Tag: Climate Change Disinformation

Abstract

The last decade has seen major advances and growth in internet-based surveillance for infectious diseases through advanced computational capacity, growing adoption of smart devices, increased availability of Artificial Intelligence (AI), alongside environmental pressures including climate and land use change contributing to increased threat and spread of pandemics and emerging infectious diseases. With the increasing burden of infectious diseases and the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for developing novel technologies and integrating internet-based data approaches to improving infectious disease surveillance is greater than ever. In this systematic review, we searched the scientific literature for research on internet-based or digital surveillance for influenza, dengue fever and COVID-19 from 2013 to 2023. We have provided an overview of recent internet-based surveillance research for emerging infectious diseases (EID), describing changes in the digital landscape, with recommendations for future research directed at public health policymakers, healthcare providers, and government health departments to enhance traditional surveillance for detecting, monitoring, reporting, and responding to influenza, dengue, and COVID-19.

Abstract

The potential benefits and risks of artificial intelligence technologies have sparked a wide-ranging debate in both academic and public circles. On one hand, there is an urgent call to address the immediate and avoidable challenges associated with these tools, such as accountability, privacy, bias, understandability, and transparency; on the other hand, prominent figures like Geoffrey Hinton and Elon Musk have voiced concerns over the potential rise of Super Artificial Intelligence, whose singularity could pose an existential threat to humanity. Coordinating the efforts of thousands of decentralized entities to prevent such a hypothetical event may seem insurmountable in our intricate and multipolar world. Thus, drawing from both perspectives, this work suggests employing the tools and framework of Stoic philosophy, particularly the concept of the dichotomy of control—focusing on what is within our power. This Stoic principle offers a practical and epistemological approach to managing the complexities of AI, and it encourages individuals to organize their efforts around what they can influence while adapting to the constraints of external factors. Within this framework, the essay found that Stoic wisdom is essential for assessing risks, courage is necessary to face contemporary challenges, and temperance and tranquility are indispensable; and these lessons can inform ongoing public and academic discourse, aiding in the development of more effective policy proposals for aligning Narrow AI and General AI with human values.

Abstract

The call to make artificial intelligence (AI) more democratic, or to “democratize AI,” is sometimes framed as a promising response for mitigating algorithmic injustice or making AI more aligned with social justice. However, the notion of “democratizing AI” is elusive, as the phrase has been associated with multiple meanings and practices, and the extent to which it may help mitigate algorithmic injustice is still underexplored. In this paper, based on a socio-technical understanding of algorithmic injustice, I examine three notable notions of democratizing AI and their associated measures—democratizing AI use, democratizing AI development, and democratizing AI governance—regarding their respective prospects and limits in response to algorithmic injustice. My examinations reveal that while some versions of democratizing AI bear the prospect of mitigating the concern of algorithmic injustice, others are somewhat limited and might even function to perpetuate unjust power hierarchies. This analysis thus urges a more fine-grained discussion on how to democratize AI and suggests that closer scrutiny of the power dynamics embedded in the socio-technical structure can help guide such explorations.

Abstract

The essay interrogates the history and contemporary plight of academic freedom in the current context of heightened political pressures amidst polarizing, moralizing ideological commitments and suppressions of free inquiry, debate, dissent, and truth seeking. It argues that such semiotic collapses reflect a vanishing signifying gap, which has unconscious determinants linked with the erasures of the feminine, and which produces a stifling insistence on sameness at the expense of difference. By examining the surveillances of speech in the context of Israel-Palestine, and particularly post October 7, the essays argues that Palestine , as the site of radical rupture of the signifying chain, occupies a space where freedom of association and speech halt. This crisis also functions as a zero point to law, a semiotic and structural role occupied by the feminine and its cryptic yet spatializing signifier, the vaginal. When enabled, this signifying gap opens an onto-ethical space between the real of ancestral, disavowed trauma and the symbolic discursive realm, revealing unsettling truths, social tensions, and liberatory desires. Its relevance to the semiotic confinements and censorial campaigns haunting the academy (and general culture) but also haunting the holy contested land, occupied territories, and contiguous/noncontiguous borders of Israel-Palestine is not accidental; perhaps this void is so primal as to be barely a metaphor for the sacred dimensions between possession and dispossession essential to political, semiotic, and spiritual liberation/enfranchisement. The wave of encampments and protests across US campuses, unsettling and agitating as they necessarily must be, underscore the primacy of the gap, of a symbolic and real space, in fostering a mutually constitutive relationship between academic freedom and emancipatory politics.

Abstract

One of the major issues in international development is how disadvantaged populations mobilize in response to state repression. Whether in the Black Lives Movement or in the 2011 Arab Spring, digital exposures of police abuse have spurred social movements when people took to social media to expose it. Yet, in authoritarian regimes, citizens cannot easily initiate or participate in social movements. In such cases, how do victims of police violence express their dissatisfaction? This study examines this question in contemporary China, where repression of protesters is well documented. Based on a dataset of microblogs—Chinese tweets—documenting 74,415 protest events in the early Xi administration (2013–2016), this study analyzes how ordinary protestors, including migrant workers, peasants, and the urban poor, expose police abuse in social media. A close reading of microblogs documenting 150 randomly sampled events finds that Chinese protestors adopt three distinct narrative types: citizenship, solidarity, and confrontational. An accompanying quantitative analysis of the wider dataset further finds that ordinary protestors frequently expose police abuse online and that mentions of police abuse are closely associated with the above three narratives. Overall, this study contributes to understanding how abused protestors discursively contest authorities in the world’s most powerful authoritarian regime.

Abstract

We take an ethics theory perspective to examine rule violations and workarounds in the UK construction industry in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The UK construction sector remained largely operational during lockdowns in the UK, providing an opportunity to explore the ways in which construction workers made ethical decisions in situ, related to health and safety at work, and COVID-19 rules. We conducted 22 semi-structured interviews with participants from 11 organisations (3 major construction companies and 8 subcontractors) during November 2021 to January 2022. Our qualitative analysis focused on coding responses based on the use of moral disengagement tactics, and the dimensions of moral intensity (magnitude of consequences, social consensus, probability of effect, temporal immediacy, proximity and, concentration of effect). We found instances of ethical dilemmas, including conflicts between compliance with organisational health and safety rules, and following COVID-19 rules. Our analysis showed that rule violations were often justified based on moral disengagement tactics, particularly cognitive reconstrual, obscuring personal agency, disregarding consequences and vilification of the victims. Furthermore, moral intensity played a significant role in making ethical decisions about violating rules. Moral intensity was most influential (across dimensions) for moral disengagement based on cognitive reconstrual (e.g., justifications for choosing to follow one set of rules over another). Social context was highly influential in workers’ ethical decisions, including organisational and group social norms, but wider societal attitudes towards the COVID-19 pandemic, also played a significant role. We discuss the implications for business ethics theory, policy and practice, including recommendations for businesses and policymakers.

Abstract

This research aims to assess and quantify the impact of educational attainments on trust in scientists during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study utilizes instrumental variables (IV) and conventional ordinary least squares regression (OLS) approaches that are applied to micro-data from a multinational survey in 26 nations. The IV approach is used to address endogeneity that is caused by reverse causality, omitted variables, and measurement error. The results of IV models suggest that a unit increase in educational attainments leads to an increase in trust in scientists by a factor of 0.20 to 0.28. In comparison, the results of the conventional OLS suggest that a unit increase in educational attainments leads to an increase in trust in scientists by a factor of 0.09 to 0.16. The results suggest that ignoring endogeneity leads to a considerable underestimation of education’s effect on trust in scientists. At the same time, the results indicate that educational training is a key tool to promote science by increasing trust in scientists. Such a conclusion is especially important given that the results are based on the survey conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic, a period characterized by unprecedented public health and economic crises, political backslash, and an “infodemic” of disinformation and misinformation.

Abstract

In this article, we argue that YouTube’s algorithm should be programmed to make a modest but significant percentage (e.g. 2%) of recommendations for the climate. Just as a librarian has a (meta-editorial) responsibility to highlight certain titles and not others, we believe that so should YouTube’s algorithm. The company, we argue, has duties of content moderation, reparation and meta-editing, as well as strong consequentialist reasons to program its algorithm to do so. With 2 billion users, our proposed intervention could be an effective contribution to mitigating the climate crisis in a transparent and accountable way. We consider different setups, with varying degrees of transparency and centralization. We then address the worries that such a project may raise: the risk of manipulation, the threat of a slippery slope, and the concerns for freedom of expression. We conclude that none of these elements seriously undermine the desirability of our proposal.

Abstract

This study explores epistemic virtue as a new lens to scrutinize organizational behavior. Organizational epistemic virtues are the qualities of organizations that support the creation, sharing, and retaining of knowledge. We study how well organizations handle information and if that can prevent organizational misconduct. We propose a theoretical framework to link epistemic virtue to the prevention of misconduct and test this model using data from 822 U.S. companies. These companies are scored on six epistemic virtues by analyzing over one million online employee reviews using natural language processing. We focus on the epistemic virtues of curiosity, epistemic beneficence, epistemic justice, epistemic integration, humility, and open-mindedness. We find that companies with these virtues engage in less corporate misconduct, measured in terms of the number of penalties imposed by government agencies. We also give practitioners a framework to assess the epistemic virtues of organizations.

Abstract

Increasingly, universities have been seen as sites for practicing decolonization work. Examples include the introduction of Land-based curricula, tribal relationship building, and the offering of critical Indigenous studies courses. However, universities remain spaces with deep colonial foundations. This paper offers a description of the challenges and insights gained through attempted decolonial reconcili-action work within this imperfect environment. We critically examine the conception, implementation and lasting impact of a course offered at Western Washington University (WWU), located in Washington State on the ancestral territory of the Lummi and Nooksack peoples. The “Socio-ecology and Reconcili-action in the Northern Salish Sea” course wove together Land-based learning and relationship-building to engage students in reconciliation. We worked specifically with the ɬaʔəmen (Tla’amin) Nation, located in British Columbia, and included classroom and virtual work in Bellingham and a field trip to the Nation’s traditional territory near qathet Regional District (so called Powell River). Two settler students and a settler instructor reflect on the course through a series of reflexive vignettes culminating in a list of learning commitments: to learn from a diversity of peoples, especially Indigenous community members; to learn with gratitude, respect, and reciprocity, and without fear of making mistakes; and to actively apply our knowledge to further reconciliation and decolonization. These commitments are offered as a starting point for other members of the higher education community who recognize their responsibility to advance reconciliation and decolonization.