Dr Laura James's writings

Ian Lewis, who in normal times occupies the office next to mine at the Computer Lab , works on SmartCAMBRIDGE and so has access to fascinating data about how things have changed since early 2020 in the city: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~ijl20/cambridge_lockdown.html Dave Birch wonders whether this might be an opportunity to build an appropriate digital identity infrastructure . There are four categories of pandemic response digital tool: three from the Economist, and one more: The first is documentation: using technology to say where people are, where they have been or what their disease status is. The second is modelling: gathering data which help explain how the disease spreads. The third is contact tracing: identifying people who have had contact with others known to be infected. ... A fourth category... demonstrating that people have the COVID-19 antibodies and are thus no longer susceptible to infection.  It's a good outline including some of the social and ethical c...

Sheila Jasanoff on the pandemic , including the neglect of social sciences, the side effects on vulnerable populations, etc: A friend in the Netherlands told me about their shortage of intensive care units. Germany has one of the highest ratios of intensive-care beds-to-population of Northern European countries. They’re economically very comparable countries, so why the lower percentage of ICUs in the Netherlands than Germany? My intuition is that the Dutch have a much more stringent idea of when ICUs are allowed to be used—that is, their social definition of what patients should get ICUs seems to be different from Germany’s. What is a life worth saving? When do we declare that further measures should not be undertaken, when do we not call it triage but a sensible medical decision? These are cross-cultural questions that we haven’t really thought about. .... Science has become as powerful as it has because it has adopted the idea of peer review—that you don’t trust one person, you t...

It's been nearly two weeks since my last weeknotes, which I'll blame on a busy period of consultancy this week, so this is rather too long. I feel I should provide an index so you can skip ahead to the good stuff, so in this fortnight's edition you can find: a rant about being helpful in crises a link to beautiful sketches of key workers  notes on how mutual aid can work well and how community efforts need to sustain feminist perspectives on catastrophe and on peer production access to the internet for those in greatest need, and how we might change how we do things online from now on thoughts about scaling up the UK PPE manufacturing response various thoughts on supply chains, where things are made and who by, and repair a couple of notes on the tech industry and being green a handful of other things I found interesting two Cat and Girl cartoons. Someone asked this weekend what my ideal role would be in helping with UK PPE response. Aside from coordination, i...