Misc
Jasanoff compares these three countries, examining their different understandings/constructions of government credibility and how these impact the policies they can implement
What is the U.S., the United Kingdom, and Germany?
One of our very first readings used this scientist and his experiment to make a point about how scientific success/reception is subjective
Who is Joseph Weber and what is the gravitational waves experiment?
We started off our unit on technology by watching a clip from this critically-acclaimed movie
What is 2001: A Space Odyssey?
Elisabetta Costa's article examines how residents of a Turkish town use this social media platform differently from users in the West
What is Facebook?
This occurs when people agree on which values to prioritize in a debate, leading to less contentiousness.
What is Tornado Politics?
This historic disease outbreak has come up a number of times throughout the course, across multiple units
What is the 1918 flu pandemic?
AIDS activists learned scientific language and attended conferences in order to acquire this, allowing them to play a greater role in AIDS research.
What is cultural competence?
I used this piece of technology as an example to illustrate the complexities of supply chains and the military origins of many of our modern technologies.
What is the iPhone?
The era of mass production of consumer goods caused a shift away from this kind of production
What is artisanal production?
Tornado Politics are turned into Abortion Politics when this happens.
What is keeping value trade-offs hidden or blurry and only discussing values that are amenable to a specific interpretation?
We talked about this early-20th-century movement/ideology in connection with the article on AI and NICU care
What is eugenics?
Techniques "for collecting, analyzing, and sharing data that can generate or lend credence to false-positive findings” are called this
What are QRPs (questionable research practices)?
Ruth Cowan uses this household appliance to explore the variety of factors that contribute to why a technology "fails"
What is the refrigerator? (bonus point for electric vs. gas/compression-driven vs. absorption driven)
The term "designer" emerged in this century (hint: it's the era of mass production of consumer goods)
What is the 19th century?
Farmers in Cumbria believed that any radiation scientists found in their sheep came from this disaster rather than Chernobyl
What is Sellafield?
Instagram and a variety of other businesses use this kind of testing in order to boost user engagement (despite user pushback to changes)
What is A/B testing?
This alternative to traditional statistical testing was proposed by Singal as a way to avoid questionable research practices.
What is Bayesian inference?
This author argued that science and technology are “distinct bodies of knowledge, practice, material things and institutions that interact with one another, but are often independent”
Who is Sarewitz?
"[T]echnical objects define a framework of action together with the actors and the space in which they are supposed to act," which can be called this
What is a script?
This is what Gil Eyal says trust is.
What is a gift?
I call my cat this, after a thought experiment that Jeremy Bentham came up with in the 18th century
(hint: we used this to discuss how technology can automate and deindividualize power, as we can see in the joke that an FBI agent is always watching what you do on your phone)
What is the panopticon?
According to Sarewitz, this is what keeps scientific controversies alive.
What is an "excess of objectivity"?
Our working definition for technology was a set of these to organize materials and people to accomplish a specific task
Technologies can "fail" even when they are more efficient than the alternative, as a Planet Money episode on this technology (and its potential replacement) showed us
What are pagers and text-messaging systems?
Pielke says that this expert role can best help us avoid the scientization of politics
What is the "Honest Broker of Policy Options"?