Star Trek: Voyager: Critical and Historical Approaches to Ethics, Politics, and the End of the 1990s

Forthcoming work on Voyage

Speech-to-song transformation in perception and production

The speech-to-song transformation is an illusion in which certain spoken phrases are perceived as more song-like after being repeated several times. The present study addresses whether this perceptual transformation leads to a corresponding change in how accurately participants imitate pitch/time patterns in speech. We used illusion-inducing (illusion stimuli) and non-inducing (control stimuli) spoken phrases as stimuli. In each trial, one stimulus was presented eight times in succession. Participants were asked to reproduce the phrase and rate how music-like the phrase sounded after the first and final (eighth) repetitions. The ratings of illusion stimuli reflected more song-like perception after the final repetition than the first repetition, but the ratings of control stimuli did not change over repetitions. The results from imitative production mirrored the perceptual effects: pitch matching of illusion stimuli improved from the first to the final repetition, but pitch matching of control stimuli did not improve. These findings suggest a consistent pattern of speech-to-song transformation in both perception and production, suggesting that distinctions between music and language may be more malleable than originally thought both in perception and production

Digital Piracy

The internet has long been a space of copyright violation. But there are many different types of piracy that range from home piracy practices, through to an elite competitive scene of illicit file trading. This chapter sets out the ways in which these everyday practices are underpinned by an entire pyramid of different types of piracies

Living together

Book synopsis: What would a Butlerian Marxism look like? Marxist criticisms of Butler range from careful comparisons of forms to the total dismissal of an unpolitical, merely cultural anarchy. None of these criticisms, however, focuses on what seems to most closely unite these two projects: the universal abolition of the universal. While Marxist communism is focused on the abolition of value and property, Butler is consistently concerned throughout their corpus with the abolition of the subject as the universal form of social relations, an abolition staged by way of a relational ontology and ethics. Their methodologies for achieving abolition, however, vary hugely. While Butler sees the performativity of subjects and power as an opportunity for differential assembly, Marxists are primarily concerned with the working class as a revolutionary vanguard that withdraws its labor from production. Judith Butler and Marxism explores the possibility of a Butlerian Marxism, understood as abolitionist performativity, differential vulnerability, and generalized practices of care. The essays in this volume attempt to actualize the antagonistic persistence of social particulars, pursuing the abolition of the domination and violence that pervade society with increasing brutality. The three sections of this volume are structured according to three pivotal political concepts in Butler’s corpus: performativity, vulnerability, and care. Each essay contributes to a possible mutual development of Butler’s and Marxism’s concern with assembly, interdependence, and refusal, forming a revolutionary politics of care. This is the first book to fully study the contentious link between the vastly influential projects of Judith Butler and Marxism

"Mild Preparations": work, practices, and the internal good of recognition

This chapter seeks to articulate the ethically developmental potential of work, both in terms of the intrinsic satisfactions of the very best activities, and because of the recognition structures work can provide. We do so by exploring the goods of work in the context of the discussion concerning technological unemployment. One response to the possibility of technological unemployment is provided by the anti-work perspective, the plausibility of which rests in large part on its capacity to do justice to the impoverished nature of much contemporary work. Drawing on MacIntyre’s concept of practices we argue, however, that the concept of good work is better equipped to sustain the recognition structures that facilitate the achievement of excellence in those practices. Thus, good work can be viewed, somewhat ironically, as being powerfully conducive to our efforts to prepare ourselves for a world in which leisure is more socially central

Forecasting cyber threats and pertinent mitigation technologies

Geopolitical instability is exacerbating the risk of catastrophic cyber-attacks striking where defences are weak. Nev- ertheless, cyber-attack trend forecasting predominantly relies on human expertise, which is susceptible to subjectivity and potential bias. As a solution, we have recently presented a novel study that harnesses machine learning for long-term cyber-attack forecast- ing. Building upon this groundwork, our research advances to the next level, by predicting the disparity between cyber-attack trends and the trend of the relevant alleviation technologies. Our predictive analysis aims to offer strategic insights for the decision of investment in cyber security technologies. It also provides a sound foundation for the strategic decisions of national defence agencies. To achieve this objective, we have expanded our dataset, which now encompasses records spanning 42 distinct cyber-attack types and various related features, alongside data concerning the trends of 98 pertinent technologies, dating back to 2011. The dataset features were meticulously curated from diverse sources, including news articles, blogs, government advisories, as well as from platforms such as Elsevier, Twitter, and Python APIs. With our comprehensive dataset in place, we construct a graph that elucidates the intricate interplay between cyber threats and the development of pertinent alleviation technologies. To forecast the graph, we introduce a novel Bayesian adaptation of a recently proposed graph neural network model, which effectively captures and predicts these trends. We further demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed features in this context. Furthermore, our study extends its horizon by generating future data projections for the next three years, encompassing forecasts for the evolving graph, including predictions of the gap between cyber-attack trends and the trend of the associated technologies. As a consequential outcome of our forecasting efforts, we introduce the concept of “alleviation technologies cycle”, delineating the key phases in the life cycle of 98 technologies. These findings serve as a foundational resource, offering valuable guidance for future investment and strategic defence decisions within the realm of cyber security related technologies

“Contains Scenes of Mild Peril”: Illuminating the Catalogues of Dark Archives

In this chapter, I shine some light on the catalogues-as-data of the dark archives used in the preservation of scholarly communications. I begin by outlining the recent project work that I undertook with the goal of understanding how much scholarly material really is safely preserved. In turn, this leads me to a number of criticisms of the state of digital preservation catalogues; infrastructural deficiencies that are hindering our knowledge of what work can be saved and can form the basis of responsible future research corpora. In the second part of the chapter, I then turn to the preservation and cataloguing of computer viruses, attempting to think through the analogies to conventional knowledge destruction in this space, while also acknowledging that any form of credit – say in the form of a catalogue – can bring with it damaging incentives to create further malware. This exemplar discussion serves to highlight, again, the infrastructural deficiencies of a cataloguing system that focused primarily on the academic journal article and built itself outwards, but without adequate metadata profiles for “works” of this kind

Flipped experiential learning in digital and social media marketing

In the ever-expanding realm of digital and social media marketing, educators face a persistent challenge in bridging the theory-practice gap, because students struggle to understand the skills they need to learn. Drawing upon a four-year case study, the author introduces an innovative pedagogical model termed flipped experiential learning aimed at addressing this challenge. In this model, students engage in a structured learning journey through three recursive phases: pre-seminar study, where students are introduced to new knowledge, seminar study, where they apply the week’s knowledge to real-world cases, and post-seminar study, where they create new knowledge around their projects. This chapter not only unveils the pedagogical model but also outlines five areas demanding special attention for instructors adopting this approach: assessment structure, assessment specification, module website design, student engagement, and academic misconduct. Associated best practices and theoretical implications relevant to business education are discussed

The Janus face of personal data agency in public and private use applications

Wide-spread (personal) data collection and use through digital apps and platforms raises questions around the ability of citizens to both keep some of their information private as well as have agency in how this information is used for public and private services. We contrast the digital ‘fingerprints’ and design of personal apps, such as digital identifiers to use public services or civil society for organizing collective action, with the information of use and privacy citizens have. There is an assumption that the use by citizens of various apps in their personal, private spaces as consumers creates a different relationship in terms of regulation and agency over data, as compared to those apps and digital platforms created through policymaking for access to public services. Here, we are defining data agency as a cross of awareness and informed levels of data to be collected and for what purposes with the level of control over the data once collected – in terms of use, reuse, and sale. The goal of this research is to build a framework for understanding data agency of citizens in relation to data sharing practices