Mining Money: the generative capacities of scientific and legal knowledge practices in the making of resource economies

In 1997 a scandal associated with Bre-X, a junior mining firm, and its prospecting activities in Indonesia, exposed to public scrutiny the ways in which mineral exploration firms acquire, assess and report on scientific claims about the natural environment. At stake here was not just how investors understood the provisional nature of scientific knowledge, but also evidence of fraud. Contemporaneous mining scandals not only included the salting of cores, but also unreliable proprietary sample preparation and assay methods, mis-representations of visual field estimates as drilling results and ‘overly optimistic’ geological reports. This paper reports on initiatives taken in the wake of these scandals and prompted by the Mining Standards Task Force (TSE/OSC 1999). For regulators, mandated to increase investor confidence in Canada’s leading role within the global mining industry, efforts focused first and foremost upon identifying and removing sources of error and wilfulness within the production and circulation of scientific knowledge claims. A common goal cross-cutting these initiatives was ‘a faithful representation of nature’ (Daston and Galison 2010), however, as the paper argues, this was manifest in an assemblage of practices governed by distinct and rival regulative visions of science and the making of markets in claims about ‘nature’. These ‘practices of fidelity’, it is argued, can be consequential in shaping the spatial and temporal dynamics of the marketization of nature.

Dublin 1916: theatre of revolt

At Easter 1916, Dublin city centre was one of a series of sites throughout Ireland where a rebellion was staged against British rule. It was a strategic failure, swiftly crushed by superior British forces. The event, however, subsequently took a central role in the mythology of modern Ireland.

The first visual representations were of the conflict’s aftermath: photographic journeys through landscapes of ruin. From the distance of the camera, we see none of the pockmarks of shell bursts, nor the etchings of machine guns. Instead, traces of life in the city seem to have been swept aside by an unseen hand: the passing of millennia or a violent action of nature. Architecture alone has witnessed and recorded its presence. Amongst the fragments, the shell of the General Post Office (G.P.O.) in Sackville Street is one of the few buildings still wholly recognizable. The remnants of its classical form, portico and pediment, columns and entablature seem to transcend its prosaic modern functions and allude to something more ancient. The bewilderment of city’s inhabitants is also recorded. Dubliners have become inquisitive tourists in streets which hitherto were the locus of everyday life. They wander around aimlessly in a landscape as alien and picturesque as Pompeii. This shift in perception was captured by the Irish poet W.B. Yeats who hinted that Dublin, purged of modern commercialism had transcended its petty inadequacies to revive a slumbering heroic past.

‘I have met them at the close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses [.]’
All is changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.’

His comments were prescient. Initially unpopular, the republican leaders, executed by the British, slowly became recast as heroic martyrs. Similarly, the spaces where their heroism was forged became venerated. The G.P.O. and Sackville Street, however, already had a republican history. It was originally conceived in the eighteenth century as part of a series of magnificent urban spaces to provide an arena of spectacle and self-celebration for the colonial Anglo-Irish and their vision of a Protestant republic. O’Connell/Sackville Street became the temporal, geographical and mythical hinge upon which two different versions of Irish republicanism waxed and waned. Its recasting after independence as a space of Catholic Nationalism bore testimony to its consistency in providing a backdrop for the production of ritual and myth. In the 1920s and 30s, as the nascent country, beset with economic stagnation and political tensions, turned to spectacle as a salve for it social problems, O’Connell Street and the G.P.O. provided its most sacred sites. Within the introduction of new myths, however, individual as well as national identities were created and consolidated. The emerging identity of modern Ireland became inextricably linked with that of one ambitious politician. His uses of the G.P.O. in particular revealed a perceptive understanding of the political uses of classical architecture and urban space.

Bright Molecules for Sensing, Computing and Imaging: A Tale of Two Once-troubled Cities

The circumstances in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and in Belfast, Northern Ireland, which led to a) the generalization of luminescent PET (photoinduced electron transfer) sensing/switching as a design tool, b) the construction of a market-leading blood electrolyte analyzer and c) the invention of molecular logic-based computation as an experimental field, are delineated. Efforts to extend the philosophy of these approaches into issues of small object identification, nanometric mapping, animal visual perception and visual art are also outlined.

A Molecular Mechanism for Sequential Activation of a G Protein-Coupled Receptor

Ligands targeting G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) are currently classified as either orthosteric, allosteric, or dualsteric/bitopic. Here, we introduce a new pharmacological concept for GPCR functional modulation: sequential receptor activation. A hallmark feature of this is a stepwise ligand binding mode with transient activation of a first receptor site followed by sustained activation of a second topographically distinct site. We identify 4-CMTB (2-(4-chlorophenyl)-3-methyl-N-(thiazol-2-yl)butanamide), previously classified as a pure allosteric agonist of the free fatty acid receptor 2, as the first sequential activator and corroborate its two-step activation in living cells by tracking integrated responses with innovative label-free biosensors that visualize multiple signaling inputs in real time. We validate this unique pharmacology with traditional cellular readouts, including mutational and pharmacological perturbations along with computational methods, and propose a kinetic model applicable to the analysis of sequential receptor activation. We envision this form of dynamic agonism as a common principle of nature to spatiotemporally encode cellular information.

An evaluation of the Socrative (personal response system) app for increasing student engagement and learning in an undergraduate psychology curriculum.

Personal response systems using hardware such as 'clickers' have been around for some time, however their use is often restricted to multiple choice questions (MCQs) and they are therefore used as a summative assessment tool for the individual student. More recent innovations such as 'Socrative' have removed the need for specialist hardware, instead utilising web-based technology and devices common to students, such as smartphones, tablets and laptops. While improving the potential for use in larger classrooms, this also creates the opportunity to pose more engaging open-response questions to students who can 'text in' their thoughts on questions posed in class. This poster will present two applications of the Socrative system in an undergraduate psychology curriculum which aimed to encourage interactive engagement with course content using real-time student responses and lecturer feedback. Data is currently being collected and result will be presented at the conference.
The first application used Socrative to pose MCQs at the end of two modules (a level one Statistics module and level two Individual Differences Psychology module, class size N≈100), with the intention of helping students assess their knowledge of the course. They were asked to rate their self-perceived knowledge of the course on a five-point Likert scale before and after completing the MCQs, as well as their views on the value of the revision session and any issues that had with using the app. The online MCQs remained open between the lecture and the exam, allowing students to revisit the questions at any time during their revision.
This poster will present data regarding the usefulness of the revision MCQs, the metacognitive effect of the MCQs on student's judgements of learning (pre vs post MCQ testing), as well as student engagement with the MCQs between the revision session and the examination. Student opinions on the use of the Socrative system in class will also be discussed.
The second application used Socrative to facilitate a flipped classroom lecture on a level two 'Conceptual Issues in Psychology' module, class size N≈100). The content of this module requires students to think critically about historical and contemporary conceptual issues in psychology and the philosophy of science. Students traditionally struggle with this module due to the emphasis on critical thinking skills, rather than simply the retention of concrete knowledge. To prepare students for the written examination, a flipped classroom lecture was held at the end of the semester. Students were asked to revise their knowledge of a particular area of Psychology by assigned reading, and were told that the flipped lecture would involve them thinking critically about the conceptual issues found in this area. They were informed that questions would be posed by the lecturer in class, and that they would be asked to post their thoughts using the Socrative app for a class discussion. The level of preparation students engaged in for the flipped lecture was measured, as well as qualitative opinions on the usefulness of the session. This poster will discuss the level of student engagement with the flipped lecture, both in terms of preparation for the lecture, and engagement with questions posed during the lecture, as well as the lecturer's experience in facilitating the flipped classroom using the Socrative platform.