Sometimes in the course of image-making, images are asked to represent unusual things. Around 1960, scientists and engineers working on the Computer-Aided Design Project at MIT began imagining that computers could be “active partners” to human designers. They began talking about a future of “human-computer symbiosis.” And they created a new type of image—the screenshot—that represented this new possibility. This paper describes early CAD research as a site for the emergence of the ideal of the interactive computer and how this (...) ideal was described and distributed through screenshots.Though we now routinely associate computers with interactivity, interactivity was beyond the average user’s experience in 1960.... (shrink)

ABSTRACT:The relationship between equality and equity has been theorized and described in many ways. Recently, this relationship has been popularly illustrated via a meme depicting three people watching a baseball game while standing on boxes. The meme's analogy, that achieving health equity is the ability to view a spectator sport, is a neoliberal account of health. The analogy defines equality at the expense of equity, characterizes health as individualistic, describes health equity as a static outcome, and implies that the bioethical (...) questions for achieving health equity are about the distribution and redistribution of resources. As the SARS CoV-2 pandemic vividly reminded us, health equity is no spectator sport. Health equity is the intentional removal of obstacles to health and the enabling of human flourishing to assure that everyone has fair and just opportunities for health. That relational and radical account of health equity requires different analogies. This article reimagines and re-illustrates the relationship between equality and equity using an organic analogy of three plants. The analogy calls for bioethics to nurture communal relationships and engage community leaders in pursuit of communal flourishing. (shrink)

Thanks to Michel Foucault, Jeremy Bentham's panopticon has become the iconic modern prison. But Foucault and most of his readers neglect the fact that a significant proportion of Bentham's panoptical writings were concerned with critically contrasting his ideal prison with the reality of penal transportation to New South Wales. Among his many criticisms, Bentham focussed particular attention on the problem of convict reform, arguing that surveillance was necessary to ensure genuine reformation, and that such surveillance was impossible in the open (...) prison of New South Wales. This connection between reformation and surveillance was a pervasive feature of Bentham's thought, reflected in his ideas for a centralised information state as well as his wider corpus on criminal justice. In this paper, I historicise Bentham's theory of reformative surveillance, and argue that Bentham, writing from London, misunderstood the importance of surveillance to the penal colony. At least in theory, convicts in New South Wales were subject to extensive systems of surveillance, and the failure of these systems in practice point to the limitations of Bentham's own, largely hypothetical, plans. (shrink)

Smart Thinking: Skills for Critical Understanding and Writing 2E is a practical step-by-step guide to improving skills in analysis, critical thinking, and the effective communication of arguments and explanations. The book combines an accessible and straightforward style, with a strong foundation of knowledge. The text treats reasoning as an aspect of communication, not an abstract exercise in logic. The book not only provides detailed advice on how to practise analytical skills, but also demonstrates how these skills can be used in (...) research and writing. In particular, it emphasises how to develop arguments that are coherent and that take account of their audience and context. (shrink)