STS: Your Articles

Post an article you’d like to discuss next time (for our class on April 18th), and a brief explanation of why you’d like to talk about it, by April 17th at 10pm. After you have posted your article, read through 2-3 of your classmates’ contributions (including their linked articles) to prepare for our class discussion. Note any thematic similarities you discern, and also think about how the articles relate to theories we’ve learned in class.

13 comments

  1. Marit Lidvall:

    “What is ‘brain hacking’? Tech insiders on why you should care” by Anderson Cooper (Producer: Guy Campanile). CBS 60 Minutes

    http://www.cbsnews.com/news/brain-hacking-tech-insiders-60-minutes/

    Note: This is a transcript of a segment on 60 minutes that aired on April 9, 2017. I wanted to talk about this article even though it’s a transcript because I thought it was so interesting but if it’s not okay to use this article, I’ll use this one instead:

    https://www.forbes.com/sites/daviddisalvo/2017/04/09/the-reasons-why-we-cant-put-down-our-smartphones/2/#429e31924d50

    “The Reasons Why We Can’t Put Down Our Smartphones” by David DiSalvo. Forbes. April 9, 2017.

    (This article references the 60 Minutes segment)

  2. Rodrigo Lopez

    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/16/us/politics/north-korea-missile-crisis-slow-motion.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

    New York Times: A ‘Cuban Missile Crisis in Slow Motion’ in North Korea by David E, Sanger & William J. Broad

    Its important to know how close the world is getting to another world war. The article talks how the US and other world leaders are assessing North Korea’s potential. It is important to see how history repeats itself. The article compares and contrast this situation with the Cuban Missile Crisis.

  3. Julie Kipta-Skutnik

    Title: Six Women Who Paved the Way for Female Engineers and Architects
    Author: Alissa Walker
    Publication: NA
    Link: http://gizmodo.com/six-women-who-paved-the-way-for-female-engineers-and-ar-1561870366

    This article is about women who are engineers and architects. Since I am a woman entering the architectural engineering field, motivation with women being known for great structures will give me greater hope for success, and I believe that most people have seen this field as a man concentrated field though women can do a better job of constructing and designing a structure than men.

  4. http://www.cbronline.com/news/enterprise-it/software/samsung-points-finger-technology-issues-uks-low-productivity/

    I think this interesting because according to UK businessmen having update to date tech is more important than being readily available at all time. It also shows how dependent our society is on technology to get everything and anything done. At one point in article it is basically said that technology is essential to our lives, which is something I have been trying to convince myself is not true.

  5. Social Media’s Silent Filter — The Atlantic

    Content moderation has been an ethical dilemma in the hands of social media giants and small startups alike, wishing to purge their ‘News Feeds’ and ‘streams’ of offensive material. Problem is, this isn’t fully automated yet by image-recognition technology or artificial intelligence engines that can decipher and determine the ‘appropriate-ness’ of user-posted (or bot-posted) material.

    With the advent of ‘fake-news’ in the world’s personalized news cycle, misinformation is rampant the need for fact-checking organizations is critical. Facebook has announced partnerships with independent fact-checking organizations in order to tackle, head-on, spurious articles that show up in people’s Facebook News Feeds.

    Facebook and similar social media titans are no longer simply aggregate ‘social media,’ instead, they have become full-fledged media companies and thus, have sought to act accordingly.

    While the labor of content moderation is still undertaken by humans, there must be a shift to automation. Ethical reasons aside, there is a high burnout-rate of workers content moderators. The companies are eager to mechanize the moderation processes, it’s only a matter of time and we have yet to see the implications of the time needed for artificial intelligence engines’.

    Links: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/03/commercial-content-moderation/518796/

  6. Brandon Nobrega

    Title: Manufacturing Jobs for Women
    Author: Dr. Bill R. Path
    Publisher: The Huffington Post

    My intent for this article is to illustrate the view that society has on women in the manufacturing job field, not many people consider a woman being in a role as an operator or any kind of contributor within the manufacturing industry and I would like to enlighten on the controversies of the subject.

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-bill-r-path/manufacturing-jobs-for-wo_b_5431464.html

  7. http://www.ecowatch.com/desalination-seawater-drinking-water-2345907880.html

    This article is about new advances in sea-water desalination. This article is relevant to this class because water desalination is an important technology that will only become more important in the upcoming years. Specifically, this article discusses the relationship between the materials used to desalinate water and the practicality of using water desalination as a means to provide fresh water to many across the world depends on the ability of society to develop cheap and simple solutions. One potential STS theory that could be applied and discussed in class to this article is Tech determinism because the technology of that allows water to be purified is so important to the survival of so many that it almost forces society to invest in finding better and cheaper ways to produce the same result.

  8. The New York Times
    Elements
    As Technology Gets Better Will Society Get Worse?
    Tim Wu

    This article discusses how we are evolving as we inhabit or wear more technology prosthetics like smart phones. It explains the concept of what “Technology” wants and how it is directly related to the ‘increasing’ theory that it will transform based what our biological evolution wants are. This also articulates how this can be both good or bad in different scenarios and how evolution of technology can also alter our evolution process.

    http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/as-technology-gets-better-will-society-get-worse

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