Rejecting acceptance: learning from public dialogue on self-driving vehicles

Abstract The investment and excitement surrounding self-driving vehicles are huge. We know from earlier transport innovations that technological transitions can reshape lives, livelihoods, and places in profound ways. There is therefore a case for wide democratic debate, but how should this take place? In this paper, we explore the tensions between democratic experiments and technological ones with a focus on policy for nascent self-driving/automated vehicles. We describe a dominant model of public engagement that imagines increased public awareness leading to acceptance and then adoption of the technology. We explore the flaws in this model, particularly in how it treats members of the public as users rather than citizens and the presumption that the technology is well-defined. Analysing two large public dialogue exercises in which we were involved, our conclusion is that public dialogue can contribute to shifting established ideas about both technologies and the public, but that this reframing demands openness on the part of policymakers and other stakeholders. Rather than seeing public dialogues as individual exercises, it would be better to evaluate the governance of emerging technologies in terms of whether it takes place ‘in dialogue’

“Cultural Studies” in the Era of Climate Change: Who is Knocking at the Door?

Are “Culture Studies” doomed by the coming ecocide? Or have they already become or made themselves zombies in academia and in the struggles against our possible extinction as a species? Are they complicit in that ecocide? What, if anything can be done to remedy or ameliorate the degradation of the planet’s economies, environments and intellectual life? Instead of looking backwards to the past or only studying cultures in the now conventional sense, we may need to look with urgency at what humanity has done to its world in new ways

Telemorphosis: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, Vol. 1

The writers in the volume ask, implicitly, how the 21st century horizons that exceed any political, economic, or conceptual models alters or redefines a series of key topoi. These range through figures of sexual difference, bioethics, care, species invasion, war, post-carbon thought, ecotechnics, time, and so on. As such, the volume is also a dossier on what metamorphoses await the legacies of -humanistic- thought in adapting to, or rethinking, the other materialities that impinge of contemporary -life as we know it.- With essays by Robert Markley, J. Hillis Miller, Bernard Stiegler, Justin Read, Timothy Clark, Claire Colebrook, Jason Groves, Joanna Zylinska, Catherine Malabou, Mike Hill, Martin McQuillan, Eduardo Cadava and Tom Cohen

Deep Learning Reconstruction of Ultra-Short Pulses

Ultra-short laser pulses with femtosecond to attosecond pulse duration are the shortest systematic events humans can create. Characterization (amplitude and phase) of these pulses is a key ingredient in ultrafast science, e.g., exploring chemical reactions and electronic phase transitions. Here, we propose and demonstrate, numerically and experimentally, the first deep neural network technique to reconstruct ultra-short optical pulses. We anticipate that this approach will extend the range of ultrashort laser pulses that can be characterized, e.g., enabling to diagnose very weak attosecond pulses

Mini-Publics as an innovation in spatial governance

Mini-publics—deliberative fora made up of randomly selected, representative groups of citizens—have attracted considerable interest as a means of resolving perceived weaknesses in existing forms of governance. In this paper, we consider the use of a mini-public or citizens’ assembly to constitute an ad hoc governance space based on the Travel to Work Area of Cambridge in the United Kingdom rather than working within the existing local government boundaries within which transport infrastructure is usually governed. Through this case study, we explore the question of embedding mini-publics in the wider processes of policy and decision-making. More specifically this is the question of the extent to which they ought to be permitted to inform and even assume responsibility for local-level transport policy decisions. We argue that, if they are to become more widely used, then it will be necessary to understand the practices associated with such democratic experiments and their potential to transform existing governance networks in contested areas of spatial policy

The prevalence of hepatitis B infection in a rural South African HIV clinic

The prevalence of hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection in 1 765 HIVpositive patients in rural Eastern Cape was 7.1%. This is lower than the previously reported rural prevalence and is similar to urban prevalence. Male sex and baseline alanine aminotransferase (ALT) were significant predictors of HBV status. Most HBV-positive patients had normal baseline ALT, making ALT an insensitive screening test for HBV status