How the World Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Failure: Big Data, Resilience and Emergent Causality

In modernity, failure was the discourse of critique, today, it is increasingly the discourse of power: failure has changed its allegiances. Over the last two decades, failure has been enfolded into discourses of power, facilitating the development of new policy approaches. Foremost among governing approaches that seek to include and to govern through failure is that of resilience. This article seeks to reflect upon how the understanding of failure has become transformed in this process, particularly linking this transformation to the radical appreciation of contingency and of the limits to instrumental cause-and-effect approaches to rule. Whereas modernity was shaped by a contestation over failure as an epistemological boundary, under conditions of contingency and complexity there appears to be a new consensus on failure as an ontological necessity. This problematic ‘ontological turn’ is illustrated using examples of changing approaches to risks, especially anthropogenic understandings of environmental threats, formerly seen as ‘natural’.

Validating Scanned Foot Images and Designing Customized Insoles on the Cloud

People with foot problems need special healthcare: foot care. Customized insoles can provide this care. They are inserts that are placed in the shoes. They correct biomechanical and postural inaccuracies in foot. Insole production contains four phases: foot image scanning, image validation, insole design and insole manufacturing. Currently, image scanning and validation is separated in location and time, i.e. podiatrists take images and insole designers validate them at different location and at different time. A cloud-based solution, the CloudSME one-stop shop simulation platform, enables remote access to image validation and insole design service deployed and running on the Cloud. The remote access allows podiatrists validating scanned image while the patient is in their offices. The simulation platform also supports remote design of customized insoles.