Traveling technology and perverted logics:Conceptualizing Palantir’s expansion into health as sphere transgression

This paper contains a normative interpretation and critique of Palantir’s expansion into the health domain by using the conceptual lens of ‘sphere transgressions’. The technology company, known for its activities in the sphere of security, expanded into the health domain during the pandemic, providing software to monitor the spread of Covid-19. In 2019 Palantir was severely criticized by human rights organizations for its role in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under the Trump administration. Activists and politicians worry about Palantir’s move into health. However, critique is often limited to data protection. These concerns fail to grasp the risks and harms of this expansion. In this paper, I explore the risks of Palantir’s expansion into the health sphere using Sharon’s sphere transgressions framework as a conceptual lens and critical tool to understand and judge this move. We should anticipate the risks of no public returns, dominance, and new dependencies. While this might be true for many Big Tech actors, I add that Palantir’s expansion might be particularly pernicious. Palantir’s history reveals the perversion of logics under exclusionary politics in the sphere of security. At the very least, this warrants special vigilance when importing their technologies into the sphere of health. I conclude that the sphere transgressions framework reveals risks beyond data protection regarding Palantir’s expansion into the health domain

Evaluation and examination of temporary second line evacuation methods of the DolWin Beta

This project explores different means of temporary secondary evacuation that could be used for the wind platform the DolWin Beta during the towing from Haugesund to the German Bight. The platform is extraordinarily tall, 90 meters from top to bottom, and a secondary evacuation method for the personnel on board is needed if an accident would occur. Based on reports from earlier tow operations, design drawings, interviews and research from manufactures this report focuses three different evacuation methods were found to be most suitable for the DolWin Beta platform: an evacuation chute, rappelling and ladders. These methods are evaluated in relation to technical design, simplicity, safety, how well it could handle injured personnel and how people would react when using it. After evaluating the different temporary second line evacuations for the DolWin Beta the authors have concluded that rappelling is the most suitable system due to its capability of handling injured personnel, the flexibility of evacuation points and that personnel responsible for the evacuation will be provided

Normative positions towards COVID-19 contact-tracing apps: findings from a large-scale qualitative study in nine European countries

Mobile applications for digital contact tracing have been developed and introduced around the world in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Proposed as a tool to support ‘traditional’ forms of contact-tracing carried out to monitor contagion, these apps have triggered an intense debate with respect to their legal and ethical permissibility, social desirability and general feasibility. Based on a large-scale study including qualitative data from 349 interviews conducted in nine European countries (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, German-speaking Switzerland, the United Kingdom), this paper shows that the binary framing often found in surveys and polls, which contrasts privacy concerns with the usefulness of these interventions for public health, does not capture the depth, breadth, and nuances of people’s positions towards COVID-19 contact-tracing apps. The paper provides a detailed account of how people arrive at certain normative positions by analysing the argumentative patterns, tropes and (moral) repertoires underpinning people’s perspectives on digital contact-tracing. Specifically, we identified a spectrum comprising five normative positions towards the use of COVID-19 contact-tracing apps: opposition, scepticism of feasibility, pondered deliberation, resignation, and support. We describe these stances and analyse the diversity of assumptions and values that underlie the normative orientations of our interviewees. We conclude by arguing that policy attempts to develop and implement these and other digital responses to the pandemic should move beyond the reiteration of binary framings, and instead cater to the variety of values, concerns and expectations that citizens voice in discussions about these types of public health interventions

Normative positions towards COVID-19 contact-tracing apps: findings from a large-scale qualitative study in nine European countries

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Solidarity during the COVID-19 pandemic: evidence from a nine-country interview study in Europe

Calls for solidarity have been an ubiquitous feature in the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, we know little about how people have thought of and practised solidarity in their everyday lives since the beginning of the pandemic. What role does solidarity play in people’s lives, how does it relate to COVID-19 public health measures and how has it changed in different phases of the pandemic? Situated within the medical humanities at the intersection of philosophy, bioethics, social sciences and policy studies, this article explores how the practice-based understanding of solidarity formulated by Prainsack and Buyx helps shed light on these questions. Drawing on 643 qualitative interviews carried out in two phases (April–May 2020 and October 2020) in nine European countries (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, The Netherlands, German-speaking Switzerland and the UK), the data show that interpersonal acts of solidarity are important, but that they are not sustainable without consistent support at the institutional level. As the pandemic progressed, respondents expressed a longing for more institutionalised forms of solidarity. We argue that the medical humanities have much to gain from directing their attention to individual health issues, and to collective experiences of health or illness. The analysis of experiences through a collective lens such as solidarity offers unique insights to understandings of the individual and the collective. We propose three essential advances for research in the medical humanities that can help uncover collective experiences of disease and health crises: (1) an empirical and practice-oriented approach alongside more normative approaches; (2) the confidence to make recommendations for practice and policymaking and (3) the pursuit of cross-national and multidisciplinary research collaborations

Democratic research: Setting up a research commons for a qualitative, comparative, longitudinal interview study during the COVID-19 pandemic

The sudden and dramatic advent of the COVID-19 pandemic led to urgent demands for timely, relevant, yet rigorous research. This paper discusses the origin, design, and execution of the SolPan research commons, a large-scale, international, comparative, qualitative research project that sought to respond to the need for knowledge among researchers and policymakers in times of crisis. The form of organization as a research commons is characterized by an underlying solidaristic attitude of its members and its intrinsic organizational features in which research data and knowledge in the study is shared and jointly owned. As such, the project is peer-governed, rooted in (idealist) social values of academia, and aims at providing tools and benefits for its members. In this paper, we discuss challenges and solutions for qualitative studies that seek to operate as research commons