My article with @carto-graph.bsky.social on Japanese private railways is out.
Rule of thumb, only privatise railways as much as you privatise parking.
worksinprogress.co/issue/why-ja...
Original link here: www.chronicle.com/article/the-... (paywalled but please use if you have a subscription).
Comments much appreciated!
A few weeks ago, I wrote an op-ed in the @chronicle.com about how professors and universities should pursue AI watermarking if they still want to keep a powerful tool in their learning arsenal: the analytical paper. Link: open.substack.com/pub/computin...
This is how factual errors should be acknowledged and corrected.
Cover of Automation by Design special issue of IEEE Annals. The image is the US Census' FOSDIC installation with three professionals at a desk and two behind by the mainframe computer in the background. B&W image.
Our special issue is out! "Automation by Design: Politics, Culture & Landscape in an Age of Machines That Learn"! Eds. Colette Perold, me, Gerardo Con Diaz. Authors: David Dunning, Christos Karampatsos, Polyxeni Malisova, Eliza Pertigkiozoglou, Jason Ludwig, Megan Wiessner, & Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal
Google has a new tool combining Google Scholar search with LLM chatbot style questions and summaries:
scholar.google.com/scholar_labs...
This is an incredible deep dive into data centers and their water consumption. Lots of links that you can look into (though I didn't). The conclusion seems to be that data centers have to be treated like any other industrial center.
andymasley.substack.com/p/i-cant-fin...
I'm not sure that negates anything about the actual argument she makes in her piece. If anything, it shows even more why she's right about the importance of persuasion.
Sentence of the day! "If I've learned one bitter lesson about this stuff over the years, it's that the best productivity hack in the world is simply liking your job."
Great post by @caseynewton.bsky.social with some new tools I hadn't heard of: www.platformer.news/productivity...
Of interest to my fellow BlueSky STS people: @castac.bsky.social @asaskat.bsky.social @labortechresearchnetwork.org @cstms.bsky.social And @asociologist.bsky.social @shobitap.org @lmesseri.bsky.social
My recommendation is that policy advocates should make a case for their policies by emphasizing value-tradeoffs. This is a much more honest way of making their case that also ensures that it does not get delegitimized down the line. It is more, dare I say it, … democratic.
(2) plenty of policy frameworks can be expert-driven but still “democratic,” such Community Notes on Twitter designed entirely by programmers but still much beloved for its underlying values. Or the NHS's NICE committee that @ezrakleinbot.bsky.social wrote about here. www.vox.com/2020/1/28/21...
In this new post, I argue that (1) democracy is not about the public versus the experts; rather, it’s a shared culture of remaining open to different voices and causes (but without any guarantees that any cause will win out)
Rather, we have experts and regular people on ALL sides of an issue.
Advocates for policies and policy frameworks will often argue that their proposal is more “democratic” while the one they oppose is “technocratic.” But conflicts in many industrial societies today are NOT between publics on one side and experts on the other.
New post on my Substack about why the dichotomy between "democracy" and "technocracy" is a false one that is premised on a definition of "democracy" as public input as opposed to expert input. computingandsociety.substack.com/p/democracy-.... Thread below.
I forgot to thank you and Con for being such good stewards and editors! So, thank you to you both!
Very happy that "Just Code" is now published. It was a great journey from conference to book. I'm very happy to be among the company of all the writers in the anthology.
🦟 Can the Mosquito Bite? 🦟
The Multispecies Transmutation of Wolbachia Mosquitoes as Biotechnologies of Epidemic Control in Rio de Janeiro
How does the use of a bacterium in vector control reconfigure biopolitical relations?
New article at @estsjournal.bsky.social! #STSsky #AnthroSky
Would be curious to see other people's thoughts!
But calling everything "power" just confuses all the distinctions we should be making between institutions and different organizing machineries.
What is his contribution? It's that the essence of modernity is that science and scientific experts create what one might call the “organizing machinery” or dispositifs of daily life.
The problem with Michel Foucault's work: I wrote a post on my favorite philosopher explaining why his habit of calling his contribution as "power" makes the term "power" essentially meaningless. computingandsociety.substack.com/p/what-was-m...
E.g. I wrote a whole piece on *why* we have post-truth and most of its citations just say "we live in a post-truth age (five articles with the word post-truth in title including mine)." It may be the pressure of just having to cite something; it could also be that we produce too many papers.
I feel this is true of most citations; they may not be this egregious but most tend to be broad references to a topic rather than actually engaging with specific arguments of the papers.
I tried it once. I think it worked overall but I didn't do it again even though I love having everyone share one physical text. One thing I would change if I did it again would be to keep the number of pages on the lower side so that it's not too thick (and this also reduces its cost for students).
Thanks to @markfabian.bsky.social for interviewing me. It was really fun to talk about my research. In the interview, I expand on what happened to MOOCs, how they became domesticated in that the wild hopes associated with them (access, big data!) abated but some concrete gains remained.
