Flows and fixes: water, disease and housing in Bangalore, 1860–1915

Using the city of Bangalore as a specific instance, this article puts together the framework of metabolic cities and techno-spheres to show how ecology and infrastructure constituted colonial cities. Divided between the colonial cantonment governed by the British and the petah or native market town/village governed by the Mysore prince, colonial medics were concerned by numerous diseases affecting the city. Attempts to control the flows of water from the cantonment to the native town proved futile. Amidst famine like conditions from the 1870s, chronic water shortages affected the city. In the 1890s, the plague struck Bangalore. The plague affected the barracks, streets, neighbourhoods and homes. Together, the diseases and water shortages led to new piped water schemes drawn from outside the city and wholesale changes in housing. The article moves beyond the framework of ‘sanitary cities’, at the confluence of colonialism, the body, fixed infrastructures and micro and macro ecological phenomena.

Categorical Distinctions and Claims-Making: Opportunity, Agency, and Returns from Wage Negotiations

In this article, we examine wage negotiations as a specific instance of claims-making, predicting that the capacity to make a claim is first a function of the position, rather than the person, and that lower-status actors—women, migrants, fixed-term, part-time, and unskilled workers—are all more likely to be in positions where negotiation is not possible. At the same time, subordinate-status actors may be less likely to make claims even where negotiation is possible, and when they do make wage claims they may receive lower or no returns to negotiation. Analyses of wage negotiations by more than 2,400 German employees largely confirm these theoretical expectations, although the patterns of opportunity, agency, and economic returns vary by categorical status. All low-status actors are more likely to be in jobs where negotiation is not possible. Women, people in lower-class jobs, and people with temporary contracts are less likely to negotiate even when given the opportunity. Regarding returns, agency in wage claims does not seem to improve the wages of women, migrants, or working-class individuals. The advice to “lean-in” will not substantially lower wage inequalities for everyone, although men who lean in do benefit relative to men who do not.

Artificial fairness? Trust in algorithmic police decision-making

Objectives Test whether (1) people view a policing decision made by an algorithm as more or less trustworthy than when an officer makes the same decision; (2) people who are presented with a specific instance of algorithmic policing have greater or lesser support for the general use of algorithmic policing in general; and (3) people use trust as a heuristic through which to make sense of an unfamiliar technology like algorithmic policing. Methods An online experiment tested whether different decision-making methods, outcomes and scenario types affect judgements about the appropriateness and fairness of decision-making and the general acceptability of police use of this particular technology. Results People see a decision as less fair and less appropriate when an algorithm decides, compared to when an officer decides. Yet, perceptions of fairness and appropriateness were strong predictors of support for police use of algorithms, and being exposed to a successful use of an algorithm was linked, via trust in the decision made, to greater support for police use of algorithms. Conclusions Making decisions solely based on algorithms might damage trust, and the more police rely solely on algorithmic decision-making, the less trusting people may be in decisions. However, mere exposure to the successful use of algorithms seems to enhance the general acceptability of this technology.

Artificial Fairness? Trust in Algorithmic Police Decision-Making

Objectives: Test whether: (1) people view a policing decision made by an algorithm as more or less trustworthy than when an officer makes the same decision; (2) people who are presented with a specific instance of algorithmic policing have greater or lesser support for the general use of algorithmic policing in general; and (3) people use trust as a heuristic through which to make sense of an unfamiliar technology like algorithmic policing.Methods: An online experiment tested whether different decision-making methods, outcomes and scenario types affect judgements about the appropriateness and fairness of decision-making, and the general acceptability of police use of this particular technology. Results: People see a decision as less fair and less appropriate when an algorithm decides, compared to when an officer decides. Yet perceptions of fairness and appropriateness were strong predictors of support for police use of algorithms, and being exposed to a successful use of an algorithm was linked via trust in the decision made to greater support for police use of algorithms.Conclusions: Making decisions solely based on algorithms might damage trust, and the more police rely solely on algorithmic decision-making, the less trusting people may be in decisions. However, mere exposure to the successful use of algorithms seems to enhance the general acceptability of this technology.

Too Important for the Bureaucrats: Rethinking Risk and Regulatory Presumptions in Times of Crisis

The posture of American regulation of medicine is negative—we assume that a new drug is unsafe and ineffective until it is proven safe and effective.1 This regulatory posture is a heuristic normative principle, a specific instance of the so-called precautionary principle in public health law.2 It is defensible, if debatable, in many ordinary circumstances.3 But like many normative heuristics, this negative posture may compel suboptimal decision-making in emergencies, where context-specific decisions must be made and a range of unique values may apply.

Review

This chapter examines how attempts to subdivide the imperial public sphere along racial lines so as to undermine dissent led to the development of new mass media forms in which the racial divide was explicit. This affected both the ways audiences were addressed and the ways information was amassed and presented. For such knowledge, the chapter investigates how an imperialist form of white supremacy influenced the emergence of two “reviews of reviews” at the turn of the twentieth century, within which the digestion and redaction of other periodicals was seen as a way to accelerate an imagined community into a lived reality. The chapter unpacks a specific instance of this phenomenon in detail, demonstrating how an Indian periodical loosely based on W. T. Stead's Review of Reviews affected Stead's ideas as well as his publishing enterprise more broadly. It also discusses the Calcutta-based journal, the Indian World, that was explicitly and cannily a derivative of Stead's.

The ‘Oumuamua Encounter: How Modern Cosmology Handled Its First Black Swan

The first macroscopic object observed to have come from outside the solar system slipped back out of sight in early 2018. 1I/2017 U1 ‘Oumuamua offered a unique opportunity to test understanding of gravity, planetary formation and galactic structure against a true outlier, and astronomical teams from around the globe rushed to study it. Observations lasted several months and generated a tsunami of scientific (and popular) literature. The brief window available to study ‘Oumuamua created crisis-like conditions, and this paper makes a comparative study of techniques used by cosmologists against those used by financial economists in qualitatively similar situations where data conflict with the current paradigm. Analyses of ‘Oumuamua were marked by adherence to existing paradigms and techniques and by confidence in results from self and others. Some, though, over-reached by turning uncertain findings into graphic, detailed depictions of ‘Oumuamua and making unsubstantiated suggestions, including that it was an alien investigator. Using a specific instance to test cosmology’s research strategy against approaches used by economics researchers in comparable circumstances is an example of reverse econophysics that highlights the benefits of an extra-disciplinary lens.