Search Results for: big data

AI as a Feminist Issue

Ana Carolina de Assis Nunes September 5, 2023
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By choosing to look at the funding from the American Government on this field, I aim to tell a different story about AI. A quick search for the word “librarian” on Google reveals images upon images of women holding books amongst big shelves, attending to patrons, reading stories for children, or stocking book shelves. Librarian is one of those professions that, like many others, such as nurse and secretary, have been associated with the female world.  If this text is about AI, you might be asking why I’m writing about libraries and librarians–but as scholars Safyia Noble (2018) in her Algorithms of Oppression and Monica Westin (2023) more recently have shown, what most people in Western countries usually understand as the internet, and what fuels the data collection of digital information that feeds generative artificial intelligence (AI) such as ChatGPT, was first started in the 1970s by groups of librarians (read more...)

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Hipócrates Contra Protocolos: Experimentos, Experiência e Medicina Baseada em Evidências no Brasil

Rosana Castro July 25, 2023
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Neste texto abordo processos nos quais a ciência vem sendo reivindicada, chacoalhada, disputada e imprevisivelmente rearticulada no campo da medicina no Brasil, especialmente no contexto de práticas e movimentos negacionistas durante a pandemia de Covid-19. A partir de uma aproximação etnográfica de algumas ações de grupos e instituições médicos críticos à vacinação contra a Covid-19 e defensores do uso de medicamentos considerados ineficazes para “tratamento precoce” da doença, procuro destacar como suas práticas rearticulam, transformam e disputam novos sentidos de ciência, ao invés de simplesmente repeli-la. Embora sejam publicamente nomeados pela mídia e por cientistas como negacionistas, suas práticas e discursos, bem como as repercussões e de suas ações, parecem não ser bem explicadas por alegações de vulnerabilidade à desinformação, falta de compreensão de aspectos técnicos da doença ou mesmo pelo diagnóstico supostamente autoexplicativo de um posicionamento francamente anti-ciência. Ao contrário, conforme demonstro neste ensaio, esses grupos recorrem a diferentes (read more...)

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Hippocrates Against Protocols: Experiments, Experience, and Evidence-Based Medicine in Brazil

Rosana Castro July 25, 2023
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In this text, I address processes in which science is being claimed, shaken, disputed, and unpredictably rearticulated in Brazil’s medical field. Specifically, I consider denialist practices and movements during the Covid-19 pandemic. Based on an ethnographic approach to a variety of actions by medical groups and institutions that are critical of vaccination against Covid-19 and instead defend the use of drugs (considered ineffective by others) for the “early treatment” of the disease, I seek to highlight how their practices rearticulate, transform, and dispute new meanings, values, and practices of science, rather than simply reject it. Although they are publicly named by the media and scientists as denialists, their practices and discourses, as well as the repercussions of their actions, do not seem to be well explained by mere vulnerability to misinformation, lack of understanding of the technical aspects of the disease, or even the supposedly self-explanatory diagnosis of a frankly anti-science position. On the contrary, as I demonstrate in this essay, these groups resort to different constructions of science to produce their arguments and defend themselves against criticism. They do this by repositioning the content and legitimacy of the evidence on different axes than those of Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM), while at the same time, claiming EBM’s authority. In this sense, the following question animates this text: since the practices of these doctors can be recognized as denialist, how can this concept refer to something beyond a simple and direct refusal of everything that is usually called “science”? (read more...)

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A Vocabulary for Junk in Four Movements

Rebecca Carlson, Emil Rieger, Sarah Thanner July 6, 2023
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It was really a miracle that he was able to function. He had accumulated so much shit, it was starting to get concerning, or would have, if there had been anyone to be concerned. As it was, all he was, was being practical. Weirdos hoard shit for god knows what reasons but he was keeping a collection of spares. Admittedly, there was a tight line one approaches when one, for example, collects spares for other spares or if you’re missing the very thing to donate parts for in the first place. But he was aware of that. Each time a new thing came into the house, he would reflect on that line. It was a dotted line, like those where you’d put your signature or tear along. Which one it was, that’s an open discourse, to be negotiated anew. As of right now, there was a more practical concern. The (read more...)

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Earth, Air, Fire, Water, and Entropy: Internet and Synthetic Biology Pioneer Randy Rettberg’s Story on How Information Was Forged

Clarissa Reche, Érico Sant Anna Perrella June 27, 2023
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Our first encounter with Randy Rettberg was somewhat surreal. Not that the others weren’t—the sui generis atmosphere is always present—but that first meeting was set in a scenario so far from our everyday reality that it felt like we’d been thrown into a science fiction novel. It happened in 2022 and we were a bit disoriented after ten hours of transatlantic travel and two hours riding Bentleys to the British countryside. It was July, and we had left the cold and dry wind of our almost never rigorous Brazilian winter to find a pleasant summer sun that gently bathed the English lands. The people there were in a good mood and smiling. Someone told us that it was an atypical moment, that life was not so bright most of the time. We got lucky. At least the weather made us feel a little bit at home, but only that. (read more...)

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Violence/Freedom: Gender and the Politics of Surveillance in Public Parks

Shanel Khaliq May 2, 2023
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Cities all over the world have witnessed a surge in the use of surveillance technologies, such as data-gathering phone apps, facial recognition software, and closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras among others, to address crime and safety in public spaces. While it may appear that these technologies unequivocally create a safe environment regardless of social identities, unresolved incidents of violence against women and transgender bodies in public spaces suggest otherwise. Surveillance technologies intersect with predisposed social systems and ideas around morality and power in complex ways and may not always achieve the desired results. (read more...)

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The Use of Patent Information to Investigate Algorithmic Systems

Debora Machado April 11, 2023
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During my master’s degree, I wanted to study the idea that some social media platforms had tools for guiding users’ behavior in a certain direction. Even though this is by now commonsense among communities interested in studying tech and society, it was a hypothesis that was not easy to confirm with empirical data. That’s when I decided to experiment with patent analysis. (read more...)

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O Uso de Informações de Patentes para Investigar Sistemas Algorítmicos

Debora Machado April 11, 2023
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Durante meu mestrado comecei a pensar na hipótese de que algumas plataformas de mídias sociais possuiam sistemas e ferramentas para orientar o comportamento dos usuários em uma determinada direção. Por mais que isto fosse senso comum entre a comunidade da tecnologia e sociedade, não era uma hipótese fácil de confirmar com dados empíricos. Foi aí que decidi experimentar a análise de patentes. (read more...)

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