The personalisation of insurance:Data, behaviour and innovation

The adoption of Big Data analytics (BDA) in insurance has proved controversial but there has been little analysis specifying how insurance practices are changing. Is insurance passively subject to the forces of disruptive innovation, moving away from the pooling of risk towards its personalisation or individualisation, and what might that mean in practice? This special theme situates disruptive innovations, particularly the experimental practices of behaviour-based personalisation, in the context of the practice and regulation of contemporary insurance. Our contributors argue that behaviour-based personalisation in insurance has different and broader implications than have yet been appreciated. BDAs are changing how insurance governs risk; how it knows, classifies, manages, prices and sells it, in ways that are more opaque and more extensive than the black boxes of in-car telematics

Contemporary Wiradjuri relatedness in Peak Hill, New South Wales.

Wiradjuri Aboriginal people in Peak Hill, a small economically-declining town in central rural New South Wales, have been subjected to a century of government policies included segregation, assimilation, and forced relocations. Despite this local, colonial history Peak Hill Wiradjuri continue to experience daily life in a distinctively Wiradjuri way. To ‘be Wiradjuri’ is to be embedded within a complex web of close relationships that are socially, morally and emotionally developed with both kin and friends, human and non-human subjects. Despite dramatic social and cultural transformations in Wiradjuri meanings and practices of relatedness, the Wiradjuri social world and their ways of self-experience remain informed by past practices. To understand contemporary socialities, and thus the significance of these transformations, this thesis is an examination of the ways in which the moral and emotional order of relatedness governs relatedness, where daily lived experience of shared emotional states can be understood in terms of a language for the self and moral framework. Specifically, this thesis is an exploration of how Wiradjuri people negotiate relatedness in a space in which shared and contrasting Wiradjuri and non-Wiradjuri inter-subjectivities are experienced. This study draws on historical research and ethnographical fieldwork to move beyond an analysis of kinship in terms of structures, roles or values to explore the deeper foundations of emotions and states of being in everyday life

Science by, with and for citizens: rethinking ‘citizen science’ after the 2011 Fukushima disaster

AbstractThis study illustrates how citizen-driven radiation monitoring has emerged in post-Fukushima Japan, where citizens generate their own radiation data and measurement devices to provide public with actionable data about their environments. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in and around Fukushima Prefecture, it highlights the multifaceted character of these bottom-up, citizen-led efforts, contrasting these initiatives with the emergence of “citizen participatory” science policy discourses in Japan. Recognizing the contested nature of citizenship in Japan and in the nuclear arena, the article considers how terms and definitions shape the participation of citizens and other stakeholders (local communities, public authorities, regulators, and professional scientists) in science and technology in culturally and historically specific ways. It builds on these observations to open up new spaces of expertise, which engage all stakeholders through social-scientific intervention.</jats:p

Mapping the use of computational modelling and simulation in clinics: A survey

In silico medicine describes the application of computational modelling and simulation (CM&S) to the study, diagnosis, treatment or prevention of a disease. Tremendous research advances have been achieved to facilitate the use of CM&S in clinical applications. Nevertheless, the uptake of CM&S in clinical practice is not always timely and accurately reflected in the literature. A clear view on the current awareness, actual usage and opinions from the clinicians is needed to identify barriers and opportunities for the future of in silico medicine. The aim of this study was capturing the state of CM&S in clinics by means of a survey toward the clinical community. Responses were collected online using the Virtual Physiological Human institute communication channels, engagement with clinical societies, hospitals and individual contacts, between 2020 and 2021. Statistical analyses were done with R. Participants (n = 163) responded from all over the world. Clinicians were mostly aged between 35 and 64 years-old, with heterogeneous levels of experience and areas of expertise (i.e., 48% cardiology, 13% musculoskeletal, 8% general surgery, 5% paediatrics). The CM&S terms “Personalised medicine” and “Patient-specific modelling” were the most well-known within the respondents. “In silico clinical trials” and “Digital Twin” were the least known. The familiarity with different methods depended on the medical specialty. CM&S was used in clinics mostly to plan interventions. To date, the usage frequency is still scarce. A well-recognized benefit associated to CM&S is the increased trust in planning procedures. Overall, the recorded level of trust for CM&S is high and not proportional to awareness level. The main barriers appear to be access to computing resources, perception that CM&S is slow. Importantly, clinicians see a role for CM&S expertise in their team in the future. This survey offers a snapshot of the current situation of CM&S in clinics. Although the sample size and representativity could be increased, the results provide the community with actionable data to build a responsible strategy for accelerating a positive uptake of in silico medicine. New iterations and follow-up activities will track the evolution of responses over time and contribute to strengthen the engagement with the medical community

Solidarity after nature: From biopolitics to cosmopolitics.

peer reviewedWhat is sustaining the divide between nature and nurture, even though sciences like epigenetics have been challenging it for at least two decades? Evelyn Fox Keller asked this question and considered it a logical problem rooted in terminological confusion within the sciences. In this article, we propose a complementary diagnosis of the problem: the nature-nurture divide is (re-)mobilized when society faces questions of inclusion and solidarity. With examples stemming from the fields of insurance and health care, immigration policy and epigenetics, we demonstrate how the nature-nurture divide is performed through techniques of classification for a politics of solidarity. We identify a common operation to these different examples that we coin 'biopolitical imputation'. We use this term to draw attention to how (Western) societal institutions, including science, create solvable problems out of complex situations, defining human actors and their agency along the lines of the nature-nurture divide as a moral guide. We argue that the tenacity of the nature-nurture divide is therefore not only a logical problem needing better scientific concepts, but also a cosmopolitical problem asking for a more profound reflection on the ontology and ethics of solidarity in order to move beyond the biopolitics of nature versus nurture

Health Insurance, Employment, and the Human Genome: Genetic Discrimination and Biobanks in the United States

Does genetic information warrant special legal protection, and if so how should it be protected? This essay examines the most recent (and indeed only) significant effort by the US government to prohibit genetic discrimination, the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA). We argue that the legislation is unlikely to have the positive impact sought by advocates of genetic privacy and proponents of biobanks. In part, GINA disappoints because it does too little. Hailed by its promoters as “the first civil rights act of the 21st century,” GINA’s reach is in fact quite modest and its grasp even more so. But GINA also fails by trying to do too much, tying the hands of insurers and employers in ways that may fail to serve the interests of individuals or society more generally. In short, if genetic discrimination is a problem that needs to be solved, GINA is not the solution. Instead, the Act creates a number of new and possibly intractable problems that may be more troublesome than what it originally set out to resolve

Science by, with and for citizens: rethinking ‘citizen science’ after the 2011 Fukushima disaster

Abstract: This study illustrates how citizen-driven radiation monitoring has emerged in post-Fukushima Japan, where citizens generate their own radiation data and measurement devices to provide public with actionable data about their environments. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in and around Fukushima Prefecture, it highlights the multifaceted character of these bottom-up, citizen-led efforts, contrasting these initiatives with the emergence of “citizen participatory” science policy discourses in Japan. Recognizing the contested nature of citizenship in Japan and in the nuclear arena, the article considers how terms and definitions shape the participation of citizens and other stakeholders (local communities, public authorities, regulators, and professional scientists) in science and technology in culturally and historically specific ways. It builds on these observations to open up new spaces of expertise, which engage all stakeholders through social-scientific intervention

A genetic algorithm for the atomistic design and global optimisation of substitutionally disordered materials

We present a genetic algorithm for the atomistic design and global optimisation of substitutionally disordered bulk materials and surfaces. Premature convergence which hamper conventional genetic algorithms due to problems with synchronisation is avoided using a symmetry adapted crossover. The algorithm outperforms previously reported Monte Carlo and genetic algorithm simulations for finding low energy minima of two simple alloy models without the need for any redesign.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, presented on E-MRS Fall Meeting 200