Do libertarians dream of electric coins? The material embeddedness of Bitcoin

The new, decentralized, anonymous digital currency Bitcoin has in less than three years gone from a proof-of-concept to being traded for about €78 million on a daily basis. Its ascendancy offers up a puzzle for financial regulators and other law enforcers worldwide, while also promising to fulfill the political visions of a group of market-anarchist cryptographers. While it is still a very small economy in absolute terms, Bitcoin also poses some interesting challenges to traditional economic institutions, and is thus an interesting case for economic sociology. Using the notion of material embeddedness, this paper examines the possible implications of a further propagation of Bitcoin. If the currency proves a success, this will have ramifications for a large number of economic institutions, such as the possibility of taxation of untraceable money, the credit economy and interest rates, and international currency control.© 2014 Taylor & Francis. This is the authors’ accepted and refereed manuscript to the article

Building library-based support structures for Open Science

Research institutions meet increasing demands for transparency, accountability, added value and reuse of all aspects of scientific production, from documenting the research process to sharing underlying data to open access to publications. Going beyond admirable slogans about openness there is a clear need for support infrastructures relating to the actual practice of Open Science – describing metadata, archiving datasets and publications and disseminating increasingly interdisciplinary research results. Research libraries, having always been stewards of research institutions’ collective knowledge and offering a variety of research support services, are in a unique position to offer future support for Open Science based on the core competencies already existing at the library. This paper describes the process of building a comprehensive research support structure for Open Science at the university library of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. It shows how the library identified stated, but not necessarily operationalized, university strategies for Open Access and Open Data, and proceeded to strengthen its existing competencies in this area with human resources and a targeted approach to linking the library to the central research infrastructure of the university. This resulted in the library assuming responsibility for new research support services and plans of action for Open Access and Open Data for the whole of NTNU

The Stedegenhet of Nordic STS

This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.The increasing formalization of STS research networks in the Nordic countries prompts a discussion of how research and academic work in the region is constituted – what makes something ‘Nordic’ STS as opposed to just ‘regular’ STS? Similarly, the degree to which international STS theories can be translated into a Nordic institutional context is a matter of importance for assessing the type of work that is being done by Nordic STS researchers. The article provides an overview of STS-related institutions and activities in the Nordic countries, and discusses the diffusion and diffraction of STS theory across national and institutional barriers

Theory and Practice

The relationship between theory and practice is central to science and technology studies - in many ways the field was started in an attempt to dispute representations of this relationship that were too fixed, too neatly delineated, too self-satisfied. Too often, accounts of scientific and technological developments rested on a description of the process as a linear movement from theoretical insight, through experimental testing and to final implementation. The claim of STS was that there is more going on here than a simple movement from theory to practice, from laboratory to invention, from idea to execution. Rather, more can be gained from paying attention to the actual movement back and forth between our ideas of the world and how the world operates – things may be more complex than they seem. This issue of NJSTS features three articles which, while topically different, offer an illustration of the knotty relationship between theory and practice.

Når jentene må inn i skapet: Seksuell trakassering og kjønnsfrihet i online dataspill

This article presents findings from a Norwegian research project on sexual harassment in online gaming. Based on an online survey (N=935) and expert interviews (N=8) with players, the authors examine sexual harassment, how it is performed, explained and with what consequences. The survey shows that sexually harassing language and behaviour is prevalent in games, but is also subject to controversy as many players code their activity as part of gameplay and not as a marginalizing process.Denne artikkelen presenterer funn fra et forskningsprosjekt om holdninger til kjønn, seksualitet og online-spill hos norske spillere. Forfatterne diskuterer spilleres forståelser av betydningen av trakasserende språkbruk og oppførsel i spill, og konsekvensene av seksuell trakassering på spillkulturnivå og aktørnivå gjennom en spørreundersøkelse og kvalitative intervju. Undersøkelsen viste at potensielt seksuelt trakasserende språkbruk er utbredt i spill, men også at det er stor uenighet blant spillere om hvorvidt slik språkbruk faktisk virker trakasserende, og hvorvidt det utgjør et problem. I artikkelen presenterer og diskuterer vi de to ulike synspunktene informantene har på seksuell trakassering i spill, og analyserer betydningen av at mange kvinnelige spillere holder skjuler informasjon om kjønn for å unngå seksuell trakassering.This article is downloaded from www.idunn.no. © 2015 Author(s). This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC 4.0 License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), allowing third parties to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for non-commercial use, provided the original author and source are credited

The Stedegenhet of Nordic STS

The increasing formalization of STS research networks in the Nordic countries prompts a discussion of how research and academic work in the region is constituted – what makes something ‘Nordic’ STS as opposed to just ‘regular’ STS? Similarly, the degree to which international STS theories can be translated into a Nordic institutional context is a matter of importance for assessing the type of work that is being done by Nordic STS researchers. The article provides an overview of STS-related institutions and activities in the Nordic countries, and discusses the diffusion and diffraction of STS theory across national and institutional barriers

The many faces of engagement

We live in an age of public engagement.

Competence of graph convolutional network in anti-money laundering in Bitcoin Blockchain

Graph networks are extensively used as an essential framework to analyse the interconnections between transactions and capture illicit behaviour in Bitcoin blockchain. Due to the complexity of Bitcoin transaction graph, the prediction of illicit transactions has become a challenging problem to unveil illicit services over the network. Graph Convolutional Network, a graph neural network based spectral approach, has recently emerged and gained much attention regarding graph-structured data. Previous research has highlighted the degraded performance of the latter approach to predict illicit transactions using, a Bitcoin transaction graph, so-called Elliptic data derived from Bitcoin blockchain. Motivated by the previous work, we seek to explore graph convolutions in a novel way. For this purpose, we present a novel approach that is modelled using the existing Graph Convolutional Network intertwined with linear layers. Concisely, we concatenate node embeddings obtained from graph convolutional layers with a single hidden layer derived from the linear transformation of the node feature matrix and followed by Multi-layer Perceptron. Our approach is evaluated using Elliptic data, wherein efficient accuracy is yielded. The proposed approach outperforms the original work of same data set

Making Sense of Blockchain Applications:A Typology for HCI

Blockchain is an emerging infrastructural technology that is proposed to fundamentally transform the ways in which people transact, trust, collaborate, organize and identify themselves. In this paper, we construct a typology of emerging blockchain applications, consider the domains in which they are applied, and identify distinguishing features of this new technology. We argue that there is a unique role for the HCI community in linking the design and application of blockchain technology towards lived experience and the articulation of human values. In particular, we note how the accounting of transactions, a trust in immutable code and algorithms, and the leveraging of distributed crowds and publics around vast interoperable databases all relate to longstanding issues of importance for the field. We conclude by highlighting core conceptual and methodological challenges for HCI researchers beginning to work with blockchain and distributed ledger technologies

Educational evaluation : organization, bureaucracy and participation : evaluation in Norwegian and Finnish primary schools

The main purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between evaluation and organizational forms in Norwegian and Finnish primary schools. With a field work in Norwegian schools, an in-depth analysis of this system is provided, with Finland chosen as a comparative example to contrast and compare with the Norwegian system. The field work was conducted in three primary schools in Norway. About twenty-five teachers, principals and pupils were interviewed in semi-structured qualitative interviews to provide me with enough data to make an analysis. The main questions being examined revolved around the practice of evaluation in the two countries, its connection to the organizational environment of the school systems and the level of participation in the evaluation process among stakeholders both inside and outside schools. The results show that there is a clear difference in how Norway and Finland conduct and assess evaluation, and that there are advantages and drawbacks to both methods. Norwegian schools are evaluated with the classical approach, and could do with a certain loosening up of their evaluation structure, while Finnish schools have moved towards a stakeholder approach to provide more institutional autonomy, but might need some external guidance to fully utilize their potential