B U R N

I am still trying to come to grips with this clip (-from the very newspaper that brought you the infamous Muhammad cartoons). Supposedly, in all sincerety, it is about an IT company deploying ‘untraditional’ means to boost its productivity and ‘well-being’, for example, by having James Bond themed days and making it obligatory for everyone to conform to their role.

I was always a cynic, but this is just too much of a toe-cringing gut-wrenching experience before noon.

Do not worry, you do not need to understand Danish to get the gist of it, in fact, it is likely to be even funnier with an added dash of anthropological strangeness.

An all too familiar dilemma arises when you have to choose between talks by two equally really, really, really interesting people.

So is it going to be Sherry Turkle at 5pm, talking about cyborgs and intimacy, or is it going to be Craig Venter at 5.30pm? Rumour has it that he is about to announce the first synthetic lifeform.

[Update: There were no announcements, but plenty of food for thought about the infinity of what we do not know.]

The arrival of autumn normally falls under the same category as cancelled concerts and chain restaurants, if you ask me, however, this year, Canada did her best to prove me wrong. It seems to me that 10,000 Japanese cannot go wrong.

Yesterday, I was offered weed by three random people in three separate locations.

A week ago, a friend told me that I look like I have a blond badger camping permanently on top of my head.

[Update 09/10] This is looking really promising: The organisers have now posted a ‘logistics update’ on the conference website, stating that conference participants should bring their own LCD projectors. This is slightly surprising given that a) we live in the 21st century and b) of all places, the conference venue is a Hilton hotel. If only project management skills and academic excellence came in neatly wrapped packages…

If you happen to be in Montreal next week (as if?!), I invite you to pop by for the Ethics in Practice panel at the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) Annual Meeting, which has been organised by yours truly.

This is the call for papers:

Outside the crowded ethical fields, such as medicine, and bio- and nanotechnology, there seems to be little science and technology studies (STS) research examining ethics as mundane practice. We might expect an STS sensibility to portray ethics in terms of an ongoing achievement involving the orchestration and alignment of materialities, (in)formal accountability systems and ex-/inclusion criteria, and vocabularies. This proposed agenda gives rise to a number of questions:

- What does it mean to be ethical and how do people tinker with, and/or accommodate, competing versions of ethical knowledge?
- How is ethical consistency accomplished within organisational settings?
- What are the methodological challenges faced by researchers who want to study ethics as it unfolds?
- What are the connections, if any, between this ethnographic materialist perspective and the search for “ethical guidelines” – Can STS make practice more ethical?

These are some of the questions to be addressed in the Ethics in Practice session, which invites papers exploring what happens when STS and ethics enter into discussion. The session is open to ethnographic and other empirical approaches, as well as theoretically inclined pieces.

This is the line-up of speakers:

Klaus Hoeyer (U. Copenhagen): The hip prosthesis between person and commodity

Daniel Neyland (U. Oxford): Using Science and Technology Studies to establish ethical accountability in medical research

Christian Toennesen (U. Oxford) and Steve Woolgar (U. Oxford): It’s an Ethical World After All

Sarah Dyer (U. Oxford): Knowing ethical subjects? Informed consent and the production of subjects in medical research

Alfred Moore (U. Cork): Public engagement and the framing of ethical concerns in the government of biotechnology in the UK.

Naturally, I am quite excited about this. In other news, despite swearing not to get caught up in any sort of commitments this year, I will, most likely, deliver a talk at the Oxford-Achilles Working Group on Corporate Social Responsibility sometime in January.

With my legs gradually returning to working order, it is time to conclude that running the Berlin Marathon was very worthwhile. Everyone in the group, including my mum, sister, step-dad, brother, auntie, uncle, and my cousin, made it through in style.

The historical city centre of Berlin and the million-strong crowd provided the perfect atmosphere for this very special race, which explains why, perhaps, Ethiopia’s Haile Gebrselassie managed to set a new world record at 2:04:26. On the other hand, Gebrselassie ran his first marathon at age 15 in 2:48 - if anyone, this guy has managed to transgress the boundary between humans and phenomena in a very assertive manner. One day I will be able to tell my grandchildren that I was only 300 metres behind this legend (just before the start of the race, but let us not get into details).

What I find most fantastic, though, was the sheer enthusiasm of the crowd, who cheered for everyone, no matter the pace and level of fitness. For an amateur like me, it was unbelievable to feel the roar from the tribune when running through the ‘gates’ of Brandenburger Tor. Under normal circumstances, I would have given up/died/donated my body to science - especially the legs - many miles earlier, I am sure.

A great special thanks to those who made a donation to MSF. The link is open for another couple of weeks. I should clarify that everything goes to the charity, so when I say ‘please sponsor me’, you will not end up covering any of my expenses whatsoever - that is not why I set it up.