Building social? More like designing to afford contestation

Building a Parser That can Afford to Interact with Semantics

Natural language understanding programs get bogged down by the multiplicity of possible syntactic structures while processing real world texts that human understanders do not have much difficulty with. In this work, I analyze the relationships between parsing strategies, the degree of local ambiguity encountered by them, and semantic feedback to syntax, and propose a parsing algorithm called He...

Can We Afford It? Issues in Designing Transparent Technologies

Situated Action claims that action is guided by an environment featuring objects, including technologies, whose use is transparent to us. Work on affordances perceived properties of objects which, in the context of a given course of action, tell us directly what those objects are for helps explain this. It is argued that an affordance helps make a technology transparent because it is a function...

Canada can afford universal pharmacare – no more excuses.

Margaret McCartney: The NHS can't afford more litigation.

Things go wrong in the NHS every day. Complaints to the General Medical Council by the public rose from 3858 in 2010 to 5808 in 2014. The NHS Litigation Authority has, compared with last year, nearly doubled the money it sets aside for future claims to £56.4bn (€65.9bn; $73.6bn), having paid out £1.4bn in the past year. (The NHS annual budget is £116bn.) Doctors are encouraged to be honest abou...

Designing and Building Autonomous Minirobots

The paper describes the organization and technical details of an undergraduate project that culminated at the IJCAI robot competition in August 1995. As part of the project, a team of ve undergraduate students designed and built an autonomous minirobot that was able to detect cups and cans, pick them up, and bring them to the appropriate trash or recycling bin. The robot was named Walleye, the ...