Blood,Sweat, and Tears: Navigating Creepy versus Cool in Wearable Biotech

ABSTRACT

This paper considers how personal data protections figure into the design process of wearable technology. The data question is becoming especially important in the face of recent innovations in biotechnology that capitalize on the new fungibility of biology and electronics, in which new biotech wearables capitalize on the ability to analyze and track changes in blood, sweat, and tears. Interviews and participant observation with wearable tech designers, data scientists, fashion tech entrepreneurs, and select experts in cybersecurity and intellectual property law, reveal a range of approaches to data protection in design within the culture where wearables are beginning to merge with biotech. While a few respondents were extremely vigilant about protecting consumer’s privacy, the majority felt that when consumers ‘opt in’ to data sharing, they should be cognizant of the risks. From their perspective, it is not necessarily the producer’s responsibility to protect user's personal data. These attitudes present a problematic logic, which leaves users vulnerable to data exploitation. The paper concludes by arguing that this laissez-faire culture is the environment in which wearable biotech is being developed and will be deployed. This emerging technology raises issues about bodies, data, and ownership in crucial need of analysis and critique to push its move into the mainstream toward more equitable and inclusive ends.     

There is an app for that? The impact of community knowledge workers in Uganda

Rapidly expanding mobile network coverage in developing countries offers new ways to reach poor farmers in isolated places. This article explores the potential for Information and Communication Technology to provide agricultural information and extension services to smallholder farmers, and links this to empirical insights of an intervention in Uganda, where community knowledge workers rely on mobile devices to deliver context- and time-sensitive data to farmers. Consistent with theoretical insights related to information inefficiencies, we find that the intervention leads farmers to move away from low-risk low-return crops toward more commercially oriented commodities. Our analysis also suggests that, for the case of maize, the intervention causes farmers to sell less on the market, but at significantly higher prices.     

Usability and Feasibility Study of a Remote Cognitive Behavioral Therapy System with Long-Term Unemployed Women

We present the results of the use of a cognitive behavioral therapeutic intervention tool to improve the mental, physical, and social health of a group of long-term unemployed women in Spain. Method: We sent automated text messages (SMS) to the mobile phones of long-term unemployed women selected at random from public social services. During a 28-day intervention period, women received four daily automated text messages on her mobile phone on a predetermined hourly schedule. We measured depression symptoms at the start and end of the intervention and we analyzed qualitative data to determine the acceptability of a remote SMS program. Results: Depression symptoms using the Personal Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9), went from an average of 13.8 at baseline to 4.9 at the end of 28 days (p?=?0.89). One hundred percent of the women reported that they liked receiving the text messages and most found them helpful.     

The ‘digital glimpse’ as imagining home

This paper proposes the concept of the ‘digital glimpse’, which develops the existing framing of imaginative travel. Here it articulates the experiences of mobile workers digitally connecting into family life and everyday rituals when physically absent with work. The recent embedding of digital communication technologies into personal relationships and family life is reconfiguring how absence is experienced and practiced by workers on the move, and through this, new digital paradigms for life on-the-move are emerging. This paper explores how such social relationships are maintained at-a-distance through digital technology – using evidence from qualitative interviews with mobile workers and their families. Digital technology now enables expressive forms of ‘virtual travel’, including video calling, picture sharing, and instant messaging. This has implications for the ways in which families can manage the social and relational pressures of being apart. Experiences of imaginative travel created through novel media can enrich the experience and give a greater sense of connection for both those who are at home and those who are away. While technology is limited in its ability to replicate a sense of co-presence, ‘digital glimpses’ are an emergent set of sociotechnical practices that can reduce the negative impact of absence on family relationships.     

The middling mobile: finding place in the liquid city

The middling mobile, differentiated by their modest and unsure mobility, are a vast of bulk of people who intend or expect to move on. As they travel, they tread differing intensities of rhythm and social embeddedness felt to be chaotic, constraining, liberating, or comforting. Owing to their aspirations to ‘get out’ of a rhythmic life, or to move somewhere familiar, the middling mobile use movement and rootedness to navigate and manage everyday life in the liquid city. My analysis offers a holistic exposition of a life that flows between mobility/immobility and rhythmic/arrhythmic forms, and the transitions between them.     

The contingent futures of the mobile present: automation as possibility

In this article we outline and demonstrate a design anthropological approach to investigating automated mobile futures as a processual opening up of possibilities, rather than as a process of technological innovation. To undertake this we investigate the example of how the car-smartphone relationship is configuring in the contingent circumstances of the mobile present and the implications of this for automated mobile futures. Our discussion is set in the context of the growing possibility that automonous driving (AD) features are increasingly part of everyday mobilities (even if unequally distributed globally) and in which personal mobile smart technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) will exist in some form and will interface with humans and be interoperable with other technologies. In developing this we draw on ethnographic understandings of how people live with the possibilities afforded by technologies in everyday life.     

Information society and digital divide in South Africa: results of longitudinal surveys

Integration into the information society implies that information plays an increasingly important role in all sectors of society and holds distinct social and economic benefits. Discourses on the information society are, however, also associated with the digital divide and inequalities in access to and use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). Within sub-Saharan Africa, South Africa is often regarded as one of the most information-integrated societies due to widespread mobile phone ownership, among other things. However, while ICT access has been emphasized, research also points to the role of demographic, socio-economic and cultural factors such as ethnicity, income, education and gender. This article discusses the results of questionnaire surveys conducted by Afrobarometer among probability South African samples in 2008 and 2011. The results indicate that individual Internet use and mobile Internet access were lower than estimated in the literature. Furthermore, gender gaps, as well as considerable gaps between population groups and educational levels, were found in Internet and computer use, mobile ownership and access to mobile Internet and accessing news via the Internet. Conclusions regarding strategies for bridging the digital divide and integrating South Africa into the information society are discussed.     

银行证券保险业监管比较

银行、证券、保险三行业因其业务特性不同,从而面临的主要风险及风险表现的特征也不同。各行业的风险管理既表现出针对主要风险、服从业务特征的共性,也表现出在具体管理技术、方法上的差异性。因此,三行业的监管导向及监管实践都存在着差异和侧重：银行业突出系统性、监管协调和对资产的监管;证券业强调监管对象的多层次性、监管的透明性和对业务的监管;保险业以承保风险为核心,突出母国鉴定和对负债的监管。     

手机传播机制与受众文化心理

手机传播充分进入了人们的日常生活,传播人人同时参与的事实基本实现。手机媒体文化传播显现出普适性、放射性的传播机制,人际传播动能极强,手机媒体传播机制具有“碎片化”传播的随机性与多样化特点．手机的使用最大限度地缓解了现代人的．心理危机,满足了人们多样化交流的欲望。从手机文化传播受众需求来看,使用与满足正是人们使用手机媒体、构筑手机文化的心理动机。     

大学生手机成瘾行为的成因及其对策

随着Android智能手机的普及,其开放性和应用性得到广大青年尤其是大学生的青睐,由此引发的大学生对手机过度依赖的现象时有发生,甚至出现手机成瘾现象。笔者以重庆邮电大学为例,探讨了大学生手机成瘾行为的现状：手机成瘾者月话费较高,反应更加敏感,表现出更强的戒断综合症;从外界存在的客观因素（包括手机本身的特点、社会交往模式的改变等）以及学生自身的心理状态（包括大学生发展阶段特点、从众心理的影响、自我控制感的缺失、满足某些心理需求等）两个层面分析了手机成瘾的原因,从家庭、学校、社会以及个体四个方面提出相应的教育管理对策。