The ‘Scaling Trust’ project is a UKRI Future Leaders’ Fellowship examining trust in the cyber security profession. As the initial period of funding comes to an end, CIM academics Matt Spencer and Daniele Pizio have published two policy papers that engage with current challenges in cyber security.

‘Assurance by Principle: Preparing for the next generation of technology assurance’ is a report by Matt Spencer, published through the Research Institute for Sociotechnical Cyber Security (RISCS). It provides a series of recommendations for moving technology assurance policy away from prescriptive standards, and towards the new ‘goal-based’ approach that has become influential in cyber policy.

‘Deperimeterising Zero Trust: Challenging metaphors in information security’ is a policy brief by Matt Spencer and Daniele Pizio, part of the University of Warwick’s Policy Briefing Series. It examines current challenges with the trend towards a ‘Zero Trust’ paradigm for information security, and draws conclusions aimed at industry, government and academia.

A new paper from CIM members Carlos Cámara-Menoyo and Greg McInerny, along with João Porto de Albuquerque, Joanna Suchomska and Grant Tregonning has just been published in Environmental Science and Policy

The paper, "Co-designing grounded visualisations of the Food-Water-Energy nexus to enable urban sustainability transformations" tackles a particularly significant knowledge gap in the Food-Water-Energy nexus by presenting the experience, decisions and lessons learnt from the co-design process of an interactive tool to visualise these complex interrelations for a particular case: food choices in kindergartens in Poland.

To make the FWE nexus understandable and actionable for the various stakeholders, our approach had two distinctive features: 1) grounding the FWE nexus following a pedagogical/Freirean approach that connects to lived experiences and problematises frames of references to activate transformation; and 2) the use of data visualisations to critically enquiry and learn about the nexus. The combination of these features resulted in data visualisations that “ground” FWE nexus by connecting to lived experiences and problematising frames of references to open transformation pathways.

The outcomes demonstrate a shift in perspectives towards the FWE Nexus that resulted from the design process and the interaction with our visualisation tool. Although further investigation is needed, we see it as a first step to opening new data-enabled transformation pathways to sustainability, not only through improved individual choices, but also by enabling new collective action, change of policies and organisational procedures, as well as new governance arrangements.

Here is a commentary from Meg Davis and co-authors for the somewhat glossy publication, Health: A Political Choice – From Fragmentation to Integration: https://bit.ly/hapc23

The magazine will be published at the World Health Summit, in Berlin, 15–17 October.

Meg's article is "Alternative Futures for Digital Health"

New paper! In 'Creative Malfunction: Finding Fault with Rowhammer, CIM's Matt Spencer examines one of the most significant hardware vulnerabilities of recent years for what it tells us about the nature of repair and transformation in computational systems. http://computationalculture.net/creative-malfunction-finding-fault-with-rowhammer

Click here, to find out more about the new chapter by Pablo Velasco González and Nathaniel Tkacz in the Handbook of Peer Production

Click here to find out more about the recent publication by David Stark and Ivana Pais on the topic of Algorithmic Management in the Platform Economy.

Naomi Waltham-Smith has written the chapter on “Deconstruction” and translated an essay by Jean-Luc Nancy on “Galant Music” for the new Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy, edited by Tomás McAuley, Nanette Nielsen, and Jerrold Levinson.

A new volume co-edited by Michael Castelle, The Cultural Life of Machine Learning: An Incursion into Critical AI Studies, has been published by Palgrave Macmillan. Inspired by a conference organized by Dr. Castelle with co-editor Dr. Jonathan Roberge of the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (INRS) in Montreal, Canada, the book brings together the work of historians and sociologists with perspectives from media studies, communication studies, cultural studies, and information studies to address the origins, practices, and possible futures of contemporary machine learning.

A chapter by Aaron Mendon-Plasek, "Mechanized Significance and Machine Learning", has been released open-access, and the entire book can be accessed by university libraries with a SpringerLink subscription.

Naomi Waltham-Smith has published an article entitled “Turning Ears; Or, Ec(h)otechnics” in a special double issue of Diacritics devoted to “The Turn” edited by Andrea Bachner and Carlos Rojas, alongside contributions from Emily Apter and Jonathan Culler.

The vestigial auricular muscles are a trace of an earlier evolutionary capacity to turn the ears. While they are still functional in other mammal species, they are scarcely responsive in humans, who compensate by turning the head instead. This transformation was part of adaptations in the cervical spine that made possible the becoming-technological of the upright stance and humanity’s front-facing posture. Unable to sense what comes from behind, human ears are oriented toward what lies ahead within the field of vision—toward the foreseeable—and yet in listening, as in walking, the human is thereby compelled to turn back. From this angle, the sonic turn—often figured as a return to sound—instead names multiple moments of turning back: an originary nonhuman turning of the ears, humanity’s turning its back on this turn, and the unavoidable detours from this precipitous path. This essay argues not only for an originary technicity and prostheticity of aurality, but also that the nonhuman turn takes place via a sonorous detour. Analyzing the metaphoricity and tropological of language, it compares two figures—apostrophe and interjection—to show how the sonic and nonhuman turns continually address and animate one another.

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/774745