This morning I have been reading a chapter by Ian Hacking on The Creation of Phenomena in scientific practice.
Hacking's essential argument is that often the conditions in the lab are so artificial, or "pure" that the phenomena found in their experiment is created rather than discovered. "Its modern equivalent has become technology, reliable and routinely produced. The effect, at least in a pure state, can only be embodied by such devices"
Insightful essay from Bruce #Schneier and Barath Raghavan - using James C. Scott's "Seeing like a State" and showing how abstraction of socio-technical systems now lets us "See like a Data Structure".
"A university fired a faculty member almost immediately not for out-of-classroom speech but for an optional course assignment. The assignment asked students to, among other things, explain “the impact of genocide/ethnic cleansing on the health/biology of the people it impacts.”"
Here's my new poster, which explains in simplified terms all the processes involved, from quartz extraction to the production of a monocrystalline wafer. This time I've also included the inputs and outputs of each type of process to give an idea of the flows and associated environmental impacts.
The recording of the 2024 Sue and Harry Bovay Lecture in the History & Ethics of Engineering is now live!
Jon Leydens (Colorado School of Mines) spoke about social context & public welfare in engineering curricula and how we can better include these topics in engineering education.
We are running a workshop (W147) at EASST to map the intersections of STS and citizen science. The participants will map their experiences, methods, and practices using Miro and pen-paper. The Situational Analysis approach highlights elements that might be overlooked to enable future collaborations.
We think our workshop will be 17/07/2024 15:30 come and join us if you will be in Amsterdam.
Now that it's been accepted to ACM FAccT'24, I've updated the preprint of my paper on why artists are right that AI art is a kind of theft. I hope this promotes more serious thought about the visions of generative AI developers and the impacts of these technologies.
Oh, man, it's happening. There was an #STS@sts article (or book?) that I really thought was Maria Kaika but very apparently isn't about three phases of modernist water management—something like ascendant, triumphant, and chastened, or some such.
I went to look it up tonight in the old references and I cannot find it.
Tomasz Poprawka: « la recherche est aujourd’hui l’un des piliers politiques essentiels de l’Union européenne ».
Usually science administrators prefer to hide behind a Popperian curtain of political neutrality - even where actual scientists <@ScientistRebellion > get arrested - but the actual disconnect between the scientific consensus and the miasma exhaled by certain political agendas is now so obvious that even the conservative academies of science are accepting that they are, indeed, political actors with moral responsibilities.
«Les élections de juin ne seront pas normales, elles seront cruciales dans un contexte de très fortes incertitudes.» ( Patrizio Bianchi)
On May 7 at 4:30 PM EDT, Jon Leydens will deliver the Bovay Lecture in the History & Ethics of Engineering at Cornell University. His research concerns how engineering education can contribute to social justice, sociotechnical thinking, and humanitarian engineering.
#STS and adjacent people, I'm looking for reading recs on scifi + "capital S monolithic Science" as religion/pseudoreligion
not looking for the actual historical ties between religious institutions and research disciplines (tho I won't be mad if you share those too)
looking more for stuff like... how we went from early scifi tales and allegories at a time when many disciplines and methods where only starting out, to the rampant Scientism and TESCREALism of today... how that's played into technocracy and modulated colonial narratives and education and actual R&D initiatives and etc...
there's tons of individual connections to make between religious narratives and contemporary scifi-treated-as-reality, like general AI as both gods and eschatological prophecy. interested in that sort of thing too