Data Epistemologies / Surveillance and Uncertainty

Data Epistemologies studies the changing ways in which ‘knowledge’ is defined, promised, problematised, legitimated vis-á-vis the advent of digital, ‘big’ data surveillance technologies in early twenty-first century America. As part of the period’s fascination with ‘new’ media and ‘big’ data, such technologies intersect ambitious claims to better knowledge with a problematisation of uncertainty. This entanglement, I argue, results in contextual reconfigurations of what ‘counts’ as knowledge and who (or what) is granted authority to produce it – whether it involves proving that indiscriminate domestic surveillance prevents terrorist attacks, to arguing that machinic sensors can know us better than we can ever know ourselves. The present work focuses on two empirical cases. The first is the ‘Snowden Affair’ (2013-Present): the public controversy unleashed through the leakage of vast quantities of secret material on the electronic surveillance practices of the U.S. government. The second is the ‘Quantified Self’ (2007-Present), a name which describes both an international community of experimenters and the wider industry built up around the use of data-driven surveillance technology for self-tracking every possible aspect of the individual ‘self’. By triangulating media coverage, connoisseur communities, advertising discourse and leaked material, I examine how surveillance technologies were presented for public debate and speculation. This dissertation is thus a critical diagnosis of the contemporary faith in ‘raw’ data, sensing machines and algorithmic decision-making, and of their public promotion as the next great leap towards objective knowledge. Surveillance is not only a means of totalitarian control or a technology for objective knowledge, but a collective fantasy that seeks to mobilise public support for new epistemic systems. Surveillance, as part of a broader enthusiasm for ‘data-driven’ societies, extends the old modern project whereby the human subject – its habits, its affects, its actions – become the ingredient, the raw material, the object, the target, for the production of truths and judgments about them by things other than themselves

Data’s Intimacy: Machinic Sensibility and the Quantified Self

Today, machines observe, record, sense the world – not just for us, but sometimes instead of us (in our stead), and even indifferently to us humans. And yet, we remain human. Correlationism may not be up to a comprehensive ontology, but the ways in which we encounter, and struggle to make some kind of sense of, machinic sensibility matters. The nature of that encounter is not instrumentality, or even McLuhanian extension, but a full-blown ‘relationship’ where the terms by which machines ‘experience’ the world, and communicate with each other, parametrises the conditions for our own experience. This essay will play out one such relationship currently in the making: the boom in self-tracking technologies, and the attendant promise of data’s intimacy. This essay proceeds in three sections, all of which draw on a larger research project into self-tracking and contemporary data epistemologies. It thus leverages observations from close reading of self-tracking’s publicisation in the mass media between 2007 and 2016; analysis of over fifty self-tracking products, some of it through self-experimentation; and interviews and ethnographic observation, primarily of the ‘Quantified Self’ connoisseur community. The first section examines the dominant public presentations of self-tracking in early twenty-first century discourse. This discourse embraces a vision of automated and intimate self-surveillance, which is then promised to deliver superior control and objective knowledge over the self. Next, I link these promises to the recent theoretical turns towards the agency of objects and the autonomous sensory capacities of new media to consider the implications of such theories – and the technological shifts they address – for the phenomenology of the new media subject. Finally, I return to self-tracking discourse to consider its own idealisation of such a subject – what I call ‘data-sense’. I conclude by calling for a more explicit public and intellectual debate around the relationships we forge with new technologies, and the consequences they have for who – and what – is given which kinds of authority to speak the truth of the ‘self’

Towards Spectacular Nationality: Media Production of Korean Nationality through the 2002 World Cup

This paper explores the role of the media in the production of Korean nationality during the 2002 World Cup. It suggests that the media coverage helped organise a spectacle of consumption, which became the primary means by which Korean nationality was articulated and understood. This study brings together research in media and Korean studies and aims to contribute to a timely understanding of nationality that recognises both its intimate connection with media and consumer culture and its normative and taxonomic function. The study elaborates a hybrid theoretical framework of a ‘system of signs’, which draws from Michel Foucault’s analysis of power and normalisation and the ideas of spectacle and simulacrum by Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard. The study examines two key cases of nationality production. Firstly, the ‘Red Devils’ and millions of street supporters that celebrated Korean victories were appropriated by the media to produce internally oriented affirmations of Korean identity and values that doubled as an entertainment spectacle. Secondly, the cult of admiration around the foreign manager Hiddink demonstrated how discourses of globalisation contribute to a social imaginary of global nationalities that compelled Koreans to judge their own nationality against the standards of the sŏnjin’guk (‘advanced nations’)

Amyloid Precursor Protein Binding Protein-1 Modulates Cell Cycle Progression in Fetal Neural Stem Cells

Amyloid precursor protein binding protein-1 (APP-BP1) binds to the carboxyl terminus of the amyloid precursor protein (APP) and serves as the bipartite activation enzyme for the ubiquitin-like protein, NEDD8. In the present study, we explored the physiological role of APP-BP1 in the cell cycle progression of fetal neural stem cells. Our results show that cell cycle progression of the cells is arrested at the G1 phase by depletion of APP-BP1, which results in a marked decrease in the proliferation of the cells. This action of APP-BP1 is antagonistically regulated by the interaction with APP. Consistent with the evidence that APP-BP1 function is critical for cell cycle progression, the amount of APP-BP1 varies depending upon cell cycle phase, with culminating expression at S-phase. Furthermore, our FRET experiment revealed that phosphorylation of APP at threonine 668, known to occur during the G2/M phase, is required for the interaction between APP and APP-BP1. We also found a moderate ubiquitous level of APP-BP1 mRNA in developing embryonic and early postnatal brains; however, APP-BP1 expression is reduced by P12, and only low levels of APP-BP1 were found in the adult brain. In the cerebral cortex of E16 rats, substantial expression of both APP-BP1 and APP mRNAs was observed in the ventricular zone. Collectively, these results indicate that APP-BP1 plays an important role in the cell cycle progression of fetal neural stem cells, through the interaction with APP, which is fostered by phopshorylation of threonine 668

A High Step-up Modular Isolated DC-DC Converter for Large Capacity Photovoltaic Generation System integrated into MVDC Grids

Nowadays, the research and design of the DC-DC conversion system has become more and more popular in the application of photovoltaic generation into the medium voltage DC (MVDC) grids. A novel high power modular isolated DC-DC converter with high step-up ratio is proposed as a module of the DC-DC conversion system in this paper. Based on the input parallel and output series (IPOS) connections of the proposed modular converters, the system is easy to achieve high capacity and high voltage. A two-stage structure is employed in the proposed converter. The interleaved boost topology is applied to the front-stage, which realizes MPPT for PV arrays with low input current ripples. The full-bridge LLC topology is employed as the back-stage, which lowers power losses by the implementation of soft-switching. The voltage gain of the proposed converter is derived in detail. The theoretical analysis and control strategy are studied in depth. Simulation and experiment verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed converter.N

Improved hematopoietic differentiation of human pluripotent stem cells via estrogen receptor signaling pathway

Additional file 2: Table S1. Temporal changes (%) of ER-Îą and hematopoietic phenotypes during hiPSC-derived hematopoietic differentiation

A Role of Canonical Transient Receptor Potential 5 Channel in Neuronal Differentiation from A2B5 Neural Progenitor Cells

Store-operated Ca2+ entry (SOCE) channels are the main pathway of Ca2+ entry in non-excitable cells such as neural progenitor cells (NPCs). However, the role of SOCE channels has not been defined in the neuronal differentiation from NPCs. Here, we show that canonical transient receptor potential channel (TRPC) as SOCE channel influences the induction of the neuronal differentiation of A2B5+ NPCs isolated from postnatal-12-day rat cerebrums. The amplitudes of SOCE were significantly higher in neural cells differentiated from proliferating A2B5+ NPCs and applications of SOCE blockers, 2-aminoethoxy-diphenylborane (2-APB), and ruthenium red (RR), inhibited their rise of SOCE. Among TRPC subtypes (TRPC1-7), marked expression of TRPC5 and TRPC6 with turned-off TRPC1 expression was observed in neuronal cells differentiated from proliferating A2B5+ NPCs. TRPC5 small interfering RNA (siRNA) blocked the neuronal differentiation from A2B5+ NPCs and reduced the rise of SOCE. In contrast, TRPC6 siRNA had no significant effect on the neuronal differentiation from A2B5+ NPCs. These results indicate that calcium regulation by TRPC5 would play a key role as a switch between proliferation and neuronal differentiation from NPCs

Comparative Genomic Analysis of the 2016 Vibrio cholerae Outbreak in South Korea

In August 2016, South Korea experienced a cholera outbreak that caused acute watery diarrhea in three patients. This outbreak was the first time in 15 years that an outbreak was not linked to an overseas source. To identify the cause and to study the epidemiological implications of this outbreak, we sequenced the whole genome of Vibrio cholerae isolates; three from each patient and one from a seawater sample. Herein we present comparative genomic data which reveals that the genome sequences of these four isolates are very similar. Interestingly, these isolates form a monophyletic Glade with V. cholerae strains that caused an outbreak in the Philippines in 2011. The V. cholerae strains responsible for the Korean and Philippines outbreaks have almost identical genomes in which two unique genomic islands are shared, and they both lack SXT elements. Furthermore, we confirm that seawater is the likely source of this outbreak, which suggests the necessity for future routine surveillance of South Korea's seashore.

Metastatic Gastric Linitis Plastica from Bladder Cancer Mimicking a Primary Gastric Carcinoma: a Case Report

Primary gastric carcinoma is the most common cause of linitis plastica. Less frequently, metastatic gastric cancer from the breast, omental metastases and non-Hodgkin lymphoma involving the stomach have been reported to show similar radiographic findings as for linitis plastica. A metastatic gastric cancer from bladder cancer is extremely rare. We present an unusual case, the first to our knowledge, of gastric linitis plastica that resulted from a metastatic urothelial carcinoma of the bladder