that had already been captured, however also the business-app shell that had captured it.

The Security Advantages of a Microsoft Office 365 Migration

Gone are the times of having to continuously upgrade your PCs, servers and software program. With the discovery of cloud computing came the possibility for agencies to convert their systems to the modern version of Microsoft Office 365: a subscription-based cloud service that gives get right of entry to more than one offerings built on the Microsoft Office platform.

365 is now an entire Office Cloud Service up to now,

Proving greater cost-powerful and less difficult to apply than previously implemented systems around the sector. The software consists of hosted versions of Skype for Business, Office Web Apps, Share Point, One Drive and a number of Microsoft computing device programs, in addition to tons more.

Not handiest does this software program boast an excellent wide variety of plans for agencies and home users, the carrier an additionally be tailor-made to satisfy the wishes and budgets of small, medium and big sized establishments. It might be clean to get entry to your enterprise software program at any time the use of your tool and a web connection, anywhere you are within the global.

Staff may also be saved in sync the use of the state-of-the-art calendar and email offerings. It is truly the perfect manner to percentage documents and works collaboratively with multiple users in any vicinity. Companies who take gain of this software will gain from value savings, efficiency, and flexibility.

Microsoft Office 365 also boasts some of the protection blessings that is one of the reasons it’s so a success with modern corporations.

The provider takes all the obligation for reliability and safety, permitting your employer’s IT crew to paintings on different responsibilities, in addition improving your business productivity.

If, like many other enterprise owners, you’re not cozy with an appropriate of an outside company coping with your protection, fear no longer: Microsoft knows that this can be unsettling, which is why they offer all in their subscribers with an extensive service level settlement to make sure they remain included.

The provider gives some of the security and privacy features,

Along with regularly backed-up statistics, encryption, relaxed transmissions among the information center and consumer and enforced password regulations. More facts approximately the statistics processing settlement may be acquired from the Microsoft internet site, or from your 365 issues.

The best issue about any of those capabilities is that they can grow to become on and stale at any time in order now not to infringe upon your privacy or the every day walking of your business. The security plan is bespoke, so can be tailored to fit the desires of your business – being as strict or as lenient as you want.

Surprisingly Simple And Affordable Ways To Make Your Backyard More Exciting

Investing money into your outdoor regions is a great way to enhance the quantity of average usability and leisure that your home gives. When updating and improving their homes, many clients make the error of overlooking those areas. Surprisingly, even a totally modest investment at the property exterior can provide first-rate returns. Following are a number of easy and lower-priced way to make this part of your home ways extra thrilling.

You would possibly want to reflect consideration on creating a place wherein you could both put together and serve food outside. Not only will this keep you from heating up your home by means of cooking indoors at some point of a number of the warmest months of the yr, however, it’ll also provide a brilliant space for unique. You can host dinner events, cookouts, birthday celebrations and greater, all without having to pay the charges of a venue rental.

One way to create a purposeful out of doors kitchen is by way of investing in a cooktop that may be used outdoors.

This is quite of a hybrid that fuses all of the fine elements of an indoor range and a fish fry grill. It is long lasting enough to resist the factors and sufficiently large and functional for getting ready both main dishes and several facets.

Before putting this unit in your backyard, however, you’ll need to create a stable and stable platform on which it is able to stand. For example, you might strive to install a flagstone walkway or even an easy patio. With less cash to spend, you may start with an easy, concrete slab. Although very primary and coffee in cost, it will serve it motive by means of preserving your out of doors home equipment upright. This can later be enhanced with an overlaying which include a loose status awning.

Make sure that you have sufficient seating for your guests as well.

You can spend money on a patio desk and chairs as well as some coordinating garden seats. Items like those may be taken out while web hosting a party after which saved away again once your visitors leave. They are superb for keeping the backyard versatile and for making choices use of the space.

Some humans favor having outside pizza ovens. These may be used to complement your cooktop or they may be mounted in the vicinity of it. Not most effective are those best for making pizza proper at domestic, but they’re also capable of generating a totally numerous array of opportunity meals and dishes.

Consider the benefits of installing a water feature.

This can be used purely for its aesthetic value or it may offer some of the purposeful benefits as properly. A first-class koi pond will create a peaceful and tranquil environment while giving absolutely everyone something fine to have a look at and filling the gap with soothing sounds.

Another popular and lower priced water feature is the above ground swimming pool. This price a long way much less to put in than in-floor designs and but, they could provide all the identical features and features. With this sort of in vicinity, you are genuinely assured to have something thrilling and amusing to do for each family citizens and guests of every age.

How to Find the Best Secure and Comfy Baby Swing

However, with a lot conflicting recommendation accessible approximately the protection of your infant, it can be hard to recognize which products you may rely upon.

If you need to know which functions to look out for in a toddler swing, observe our advice to get began in your seek.

Firstly, you will need to make sure your baby is the age for an infant swing. Most swings might be suitable by way of birth and will accommodate your infant until he is 9KG in weight – something from nine months to a year and the past for smaller toddlers. But in case you buy proper, you’ll have a product you could use for any future kids, or for toddlers who come to go to.

Secondly, you’ll need to familiarize yourself with the exceptional swing modes and motions on providing.

Some fashions will provide a simple, mild swing with adjustable velocity because others can have a much wider range of rocking and swinging alternatives. Make certain these are clean to alter if your infant develops a desire. Some toddler swings actually have an intuitive motion detector in order to lightly rock when the infant starts to wake or cry, presenting them with immediate consolation, especially for when they’re colicky or teething.

This is tremendous for twins, as in case you’re busy changing one baby’s nappy, you will have some thing to entertain and comfort the opposite. Most top swings will offer various melodies and natural sounds, to both soothe or entertain your infant. Some will even provide a ‘white noise ‘ putting which replicates the natural sounds of the womb, providing comfort from day one to assist your child in relaxing.

You’ll additionally want to keep in mind what you will be the usage of your infant swing for.

If you travel a lot and want some thing transportable, you’ll need to discover something tremendously compact that you could effortlessly fold down.

Most toddler swings are made for the mom in mind, so are smooth to hold and keep. Some swings can even include a convey bag.

If you already know you are simplest going to be the use of the swing at home, however, you might not mind going for something that takes up a bit more area.

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