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Weekly reflections

Documenting my Master's program, week by week

WEEK 5

Tech Beyond the Myth


This week we engaged in two types of group activities revolving around understanding technology better. The first one focused on demystifying the “black box” we often see in the hardware side of technology. Each group had to pull apart an electric appliance and examine the contents of it, trying to understand how each feature worked and how easy it would be to repair. There was a tv, a roomba, an induction stove, an iMac and a macbook. My group got the 2003 apple Macbook. These were the findings of our technological dissection:

Forensic report: Disassembling a 2003 macbook


  • serial number: A1046
  • Brand: Apple (in California)
  • Model: Powerbook G4
  • Color: silver
  • Assembled in: Taiwan
  • Rated: 25.4VDC
  • Specifications: Canadian ICES-003 Class B
  • Tested: FCC standards (Home or Office use)


What does it do?


The Macbook is a portable electronic device that can store large amounts of information and be given sets of instructions to organize and change it very quickly. It can also access the internet via wifi or cable.


How does it work?

  • the chargeable battery provides power
  • the CPU provides computational power
  • the GPU processes the graphics
  • the RAM stores the short-term data and ensures speed
  • the hard drive stores data indefinitely
  • the motherboard connects everything together and runs the operation system
  • the wifi cards and telecommunication chip provide access to the internet wireless and with a cable
  • the two fans cool the system down
  • the two speakers provide audio


How is it built?

The body is made out of aluminium and the inner structure has a magnesium coating. Screws keep the components together and the cables connect the components to each other. We assume that part of the construction was automated and the small details had human intervention.



Why did it fail, or it wasn't used anymore?

We believe that one of the two fans was damaged, possibly leading the CPU to overheat and melt. We also think the whole laptop is not usable anymore due to its outdated components.



As you can see, there seems to be some damage on the fan + cpu.



Opening the laptop

  1. Unscrew the back to find the battery (15inch, rechargeable battery, Li-ion, no mercury, 10.8V)
  2. Unscrew the lid of the RAM (produced by Samsung in Korea 0351)
  3. Find and eject 2 RAM memory cards (each card had 256MB)
  4. Remove all screws visible on exterior
  5. At this point, the safety check popped out, voiding the warranty.


Everything beyond these simple steps would void the warranty, meaning that Apple would no longer take responsibility to fix the product.

unscrewing the computer unscrewing the computer unscrewing the computer

Inside the laptop

  1. hard drive (made in Thailand, assembled in China)
  2. Air port extreme / wifi part (assembled in Taiwan)
  3. wifi connector (Korea & Mexico)
  4. 2 fans
  5. battery to remember the time
  6. cd reader (Japan)
  7. a case to insert another memory card
  8. sensors under the speaker plates to check the brightness in the environment with a photodiode (BS520, Brand: sharp)
  9. on-off-button
  10. two speakers
  11. motherboard
  12. two RAM-cards
  13. various ports

unscrewing the computer unscrewing the computer

close ups of components



Inside the display

  1. remove all the screws
  2. take off the frame and separate it in two parts (aluminium/plastic)
  3. take apart the 6 layers for light (6 different materials) and 1 layer for pictures
  4. observe the horizontal light (LED-stripe) on the top edge
unscrewing the computer unscrewing the computer


Inside the keyboard

  1. Remove all the keys/buttons
  2. take off the first plastic layer with the attachments
  3. take off the second layer which includes the programming
  4. observe the light cables for the keyboard
  5. power the keyboard to understand how the fiber optic cables light up.


unscrewing the computer unscrewing the computer


Conclusions

Overall, it was a lot of fun to disassemble the laptop and examine all the parts to see how they work and which ones are connected.

What did we learn?

The parts were mostly made and assembled in Asia There were so many different parts in a single laptop The warranty was void almost immediately. Nowadays you wouldn't even be able to open new macbooks so easily.



What surprised us?
  • what a large amount of screws there were (about 100)
  • how many countries were involved in the production
  • many of the components inside the macbook were not produced by Apple, but instead companies like Samsung, Intel and Motorola
  • how much the technology changed in such a short time
  • how precise the parts were integrated and connected to each other
  • how difficult it was to disassemble it - it’s like they don't want us on the inside.


unscrewing the computer unscrewing the computer
Find the original hackmd report here

PART 2



The second activity involved data. The day after taking apart hardware and examining it carefully, we switched into different groups again, this time trying to define a project involving data. We had to map out an objective, a hypothesis and questions whose answers would be found in the data we would gather. Surprisingly, we found many “black boxes” in this activity too, even though that may not have been the initial goal of it. Here is the process of our data project:

Objective → Hypothesis → Data gathering

Objective: We want to eat more locally produced food.

Hypothesis: the food from the vending machine does not come from local sources.

Question: Where does the food from the vending machine come from?



Ideas on data gathering:

Camera

  • Put a camera next to vending machine and detect which brands are being bought
  • Use it to detect whether people are interested in knowing where the products are actually coming from.
  • Engage people to ask whether they can understand if foods are produced locally from the label itself
  • Ask people to take photos of the serial number each time they buy something (this way we don’t have to empty out the vending machine)

Web scraping

  • understand where the ingredients are coming from through online sites

GPS

  • Use it to make a map of where products are coming from


In the end we voted for the webscraping tool. Here is how we used it in our research.

Journal: Food Origins

MDEF: Measuring the world / A world in data activity report.

unscrewing the computer


Brainstorming

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Tool selection

Web scraping: Manually and Automated through python


We found websites that have databases about food production, import and export All database sources are written below.

How do you combine the tool provided with your creativity to prove your hypothesis? How long did you capture data?

We decided which categories of food brands and ingredients to research, basing ourselves on the available resources within IAAC's specific vending machine. We started small, then built up until we reached a global scale of interconnected supply chains.

List all the materials needed, including those given to you, those you source or even things you built yourself.

Techniques used: Resources used: Explain the setup process.



We looked at the products in the vending machine and tried to gather information about each one, using different websites.

Describe the raw data you collected by posting a sample i.e. a picture, a screen capture, etc.



Excel sheets generated from open food facts, Map from open food facts, Excel sheets generated from ITC trade map and Interactive map from OEC



Thanks to all of these sources, we managed to cross reference the information which we obtained. We noticed many differences from one resource to the other.

Post at least two images of a chart, a screen-shoot of your data, that you used to prove if your hypothesis is false.

We were surprised to see that the Natwins cookies claimed their product was "local". However, they do not define what exactly local means, and later state that their ingredients come from the "Mediterranean".

The mediterranean area includes 21 countries, which means that the food origins are almost untraceable (Albania, Algeria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Cyprus, Egypt, France, Greece, Israel, Italy, Lebanon, Libya, Malta, Monaco, Montenegro, Morocco, Slovenia, Spain, Syria, Tunisia, and Turkey)



Web scraping v/s Open APIs

Sometimes it might be beneficial to see if there is an open API to access a database instead of going for web scraping the frontend data right away. In the case of Openfoodfacts.com, they offered an open and very well-documented API, offering various export formats. This allowed us to easily download and analyze the complete dataset for the product category of 'sandwiches'. This was made possible thanks to all the data being covered by the Open Data Commons.

Last step

We decided to buy a sandwich from the vending machine and trace the possible origins of the main ingredients, using OEC’s data concerning Spain’s imported products. The unit of measurement was the value of the product in USD$ and not in tonnes.

The primary ingredients of the sandwich were:
  • wheat
  • pig meat
  • cheese
  • nuts
  • eggs
  • yeast
  • olive oil
And these were the primary imports in Spain:




Of course, this only displays the probability of where each component originated if they were imported. Yet again, the data available to us was incomplete.



Conclusions

We now understand that our expectations were too high: we assumed that a lot of the data regarding food production would be available to the public. Maybe we could re-orient our objective from location to nutrition, because that information is much more available.

Tips: Explain one or more mistakes you've made during that phase? What would you change if you did it again? What if you will have more time?

Defining a more specific target in our hypothesis, would have allowed us to access more relevant information. Also, using a different context (restaurant, grocery store) would have yielded more interesting results.

Solutions

Starting an open conversation on the topic of food origins: Find the full group presentation here

Find the original hackmd report here

Activity conducted by Angel Cho, Chris Ernst, Julia Steketee, Tatiana Butts, Paula Del Rio and Vikrant Mishra.

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Overall, this week was jam-packed with different, engaging activities. There is a lot to talk about when it comes to planned obsolescence and data gathering in the tech industry. Something that particularly struck me was when we were talking about our objectives during the data exercise, and Victor mentioned that we are not expected to save the planet in two days, so we should pick topics that interest and engage us, regardless of what the outcome may be. I remember he specifically said:

“I know a lot of people who said they were going to save the world and instead they end up rich.”



And I think that sums up the tech industry.


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