Digital work in the planetary market

Many of the world’s most valuable companies rely on planetary networks of digital work that underpin their products and services. This important book examines implications for both work and workers when jobs are commodified and traded beyond local labor markets. For instance, Amazon’s contractors in Costa Rica, India, and Romania are paid to structure, annotate, and organize conversations captured by ‘Alexa’ to train Amazon’s speech recognition systems. Findings show that despite its planetary connections, labor remains geographically “sticky” and embedded in distinct contexts. The research emphasizes the globe-spanning nature of contemporary networks without resorting to an understanding of “the global” as a place beyond space.Aujourd’hui, de nombreux emplois peuvent être exercés depuis n’importe où. La technologie numérique et la connectivité Internet généralisée permettent à presque n’importe qui, n’importe où, de se connecter à n’importe qui d’autre pour communiquer et interagir à l’échelle planétaire. Ce livre examine les conséquences, tant pour le travail que pour les travailleurs, de la marchandisation et de l’échange des emplois au-delà des marchés du travail locaux. Allant au-delà du discours habituel sur la mondialisation « le monde est plat », les contributeurs examinent à la fois la transformation du travail lui-même et les systèmes, réseaux et processus plus larges qui permettent le travail numérique dans un marché planétaire, en offrant des perspectives empiriques et théoriques. Les contributeurs - des universitaires et des experts de premier plan issus de diverses disciplines - abordent une variété de questions, notamment la modération du contenu, les véhicules autonomes et les assistants vocaux. Ils se penchent d’abord sur la nouvelle expérience du travail et constatent que, malgré ses connexions planétaires, le travail reste géographiquement collé et intégré dans des contextes distincts. Ils examinent ensuite comment les réseaux planétaires de travail peuvent être cartographiés et problématisés, ils discutent de la multiplicité productive et de l’interdisciplinarité de la réflexion sur le travail numérique et ses réseaux et, enfin, ils imaginent comment le travail planétaire pourrait être réglementé. Les directeurs Mark Graham est professeur de géographie de l’Internet à l’Oxford Internet Institute et chargé de cours à l’Alan Turing Institute. Il est l’éditeur du livre Digital Economies at Global Margins (MIT Press et CRDI, 2019). Fabian Ferrari est un candidat au doctorat à l’Oxford Internet Institute

Viral Loads: Anthropologies of urgency in the time of COVID-19

Drawing upon the empirical scholarship and research expertise of contributors from all settled continents and from diverse life settings and economies, Viral Loads illustrates how the COVID-19 pandemic, and responses to it, lay bare and load onto people’s lived realities in countries around the world. A crosscutting theme pertains to how social unevenness and gross economic disparities are shaping global and local responses to the pandemic, and illustrate the effects of both the virus and efforts to contain it in ways that amplify these inequalities. At the same time, the contributions highlight the nature of contemporary social life, including virtual communication, the nature of communities, neoliberalism and contemporary political economies, and the shifting nature of nation states and the role of government. Over half of the world’s population has been affected by restrictions of movement, with physical distancing requirements and self-isolation recommendations impacting profoundly on everyday life but also on the economy, resulting also, in turn, with dramatic shifts in the economy and in mass unemployment. By reflecting on how the pandemic has interrupted daily lives, state infrastructures and healthcare systems, the contributing authors in this volume mobilise anthropological theories and concepts to locate the pandemic in a highly connected and exceedingly unequal world. The book is ambitious in its scope – spanning the entire globe – and daring in its insistence that medical anthropology must be a part of the growing calls to build a new world

Multimedia Forensics

This book is open access. Media forensics has never been more relevant to societal life. Not only media content represents an ever-increasing share of the data traveling on the net and the preferred communications means for most users, it has also become integral part of most innovative applications in the digital information ecosystem that serves various sectors of society, from the entertainment, to journalism, to politics. Undoubtedly, the advances in deep learning and computational imaging contributed significantly to this outcome. The underlying technologies that drive this trend, however, also pose a profound challenge in establishing trust in what we see, hear, and read, and make media content the preferred target of malicious attacks. In this new threat landscape powered by innovative imaging technologies and sophisticated tools, based on autoencoders and generative adversarial networks, this book fills an important gap. It presents a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art forensics capabilities that relate to media attribution, integrity and authenticity verification, and counter forensics. Its content is developed to provide practitioners, researchers, photo and video enthusiasts, and students a holistic view of the field

Satellite provided customer premise services: A forecast of potential domestic demand through the year 2000. Volume 3: Appendices

Voice applications, data applications, video applications, impacted baseline forecasts, market distribution, potential CPS (customers premises services) user classes, net long haul forecasts, CPS cost analysis, overall satellite forecast, CPS satellite market, Ka-band CPS satellite forecast, nationwide traffic distribution model, and intra-urban topology are discussed