Dignity - The Enemy from Within

The manuscript challenges the use of human dignity as an independent free speech justification. The articulation of free speech in human dignity terms carries unwarranted potential consequences that may result in limiting free speech rather than protecting it. This possible outcome makes human dignity inadequate as a free speech justification. The manuscript also demonstrates why articulations of the rationales behind the “argument from dignity” are either superfluous, since they are aptly covered by the “argument from autonomy,” or simply too broad and speech-restrictive to be considered a free speech justification. As a matter of principle, the nexus between freedom of speech and human dignity should be construed as inherently contentious. The manuscript combines theoretical and comparative analyses to demonstrate why European, and other western democracies are more susceptible to the use of human dignity, both in their constitutional doctrines and as a speech-restrictive term. Current American scholarship regarding dignity as a free speech justification neglects to recognize the harms of such discourse in a non-American setting, as well as in the United States. Thus, unintentionally, advocates of free speech may actually promote a justification that eventually will lead to its restriction. For these reasons, the manuscript warns that inserting human dignity into the realm of free speech justifications may be analogous to inserting a “Trojan Horse,” with human dignity as “the enemy from within.

Correlations between plasma variables and the deposition process of Si films from chlorosilanes in low pressure RF plasma of argon and hydrogen

The dissociation of chlorosilanes to silicon and its deposition on a solid substrate in a RF plasma of mixtures of argon and hydrogen were investigated as a function of the macrovariables of the plasma. The dissociation mechanism of chlorosilanes and HCl as well as the formation of Si in the plasma state were studied by sampling the plasma with a quadrupole mass spectrometer. Macrovariables such as pressure, net RF power input and locations in the plasma reactor strongly influence the kinetics of dissociation. The deposition process of microcrystalline silicon films and its chlorine contamination were correlated to the dissociation mechanism of chlorosilanes and HCl

Deviant Media: Thinking Beyond Noise to Understand It

Negotiating Noise Across Places, Spaces and Disciplines brings together writing by 20 researchers from across Europe and South-East Asia on the slippery but fascinating topic of noise. What is noise, where can it be heard, and what should we do with it? These questions are answered in very different ways in this book from the perspectives of research in ar­chitecture, anthropology, cultural history and theory, ethno- and his­torical musicology, digital culture, linguistics, medicine, musical com­position, sociology, sound design, sound art, and urban planning. Drawing on transdisciplinary conversations at two workshops – one at Lund University and one at the University of Nottingham, Malaysia Campus – the book bridges professional as well as cultural divides. It sets out current research trajectories in the different disciplines involved in researching noise through a series of Position Papers. It also brings these perspectives together through a series of jointly authored Manifestos for the future

The hidden listeners: regulating the line from telephone operators to content moderators

This article examines hidden workers in media technologies and how media companies use them to engineer sociality. It focuses on two types of workers: telephone operators in the early 20th century and contemporary content moderators in social media. This article proposes processed listening as a concept that is better suited to examine their work, especially attending to multiplicities of actors, spaces, and temporalities. Drawing on science and technology studies and sound studies, I examine how processed listening involves the way hidden media workers tune in and out of multilayered mediated spaces to monitor, detect, measure, categorize, and filter unwanted people and behaviors. In doing so, they embody both the communication channel and the filter. They create a feeling of immediacy that is sold as “real-time” experience, while shaping what is sociality. In this way, media companies can avoid being accountable for the decision-making processes involved in the operation of their services

A feminist Critique to digital consent

This paper presents a feminist critique to digital consent and argues that the current system is flawed. The online surveillance adtech industry that funds the web had to use a mechanism that commodifies people, rendering their behaviors into data - products that can be sold and traded for the highest bidder. This was made possible by objectifying, dehumanizing and decontextualizing human engagement and identity into measurable and quantifiable data units. In this way, digital consent serves as an authorizing and legalizing instrument to the business model of spying, selling and trading people in the online ecosystem. Using four key feminist approaches - process, embodiment, network and context - this article shows the way digital consent is a mechanism that transfers responsibility to people and enables an exploitative-extractivist market to exist. The design of digital consent creates a specific interface that teaches people to behave in ways that preserve the asymmetric power relations. Consequently, the article shows the broader educational effects of digital consent which conceives people as products with narrow agency and understanding of what they can do, think and imagine. The article concludes with a refusal to provide an easy solution to a flawed system

Media Distortions: Understanding the Power Behind Spam, Noise, and Other Deviant Media

Media Distortions is about the power behind producing deviant media categories. This book examines the politics behind categories we take for granted such as spam and noise, and what this power means for our broader understanding of media

MEDUSA - New Model of Internet Topology Using k-shell Decomposition

The k-shell decomposition of a random graph provides a different and more insightful separation of the roles of the different nodes in such a graph than does the usual analysis in terms of node degrees. We develop this approach in order to analyze the Internet's structure at a coarse level, that of the "Autonomous Systems" or ASes, the subnetworks out of which the Internet is assembled. We employ new data from DIMES (see http://www.netdimes.org), a distributed agent-based mapping effort which at present has attracted over 3800 volunteers running more than 7300 DIMES clients in over 85 countries. We combine this data with the AS graph information available from the RouteViews project at Univ. Oregon, and have obtained an Internet map with far more detail than any previous effort. The data suggests a new picture of the AS-graph structure, which distinguishes a relatively large, redundantly connected core of nearly 100 ASes and two components that flow data in and out from this core. One component is fractally interconnected through peer links; the second makes direct connections to the core only. The model which results has superficial similarities with and important differences from the "Jellyfish" structure proposed by Tauro et al., so we call it a "Medusa." We plan to use this picture as a framework for measuring and extrapolating changes in the Internet's physical structure. Our k-shell analysis may also be relevant for estimating the function of nodes in the "scale-free" graphs extracted from other naturally-occurring processes.Comment: 24 pages, 17 figure