Eva Modebadze wrote an interesting article in relation to the current protests for abortion rights in Poland. The following is a quote from her article on foucaultblog, in which she recaps the argument on the interlinkages between the construction of gender, sexuality and the nation state:
This article from The Financial Times titled “What the South Sea Company can teach us” explores the history book “Money For Nothing” by Thomas Levenson on The South Sea Bubble. From the following quote from the article, it seems that Levenson combines interesting perspectives on the history of science and economics:
In article from the Financial Time on how Big Tech can “best tackle conspiracy theories,” the author shares some interesting insights from research done by a group of ethnographers called Ethnographic Praxis in Context. Apparently these researchers observed that people who believe in conspiracy theories tend to “believe information that comes from scruffier, amateurish sites, since these seem more ‘authentic’”:
Member of the European Parliament Sofie in ’t Veld wrote an article on about:intel about the reliance on foreign and US technologies in EU domestic security, such as Palantir. Here’s a quote from her conclusions:
This article from The New Yorker discusses a Reddit forum where people post pictures of their fridge and others guess what kind of person they are.
Very interesting keynote by Tommaso Venturini at the iNovaMediaLab titled “What do we See when We look at Networks.” In his talk he remarks how networks have become the metaphor of connected complexity and explains how they should be a tool to make sense of this complexity.
Two interesting articles from Wired dealing with current sociotechnical controversies:
In het volgende interview met VPRO Tegenlicht vertelt de Duitse filosoof over het begrip vrijheid in onze hedendaagse samenleving. Erg interessant is zijn uitleg rond minuut 7 over hoe mensen zich niet zozeer persoonlijk geraakt voelen door een toename aan staatscontrole. Hij geeft een passend voorbeeld hoe de controle in luchthaven ordinair is geworden en we het accepetern omdat er nu eenmaal bijhoort. Volgens hem is dit voorbeeld passend voor hoe we dagelijks met zulke beperkingen in vrijheid omgaan.
An article from CNET reports on the use of “keyword warrants” in police investigations the US:
Typically, probable cause is needed for search warrants, which are associated with a suspect or address. The demands for information are narrowly tailored to a specific individual. Keyword warrants go against that concept by giving up data on a large group of people associated with searching for certain phrases.
Apparently the U.K. was not undercounting COVID-19 cases in the country due issues with the Excel file format they were using.
According to the BBC, the error was caused by the fact that Public Health England developers stored the test results in the file format known as .XLS. These .XLS files were then sent to the NHS after uploading to a central system. .XLS is an outdated file format, however, and each spreadsheet can have only 65,000 rows. By contrast, the .XLSX file format, which was first released in 2007, allows for more than 1 million rows. Because of the limited number of rows, each spreadsheet could contain about 1,400 cases, leaving excess cases off the file altogether. Although the issue was reportedly fixed by splitting the files into smaller batches, many are slamming Public Health England. “Why are critical databases in a national pandemic posted on Excel spreadsheets?” Jonathan Ashworth, the Labour Party’s shadow health secretary, said. “Why aren’t they using specialist data-based software?”