The transition from hunting to herding transformed the cold, arid steppes of Mongolia and Eastern Eurasia into a key social and economic center of the ancient world, but a fragmentary archaeological record limits our understanding of the subsistence base for early pastoral societies in this key region. Organic material preserved in high mountain ice provides rare snapshots into the use of alpine and high altitude zones, which played a central role in the emergence of East Asian pastoralism. Here, we present the results of the first archaeological survey of melting ice margins in the Altai Mountains of western Mongolia, revealing a near-continuous record of more than 3500 years of human activity. Osteology, radiocarbon dating, and collagen fingerprinting analysis of wooden projectiles, animal bone, and other artifacts indicate that big-game hunting and exploitation of alpine ice played a significant role during the emergence of mobile pastoralism in the Altai, and remained a core element of pastoral adaptation into the modern era. Extensive ice melting and loss of wildlife in the study area over recent decades, driven by a warming climate, poaching, and poorly regulated hunting, presents an urgent threat to the future viability of herding lifeways and the archaeological record of hunting in montane zones.

Critical computing should include a concern for the everyday work practice of IT professionals. We explain our 'micro-ethical view', which shifts focus towards everyday work culture, seemingly mundane action, and describe what is gained thereby and by 'preventive' ethics. Four scenarios illustrate the situations relevant for our analysis. Reconstructing the history of 'responsibility' uncovers various concepts that provide fields of tension and systematize our analysis. We finish with related research questions relevant for this micro-ethical view that offer a broad field for research, as well as for professional action.

Unlike most computer-ethics discussions on issues like hacking, software piracy, or "big" ethical issues, we want to discuss the routine work of ITspecialists and the context in which it is situated. The work of creating and facilitating use of IT-systems offers many routine opportunities to "do the right thing" and many contextual factors hindering this. Thus our analysis starts looking at everyday practice, and reconstructing "responsibility". With this approach we hope to expose new ethical issues. Using the rich structure and history of the term "responsibility" as a resource, we learn to use essential notions like intention, voluntariness, autonomy, obligation, possibility of foresight, causal influence, (care) responsibility, and attribution and discuss how these relate to the practice of IT practitioners. This discussion aims to give some structure to the messy entanglement of practice, pointing to general problems and issues like: workplace and computing culture, the ability for ethical judgement, showing how global and local actions, collective and individual choices supplement each other.

Our patterns of thinking and acting (as “computer professionals”) must be out in the open, so as to expose informatical action to criticism by the society as a whole. We are responsible for the provision of knowledge about these patterns. This article criticizes the (defining) use of the trait approach and the functional approach to “profession” in the debate on professionalization in the field of computer science (informatics). An attempt is made to show how informatical action might be better understood by examining the concept of profession in a multidimensional approach, sensitive towards the various perspectives. For this purpose it becomes necessary to examine first of all the various perspectives on the concept “profession” and secondly the debates on professionalization in other disciplines.