New technologies and the new business practices that they bring often raise difficult questions about the application of the law. This often stems from the difficulty of clarifying the impact of new technologies on the interests of different groups in society and, in particular, the difficulty of measuring the public interest brought about by new technologies. In practice, in disputes arising from new technologies, the users of the new technologies often justify their actions in terms of the public interest. In this paper, we compare data collection cases in the US, EU and China and extract the types of public interests discussed in typical cases in different countries, including (1) data-related property rights protection and commercial principles to prevent free-riding; (2) privacy, personal data protection and data security; (3) competition and innovation interests related to the free flow of data; and (4) freedom of expression. The comparison shows that an appropriate focus on the public interest in data flow has led Chinese and US courts to rule in favour of scrapers in a few recent cases, in contrast to the judicial attitude of EU courts, whicht value privacy. The author applauds the attitude of the courts in the US and China and argues that free competition and innovative interests based on data flows are public interests that should be prioritized in data scraping cases.

This paper explores the way in which childhood is socially constructed in the context of child marriage regulation. Despite extreme social and cultural diversity, there is a core ideology in UN human rights instruments, around which official versions of childhood pivot. International law recommends setting the minimum age of marriage at 18years. This article problematizes the progressively depoliticizing effects of a seemingly neutral regulatory drive at the heart of the UN’s promotion of a standardized construction of childhood. The immediate purpose of this article is not to offer solutions to child marriage, but to bring together some elements that may form a basis for understanding the way in which conceptions of childhood are contextually constructed. My hope is that a familiarity with these social perceptions will help to explain the present struggle and resistance to apply universal rights constructions of childhood to non-western societies.

As an industrial science, vaccinology is susceptible to changing social, economic and political frameworks. This article reconstructs the history of the birth of the Sabin strains-derived inactivated polio vaccine (sIPV) in China. The development of this nascent vaccine can be attributed first and foremost to the circulation of knowledge and technology in the global polio research network of the 1980s, before the privatization of vaccine manufacturing and the escalation of intellectual-property protections. Tracing correspondence between Jonas Salk and a Chinese scientist, Jiang Shude, and his colleagues, we chart how institutional efforts in search of a profitable product and scientists’ motives in pursuing personal careers in the post-socialist reform era led to collaboration on many levels, centered around polio vaccines. In response to recent polio history research, we also emphasize the impact of multiple temporalities of polio dramaturgy on the vaccine manufacturer, as this article demonstrates how the confluence of shifting global polio eradication agendas and contingencies in complex vaccinology undertakings ironically helped to materialize the idea of the sIPV. Finally, stories of vaccines and scientists in China add compelling subplots to the global polio history, which reveals the need to reconsider the politicization of imported technology in broader socialist contexts.

A letter dated ‘3 June 1986’ was mailed from Jonas Salk to Jiang Shude (姜述德). Jiang had been an unknown vaccinologist working at the Institute of Medical Biology (IMB) in Flower Red Cave in the Western Hills of Kunming, in south-western China. Salk had visited two years earlier to discuss the feasibility of the IMB's proposal to manufacture inactivated polio vaccine (IPV). The initial collaborative plan had come to a halt by the time Salk wrote the letter to Jiang; still, he kindly offered Jiang an opportunity to travel to Bilthoven and then Lyon to learn IPV-related technology with a generous $10,000 grant for his one-year stay in Europe.1

In order to explore the ways knowledge travels across spatial and cultural boundaries, this article focuses on the intriguing case of the Edinburgh-trained Scottish surgeon James Esdaile (1808–59), who, after practising conventional surgery for almost fifteen years in British colonial India, quite unexpectedly turned to mesmeric anaesthesia in the last five years of his service. By following his career and his mesmeric turn, the article describes Esdaile's subsequent public experiments in mesmeric anaesthesia in collaboration with indigenous practices and practitioners of trance induction in the 1840s which led to the creation of a special mesmeric hospital in Calcutta. Although very successful, it eventually ceased to function, apparently victim to new and cheaper chemical anaesthetics. Mobilizing the insights of science studies scholarship into the processes of scientific experimentation, this article seeks to shed new light on the necessary professional, social and political investments for the making and mobility of scientific knowledge across social and cultural boundaries in a colonial setting.

Given how thoroughly the history of quantum physics has been excavated, it might be wondered what these two hefty volumes by a physicist (Duncan) and a historian (Janssen) bring to the table. Aside from their inclusion of a wide range of recent work in this area, including some notable publications by themselves, the answer is twofold: first, as they state explicitly in the preface to the first volume, derivations of the key results are presented ‘at a level that a reader with a command of physics and mathematics comparable to that of an undergraduate in physics should be able to follow without having to take out pencil and paper’ (vol. 1, p. vi). In response to those who might raise Whiggish eyebrows, I shall simply play the ‘you-try-reading-Pascual-Jordan's-groundbreaking-work-in-the-original’ card. As the authors suggest, by using modern notation and streamlining derivations whilst also, they maintain, remaining conceptually faithful to the original sources (ibid.), the book is rendered suitable for classroom use, albeit at the higher undergraduate or graduate levels.

This article examines the role of primary ethnographic materials – of field notes, letters and photographs – and even of the shelves and bookcases – in building accounts of the human condition. We trace the lives of incomplete and not-yet-found manuscripts, which have been treated as representative of whole archives, as well as closely held convictions and ideas in the history of anthropology. In so doing, we employ the notion of a ‘proxy’, or a set of signs and images which point the audience in particular directions, without determining their overall destination. Our research is based on a few episodes from the histories of paper and digital copies of manuscripts and photographs of the anthropological couple Sergei and Elizabeth Shirokogoroff, who conducted ethnographic, linguistic and some archaeological research, first on the borderlands between China and Russia, and then later within China. We aim to show the complexity and social and intellectual vibrancy of their ethnographic field archives, which have been scattered across countries, institutions and personal collections. We conclude by suggesting that engaging anthropologically with field archives enables us to approach existing perspectives on archives in a new way, viewing them not as containers of catalogued information, but as entanglements reflecting social relations in local communities, the trajectories of ethnographers, and the aspirations of scholars asking questions today.

This article aims to bring out the problematic nature of condensation and rarefaction for early modern natural philosophers by considering two historically significant attempts to deal with it, first by Sir Kenelm Digby in his Treatise on Body (1644), and subsequently by Isaac Newton, chiefly in manuscript works associated with the Principia (1687). It is argued that Digby tried to sidestep the problem of variation in density and rarity by making it a fundamental starting point for his physics. But he also brought out the difficulties of dealing with condensation and rarefaction within the mechanical philosophy, whether that philosophy was plenist or allowed for void space. The problems became exacerbated after experiments with the air-pump achieved extreme rarefactions. It is argued that these led Newton to first consider a retiform or net-like structure of matter, before adopting the radical innovation of supposing repelling forces operating at a distance between the particles of the rarefied bodies. Eventually, Newton came to believe that extreme rarity was inexplicable ‘by any other means than a repulsive Power’.

The Glaisher snowflakes (1855) are amongst the most recognizable images of snow crystals produced in the nineteenth century. Made with the intent of compiling a comprehensive record of snow crystal forms, they also appeared in a variety of print publications, from popular magazines to scientific textbooks, and briefly circulated through various scientific and artistic societies. In a time when reliable images of these small, transparent, ephemeral objects were few and far between, the Glaisher snowflakes were widely praised for both their beauty and their fidelity to nature. But their origin has so far been little examined. This article sheds light on how James and Cecilia Glaisher went about making them, and invites readers to see them through three interconnected perspectives: as products of a domestic environment, as products of a husband-and-wife collaboration, and as products of iterative image making.

Few views have seen a more precipitous fall from grace than hedonism, which once occupied a central position in the history of ethics. Recently, there have been efforts to revive interest in the view, including well-motivated pleas for contemporary ethicists to at least take the view seriously. In this article, I argue for the seriousness of hedonism on metaethical grounds. Taking J.S. Mill's argument for hedonism as a test case, I show that historically, classic hedonism was grounded metaethically via a commitment to two positions: empiricist epistemology and the view that pleasure occurs in sensation. Together, these two positions provided principled grounds for various iterations of classic hedonism. Moreover, these two positions are still serious options in both contemporary epistemology and the contemporary literature on the nature of pleasure. Insofar as a contemporary ethicist takes those two views seriously, they ought to take classic hedonism seriously as well.

Theodor W. Adorno suggested that music is mediated by socially derived forms of reason, a provocation here considered with respect to neoliberalism. Drawing on a Foucauldian understanding of neoliberalism, which in Wendy Brown's summary takes neoliberalism as ‘a specific and normative mode of reason’, I consider what this means for immanent features of music and processes of its composition. This critical attention to music's formal, aesthetic register enables me to go beyond the more well-established (although nonetheless valuable) frameworks for discussing music and neoliberalism, which focus on music's relation to labour conditions and creative industries. A range of music and sonic art is discussed, work by Chino Amobi, Brian Eno, Bryn Harrison, Sarah Hennies, Johannes Kreidler, Wolfgang Rihm, Marina Rosenfeld, and John Zorn. I ultimately argue that some core features of Adorno's conception of critical art and music need reformulating for the neoliberal age.