This column was first published in the UCLA Daily Bruin on April 28, 2009.

Imagine: It’s 2059. You’re in the Guiyu of Guangdong Province, China, strolling the streets. The air is crisp and the grass green. The cafe-lined streets are littered with people chatting and typing away on their laptops.

Actually, at this rate, the only thing Guiyu will be littered with is electronic waste, or e-waste, an umbrella term for discarded electronic devices.

Instead of the idyllic image of Guiyu above, the town is the main center of exported e-waste, in China.

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This column was first published in the UCLA Daily Bruin on April 3, 2009.

I’ve always wanted to be a meteorologist.

The forecast? Cloudy. Well, the technological forecast, anyway. The next big Internet innovation is cloud computing.

In this case, the “cloud” represents the intricacies of all of the interconnected computers on the Internet. Cloud computing is a way to store your data on the Internet and make it accessible anywhere, through any computer.

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This collection of analyses was submitted for “History 2B: Social Knowledge and Social Power” with Professor Sharon Traweek in Winter 2009.

Heinze, From Scarcity to Abundance, 1990
Heinze’s topic focused on immigrants as consumers, but emphasized Jewish immigrants in particular. Heinze set out to explore why there was such a disparity between the consumption patterns of Jewish people who have immigrated to the United States versus those who have not. His hypothesis involves how Jewish immigrants interpret the values of the United States, link that to their religious past to view “America as a haven” (196) and assimilate accordingly. Thus, as Heinze concludes, Jewish immigrants are more absorbed in wanting to adopt US values, particularly consumerism, to more quickly adopt to their new home. Heinze mainly uses statistics and observations, whether his own or those noted in cultural histories.

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