Viscous Objects. The Uneven Resistances of Repair
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The MV Veteran, a seagoing car ferry constructed by the Dutch industrial conglomerate Damen Shipyards Group, connects the two small, rural outport communities of Fogo Island and Change Islands to the larger island of Newfoundland, Canada. Our paper examines the breakdowns of this new ferry and the repairs facilitated through its manufacturer’s warranty. In our analysis, we treat the warranty as a ‘script’ as something that both constrains and enables action and engenders resistances. The warranty anticipates and conditions both future times and spacings of breakdown and how those future breakdowns are to be addressed through activities such as maintenance and repair. In recounting the ferry’s breakdowns and repairs, we explore how the case of this ferry and its warranty in this particular place suggests a need to add to the analytical and conceptual repertoire for thinking about the breakdown and repair of technical objects. We suggest there is a need for supple enough concepts of breakdown and repair that they can deal with technical objects that are neither as ‘fluid’ as the classic example of a bush-pump nor quite as ‘fixed’ as infrastructures embedded in landscapes such as electrical grids or canals. Thus, we think with the notion of the ‘viscosity’ of technical objects. We claim that the importance of the term viscosity in the sociotechnical lexicon is not to demark a halfway point between fluid and fixed, mobile and immobile, but to point out how a single object like a ferry can be all of these things, unevenly, at once through characterizing its multiple resistances following breakdowns.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it