We Have Built You: On the Nature of Artificial Intelligence in Blade Runner and Babylon Babies.

While “Artificial Intelligence” describes cognition occurring on the part of machines, over the last several decades representations in television, film, and literature complicate what might comprise “the natural” relative to intelligence. This article explores what is at stake, besides masterful control, in narratives of intelligence as mediated and technical

The Brazilian higher education evaluation model: “SINAES” sui generis?

"Available online 29 November 2017"A study applied to the context of Higher Education (HE) accreditation and evaluation in Brazil. It discusses recent reforms within the context of the Brazilian evaluation model. The changes brought by the new resolutions published in 2016 have been presented, and a conceptual mapping of the HE evaluation model has been drawn. The objectives were to explain, longitudinally, the ways used by monitoring agencies/bodies to assess performance, and to assure a quality HE. The research methodology used a combination of multiple qualitative methods to present results as conceptual maps. The study may contribute to improving quality, based on best practices in the evaluated model.The authors are grateful to the Research Center for Political Science (CICP-Portugal) of the University of Minho and Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES-Brazil).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Collaborative Aesthetics and the Politics of Trans-Subjectivity

This dissertation explores how creative collaborative practice transforms subjectivity, before it is leveraged as an industrial resource. Raising key questions about the nature of collaborative practice itself, I discuss in detail the histories and processes of select collaborative groups in order to unfold an idea of intensity among participants that exceeds the boundaries of each artist without eradicating individuality. I argue that from the commingled exchange occurring in a material and discursive mash-up called "the mangle," emergent onto-epistemologies arise that disrupt static physical and identity formations. From this disruption, the ways in which language or sense-making functions are transformed and begin to include alternative ways of knowing that occur in bafflement, the inability to comprehend, and dysfunction. I work rigorously to transform the chaotic status of these negative terms into something that can be understood as lively, creative, and transformative in their own right and not merely opposites of order, understanding, clarity, and sanity. Overall, the project is highly trans-disciplinary in that I analyze art works and art practices, films, musical performances, composition techniques, and my own long-term creative collaborative work with a group called Multipoint. Further, in a very focused effort to transgress disciplinary boundaries, I place Material Feminism and post-Marxist theory alongside the philosophical works of Deleuze, Wittgenstein, Agamben, and Derrida. Divided into five chapters, the project addresses different aspects of intricate sharing and mangled time. The preface and the first chapter introduce the concept of trans-subjectivity and outline a chaotic, intense description of collaborative practice as I conceive it for this project, tracing a myopic history from the 1950s to the present to consider various forms of collaboration and their effects. The second chapter imagines networked, complex bodies in the video works of Natalie Bookchin and in installation art generally. The third considers the way language becomes complicated and remade through forms of virtuosity and incomprehensibility, while the fourth develops a theory of a-productivity involving lingering in conditions of highly queered time. The last chapter reads Giorgio Agamben's "whatever being" through Derrida's concept of impossible hospitality to envision the potentials for emergent forms of community