Platypus

Politics in environmental research infrastructure formation: When top-down policy-making meets bottom-up fragmentation

 Elena Parmiggiani  June 13, 2018

By: Elena Parmiggiani, Helena Karasti, Karen Baker, and Andrea Botero The environmental sciences have been a fertile ground for the development of scientific infrastructures (a.k.a. cyberinfrastructure in the USA and research infrastructure in Europe). Their promises of addressing grand challenges such as climate change require increasing collaboration as well as new forms of research based on data sharing. However, infrastructure policy work in this domain has proven arduous. The environmental sciences are intrinsically heterogeneous with variations in data that must be navigated across local and global scales, ecological variety, societal concerns, and funding structures. (read more...)

The Power of Small Things: Trustmarkers and Designing for Mental Health

 Stefan Johansson  June 7, 2018

At my office we put tennis balls on the legs of the chairs to reduce the noise of the scraping chairs against the parquet floors. They are hard to miss, but they fulfill their purpose. For this reason, I never reflected on what kind of feelings these bright fluorescent yellow balls might evoke when visitors see them attached to the bottom of the meeting room’s chair legs. (read more...)

Regulating Physical Places with Digital Code

 Christopher Bates  May 31, 2018

Editor’s Note: This is the seventh and final post in our Law in Computation series. At first, I was perplexed by the K5 by Knightscope, a “fully autonomous security data machine,” rolling through the Irvine Spectrum Shopping Center last summer. Now, I am not cavalier, nor naive, about my rights to privacy, confidentiality, and anonymity, but I fully accept that I will be captured by surveillance cameras from my arrival to departure in many private places. After all, there is a strong market demand for surveillance technologies, and the market has long existed with little regulations from statutory or case law; their use continues to expand as the cost of sensors and data processing decreases. (read more...)

Ethnographic Designs for Buen Vivir: Fieldnotes from Nicaragua

 Alex Nading  May 29, 2018

Co-Authored by Alex Nading, Josh Fisher, and Chantelle Falconer What does it mean to find value in urban ecologies? This question sparked our collaborative research in Ciudad Sandino, Nicaragua, a city of some 120,000 inhabitants just outside Managua. Residents of Ciudad Sandino face persistent poverty, and they are still dealing with the socio-ecological aftermath of the Hurricane Mitch disaster in 1998. Despite other factors that might be divisive, including a chronic municipal waste crisis, gang violence, and the uncertain legacy of Nicaragua’s 1979 popular revolution, people in Ciudad Sandino remain adamant that fostering collective political and ecological responsibility is key to building a livable urban future. They are concerned not just with surviving in the city but with living well, or Buen Vivir. (read more...)

Rule of Law by Machine? Not so Fast!

 Mona Lynch  May 24, 2018

Editor’s Note: This is the sixth post in our Law in Computation series. Back in the mid-1990s when I was a graduate student, I “interned” at a parole office as part of my methods training in field research. In my first week, another intern—an undergraduate administration of justice student from a local college—trained me in how to complete pre-release reports for those men and women coming out of prison and entering onto parole supervision. The pre-release report was largely centered on a numeric evaluation of the future parolee’s risks and needs. The instrument used by the parole office was relatively crude, but it exemplified a trend in criminal justice that pits numbers-based tools, designed to predict and categorize system-involved subjects, against more intuitive judgments of legal actors in the system. (read more...)

Data Doppelgängers and Issues of Consent

 noopur raval  May 22, 2018

Editor’s Note: This is the fifth post in our Law in Computation series. In February 2018, journalist Kashmir Hill wrote about her collaboration with researcher Surya Mattu to make her (Hill’s) home as “smart” as possible. They wanted to see what they could learn about privacy, both from the perspective of living in such a house and from the ‘data fumes’ or ‘data exhaust’ of all these smart appliances themselves. Data fumes or exhaust refer to the traces we leave behind when we interact digitally but also, often, information that we provide to sign-up on digital platforms (gender, location, relationships etc). These traces, when aligned and collated with our daily digital behaviours on social media, e-commerce and Search platforms, are vital to the speculative and dynamic constructions of who we might be. (read more...)

Parrotfish: The Charisma of Conservation in the Caribbean

 Kyrstin Mallon Andrews  May 8, 2018

During the week of Easter, the beaches of the Dominican Republic were converted into billboards for the campaign to stop the consumption of parrotfish. Pictures taken from drones showed brilliant blues of the ocean bordered by the characteristic white sands of beaches throughout the country. Spelled out on the sand were calls for help. The messages, “Save me, don’t eat parrotfish,” “If you eat parrotfish, I disappear,” “If you eat parrotfish, you eat away my sand,” and “SOS: parrotfish,” were each followed by the hashtag #lasplayashablan: the beaches speak. (read more...)

Indigenous Women’s Engagements with Technology: From Anomaly to Autonomy

 Nell Haynes  May 1, 2018

Este contenido está disponible en español aquí.

In 2013, Bolivia became the last of South America’s major nations to launch a telecommunications satellite. The government outsourced construction and the satellite’s launch to the People’s Republic of China for USD302 million. Bolivia’s first Indigenous president, Evo Morales, was present in Xichang for the launch while those in Bolivia’s capital city, La Paz, watched on large screens erected in public squares. They cheered as the satellite, named after 18th century Indigenous leader Túpac Katari, started to climb. (read more...)