Category: Gordon Hull
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To review the issue: The Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine uses a modified adenovirus, as do several other vaccines in development, most notably the Russian Gamaleya Institute one. Early, puzzling results suggested that the Oxford vaccine was about 70% effective overall, but that the overall number obscured a disparity between two groups: a two-dose group of all ages…
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By Gordon Hull In an important recent article, Robin Kar and Margaret Radin propose a way to interpret the volumes of boilerplate that accompany pretty much any electronically-mediated consumer transaction. Rather, they propose a way to interpret the phenomenon of the deluge of such boilerplate. We all know the scenario: you decide to buy a…
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At least not from the appearance of things. Google summarily fired Timnit Gebru, one of its lead AI Ethics researchers and one of the few Black women in a leadership position at the company. Her sin? Producing academic research critical of biases in AI: “The email and the firing were the culmination of about a…
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UPDATE 12/6: For more on the mess in Rhode Island, see here. This week’s SCOTUS opinion overturning New York’s restrictions on religious gatherings is disappointing in many ways. Most obviously, it hamstrings the ability of governors to respond with science to Covid and is part of a conservative backlash to that effort; Justice Breyer makes…
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By Gordon Hull As one knows, online privacy policies (and access to the Internet in general) are generally conditioned on a user’s acceptance of some sort of boilerplate terms of service. Lots of people (myself included) have complained about this state of affairs as attempting to get users to consent to all sorts of practices…
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Given the role of qualified immunity in absolving police officers of murdering unarmed black men (and doing all sorts of other nefarious things), it’s encouraging to see that the Supreme Court said in a per curiam opinion today that there is an outer limit to how far that doctrine can be extended. Recall the problem:…
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If you’re like me, you spend too much time – way too much time – these days looking at polling data. I ran across some interesting remarks by Foucault on opinion yesterday, which I’ll share here as a technique of distraction. He makes them in the context of a 1976 conversation with J. P. Barou…
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By Gordon Hull I’m going to be teaching Harold Demsetz’s “Toward a Theory of Property Rights” (1967) tomorrow, and noticed a couple of things that I hadn’t before. I suspect they’re related, and say something about the moment the article appeared. At least, that’s what I want to propose here. To set it up: Demsetz…
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By Gordon Hull I want here to tie together the preceding several posts (one, two, three, four, five) and finish the case for a Deleuzian undercurrent (perhaps better to say, Deleuzian and Althusserian undercurrents) to Foucault’s 1969 “What is an Author” seminar. Recall the specific point of interest: in a somewhat odd moment near the…
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By Gordon Hull Early on in the Covid-19 pandemic, I dedicated a post (and a short follow-up) to the idea that our knowledge of Covid-19 is mediated by the indicators we have to represent it, and that those indicators are themselves epistemically tricky. In particular, there’s a difficulty in understanding “Covid incidence,” because of difficulties…
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