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Mutual Aid/Best Practices vs Local Practices

_jzhao

This image reminds me of how mutual aid and communities keep each other fed, and safe, and how local practices are actually best practices. My own research, although not immediatley related to the specific public health concern of COVID, will focus on Indigenous food soverignty, particularly the right and autonomy to ferment and distribute alcohol (紅糯米酒) within the Amis community, and their current fight with the local health department on declaring whether or not their alcohol is "safe" for public consumption and distribution.

(Non)Sharing Economies

mwenda

I am interested in the Macro scale and the macro effects evident at a city-scale level. I remember visiting New Orleans in 2016 and vividly remember seeing several signs with a large 'No' symbol drawn and the text  "neighbors not tourists" printed on the sign. Recently, as part of my research into New Orleans, I stumbled on this piece by the Guardian on how short-term rentals through platforms such as Airbnb are leading to gentrification in New Orleans. Highlighted in the article is how several Airbnb hosts do not reside on the listed premises. I remember the place we stayed, as we were a large party, having a 617 prefix number.  The prefix stood out as I knew the code 617 represented Boston and was curious what someone with ties to Boston doing in New Orleans as a host. In a similar vein, the article also highlights the problem of absentee hosts, hosts who acquire property for the sole purpose of setting up the property as an Airbnb site.

To tackle the problem, one councilwoman passed a law that required any Airbnb hosts in residential zones to have a homestead exemption verifying they live on site. In this case, a city-wide measure was taken and passed into law affecting the micro. It is common to have one host having several properties in different residential areas in New Orleans. From a technical standpoint, it could be viewed that Airbnb as technology is developed and presented as a scalable product. With no limits to reproducibility. Meanwhile, real-life discontinuities exist in the form of such homestead laws. It is impossible to live in more than one homestead at the same time. In other words, the concept of the human is not scalable.
Likewise, neither is cultural heritage. The city of New Orleans positions its self as a city with great cultural heritage. It is through this heritage that they seek to draw more and more tourists. How do cities think of scaling up successful initiatives and how do they navigate the political, social, ecological, or economic entanglements. At what point is downscaling necessary? Is culture scalable?

[1]https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/13/new-orleans-airbnb-trem…

QUOTIDIAN ANTHROPOCENES: NEW ORLEANS

mwenda

I am currently a Ph.D. student interested in exploring the entanglements of scale, especially in the context of environmental sensing.  My primary research seeks to engage in discourse around the value of scalability that is presented as inherent in computation. While the term scale-up is almost synonymous with computation, sustainability; on the other hand, is known as a problem of scale. Take for example, the discourse on climate change where the actions required to combat climate change requires interventions at different scales. In this context, demanding changes at individual scales while no corresponding changes happen at larger scales would not yield much.

In looking at New Orleans, I came across a video on IoT cameras developed by Cisco, the networking giant. What struck me other than the apparent rise of surveillance capitalism was the narrative of one of the police officers highlighted in the video. The officer mentions that it is not feasible for the city to place police officers on every corner. In the context of scale, the police officer is implying that cameras are useful as they extend the police officer's ability to surveil the city. In other words, cameras and the networks help scale up the police officer, making it possible for them to cover a larger scale than before.

One of the police officers, in the video, also mentions that New Orleans is a tourist and hospitable town. Which brings up the question at any given period, what scale of visitors can New Orleans support without stretching the city's resources? Several other cities in the world have made efforts to limit visitors, in order not stretch city resources. The recent crisis at Mount Everest is an excellent example of what happens when resources are stretched to accommodate the increasing number of local visitors. How could something of this nature similarly impact New Orleans?

At the communication center where the video feed is analyzed, the IT manager provides reasons as to why they chose Cisco as their vendor. One of the reasons he gives was that the system is easily expandable, allowing the ability to scale out/up the network.

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Alexi Martin

I followed up on the Fukushima 50 what they experienced, their lack of food and water. How they faded into the background after the event was over. The government nor the public realized the ramifications of what they had done and how they had saved them all from radiation. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/jan/11/fukushima-50-kamika…

I followed up on emergency nuclear response groups if they did exist as a cause of Fukishima and came across the possibility of using robots in the place of humans in these situations. The robots could go where the humans could not saving life and limb.http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fukushima-disaster-inspires-b…

I finally looked up the statisitcs of how much cancer was prevelant in the population after the small doses of radiation to the villages surrounding Fukishima. It was interesting to find that there were more then expected and it could be a fluke due to overlooking scanning for Thyroid cancer in children in the past. There is also no definite way to prove these cancers were a direct cause of radiation or not.http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/03/mystery-cancers-are-cropping-chi…

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Alexi Martin

The three points that I looked up to further my understanding of the article were the PIH, how long it existed and its efforts were credible and successful in the treatment of facilitating the decrease and prevention of diease in rural areas. I looked up HIV/AIDS treatment in the US and found that up until recently, people could not afford treatment; this I found was in parallel with Hati- whose citizens could not have access to the medications they needed either. This surprised me, that a country with so much wealth, ignores its own citizens. The third point I looked up was structural violence to see if it was a credible term or if it was something made up by the author.

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Alexi Martin
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The narrative of the film is describing how disorganized the system of healthcare is. The film gives a one on one view of how people without insurance are left to wait for hours upon end to recieve care, then have no way to pay after they recieve treatment. The film provides a in person account of what people have to deal with, only public hospitals take patients who do not have insurance and treatment time is months in advance. The healthcare system is overflowing and the amount of resources to treat people with special circumstances are significantly less than the number of patients that need to be treated.

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Alexi Martin

Three points I looked up to further my  understanding was hand, foot and mouth disease because I was not familiar with it and it interested me. In my research I  found that it was spread easily and is common today-credible in health studies. I looked up Dark Winter to advance my understanding of the article. Through this search I found that the threat of biological weapons is very much an active threat and the US must be prepared, whether through vaccinations or research into global data on sickness. I finally looked up TB DOTS.  I found that it was a strategy to stop the spread of a TB epidemic: through attacking it quickly with a cure to those infected.. It also supported the article’s idea of global health security.