Now online: over three hours of constructive and engaging critiques of metascience and scientific reform practices, featuring Sven Ulpts, myself, Tom Hostler, Stephan Guttinger, @smirandafield, @nicole_c_nelson and @devezer. Grab some popcorn and enjoy!
@zephoria and I wrote a joint paper about our work at NASA and at the Census bureau, on how withholding resources to govt technical agencies under the banner of “efficiency” undermines their legitimacy, even without a major catastrophe. #STS scholars and #sociologists, it’s #Failure in New Institutionalism meets Failure in #sociotechnical systems.
A hospital says a patient died… and it takes him years to correct the record; A new data tool promises to lighten workloads, but even more doctors & nurses burn out. What's going on here?
I reviewed Klaus Hoeyer's DATA PARADOXES for @hnet_reviews. It's a good book for STSers, but an even better book for anyone who's deciding whether and how to deploy data-collecting infrastructure, whether in medicine (Hoeyer's case) or any other domain
Absolutely delighted that NYU MCC Prof. Mara Mills & UCSB Prof. Patrick McCray @LeapingRobot have signed on as new CBI @BabbageInst Research Fellows. Please see article link on these two incredible scholars! #sts#history
So this is finally happening. It seems like “The Connectivity of Things: Network Cultures Since 1832” will appear in #OpenAccess, too. There's still some way to go until this makes its appearance in November. Next: proofreading.
"Indeed, despite the suspicion of expertise that has become rampant in many quarters, people in advanced industrial societies do typically expect doctors and scientists to protect them from the effects of epidemic disease. The failure of the experts to solve the problem of AIDS quickly, as they were "supposed to" do, has heightened popular resentment and diminished the credibility of the establishment"
Listening to Susanna Lidström talk at UCSD Science Studies #STS about the Argos ocean sensing program. "Argos renders the ocean historical, and predictable"
Here's a podcast on New Books Network where I talk about (surprise surprise) my new book, 'Visions of a Digital Nation', and why Margaret Thatcher's 1984 #privatisation of British Telecom was a pivotal moment for both #neoliberalism and #digitalisation.
Standardization is promoted as a solution to achieve ethical AI. I attend to the tension between standardization and AI transparency. Overall, this article stresses the complexity of governing sociotechnical AI principles by standardization.
My colleagues at York (contract faculty, graduate assistants) are going on strike tomorrow.
They're asking for raises and back pay. For the past few years, the Ontario government has limited raises for university employees to 1% a year -- a law that has since been deemed unconstitutional. Many of my colleagues are using food banks or are otherwise scraping by.
Meanwhile, admins at York have enjoyed massive raises.
I ❤️ that the #STS community (which is by any measure relatively small) has taken to Mastodon with great gusto. I really like that we are walking the walk with people-powered infrastructure here
Inspired by our reading Sally Wyatt's Non-Users Also Matter. It's been a while since I'd assigned it but I feel like this essay has generated similar discussion in the past, for obvious reasons. #STS
#AI#Infrastructure#STS: "This paper explores how AI policy documents mediate the stabilization of socio-technical assemblages. It does so by developing the theory-methods package of ‘discursive infrastructuring’ and applying it to the U.K.’s National AI Strategy. By centering the conceptual slipperiness of emerging technologies such as AI, this framework sheds light on how policy documents work to stabilize emerging socio-technical assemblages comprising specific actors, ideologies, flows of capital, and relationships of power. In the context of the National AI Strategy, discursive infrastructuring reveals how the document stabilises: AI as an autonomous and inevitable force; a technical/social dualism which privileges the technical over the social in driving innovation; the ‘heroic engineer’ as an individual, masculine and rational archetype; and, the U.K. as a dominant and modernising player on AI’s global stage. This assemblage does not only exist in the document’s words; it is translated into practice through the funding of institutions, the centring of technical pedagogies of AI, and the opening of visa routes for ‘globally mobile individuals’. The application of ‘discursive infrastructuring’ to the National AI Strategy thus elucidates the constitutive role of policy discourse in stabilising politically situated material-semiotic conceptions of AI."
Pre-job-ad announcement: soon advertising 2 x 3-year research posts to work with me & Ethical Data Initiative at the Technical University of Munich (really fun & supportive environment!). Closing date for applications 1st April, start in September. Pls spread the word! Details coming v soon #philsci#sts#hps#DataScience#dataethics
Simy Kaur Gahoonia is defending her PhD thesis at ITU today. She takes us back to 2018 when "technology comprehension" was put on the danish school syllabus, and millions of DKK were committed to a trial of the subject. In 2021, the subject did not become mandatory. #STS