tzu hsu chu – Page 5

Final Project Proposal – “MySupport” Database Web-Platform (Helena and Sophy)

Project Overview: MySupport

Our goal is to offer a digital centralized health management platform for special education students. Oftentimes, special education students have a large support network that can include a multitude of personal support workers (PSW) and individuals. For example, special education students can have school teachers, external tutors, speech therapists, physical therapists, and more depending on their needs.

Through our experiences working the public health system (Helena) and working with youths on the autism spectrum (Sophy), we realized there lacked an accessible and centralized platform for parents and PSWs to communicate and collaborate with each other.

Our platform serves to create a centralized space where all the support workers can input data, information, and clinical notes about the child’s progress for the parents and all the other PSWs to access.

Challenges MySupport Tackles

- Parents are overburdened with administrative tasks
  Students with special needs or extra support often need a large and expansive support network. Oftentimes, communication between PSWs is limited and parents need to devote a lot of time and energy to reiterating, organizing, and archiving information about their special needs child. Parents struggle with updating new PSWs and they are usually left with the task of ensuring that new PSW are given the information needed to appropriately support their child. Parents, who require more support to begin with, then are tasked with administrative duties that take time away from their ability to better care for their child and family.

- Information is not centralized between PSWs
  Currently, information about special education students is not centralized in one place. The challenges this presents is that, they don’t have access to the information and progress that is being made by other PSWs that could better inform their practice and give the student the best support possible. An example being, that a student’s teacher could better help the student in the classroom if they are aware of the progress being made with the tutors or the speech therapist.Oftentimes, there can be a huge turnover rate of certain PSWs members on the team (e.g. tutors, educational assistants, etc.) such that it takes extra time and effort onboarding someone new. Having a centralized communication platform with information of the child available can streamline the process, and hopefully help with building rapport quickly between the child and new team members. An example being that with the profile and additional information available on the platform, the new member can have a better idea of how the child is motivated, their preferred ways of communication, and any additional behavior that PSWs should know such that they can build a connection to support their needs.

- There is a limited ability to extrapolate data
  The disconnection between all the progress being made by each support worker also means there is no easy way to collectively track the child’s progress and attain real ent and important data. Oftentimes, there is no way for the parents or the PWS to collectively assess the child’s behavior and recognize patterns or changes. In addition, having context specific records of behavior patterns that pop up can also help the team understand what needs to be done to provide the right support.

MySupport Solutions

MySupport seeks to make the lives of parents and families easier by removing the burden of tracking and organizing feedback and progress between PSWs. Parents, especially in blended or divorced families where guardians are not always together to support the child may benefit from centralized communication. Further, with children that require a high level of support, extended family like grandparents might also be involved. MySupport allows all relevant parties caring for the child to stay updated and aware of their development. Effectively, the platform streamlines communication across all stakeholders and removes the possibility that information will be forgotten, lost, or missed.

Demographic and Target Audience

Guardians of Special Education Children
Parents of special education children could use this platform as a means of centralizing communication and communicating with all PSW.

PSWs Supporting Special Education Children
The personal support workers who are working to support special needs children in all aspects of their life would benefit from a centralized platform that allows for progress management.

How Does it Work?

All personal support workers would be given access to the child’s profile and each PSW worker would have a respective section where they would be able to upload documents, add updates, and keep track of the child’s progress. Over the period in which they are supporting the child, each PSW would also have access to the other PSWs sections to be able to see their updates as well. Parents would be able to control who has access to each section, for example a parent might not feel comfortable with a tutor seeing the physical therapists updates, so the tutor would only have access to the school teachers updates. The control of visibility would be determined by the parents and the respective PSW. However, each PSW would have a dashboard where all the updates from other PSW would be centralized and organized so that they could stay in the loop with the students’ progress through written documentation.

Further, our platform would include integrated survey and questionnaire methods that allow parents and PSW to keep track of progress being made using assessment methods that could then be extrapolated to find patterns and helpful data.

Platform Outcomes

The centralized platform would mean that all the information and required documents would be added to the platform by individuals. Each individual would need to have a place to store their respective materials as well as one place where all the updates could be easily displayed, preferably in a chronological order. Further, this dashboard would act as a database that allows parents and PSW to search for information if they need to reference anything.

Technical Components

We intend on deploying our product ona cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) platform. The benefit of using a CRM platform in a healthcare management setting, is that it includes several automation and integration features that would make catering our product to several PSWs more inclusive. For example, being able to integrate Google Classroom schedules as well as an Outlook calendar into a centralized calendar system ensures that all important dates are automatically populated. Further, contact management and pipeline management are needed to help track and manage progress and internal development.

Salesforce would be an ideal platform, as it is expansive, versatile, and scalable depending on the team’s needs, and the cloud-based portal would make the platform accessible. However, a limitation to using this platform is that the service is not free for small business or individual users. Meaning, it is more cost effective for the development of our prototype to look elsewhere and find a product that is more financially accessible in the time being.

Similar CRM technologies include Hubspot, Zoho, Freshsales, Insightly, etc.

For the demonstration of our tool, we plan to use Hubspot as it is more user-friendly on smaller scales and has more affordable plans. In the Free CRM Plan, the automation function is limited, and requires upgrade and payment. It can also be easily integrated with other external applications for file storage, spreadsheets, emails, databases, etc.

Limitations

Our main limitation is to ensure that the healthcare management system must comply with HIPPA health regulations and privacy concerns.

Intellectual Production #6 – Prescriptive vs Holistic Technologies

Brief:

We were to listen to lectures on technology from 30 years ago created by Massey College at University of Toronto, and think about the “media ecology” created from these lectures, and how it functions as a form of educational technology.

Then, skimming Ursula Franklin’s text The Real World of Technology, we were to think about Franklin’s categories of “prescriptive” and “holistic” technologies as applied to educational technologies.

Lastly, a close reading of Chapter 2 of Illich and Sanders’ ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind to describe “oral technologies” and how they shape thinking, memory and communication in the context of their concept of “memory palace”.

Some additional questions to consider:

What differences did you see as you switched from listening to skimming to close reading?
Were you able to experience the recorded lecture in any ways differently than when reading the text?
Listening takes more “real world” time, so where did spending that extra time get you in terms of understanding?

Intellectual Production #5 – Technologies of Externalization

Brief:

First, stick to Taylor’s specific arguments (supplemented by the Harry Potter excerpt) to identify and explain how online learning can risk reverting to The Umbridge Approach.

Then, using Taylor’s own terms, supplemented by Baynes et al. paper on being “at” UBC as a distance education student. What has been your own experience of online learning? Describe current situation in the MET program at UBC, how would one take up Taylor’s argument(s) about the “relative value” of your degree under the massification of online education?

Taylor (1996) outlines many of the pedagogical benefits and challenges of open learning, specifically under the concept of looking at borders in the context of “social resources associated with the use of educational artifacts”, especially around the focus of social conventions which are integral to such artifacts (p. 60).

One challenge was how open learning lacks social inertia which is strongly associated with authority, as the material properties that lend authority to the educational experience are stripped away by the usage of information and communication technologies (p. 68).

The physical demassification of the classroom and the social demassification of higher education in this sense means higher customizability of pedagogical practices to particular groups. However, the paradox to this would be that the social conventions and identities of “student” and “teacher” are stripped away by the adoption of open learning, which challenges authority and legitimacy of knowledge and pedagogical practices once it has moved beyond the confines of a physical institution.

Relating back to the Harry Potter excerpt per essay prompt, this can be illustrated through Prof. Umbridge’s approach to teaching the Dark Arts (Rowling, 2003).

In her class, Prof. Umbridge holds the authority and commands the classroom with her tyrannical rules. The students parrot “Yes, Prof. Umbridge” or “No, Prof. Umbridge”, which reinforces her reign and those who do not follow, or question her approach will receive negative consequences (p. 240).

Her use of the textbook “Defensive Magical Theory” also upholds the legitimacy of knowledge that is “carefully structured, theory-centered, Ministry-approved” written by “Ministry-trained educational experts” (p. 242)

This poses as a problematic reverting and overcompensation of “packaging the course into an extensive syllabus” and “strong preoccupation of what to teach rather than how to teach”. This pedagogy is limiting and leads to an overly teacher- and curriculum-centered approach that is more “closed” where both teacher and students have less space to make and influence decisions (Taylor, 1996, p. 72).

Reflecting on my current experiences in this course, I now understand what Taylor means by the “stripping away” of social conventions and social inertia in distance education, especially in the ways of interaction and collaboration with my instructor and peers.

With most of the course communication on Slack, the immediacy and ability to instantaneously contact others was a strange spatial break down in terms of the social and material interactions which take place within in. (Baynes, 2014, p. 572).

The renegotiation of professional and hierarchical boundaries renders the rapport and interaction between student and instructor rather casual and friendly. On one hand, this equalized the dimension of authority within the class, opening up the space for more student-centered co-contribution within the course. On the other hand, with the lack of facilitated discussions or peer feedback on assignments, this “inconsequential” quality of interaction permeates the learning atmosphere such that it feels quite difficult to co-create my learning experience with others, more like shouting out into the void.

I think this is an example of attempting to find equilibrium between the physical and social demassification of open education, and the renegotiation of social conventions surrounding such fluid and mobile learning environments, especially through the mediation of communication technology, reiterating the notion that “technology is neither good nor bad in itself, but it is the way that it is used that matters” (Taylor, 1996).

References:

Bayne, S., Gallagher, M. S., & Lamb, J. (2014). Being ‘at’ university: The social topologies of distance students. Higher Education, 67(5), 569-583. doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-013-9662-4

Rowling, J. K. (2003). Chapter 12 Professor Umbridge. In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. New York

Taylor, P. G. (1996). Chapter 3: Pedagogical challenges of open learning: Looking to borderline issues. Counterpoints (New York, N.Y.), 29, 59-77.

Intellectual Production #2 – Tools of Intellect

Intellectual Production #1 – Media Ecology

Defining “Media Ecology”

In Lum’s introduction to media ecology (2000), he states “media ecology should be viewed as a field of study that is ever-evolving”, as can be seen in the back and forth between scholars. He attempts to position media ecology as an “intellectual tradition and a theoretical perspective”. However, to define media ecology as such is to be limited to passive perception and reception. To “wake up from our environmentally-induced stupor” (de Castell et al., 2014) we need to not just unilaterally, but reciprocally and actively engage with the environment around us. To find ourselves embodied and as embodiment, and also embedded into the environment, perhaps to an extent such that when we reach out to embrace the world, we can also feel the imprint of the “fleshiness” of the world around us.

Form AND aFFORDANCES

Nystrom’s Generalizations of Form and Biases (Lum, 2000)

Nystrom’s generalizations of forms and their “biases” really intrigued me, though I argue “affordances” seems more fitting, as it has a more positive connotation of what it has to “offer”.

I make this distinction, as “affordances” looks for the “potential” rather than the “limitations”, and I think that is a core essential part of “media ecology”. The “potential” for media to have impact to “create the environment or symbolic and cognitive structure in which people construct the world they know and understand, as well as its social, economic, political and cultural consequences” (Lum, 2000, p.2)

Selbstbildung – mediation bewteen organism and environment

To see “potential” is to harness the human agency that we have in making meaning of the world around us in the ways that we are situated in, as Geddes argues “no living organism can be understood except in the terms of the total environment in which it functioned” (Strate & Lum, 2000, p. 68).

However, the boundaries can seem quite blurry, where does an organism end and the environment begin? Just as the physical form of media is as important as the symbolic form it conveys, and that “the content of a medium is another medium” to the extent of “understanding media as environment and environment as media”, there seems to be systems within systems that are interrelated, connected, and can be two things either/or and both at once. Like “building” in the nominal sense contributing to part of the city landscape as container, provides a space or activities as an interface, and engaging with the space through social practice as a way to create meaning (de Castell et al., 2014). What is built simultaneously builds new substance that feeds into itself, and continues to be used to create new substance. The self-recursion of constant mediation between organism and environment as “selbstbildung” is what I believe allows one to feel embodied and embedded with and within the environment in which it relates to the self.

Meaning-Making through Learning to Play

Going back to Lum’s “ever-evolving field” of media ecology, and the concepts of affordances and selbstbildung, I believe it is necessary to approach it from a production pedagogy and “attend to verbs” — by taking action to disrupt the inertia of the environment to “incite critical engagement and thought, unseating our concepts and disorienting our percepts” as McLuhan puts it (de Castell et al., 2014). Mumford argues what makes human species unique is not tools, industry or labor, rather, language, art and play. Therefore, echoing the notion of de Castell et al. (2014, p. 90), I would like to add the element of “play” as the foundation of “learning” extending to the intentional act of “designing” as the process of meaning-making.

Play disrupts the current equilibrium to question what is known, and provides momentum to give rise to creation. To create and “engage in building” in a controlled, perhaps methodological way is to learn how to “mediate interconnectively between and among agents both human and not” such that “education is a practice of building“. To build sustainably is to create a “system that produces its own future capacity”, and reiterates the “active, situated, knowledgeable and skillfully productive” act of education to create an “ecology that demands the inhabitants to learn themselves, how to maintain it” such that it reaches equilibrium until it is disrupted again and again, over and over, with its every iteration and evolution. To continue this natural recursion is to allow the world to affect and envelope us in the ways that it does, and to entwine ourselves into the curves of the landscape, to fully feel its embrace and to embrace it back with just as muchness, unequivocally.

References

Linking Task 12: Speculative Futures (Joseph)

ETEC 540 – Task 12: Speculative Futures

Joseph chose to use Twine as the medium to explore the two different futures — a utopian “sweet dream” and a dystopian “nightmare”.

This was a clever design decision, as “Twine was a natural choice [to display two different viewpoints] as I could have a split narrative path to contain both of these options” (Villella, 2022).

In the opening of the game, the player is prompted to enter their name and location in the text box, in which it is used as the main character in the narrative. This already immerses the player within the story, in addition to the background music and sound effects.

Utopian “Sweet Dream”

The utopian viewpoint had a more upbeat, cheery background music that plays throughout the game.
The narrative is set in a world where nature and humanity thrive in harmony. There is emphasis on renewable energy and eco-friendly technology, which is seen on the air-hovering eco-Translink buses and the newest model of Meta Headsets powered by oxygen.

The storyline splits into two side quests, one is finding your “brother”, and the other is the journey to school.

The brother provides more context of the world through the dialogue you have with him. The player finds out that it is 2025, and personal assistant driod eRobots help with taking care of your everyday needs. There is reference to the continuing existence of technology moguls, namely Elon Jr.

On the journey to school, physical classrooms that afford collaboration still exists, yet with heavy utilization of VR headsets. The classroom environment is surprising to me, as one would think there would be complete digitization and heavy emphasis on virtual interaction with the ubiquity of VR Headsets, such that a physical classroom could be deemed unnecessary. However, it seems there is still a focus on human interaction and physical presence in the classroom, especially given the set-up of the desks to be conducive to collaboration.

Dystopian “Nightmare”

The dystopian viewpoint had a more somber and desolate background music. The narrative is set in a somewhat post-apocalyptic and barren environment, where humanity seems to have reach destruction and is in the process of rebuild.

The education environment has become a mere “virtual daycare” where students are there to be supervised as they learn digitally. Remnants of technology is strewn across the classroom, interspersed with analog methods of teaching, yet students lacking the literacy skills to successfully learn.

Through the dialogue between the player and an “officer” with the same name, context of the current world is given. The hyper-development of technology has broken down the geopolitical borders between nations, and the influence of politics has created fear and paranoia of cyber-information warfare, which in turn causes a regression of civilization to the early 2000s. When asked about the origin of this dystopian disaster, we are left on a cliffhanger and wake up from this nightmare.

Reflection

I thought the world-building was very interesting and reminds me of very distinct futures.

The utopian narrative reminds me of the vision of a solarpunk future. Solarpunk is an imagination of the future where nature and humanity are able to maintain an equilibrium without exhausting all natural resources, even proposing that technology can enable humanity to exist sustainably.

On the other hand, the dystopian narrative, “technology has replaced our own abilities” (Villella, 2022) reminds me of the grungy textures of dieselpunk , especially with reference to the “retro-futuristic” aspect of technology. It very much alludes to the downfalls where “humanity collapses on itself” and the unforeseen consequences of needing to revert to previous technology, yet without the ability or skills to do so, due to over-reliance on technological advancement.

Overall, one main aspect I really enjoyed in this Twine game is that the narration brings the player to explore both the utopian “sweet dream” and dystopian “nightmare” scenarios in a way that flows with each other; there are paths that return back to a previous point and allows the player to explore the other option, while staying cohesive to the overall structure within a dream.

References

Dieselpunk (n.d.) Wikipedia. Retrieved August 10, 2022 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dieselpunk

Solarpunk (n.d.) Wikipedia. Retrieved August 10, 2022 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solarpunk

Villella, J. (2022, August, 3). Task 12: Speculative Futures. ETEC540 Joseph Villella. https://blogs.ubc.ca/jvillella540/2022/08/03/task-12-speculative-futures/

Task 12: Speculative Futures

Project Proposal – (retro)speculative futures

For this project, I wanted to take a different approach to thinking about speculative narratives in a way that is grounded in reality such that it can be conducive to actualizing our imagined futures in practice — (retro)speculative futures, a practice of looking into the past to project ourselves into the future.

To stay true to the spirit of “retrospeculation”, the foundations of this concept/ idea will be drawn from the course modules of Multiliteracies and Speculative Futures in addition to my own personal lived experiences, thoughts and feelings as an exercise in “transformed practice” (The New London Group, 1996) Therefore, this project will be self-referential in both the framework structure and in methodology.

Foundations:

In Speculative Everything, the authors pose “design speculations as a catalyst for collectively redefining our relationship to reality” with the idea of possible futures as tools to understand the present to discuss the future people want and do not want.

However, they also mentioned that “for us, futures are not a destination or something to be strived for, but a medium to aid imaginative thought- to speculate with”.

Though speculation about the future is indeed necessary and important, in some ways, it can become limiting. Without enacting agency and taking action in the futures we desire to create, it continues to stay immaterial and almost ethereal, an intangible hope on the horizon. There seems to be a large gap between “theory” and “praxis”, in which (retro)speculative fiction hopes to bridge in-between.

In the book, the authors take a diagram inspired by futurologist Stuart Candy to illustrate the potential different kinds of future they propose:

Book: Speculative Everything. Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby set out… | by Lorenzo Iuculano | Medium — PPPP, Illustration by Dunne & Raby

Probable Futures: describes what is likely to happen unless there is some extreme upheaval of natural or societal disaster
Plausible Futures: describes “what could happen” and exploration of alternative economic and political futures to ensure that organizations will be prepared for and thrive in number of different futures.
Possible Futures: describes the linking between today’s world and the suggested one. The scenarios should be scientifically possible and have a path from where we are today to where we are in the scenario.
Preferable Futures: describes the intersection between plausible and probable but poses the questions “what does preferable mean, for whom, and who decides?” Currently determined by government and industry, though limited by citizen-consumers.

With the above proposed structure, (retro)speculative futures will be operating on the level of Possible Futures, as it aligns with the authors beliefs that it will ” allow the viewers to relate the scenario to their own world and use it as an aid for critical reflection”.

Though not totally aligning or deviating from the author’s belief that designer’s roles “should not define futures for everyone else but work with experts, including ethicists, political scientists, economists, and so on, to generate futures that act as catalysts for public debate and discussion about the kinds of futures people really want.” (p. 6) , it should be noted that (retro)speculative futures is a retrospeculation of an individual’s own future, and is hyper-personal in that regard. It aims to plant the seed of imagination in the individual first and foremost, before extending it to speculative futures as a community, or even on a larger scale as a society.

This social hierarchical structure stemming from the individual-family-community-society is highly influenced by a central concept of social harmony within Confucianism, which is informed by my own cultural upbringing and education in Taiwan. (re: “highly-self referential”) Implications of cultural literacy will also be discussed in-depth and the influence it has when it comes to the structural decisions I have made.

Methodology

Borrowing from Pedagogy of Multilieracies, given this new “critical framework”, I hope to “retrospect” on my past to see how my previous experiences has influenced my passions, habits, literacies, decision-making processes, desires, etc. in the present as “situated practice”. With the help of “overt instruction” from the reading materials, I will use the concepts as metalanguage to describe and interpret the design elements. I will then “speculate” on what my current skills, talents, knowledge, lack of knowledge, etc. are, and how that aligns with the future I would like to create for myself as “transformed practice”.

In this case, I will limit my retrospeculation in the realm of language and education, which is relevant to my own personal life, professional career, and the scope of this final assignment, in regards to ” potential relationship with media, education, text and technology”. I hope to reflect upon the focus in three different facets:

Personal: personal interests, decisions, defining moments related to topic
Interpersonal relationships: important figures, family relations, friendships
Environments: location, cities, community, educational environment, etc.

Further Development:

So far, I have yet decided on a medium in which to deliver the concept and idea. One potential would be hyper-text Twine zine, in which the medium would have enough flexibility for multi-media, and room for serendipitous exploration of different node-paths.

References:

Dunne, A., & Raby, F. (2013). Speculative everything: design, fiction, and social dreaming. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

Kunjo. (2017, February 12). Speculative. Retrieved August 7, 2022, from https://speculative.hr/en/introduction-to-speculative-design-practice/

The New London Group. (1996). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. (Links to an external site.) Harvard Educational Review 66(1), 60-92.

Linking Task 6: An Emoji Story (Trista)

Task 6: A Emoji Story

I wanted to link to Trista’s post, similar to my Emoji story, the title was not in an English language, therefore we both had to go in roundabout ways to describe them.

Please take a look at Trista’s post before reading the following, as it will contain spoilers to her Emoji story!

The movie that Trista chose was Mulan, which is not very apparent from the Emojis that she chose, UNLESS, you know Chinese.

Mu: 木 is the character for wood

Lan: 蘭 is the character for orchid

Given that, I presumed that Trista has knowledge of the Chinese language, which I was able to confirm after going back to her Task 1: What’s In My Bag blogpost. I was able to know that Trista was born and raised in Shanghai, China, and moved to Canada 7 years ago.

“I started with the title, and actually, I chose this movie because I feel that the title is easy to visualize by emojis” (Ding, 2022), which contrasted with the comments from Jessica and Emily about unable to figure out what movie it is. Some guesses included “wood flower”, “log flower”, “log blooms”. I found this quite amusing , as this is definitely a case of information being lost in translation!

I am unsure if this is the case for Trista in Shanghai, but The Ballad of Mulan is a required piece of poetry in our education curriculum in Taiwan. The context in which I learned about it is very different to the one that of a Western audience.

I think most people know of Mulan in the context of the Disney movie. Therefore, if Trista were able to narrow down the category of movies to “Disney”, it might be a helpful hint, especially for those who do not have the linguistic or cultural background that Trista and I both share.

Trista then continues a chronological re-telling of the story through emojis. Similar to my experiences, Trista mentions “spending a lot of time selecting events that the emoji can represent” (Ding, 2022) as the emoji choices can feel limiting when it comes to more general and abstract concepts.

Even without the movie title, given the events that happened:

Mulan deciding to cut her hair to look like a boy, enrolls in the army on behalf of her father was one of the big transitions in the plot, which Trista made clear with the “haircut” Emoji, and one that reaffirmed my guess.

Reflection

One thing that Trista’s post made me think about a lot is this concept of “common ground” in Linguistics. For successful conversation and communication to happen, there is a presumed background information shared by participants in the conversation.

From the phrase ” I chose this movie because I feel that the title is easy to visualize by emojis” she is leaving out “the title is easy to visualize by emojis (for her given the cultural and linguistic context)” which is normal and natural for someone who is immersed in that context, after all, how would a fish know it is in water?

Along the same topic, Trista ties multi-modal communication with Kress’ commentary, adding on that “it illustrates how speech and writing are controlled by the author, and the interpretation of pictures largely depends on the viewers” which can be seen here in this instance of the author (Trista) intending “[wood emoji] [flower emoji]” to be “Mulan” whereas the viewers (Jessica and Emily) interpreted it differently.

All in all, this is to say, that in the same time we are using multi-modal communication to express ourselves, there is also a need to review and unpack what we assume to be “common ground” amongst us and others participating in the conversation, in order to meet each other in the middle such that what we are expressing, is also what others can interpret.

References

Ding, T. ( 2022, June 25) Task 6: A Emoji Story. ETEC540 Personal Web Space. https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540trista/2022/06/25/task-6-a-emoji-story/

Task 11: Detain/Release

First of all, I wanted to point out that this module included some of my favorite podcasts that I listen to regularly, so I really enjoyed that we were using it as learning material in class!

From the Reply All Podcast on The Crime Machine, the Compstat system was created with the original intention of “treating every crime seriously”, which quickly turned into a “management tool” as crime rates dropped throughout time. The shift in mindset upstream in the system very much so trickled downstream, the higher-ups were finding loopholes to jump through whereas the police doing the actual work were forced to adhere to quotas, and normal people are being profiled and given summons from police to fulfill the quotas. It seems like no one is benefitting from this crime detection system anymore.

It was one of the stories that left a strong impression on my mind, as at the time one of the “hot topics” in our Cognitive Systems courses was “biases in algorithms” in the realm of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. If the data we are feeding algorithms is tainted with human biases (which will most likely be unavoidable), then algorithms will also learn our human biases, and reproduce them in their analysis results as well. This sentiment was echoed in the 99% Invisible Podcast, The Age of Algorithms.

Cathy O’Neil points out that many of these algorithms are used as “weapons of math destruction”, which act as proxies for profiling via race and class, often penalizing individuals for societal and systemic issue that they have little control over.

 "Algorithms aren't very objective even when they are carried out by computers. This is relevant because the companies that build them like to market them as objective, claiming they remove human error and fallibility from complex decision making, but every algorithm reflects the priorities and judgements of its human designer" (The Age of the Algorithm, n.d.)

Use of algorithms are more ubiquitous than we think in our daily lives, from employee hiring assessments, to social media algorithms shaping the news on our feeds.

Currently, the Vancouver Art Gallery has an exhibition called “The Imitation Game”, which “surveys the extraordinary uses (and abuses) of artificial intelligence in the production of modern and contemporary visual culture across disciplines around the world”

(Sidenote: this was a very fun and engaging exhibition for me – a COGS student- since this encompasses almost EVERYTHING I learned in my undergrad, so I am VERY BIASED. It is also a great introduction to those who are not familiar with these subject matters, so please go take a look and see for yourself!)

One thing I really liked about the curation is that they showed what AI could be used for in everyday application, but at the same time, pointed out the “dark side” of such applications. One exhibit from Algorithmic Justice League (AJL) questions the implication of facial recognition software that refused to recognize faces of people of color. The AJL advocates for “equitable and accountable AI, to offer agency and control for people that interact with AI, and transparency and redress for harm caused in the use of AI.”

Reflections

When I was going through the Detain/Release tasks, the first few things I tend to look at was:

- Type of committed crime : if they tend to be more violent (unlawful use of weapon, assault, etc.) then I usually detain them than crimes that are “less” violent (fraud, drug possession, etc.)
- Violence: whether or not they will pose a threat to public if I release them
- Statement from prosecution: I feel like this adds weight to the decision making process for me, as I am more likely to go with what the Prosecution Team also thinks in some ways

Factors that I didn’t consider as much in my decisions included:

- Statement from Defendant
- Name
- Age
- Gender
- Photo

Usually cases that I release have:

- Low levels of Failure to Appear
- Low levels of Commit a Crime
- Low levels of Violence

As long as Violence and Fail to Appear are low, I usually release them.
If their Commit a Crime is not low, then I check the type of crime they committed before deciding to detain or release.

I tried running the simulation 3 different times, with varying results in Jail Capacity and Fear.

The first time, I had a 40% Jail Capacity, and little Fear.

**Edit: I was able to get hold of my statistics afterwards, and have included them below in the textboxes with the actual percentage. As you can see, my guestimation is very not accurate to the actual data.**

Defendants processed: 25
Detained: 17 
Released: 8 
Violators: 3
Jail: 75% 
Fear: 8%

The second time, I had 60% Jail Capacity, with 50% Fear.
(I think I was more lenient with my release criteria this time)

Defendants processed: 25
Detained: 13 
Released: 12
Violators: 5
Jail:60%
Fear: 43%

The third time, I had 80% Jail Capacity and little Fear.

Defendants processed: 25
Detained: 13
Released: 12 
Violators: 5
Jail: 65% 
Fear: 62%

I wasn’t able to access the actual statistics for the simulation, so I am curious what the data can reveal about my judgements and assumptions in the process. Though I think I am aware of the biases that I subconsciously project onto my decisions, I wonder if showing the data and statistics of my performance and further inform me on the underlying prejudices that I carry when it comes to making detain or release decisions. By making it transparent and bringing it to the forefront of my awareness, I think it will impact my decision making processes moving forward.

References

Algorithmic Justice League – The Imitation Game. (n.d.). Retrieved July 25, 2022, from https://imitationgameexhibition.ca/15-Algorithmic-Justice-League

The Age of the Algorithm. (n.d.). In 99 Percent Invisible. Retrieved from https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-age-of-the-algorithm/

The imitation game: Visual culture in the age of Artificial Intelligence. Vancouver Art Gallery. (n.d.). Retrieved July 25, 2022, from https://www.vanartgallery.bc.ca/exhibitions/the-imitation-game

Vogt, P. (n.d.-a). The Crime Machine, Part I. In Reply All.

Vogt, P. (n.d.-b). The Crime Machine, Part II. In Reply All.

Linking Task 8: Golden Record Curation (Mark)

[8.2] Golden Record Curation

For this linking task, I decided to take a look at Mark’s post, specifically knowing his background in music, as I wanted to see how he approached this task from that perspective!

Coming from a music background, Mark definitely draws from a lot of music theory when it comes to analyzing and justifying the songs he chose. For his criteria, he wanted to find pieces that “contain an obvious example of universality of musical elements, tempo, harmony, melody and texture” (Pepe, 2022). Some common element included “ostinato patterns, chant, call and response musical phrases and representations of nature”.

The first 4 tracks he chose belonged to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Stravinsky, some big names in classical music history. Mark explains his choice with some musical jargon, but then adds more information in an accessible way for those who might not have as much background knowledge in music. He also points out the significance of the composer or the piece, and uses very descriptive expressions to compare and contrast it with each other, providing some context in the realm of classical music.

"Compared to Mozart where emotions begin to surface, Beethoven brings it to a boil" and later on "If Beethoven brought emotions to a boil, Stravinsky boiled them over"

Mark then picks some tracks in the world music genre, and uses them to demonstrate some of the universal commonality between them, such as the call and response in chanting, pulsing trance-like rhythm, and nature imagery.

Lastly he chose a more contemporary blues song, Dark Was the Night to complete his curation. Mark chose this song specifically as blues took elements from the world music previously listed, and became a foundation of North American popular music.

Reflection

I thought Mark’s post was very insightful, as much of this information about these songs is unknown to me, as I do not come from a musical background and therefore do not have the skills to decipher them directly from the music tracks alone.

The way Mark put each piece next to each other for comparison and contrast helped with extending it into a greater context such that one can see why it was significant to include a certain track. He did not look at each track solely on its own, rather, he built on more to the foundations that he had laid down, such that his track-list curation and decisions felt cohesive as a unit!

References

Pepe, M. (2022. July 10) [8.2] Golden Record Curation. Mark Pepe’s ETEC540 Course Site. https://blogs.ubc.ca/etec540mpepe/2022/07/10/8-2-golden-record-curation/