There is a post by Fabio Rojas over at orgtheory.net that might be of interest to those of your in STS and those of you teaching STS.

<http://www.iraqbodycount.org/database/>

He reports on a simple question: are military weapons used to kill other soldiers or civilians?

This question, if brought in front of a classroom, raises a few poignant issues for STS, engineering designs, and designers.

1. STS has a long history — and this appears in, for example, Volti’s Society and Technological Change much more prominently than, for example, Sismondo’s Introduction to STS — of studying military technology and the rise of the post-WWII U.S. military-industrial-complex. Especially, when I was trained in STS, MacKenzie’s Inventing Accuracy, which showed how social influences impact even internally controlled technological devices (in his case, ballistic missiles, which are thought to be impervious to outside influence once launched … of course, these are two differnt forms of “influence”, but it still made for a great book about military technology and why a device is just so accurate, or just so fast, or just so efficient, and so on. The rise of civilian deaths, which was a deep concern in MacKenzie’s book and one of the manifold reasons enhanced efficiency was pursued in the first place, so this lands as an interesting issue on that regard, especially in comparison.
2. The “use” literature has long argued that the boundary between use and design is much more porous than was once previously appreciated by the STS community. I’m thinking of How Users Matter edited by Oudshoorn and Pinch as a high-water mark in that line of work. In this case, we see all sorts of instances where use influences design directly during testing trials for particular products, instances where use influences design long after production when tools meet new contexts of use (like dental tools being used in art museums to clean ancient masks), and, of course, the SCOT discovery that uses can be imposed on new designs for public consumption. None of these approaches really captures what seems to be happening in this case, moreover, in some cases, while there is a fine line between what constitutes a “military” weapon versus something a civilian might own legally, some instances are very plain.
3. While there is not a ton of literature that I am aware of appropriate for the student-level, this also raises the philosophical/ethical concern about what responsibility engineers have for how their designs are used. I don’t mean to come off as naïve, but this is a serious question for students considering the profession (and, in my opinion, for us more broadly as well).

So, this is a rich case to get at a number of issues regarding weapons, the (US) military, and the politics of how technologies are used.

This year is a great year to teach STS because we have a leap year, and students can learn alot about STS by studying time.

As many of you know, “time” is a social construction, and it makes for a great topic to teach students about standards, units of reality, and the basic infrastructure that makes “modern” life possible. What also makes time such a great topic is how seemingly “naturalized” it has become (or been packaged to be). Time corresponds with the predictability of the Earth’s revolutions; times is, ironically, one student said, “in synch with natural rhythms.”

Leap years remind us where all that went wrong. It is important to convey to students one idea above all: the second has changed duration over time.

When early numerized “time” was being developed under the sexigecimal system (system of count according to measures of 60) by Egyptians and Bablyonians, the whole day was being “diced” into smaller and smaller units, down to the second. And this lasted for a long time, although the second was occasionally refined, it was not until 1954 that the International Committee for Weights and Measures redefined the duration of the second, this time in fairly scientific terms. Six years later, in light of the advent of the atomic clock, the second was redefined once again. Suddenly, the accounting for time started with smallest unit and “days” where built from there (rather than the inverse process, where the day was the unit to dice-up into smaller units).

Now, what’s interesting about this, in light of the leap year, is that there is now a rogue second that must be accounted for:

The International Telecommunication Union’s Radiocommunication Assembly, otherwise known as the international authority that keeps close tabs on time, will debate a philosophical question this week: They will decide whether to eliminate the leap second and in doing so break its tie to astronomical time.

“Leap seconds”

are added occasionally to synchronise ultra-accurate atomic clocks with the real length of the day, which varies slightly because of irregularities in Earth’s rotation around its own axis.

What is so nice about this example is that it will be though scientific consensus that we determine whether or not the, and I love the irony here,

The world’s timekeepers will decide … to break the age-old link between their official clocks and astronomical time based on Earth’s rotation.

This is a great lesson for social construction of science, philosophy of science, the role of induction, and a good, basic lesson (if properly fleshed-out) on challenging taken-for-grantedness in our daily lives (a good follow-up too: check out how the weight of the gram has transformed in light of radiation; both are good examples about how the units of measure that “make reality” are themselves far from uniform and stable).

The diffusion of innovations is a common topic worth discussing in basic courses in sociology, usually on the topic of cultural diffusion, as well as STS courses. While it is often not a problem to spread the good word about diffusion, a contemporary example, the spread of facebook, provides some interesting fodder for in-class discussion and student exploration.

Here is a website, inside facebook, with some interesting images that students, in my experience, will be interested in using, discussing, and perhaps hazarding a few hypotheses. The images are US-focused, which is not ideal; however, explanations for some of the geographic distribution of facebook will help students to really understand how ideas like this spread.

What’s nice about it, in my opinion, is that it provides some opportunitites to discuss the various explanations for diffusion. For example, was facebook expensive to adopt early on as compared to later on? Was facebook an obvious improvement on technologies that preceded it? How did one “adopt” facebook? Do people “use” facebook differently? Is it analytically meaningful to count every “personal facebook page” as an adoption, even if it is rarely or never used? Why did facebook spread geographically first and then how do we explain further developments in adoption patterns?

I am contemplating an in-class assignment where students break into groups, assess the images and then present their conceivably competing understandings of why facebook spread the way it did, and, importantly, not the way it didn’t…

If you were raised on STS in America, then it is likely that you read about the death of a train town named Caliente, NV. This is:

Death by Dieselization: A Case Study in the Reaction to Technological Change

W. F. Cottrell

American Sociological Review
Vol. 16, No. 3 (Jun., 1951), pp. 358-365
(article consists of 8 pages)

Published by: American Sociological Association

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2087609

One way I teach students the philosophy of science is by using the documentary “The King of Kong: A fist full of quarters.”

Storyline

In the early 1980s, legendary Billy Mitchell set a Donkey Kong record that stood for almost 25 years. This documentary follows the assault on the record by Steve Wiebe, an earnest teacher from Washington who took up the game while unemployed. The top scores are monitored by a cadre of players and fans associated with Walter Day, an Iowan who runs Funspot, an annual tournament. Wiebe breaks Mitchell’s record in public at Funspot, and Mitchell promptly mails a controversial video tape of himself setting a new record. So Wiebe travels to Florida hoping Mitchell will face him for the 2007 Guinness World Records. Will the mind-game-playing Mitchell engage; who will end up holding the record? Written by <jhailey@hotmail.com>

The film is full of ideas from the philosophy of science. For example, logical positivists were obsessed with (1) establishing theories only from data and (2) considering what evidence either falsifies or verifies a theory. In the film, Steve Weibe, the up and comer in the world of competitive gaming, sends a score into Walter Day, the guy that runs the world record center, but the score is ultimately rejected because while the video tape recording appeared legitimate, the machine he was playing on was questionable. This one is good for the falsificationists too: the score he had could not be verified because of questions concerning the video game machine he used; however, because there was no concrete evidence — merely a hunch — of tampering, the score could not be entirely falsified either. Consensus among a group of experts emerged upon reviewing the evidence of Steve’s claim to have the new highest score on Donkey Kong. This nicely emphasizes the role of experts and how consensus over reality is as important as “reality” itself.

Now, thinking all the way back to Shapin’s work on early laboratories and experiments, Steve is invited to attend an annual competition where he can achieve his highest score “live” so that all the other experts can witness first hand his skill at Donkey Kong. He does, and the entire community of competitive gamers more or less warms to the newcomer. This is not a bad lesson in the role of social connections and acceptance of newcomers in science. This is a place to begin discussions of Merton’s norms of science, and, in particular, disinterestedness. However, there is much more to say about functionalism. His competitor, Billy Mitchell, the previous record holder and longstanding insider, sends in, at the last possible moment, a video tape of a score that beats the score Steve just accomplished in person. Merton reminds us that what is good for science tends to advance it. In this case, what’s good for Walter Day and competitive gaming also happens to be what’s good for Billy Mitchell. Bill’s sketchy video score is accepted and immediately posted on-line for the world of competitive gamers to see. Additionally, and in violation of the norm of communism, Billy’s tape is not shared with Steve, even thought Steve’s original tape, which was rejected, was shared with Billy.

The documentary is also funny in places, and it does a nice job showing how a group of gaming experts arrive at conclusions about the nature of reality through norm following, norm violation, and, importantly, consensus. If you teach STS, check it out; I’ve even got a sheet prepared for students to follow along (write me at njr12@psu.edu if you’d like to see it). Also, if you’re just interested, then check it out too.

One closing remark: those old games like Donkey Kong required a very different skill set as compared to contemporary games like Halo or Neverwinter Nights. It is nice to remind new students that games used to be hard in a much different way.

Teaching controversies is a mainstay of STS; if you need a good film to show, check out “Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial” replete with Steve Fuller weighing-in on intelligent design…

Also, I have a handout already made to help students to navigate the documentary. Write me if you you’d like a copy or if you’ve used this clip for your own courses (send to: njr12 at psu.edu).

It was mentioned during some comments that we initiate a teaching section for the blog. This is a good plan. So here goes.