Search Results for: big data

Challenging Normalized Surveillance: “Birds on the Wire” Surveillance in Mexico

Mariel Garcia-Montes August 6, 2024
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In Mexican slang, “hay pájaros en el alambre” (there are birds on the wire), is an expression used to imply that a private conversation is at risk of being intentionally overheard. Birds on the wire can mean anything from one’s auntie overhearing a conversation from the other room, to a phone being wiretapped at long range by a state agency. In everyday parlance, this phrase does a lot of work to signal a broader awareness and cultural acceptance of surveillance. If, in conversation, someone is reminded of the birds on the wire, they are expected to beware—not for the birds to go away. Perhaps the statement produces a chilling effect of sorts, rather than an expectation of privacy. (read more...)

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Contra la Normalización de “Pájaros en el Alambre”: Vigilancia en México

Mariel Garcia-Montes August 6, 2024
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En el argot mexicano, hay pájaros en el alambre es una expresión que indica que una conversación privada está bajo riesgo de ser escuchada por terceros. En el mismo argot,  a tales terceros se les llama orejas; a su labor, escucha. Hay pájaros en el alambre puede abarcar desde tías que escuchan una conversación desde otro cuarto de la casa hasta un teléfono intervenido por una agencia estatal. En el lenguaje cotidiano, esta frase apunta al conocimiento y a la expectativa cultural de este tipo de vigilancia. Si en una conversación alguien dice que hay pájaros en el alambre, se espera que sus interlocutores tengan cuidado con sus palabras; no que los pájaros se vayan. Se podría decir que inspira más a la autocensura que a la expectativa de privacidad. (read more...)

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Two Insomniacs Discuss Routine and Restlessness Through Google Tracking

Alexandra Dantzer April 4, 2024
Ovaj sadržaj dostupan je i na srpskom.
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In this piece I meditate on a conversation I had with my key interlocutor, Aleksandar Kecman, about Google tracking and our reflections upon first encountering my digital footprint. I met Aleksandar in Belgrade, where I did research among insomniacs exploring how the experience of time (and tangentially, space) figures in their lives. Being an insomniac myself I felt chronically out of synch with the rest of society—people close to me and their work and sleep schedules, the rhythms of socializing, and the idea of productive life well spent in time—and this feeling tracked with my interlocutors. Many of the problems the sleepless face are quandaries of time. How are the everyday practices of insomniacs shaped by local and broader understandings of what it means, temporally, to lead a “good life,” or a productive life, within a society that values grind and hustle? (read more...)

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Lonely Planet Looking for Connection: Citizen Science SETI Research at NASA

sebastian levar spivey February 20, 2024
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NASA’s homepage is as glitzy as you would expect of the U.S. Government’s sexiest administration. Glossy pictures of nebulas, astronauts, and asteroids float across the top of the page and even the ozone hole over Antarctica manages to look like a snack. A quick swipe over to the Citizen Science Page, however, and now the images give enthusiastic, low-res, DIY vibes coupled with pun-filled project titles like “Aurorasaurous” and “Spiritacular.” Each one beckons: anyone with a cellphone or a laptop can do this project. A Jacob’s Ladder of binary stretching into the blurry heavens stops my scroll with its provoking title—Are we alone in the universe? Well golly, I don’t know. Go to Project Website. So I do. (read more...)

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Belly Versus Bin: How Digital Autoethnography Brought Me Back From the Brink of Disordered Eating

Madhura Rao November 14, 2023
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Content and Trigger Warning: This post contains commentary and reflections about disordered eating. In September 2019, I responded to an advertisement by a Dutch university for a PhD student interested in the policy and societal aspects of food waste valorisation. With a strong interest in sustainable food systems and an academic background in food supply chains and regulatory affairs, I seemed to fit the bill. I had not studied food waste before, but I felt a strong moral connection to the subject and the idea of investigating ways to better utilise food waste as a resource appealed to me. Following a successful interview, I was appointed to work on the project for a period of four years. In the months that followed, I dove head-first into literature on food waste. I learned that one third of all food produced on the planet ends up as waste while one in three people (read more...)

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Plastic Chronicles: Navigating Mumbai’s Material Mazes

Adwaita Banerjee October 24, 2023
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In the sweltering early hours of summer 2022, waste pickers make their way towards Mumbai’s Deonar dumping ground. Devi, a young waste picker, holds up a thin plastic bag, saying, “These are everywhere, but they’re so flimsy!” Vikas, a more senior segregator, sifting through a pile nearby, replies with a grin, “Ah, but that PET bottle in your other hand? Now that’s valuable. You’ve got to know your plastics, Devi.” Their daily interactions with these materials have given them an innate understanding of their worth and properties. It is here, amidst a sea of discarded materials, that a relationship evolves—one between the waste pickers, the myriad forms of plastics, and the urban space that surrounds them. This bond is grounded in empirical observations that bring order to the chaotic array of plastics, tying together the intricate dance of humans and materials within the city’s polyphonic rhythms. (read more...)

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Staring Contest

Sophie Katz October 10, 2023
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It’s 3 in the morning. I’m sitting at the end of the hallway of the boomerang-shaped intensive care unit (ICU) where I work, looking into the darkness beyond the unit’s only window. When I’m on the unit, the world outside the hospital transforms into something entirely remote—intangible, imperceptible, inconsequential. I force myself to imagine the scent of the fresh air I will inhale when I leave. It’s hard to remember that the world is pulsing with life outside these walls. The hospital’s resistance to darkness and quiet permeates the boundaries of reality itself. The fluorescent lights transform me into something other than a person, washing out the details that make me Sophie. In here, I can lose myself. In here, I am lost. (read more...)

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“The Day I Discovered I Was Collaborating on a Eugenics Project”: On Imponderables in Collaborative Research

Sandra Avila, Marisol Marini September 26, 2023
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The title that opens this reflection is a statement by computer scientist Sandra Avila, who is also a co-author of the lines that will flow here. Her account took place during the recording of a podcast on science and feminism. In that situation, Avila recounted a non-trivial research experience. She may never have been able to talk about it with her colleagues in computer science, let alone with collaborators in dermatology who offered their “expertise advice.” It was in informal conversations with feminist researchers that Avila found a safe place to talk about a situation that had made her cry with anger because she felt cheated. (read more...)

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