The Internet of Things Connectivity Binge: What are the Implications?

Despite wide concern about cyberattacks, outages and privacy violations, most experts believe the Internet of Things will continue to expand successfully the next few years, tying machines to machines and linking people to valuable resources, services and opportunities

Spirituality, Economics, and Education A Dialogic Critique of Spiritual Capital

This paper consists of a conversation between a philosopher specialising in ethics and religion and an educational researcher with an interest in cultural studies and contemporary social theory. Dialogic in form, this paper employs an interdisciplinary response to an interdisciplinary project and offers the following components: a dialogic theorizing of the implications for education of a research project on spiritual capital; a continuation of the project of analyzing moral thinking in various cultural and societal settings; a continuation of the project of analyzing political rhetoric (towards an understanding of the polemics of political rhetoric); a reaffirmation of the value of recognizing difference and ambiguity in the global moment

Co-Opting Revolution in the Post-Revolutionary Age - Revolution as Embedded Counter-Culture in Swedish Finance

From the 1980s and onwards, markets have been prime movers in an individualist, market-liberal transformation, and now take part in the every-day life of the general public. Similar to economic development, also personal identity has become fuelled by consumption. Production and work turn more peripheral vis-à-vis the self-project. Instead of the process of production, objects of consumption, in which to express one’s individuality become situated at the centre of business-life. Consumers with values of expressive individualism view seemingly non-conformist products as attractive. Swedish finance is here analysed as a formerly conservative sector of business that because of an increasingly focus on speed opens up to notions of counter-culture and even revolution.brokerage firms; co-optation; counter-cultures; ethical consumption; revolution

RFID chips: enabling the efficient exchange of information

More and more companies are using RFID radio chip technology to boost their competitiveness. Yet RFID not only enhances the efficiency of the company deploying it. It also promotes innovativeness in the economy as a whole. Nevertheless, not every RFID project driven by a technological vision will necessarily become a commercial success for the user. In any event, though, RFID will enable producers to tap sizeable potential. Considering the host of potential application areas – particularly in production, the distributive trade and the transport industry – RFID turnover is likely to increase. With the shift in market shares for individual RFID components and the exodus of production of less sophisticated products from the high-wage countries, Asia is poised to become the continent with the highest turnover.RFID, technology, transportation, logistics

The oblique perspective: philosophical diagnostics of contemporary life sciences research

This paper indicates how continental philosophy may contribute to a diagnostics of contemporary life sciences research, as part of a “diagnostics of the present”. First, I describe various options for an oblique reading of emerging scientific discourse, bent on uncovering the basic “philosophemes” of science. Subsequently, I outline a number of radical transformations occurring both at the object-pole and at the subject-pole of the current knowledge relationship, namely the technification of the object and the anonymisation or collectivisation of the subject, under the sway of automation, ICT and big machines. Finally, I further elaborate the specificity of the oblique perspective with the help of Lacan’s theorem of the four discourses. Philosophical reflections on contemporary life sciences concur neither with a Master’s discourse, nor with university discourse, nor with what Lacan refers to as hysterical discourse, but rather with the discourse of the analyst, listening with evenly-poised attention to the scientific files in order to bring to the fore the cupido sciendi which both inspires and disrupts contemporary life sciences discourse

East of the West: Repossessing the Past In India

Public history, as it is practised in India, defies easy attempts at classification. This is partially because hardly anything that would be recognised as public history is identified as such by its author(s). For the term, despite its ever-increasing acceptance outside India as a discipline and a practice distinct from history, has yet to gain any currency within India. Any attempt to identify works that are self-consciously public history in the Indian context will likely not yield much fruit. Nor, for that matter, will borrowing any of the many definitions of the term from the West and trying to find works that adhere to it in India. Instead, this chapter will try to highlight the myriad forms that public engagements with the past have taken place in India. This article focuses specifically on museums, arguably the preeminent site of public engagements with the past in India. To that end, it will look at a new generation of museums that are charting new paths towards enabling a better public engagement with the past. It will also analyse a few institutional forms of public engagements with the past

Student as Value Based Product: Reconceptualizing the Subjective Nature of Education

In this paper we consider how students are positioned in school classrooms and the effect positioning has on their ontological and social development. The creation of a powersanctioned objective reality, we argue, pervades student learning in contemporary U.S. classrooms, reducing knowledge students might otherwise acquire to socially acceptable conditions they assume in adulthood. Consequently, this creates a society in which antiintellectualism is normalized as learned codes of behavior are lived. Homogenization then isolates and alienates students as they are produced to fill the ranks of a skills-based workforce. Several factors work in tandem to ingrain students with a perceived objective consciousness, they include: top down educational policy, commodification of difference, distraction and normalization of the above mentioned codes of conduct, a sense of morality tied to citizenship, and civilized absurdity: students become mere abstractions of living experience as they accept life as citizen worker.Educatio

Assessing Ontological Arguments

Part I argues that ontological arguments, like other classical proofs of the existence of God, are parts of larger arguments in which they are embedded. These larger arguments include reasons supporting the proofs’ premises and responses to them, and to the proofs’ claims to validity and non-circularity, since, in the final analysis, our assessment of the proofs will express our best judgment of the cumulative force of all the considerations bearing on their overall adequacy. Part II illustrates these points by examining contemporary defences of, and attacks on, one of the ontological argument’s central premises, namely, that God’s existence is logically possible

Habitual Disclosure: Routine, Affordance and the Ethics of Young Peoples Social Media Data Surveillance

Drawing on findings from qualitative interviews and photo elicitation, this paper explores young people’s experiences of breaches of trust with social media platforms and how comfort is re-established despite continual violations. It provides rich qualitative accounts of users habitual relations with social media platforms. In particular, we seek to trace the process by which online affordances create conditions in which ‘sharing’ is regarded as not only routine and benign but pleasurable. Rather it is the withholding of data that is abnormalised. This process has significant implications for the ethics of data collection by problematising a focus on ‘consent’ to data collection by social media platforms. Active engagement with social media, we argue, is premised on a tentative, temporary, shaky trust that is repeatedly ruptured and repaired. We seek to understand the process by which violations of privacy and trust in social media platforms are remediated by their users and rendered ordinary again through everyday habits. We argue that the processes by which users become comfortable with social media platforms, through these routines, calls for an urgent reimagining of data privacy beyond the limited terms of consent

I’m deleting as fast as I can: Negotiating learning practices in cyberspace

Learning in and through work is one of the many spaces in which pedagogy may unfold. Web technologies amplify this fluidity and online learning now encompasses a plethora of practices. In this paper I focus on the delete button and deleting practices of self-employed workers engaged in informal work-related learning in online communities. How the relational and material aspects of online pedagogical practices are being negotiated is explored. While deleting appears to be an everyday practice, understanding the delete button as a fluid object in fluid space begins to illuminate its complexity and multiple enactments. Deleting practices which work to stem the tide of information pushing itself onto screens, as well as those practices that attempt to delete traces left behind on screens and ‘in the cloud’, are examined. Actor Network Theory provides the theoretical and conceptual tools for this exploration. I conclude with observations on the politics of the delete button and implications for more sophisticated digital fluency in everyday pedagogy