Refugee, Allocation, Algorithm, Brussels, September 2015. Formula for the allocation of refugees entering the European Union. The formula determines the member state responsible for examining an application for international protection lodged in one of the member states by a third country national or a stateless person. By Godofredo Pereira

Uncertainty, Communication, Trial, Accountability, L’Aquila, October 2012. In the aftermath of L’Aquila’s deadly earthquake, one official and six seismologists were charged with multiple manslaughter and sentenced to six years in jail (overturned in 2014), accused of professional neglect and giving inexact, incomplete, and contradictory information. The case was about communicating risks to vulnerable populations and about establishing legal causality in complex multicausal events such as earthquake disasters. By Svenja Schüffler

Warning, Nuclear Plant, Blacklist, New Delhi, May 2012. After publishing scientific papers on the seismology of Jaitapur, India, and raising uncomfortable scientific questions over the seismic hazards of Jaitapur—the new site for the world’s largest nuclear power plant situated south of Mumbai—one of the world’s leading seismologists and experts on Indian plate tectonics, Professor Roger Bilham, was apparently blacklisted and deported from India. By Svenja Schüffler

Concrete, Collapse, Corruption, Port-au-Prince, January 2010. Poor building practices turned a moderate earthquake into a major disaster with a death toll of over 100,000. Corrupt practices, poverty, and the lack of adequate inspections seemed to cause apparently strong, reinforced concrete buildings to “pancake collapse.” By Svenja Schüffler

Risk, Side-effect, Urban Renewal, Displacement, Ankara, 2005. Scientific anticipation of future earthquakes in Istanbul’s built environment mobilized a state-directed urban renewal of communities in the city. A new law allowed the government to survey, demolish, and rebuild homes at risk of damage and allowed the enforced displacement of residents, with no legal possibility of protesting, leading to an increase in real-estate speculation and the destruction of social communities. By Svenja Schüffler

Chain Reaction, Surprise, Unknown Unknowns, Ignorance, Sendai, March 2011. Previously unknown cascading fault ruptures led to an unexpected, large, offshore M9 earthquake, which resulted in a triple disaster due to the subsequent tsunami and nuclear catastrophe. It revealed surprising new facets of plate tectonics and of unexperienced consequences that had not been adequately considered in the assessment of hazard risks, either because they were not imaginable or because they were ignored on purpose. By Svenja Schüffler

Finance, Reputation, Regulation, Risk, London, 2000. Thompson Reuters has developed a database (World-Check, originally established by David Leppan) and a scalable software suite for the tracking of Politically Exposed Persons (PEPs), criminals, fraudsters, and other high-risk individuals and organizations. The database is used by financial institutions, governments, businesses, and organizations worldwide to assess and manage a variety of financial, regulatory, and other risks. By Max Symuleski

Bioinformatics, Borders, Flows, European Union, January 2003 and July 2015. The EU maintains the EURODAC database of fingerprints and data on asylum seekers and refugees in order to track individual claims for asylum across EU member states and illegal border crossings. The regulation concerning this database was recently updated and now allows the database to be used by police and security forces in order to identify suspected terrorists and criminals. By Max Symuleski

Counting, Homelessness, Statistics, Germany, 2016. Germany does not recognize homelessness; an absence of numbers is a major problem of bureaucratic knowledge production. German national governments assume a steady spatial order, addressing and counting people in their (fixed) homes. There is neither a standardized definition of homelessness nor shared statistical data across the German Federal Länder. By Christoph Eggersglüß

Absorption, Transposable Borders, Pseudo-Homogenization, Turkey, 2014. Before Turkish local elections in 2014, two municipal and metropolitan reform laws were promulgated in 2008 and 2012. The number of small-town municipalities (with fewer than 2,000 inhabitants) was reduced from 3,225 to 1,395, whereas fourteen new metropolitan municipalities were established. Data modulation through border determination lowered the representation levels of citizens. By Benek Çinçik

Exposure, Detection, Compensation, Legibility, Uncertainty, Hanford Nuclear Reservation, Washington State, 2014–15. For years, workers at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State have been exposed to chemical vapors as they manage high-level nuclear waste. In 2014, a series of exposures at Hanford’s Tank Farms brought this issue into the public eye. The Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act (EEOICPA) provides a database of exposure and compensation parameters detailing what illnesses “count” as exposure-related and are therefore deemed worthy of compensation.

Assessment, Gamification, Recruiting, Palo Alto, 2014. Start-up Knack collects data from job applicants who play their “online video games.” Quantifying users’ or applicants’ actions and decisions, Knack’s algorithms pinpoint the player’s aptitude. This is supposed to accelerate the application process and to be more informative than standard interview questions (see also “Soma-Analytics,” “Cornerstone,” and “Hays”). For general information on the topic please see here and here. By Mathias Denecke

Spectral, Nuclear, Logistics, Japan, March 21, 2016. British “ghost ships” en route to Japan to collect enough plutonium for eighty nuclear warheads. Two cargo ships, the Pacific Egret and Pacific Heron, arrived at the northeastern coastal village of Tokai, home to Japan’s main nuclear research facility, the Japan Atomic and Energy Agency. The ships, which are operated by Pacific Nuclear Transport Ltd., will transport the cargo to the Savannah River Site, a US government facility in South Carolina. These ships are traveling with all tracking devices disabled as they chart their journey around the globe. By Susan Schuppli

Porosity, Underground, Uncertainty, Risk, Environmental Racism, South Dakota, USA, 2012. The existence and calculable health effects of several thousand historic abandoned uranium mines, exploratory boreholes, and tailings piles throughout the western United States are disputed, taken to be inconsequential by the Nuclear Regulatory Committee to future uranium mines, all of which primarily impact indigenous peoples. Uranium corporations argue that nothing happens underground. By Kai Bosworth

Deep Time, Extinction, Infrastructure, South Dakota, USA, 2011 / 65 million years ago. Paleontologists argue that the proposed Keystone XL pipeline will destroy fossil evidence of the K-T extinction event. They argue that this provides a “chance to study climate change and extinction as it applies to the effects humans are having on our planet.” Ironically, the tar sands pipeline and its climate impacts are both causing extinction and erasing the record of extinction. By Kai Bosworth

Contestation, Risk, Nuclear, Populism, Japan, 2011. In the wake of the Fukushima disaster in March 2011, the Japanese government shuttered its forty-seven other nuclear reactors while risk assessments were carried out. In 2012, Osaka’s populist mayor, Tōru Hashimoto, the son of a local Yakuza, refused to open the Ōi Nuclear Power Plant after the government ruled it safe, insisting on further safety checks by independent groups, making him the most popular politician in Japan due to the groundswell of antinuclear sentiment. He agreed to a limited restart in 2012. By Rory Rowan

Earth, System, Governance, Governmentality, Geocracy, International, 2009. The Earth System Governance Project is a long-term international interdisciplinary research project launched in 2009 and one of the core programs of the Future Earth initiative on global change. It seeks to develop policy frameworks on the basis that social and environmental systems are entangled and social dimensions of global change must be central to policy development. Critics argue that the project seeks to produce the Earth system as an object of governance subject to conventional governmental rationalities and is simply the latest form of “geocracy.” By Rory Rowan

Arctic, Geopolitics, Continental Shelf, Sea Bed, Arctic Seabed, 2007. Russia claims that the location of its continental shelf in the Arctic, and hence the extent of its territorial claims and potential access to mineral resources, has been miscalculated. During the Arktika research mission, a team of geologists tried to establish the relationship between various ridges in the Arctic seabed and the Siberian shelf, and an accompanying film crew filmed the planting of a Russian flag in the seabed. Russia’s claims are disputed by other Arctic nations and the media stunt was denounced. By Rory Rowan

Arctic, Geopolitics, Territory, Materiality, Ice, Northwest Passage, 2007. The seasonal melting of Arctic ice has become so extensive as to allow the navigation of the Northwest Passage, a route previously frozen and blocked to shipping. This new shipping route has commercial interest to many of the surrounding nations and is subject to competing territorial claims that mobilize different understandings of the legal status of the ice. The passage which cuts through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago is claimed by Canada to be part of its territory on the basis that the ice has traditionally been used “as land” (mostly by indigenous communities), while the US contends that it is international waters free to navigation. By Rory Rowan

Legislation, Space, Mining, Frontier, US/Outer Space, 2015. In November 2015, the US Congress passed the US Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act (H.R.2262), in effect establishing the legal basis, within the US legal system, for issuing licenses to private interests to pursue the exploitation of mineral resources from extra-planetary bodies, such as meteorites. Although the development of extra-planetary extractive industries is as yet speculative, the bill recognizes the increasing technical potential for space mining and seeks to provide a legal framework for the development of the industry. It marks another instance of the US government unilaterally establishing a legal basis for action beyond the bounds of established international law, and historical frontier discourses have been actively evoked. By Rory Rowan

Population, Control, Forecast, China, 2015. Fearing population rise as a threat to economic development, the Chinese Communist Party introduced its One-child Policy between 1978 and 1980. The widely criticized policy produced massive social change as many families valuing the lives of male over female children opted to have sons. The Party began to believe that the gender imbalance was producing a social and economic fallout that threatened instability for China’s future development. In October 2015, the government replaced the policy with a Two-child Policy in order “to improve the balanced development of population” and bring economic production, social reproduction, and political stability back under control. It marks one of those expansive and intensive programs of population control governed by an explicit economic rationale. By Rory Rowan

Forests, Fire, Palm Oil, Frontier, Kalimantan and West Sumatra, July 2015. Fires raged across thousands of hectares of tropical forest in two areas of Indonesia for months in 2015, threatening many unique and endangered species and local livelihoods as well as producing intensive pollution for the local population, even in neighboring countries, and releasing gargantuan amounts of CO2 into the planetary atmosphere. The government has attempted to blame the out-of-control fires on the traditional dry season and on the impact of higher than usual temperatures as a result of the El Niño effect. Whilst the fires are indeed seasonal, critics have noted that the scale and intensity of the destructive blaze are the result of the massive expansion of palm oil plantations that depend upon rapid deforestation—a process often pursued via intentional fires. By Rory Rowan

Dump, Nuclear Waste, Germany, Decontamination, Remlingen, Germany, February 2013. The public was originally informed that Asse II, an old salt mine in the federal state of Lower Saxony, was merely being used to research how radioactive waste reacts in a final repository of a salt dome. However, over the last fifty years, nuclear power plants, nuclear research facilities, the German military, medical institutions and industry misused the old mine as a dump for 126,000 barrels of nuclear waste. It might become a final repository now, as the plans to retrieve the nuclear waste from a flooding, collapsing salt mine represent a unique challenge. By Svenja Schüffler

Shell, Oil Pollution, Environmental Devastation, Cleanup, Niger Delta, Nigeria, November 2015. The Niger Delta was once one of the most diverse ecological habitats on Earth. After fifty years of oil extraction, the environment and society are in ongoing crisis, devastated, impoverished, and destabilized. The Delta is the most severely oil-damaged environment anywhere in the world. Shell, the largest oil operator in the region, is responsible, under Nigerian law, for the proper maintenance, timely cleanup, and remediation of all spills from its pipelines, wells, and other infrastructure, whatever the cause. Yet the company is still failing to do this. Flight over Bodo Creek disaster. By Svenja Schüffler