791 research outputs found
Rethinking Privacy and Freedom of Expression in the Digital Era: An Interview with Mark Andrejevic
Mark Andrejevic, Professor of Media Studies at the Pomona College in Claremont, California, is a distinguished critical theorist exploring issues around surveillance from pop culture to the logic of automated, predictive surveillance practices. In an interview with WPCC issue co-editor Pinelopi Troullinou, Andrejevic responds to pressing questions emanating from the surveillant society looking to shift the conversation to concepts of data holdersâ accountability. He insists on the need to retain awareness of power relations in a data driven society highlighting the emerging challenge, âto provide ways of understanding the long and short term consequences of data driven social sortingâ. Within the context of Snowdenâs revelations and policy responses worldwide he recommends a shift of focus from discourses surrounding âpre-emptionâ to those of âpreventionâ also questioning the notion that citizens might only need to be concerned, âif we are doing something âwrongââ as this is dependent on a utopian notion of the state and commercial processes, âthat have been purged of any forms of discriminationâ. He warns of multiple concerns of misuse of data in a context where âa total surveillance society looks all but inevitableâ. However, the academy may be in a unique position to provide ways of reframing the terms of discussions over privacy and surveillance via the analysis of âthe long and short term consequences of data driven social sorting (and its automation)â and in particular of algorithmic accountability
Benign recurrent intrahepatic cholestasis : report of two local cases
Benign Recurrent Intrahepatic Cholestasis (BRIC) is a rare disorder characterized by recurrent episodes of cholestasis without permanent liver damage. Familial and sporadic cases have been reported and both autosomal recessive and autosomal dominant inheritance described. We report two children with BRIC without any previous family history.peer-reviewe
A state variable for crumpled thin sheets
Despite the apparent ease with which a sheet of paper is crumpled and tossed
away, crumpling dynamics are often considered a paradigm of complexity. This
complexity arises from the infinite number of configurations a disordered
crumpled sheet can take. Here we experimentally show that key aspects of
crumpling have a very simple description; the evolution of the damage in
crumpling dynamics can largely be described by a single global quantity, the
total length of all creases. We follow the evolution of the damage network in
repetitively crumpled elastoplastic sheets, and show that the dynamics of this
quantity are deterministic, and depend only on the instantaneous state of the
crease network and not at all on the crumpling history. We also show that this
global quantity captures the crumpling dynamics of a sheet crumpled for the
first time. This leads to a remarkable reduction in complexity, allowing a
description of a highly disordered system by a single state parameter. Similar
strategies may also be useful in analyzing other systems that evolve under
geometric and mechanical constraints, from faulting of tectonic plates to the
evolution of proteins
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