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(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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tamar.rogoszinski

OSHA covers most private sector employers and their workers. They also cover some public sector employers and workers in the US and other territories under federal authority. Those districts include DC, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Guam, and other islands as well. 

Workers at state and local government agencies are not covered by federal OSHA, but have OSH Act protections if they work in states that have an OSHA-approved state program. OSHA also permits states and territories to develop plans that cover only public sector (state and local government) workers. In these cases, private sector workers and employers remain under federal OSHA jurisdiction.OSHA’s protection applies to all federal agencies and does not cover self-employed individuals.

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wolmad

1. The article analyzes the existing international nuclear regulatory groups and determines their capabilities and possible shortcomings in organizing such a group.

2. The article analyzed how nuclear emergency response has been handeled in the past and how goverments have prepared for future disasters.

3. The article outlined some requirements a nuclear emergency response agency would need to meet and some chalenges it would face.

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wolmad

In this film, three groups of stakeholders are portrayed; doctors, patients, and mortality. The doctors depicted fight a loosing battle against aging, death, and terminal illness like cancer. They need to come to terms with the fact that they can't save everyone and they need to honor their patients wishes for how they want to conduct the end of their lives. The patients need to accept their impending death with the assistance of their doctors and advocate for how they want to conduct the end of their lives. And mortality is an object which is immaterial but ever present, and both doctors and patients need to learn how to grasp with it.

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tamar.rogoszinski

I researched,

  1. what actually caused the collapse of the World Trade Centers
  2. John Ripley Freeman and the creation of Underwriters Laboratories. 
  3. The Hague Street Explosion

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wolmad

The article was written by Paul E. Farmer, and his colleaues at Partners in Health, Bruce Nizeye, Sara Stulac, and Salmaan Keshavjee. Dr. Farmer is a physician-anthropologist, and is one of the founders of Partners in Health. He and his global colleauges have worked extensively on community-based treatment strategies and have implimented them in poor and rural areas both in the US and abroad. He and his colleauges have written extensively on both health and human rights, and about how social inequalities effect the distribution and outcome of infectious diseases. His work, and the work of his team has been published in various journals such as the Bulletin of the World Health OrganizationThe Lancet, the New England Journal of MedicineClinical Infectious Diseases, and Social Science and Medicine.

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wolmad

This article utilizes excerpts from interviews to illustrate the story narrative of an illness, showing how emotion and values are reflected in the creation of a "plot" of the narrative, and uses statistics and broader research to analize these stories from a broader, more societal perspective. 

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tamar.rogoszinski

The data presented is from governmental texts, but we do not have a bibliography to assess. However, from the references and quotations made within the chapter, I can deduce that Fassin did a lot of research using extensive resources to gather information for this chapter. 

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wolmad
Annotation of

One of the red cross' major concerns is the extreme differences in nature that can be found with almost all disasters, and being able to allocate the correct resources at the correct time. It is also a volunteer organization with funding primarily coming from donations, so being able to maintain its workforce and revenue is a constant challenge.