Collective Choice and Social Welfare
A. Sen
This book is concerned with the study of collective preference, in particular with the relationship between the objectives of social action and the preferences and aspirations of society's members. Professor Sen's approach is based on the assumption that the problem of collective choice cannot be satisfactorily discussed within the confines of economics. While collective choice forms a crucial aspect of economics, the subject pertains also to political science, the theory of the state, and to the theory of decision procedures. The author has therefore used material from these disciplines, plus philosophical aspects from ethics and the theory of justice.
3233 sitasi
en
Political Science
Research Methods in Education
Joseph Check, R. Schutt
15126 sitasi
en
Computer Science
Qualitative Research: A Guide to Design and Implementation
S. Merriam
22924 sitasi
en
Computer Science, Sociology
Qualitative research and case study applications in education
S. Merriam
18613 sitasi
en
Computer Science
Social Research Methods
N. Walliman
PART ONE: SOCIAL RESEARCH METHODS Introduction to Your Companion PART TWO: CORE AREAS OF THE CURRICULUM Theoretical Background Research Basics Research Strategies and Design The Nature of Data Defining the Research Problem Sampling Data Collection Methods Experimental Design Quantitative Data Analysis Qualitative Data Analysis Ethics PART THREE: STUDY AND REVISION SKILLS How To Get the Most Out of Your Lectures - (written in collaboration with David McIlroy) How To Make the Most of Seminars Revision Hints and Tips Exam Tips Tips on Interpreting Essay and Exam Questions Essay Writing Writing a Literature Review Writing a Research Proposal Writing Up a Dissertation or Research Project
12111 sitasi
en
Computer Science
The practice of social research
E. Babbie
21957 sitasi
en
Computer Science
Research Methods for Business Students
M. Saunders, Philip E. T. Lewis, A. Thornhill
20713 sitasi
en
Computer Science
Islamic-Based Human Resource Management Strategy at Phatna Witya School, Yala, South Thailand
Tuanchulfan Nimong, Syahrul Amsari
This study aims to investigate the management of human resources based on Islamic principles as implemented at Phatna Witya School in Yala, Southern Thailand. HR management that aligns with Islamic teachings not only focuses on skills and professionalism but also emphasizes spiritual aspects, ethics, and moral responsibilities derived from Islamic teachings. This research employs a qualitative methodology through a case study approach. Data were collected through in-depth interviews, observations, and document gathering. Participants in this study included the school principal, vice principal, teachers, and other educational staff. The findings reveal that the Islamic-based HR management approach at Phatna Witya School in Yala includes HR planning that adheres to Islamic values, a recruitment and selection process that pays attention to both competency and Islamic ethics, development of employees in spiritual and professional dimensions, and a performance assessment system that balances worldly and spiritual matters. This approach is seen as effective in shaping individuals with integrity, discipline, and a strong emphasis on Islamic values.
Islam, Economics as a science
Influence of Normative Theories of Ethics on the European Union Artificial Intelligence Act: A Transformer-Based Analysis Using Semantic Textual Similarity
Mehmet Murat Albayrakoglu, Mehmet Nafiz Aydin
Despite being regarded as a significant step toward regulating Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems and its emphasis on fundamental rights, the European Union Artificial Intelligence (EU AI) Act is not immune to moral criticism. This research aims to investigate the impact of three major normative theories of ethics (virtue ethics, deontological ethics, and consequentialism) on the EU AI Act. We introduce the concept of influence, confirmed by philosophical and chronological analysis, to examine the underlying relationship between the theories and the Act. As a proxy measure of this influence, we propose using Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) to quantify the degree of alignment between the theories (influencers) and the Act (influencee). To capture intentional and operational ethical consistency, the Act was divided into two parts: the preamble and the statutory provisions. The textual descriptions of the theories were manually preprocessed to reduce semantic overlap and ensure a distinct representation of each theory. A heterogeneous embedding-level ensemble approach was employed, utilizing five modified Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) models, built on the Transformer architecture, to compute STS scores. These scores represent the semantic alignment between various theories of ethics and each of the two components of the EU AI Act. The theories were evaluated by using voting and averaging, with findings indicating that deontological ethics has the most significant overall influence.
Assessing the socio-economic burden of inherited and inflammatory neuromuscular diseases (BIND study): a study protocol
Ian C. Smith, Yasmin Abusetah, Homira Osman
et al.
Abstract Introduction Neuromuscular diseases (NMDs) are rare multisystem, genetic or acquired disorders causing weakness and/or sensory loss. It is essential for governments, insurance providers, and broader society to have a better understanding of the burden of illness of NMDs. Our goal is to assess the social and economic burden of Canadians living with NMDs, encompassing schooling and education achievement, health-related quality-of-life, and labour force participation and productivity. Methods and analysis We will conduct a national, cross-sectional survey of individuals living with a NMD and their caregivers who are members of Muscular Dystrophy Canada and/or are patients within our national network of neuromuscular clinics. Surveys can be completed online or via telephone. The specific sub-sections of the questionnaire will differ based on respondent’s profile, whether they are 1) a minor living with a NMD, 2) an adult living with a NMD, 3) an adult who is a caregiver for someone living with a NMD, or 4) an adult who both lives with a NMD and is a caregiver for someone with a NMD. We will use descriptive statistics to describe distributions and ranges of the social and economic measures. Pearson correlations for continuous data and Spearman rho for rank data will be used to detect the strength of association of socio-demographic factors, disease characteristics, and social and economic impacts of NMDs. Ethics and dissemination The study protocol has been approved by the Ottawa Health Science Network Research Ethics Board (Protocol ID # 20210601-01H). This study will provide the overall impact of NMD on costs and health-related quality of life, disseminated via a series of manuscripts which will include both between- and within-NMD/NMD subtype comparisons. The data obtained will guide governmental policy development and inform patient organisation programs to deliver more effective supports to individuals and families affected by NMDs.
Ethics Practices in AI Development: An Empirical Study Across Roles and Regions
Wilder Baldwin, Sepideh Ghanavati, Manuel Woersdoerfer
Recent advances in AI applications have raised growing concerns about the need for ethical guidelines and regulations to mitigate the risks posed by these technologies. In this paper, we present a mixed-methods survey study - combining statistical and qualitative analyses - to examine the ethical perceptions, practices, and knowledge of individuals involved in various AI development roles. Our survey comprises 414 participants from 43 countries, representing various roles such as AI managers, analysts, developers, quality assurance professionals, and information security and privacy experts. The results reveal varying degrees of familiarity and experience with AI ethics principles, government initiatives, and risk mitigation strategies across roles, regions, and other demographic factors. Our findings underscore the importance of a collaborative, role-sensitive approach that involves diverse stakeholders in ethical decision-making throughout the AI development lifecycle. We advocate for developing tailored, inclusive solutions to address ethical challenges in AI development, and we propose future research directions and educational strategies to promote ethics-aware AI practices.
AI Governance in Higher Education: A course design exploring regulatory, ethical and practical considerations
Raphaël Weuts, Johannes Bleher, Hannah Bleher
et al.
As artificial intelligence (AI) systems permeate critical sectors, the need for professionals who can address ethical, legal and governance challenges has become urgent. Current AI ethics education remains fragmented, often siloed by discipline and disconnected from practice. This paper synthesizes literature and regulatory developments to propose a modular, interdisciplinary curriculum that integrates technical foundations with ethics, law and policy. We highlight recurring operational failures in AI - bias, misspecified objectives, generalization errors, misuse and governance breakdowns - and link them to pedagogical strategies for teaching AI governance. Drawing on perspectives from the EU, China and international frameworks, we outline a semester plan that emphasizes integrated ethics, stakeholder engagement and experiential learning. The curriculum aims to prepare students to diagnose risks, navigate regulation and engage diverse stakeholders, fostering adaptive and ethically grounded professionals for responsible AI governance.
A differential model of $N$ player games concerning ethical dilemmas
Ramkrishna Joshi, Aniruddha Joshi
Ethics play an important role in determining the behavior of an individual under certain circumstances. Ethical or unethical behavior can be treated as a strategy of a player in a pay-off game. In this paper, we present two analytical solutions to studying time evolution of behavior of an individual from ethics perspective. We also present the effect of a third player as a perturbation to a two player game and develop a general approach for a $N$ player game. We demonstrate geometric modeling of behavioral characteristics of individuals as polytopes residing in $D$ dimensional space. We treat three player and two player games using set of differential equations that lead to time evolution of phase trajectories which reveal about the interdependencies and self dependencies of each player. We also demonstrate the effect of strategies of each player on other players in cardinal games.
Effectiveness of the Wellness Together Canada Portal as a Digital Mental Health Intervention in Canada: Protocol for a Randomized Controlled Trial
Syaron Basnet, Michael Chaiton
BackgroundThe Wellness Together Canada (WTC) portal is a digital mental health intervention that was developed in response to an unprecedented rise in mental health and substance use concerns due to the COVID-19 pandemic, with funding from the Government of Canada. It is a mental health and substance use website to support people across Canada providing digital interventions and services at no cost. Two million people have visited the WTC portal over the course of 1 year since launching; however, rigorous evaluation of this potential solution to access to mental health care during and after the COVID-19 pandemic is urgently required.
ObjectiveThis study aims to better understand the effectiveness of the existing digital interventions in improving population mental health in Canada.
MethodsThe Let’s Act on Mental Health study is designed as a longitudinal fully remote, equally randomized (1:1), double-blind, alternative intervention–controlled, parallel-group randomized controlled trial to be conducted between October 2023 and April 2024 with a prospective follow-up study period of 26 weeks. This trial will evaluate whether a digital intervention such as the WTC improves population mental health trajectories over time.
ResultsThe study was approved by the research ethics board of CAMH (Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Toronto, Ontario, Canada). It is ongoing and participant recruitment is underway. As of August 2023, a total of 453 participants in the age group of 18-72 years have participated, of whom 70% (n=359) are female.
ConclusionsThis initiative provides a unique opportunity to match people’s specific unmet mental health and substance use needs to evidence-based digital interventions.
Medicine, Computer applications to medicine. Medical informatics
Mapping the Ethics of Generative AI: A Comprehensive Scoping Review
Thilo Hagendorff
The advent of generative artificial intelligence and the widespread adoption of it in society engendered intensive debates about its ethical implications and risks. These risks often differ from those associated with traditional discriminative machine learning. To synthesize the recent discourse and map its normative concepts, we conducted a scoping review on the ethics of generative artificial intelligence, including especially large language models and text-to-image models. Our analysis provides a taxonomy of 378 normative issues in 19 topic areas and ranks them according to their prevalence in the literature. The study offers a comprehensive overview for scholars, practitioners, or policymakers, condensing the ethical debates surrounding fairness, safety, harmful content, hallucinations, privacy, interaction risks, security, alignment, societal impacts, and others. We discuss the results, evaluate imbalances in the literature, and explore unsubstantiated risk scenarios.
Some Issues in Predictive Ethics Modeling: An Annotated Contrast Set of "Moral Stories"
Ben Fitzgerald
Models like Delphi have been able to label ethical dilemmas as moral or immoral with astonishing accuracy. This paper challenges accuracy as a holistic metric for ethics modeling by identifying issues with translating moral dilemmas into text-based input. It demonstrates these issues with contrast sets that substantially reduce the performance of classifiers trained on the dataset Moral Stories. Ultimately, we obtain concrete estimates for how much specific forms of data misrepresentation harm classifier accuracy. Specifically, label-changing tweaks to the descriptive content of a situation (as small as 3-5 words) can reduce classifier accuracy to as low as 51%, almost half the initial accuracy of 99.8%. Associating situations with a misleading social norm lowers accuracy to 98.8%, while adding textual bias (i.e. an implication that a situation already fits a certain label) lowers accuracy to 77%. These results suggest not only that many ethics models have substantially overfit, but that several precautions are required to ensure that input accurately captures a moral dilemma. This paper recommends re-examining the structure of a social norm, training models to ask for context with defeasible reasoning, and filtering input for textual bias. Doing so not only gives us the first concrete estimates of the average cost to accuracy of misrepresenting ethics data, but gives researchers practical tips for considering these estimates in research.
The Effect of Value-Focused Discussions on Scientists' Ethical Decision Making
Tyler Garcia, Bill Bridges, Caitlin Solis
et al.
Many scientists view science as value-free, despite the fact that both epistemic and non-epistemic values structure scientific inquiry. Current ethics training usually focuses on transmitting knowledge about high-level ethical concepts or rules and is widely regarded as ineffective. We argue that ethics training will be more effective at improving ethical decision making if it focuses on connecting values to science. We pull from philosophy and psychology to define ethical decision making using the Four Component Model. This model states that in order to make an ethical decision someone must consider four components: moral sensitivity, moral reasoning, moral motivation, and moral implementation. We formed a moderated fellowship of fourteen science faculty from different disciplines who met for ten sessions over the course of a year, where they discussed the values embedded in different scientific norms. We then conducted interviews before and after the year-long fellowship that involved guided reflection of scenarios where there was some kind of ethical misconduct where the scientific practice required value judgements (e.g using unpublished data in their own work). We looked at how the fellowship affected the scientists' ability to recognize ethical dimensions regarding the scenarios. We found that this fellowship improved moral sensitivity, but their moral reasoning does not improve. We outlined our approach on how to look at scientists' ethical decision making and made recommendations on how to improve our approach. This work can inform future ethical training to align better with what scientists value and introduce useful concepts from philosophy and psychology to education research in physics.
en
physics.ed-ph, physics.hist-ph
Helping students deal with Ethical Reasoning: The Proto-Guidelines for Ethical Practice in Mathematics as a deck of cards
Stephen M. Walk, Rochelle E. Tractenberg
Tractenberg, Piercey, and Buell 2024 presented a list of 44 proto-Guidelines for Ethical Mathematical Practice, developed through examination of codes of ethics of adjacent disciplines and consultation with members of the mathematics community, and gave justifications for the use of these proto-Guidelines. We propose formatting the list as a deck of 44 cards and describe ways to use the cards in classes at any stage of the undergraduate mathematics program. A simple game or encounter with the cards can be used exclusively as an introduction, or the cards can be used repeatedly in order to help students move to higher levels of achievement with respect to the proto-Guidelines and ethical reasoning in general. We present, in Appendix A, a sample semester long sequence of assignments for such a purpose, with activities at various levels of Blooms taxonomy.
On the role of ethics and sustainability in business innovation
Maria Fay, Frederik F. Flöther
For organizations to survive and flourish in the long term, innovation and novelty must be continually introduced, which is particularly true in today's rapidly changing world. This raises a variety of ethical and sustainability considerations that seldom receive the attention they deserve. Existing innovation adoption frameworks often focus on technological, organizational, environmental, and social factors impacting adoption. In this chapter, we explore the ethical and sustainability angles, particularly as they relate to emerging technologies, artificial intelligence (AI) being a prominent example. We consider how to facilitate the development and cultivation of innovation cultures in organizations, including budding startups as well as established enterprises, through approaches such as systems thinking.
The Ethics of Interaction: Mitigating Security Threats in LLMs
Ashutosh Kumar, Shiv Vignesh Murthy, Sagarika Singh
et al.
This paper comprehensively explores the ethical challenges arising from security threats to Large Language Models (LLMs). These intricate digital repositories are increasingly integrated into our daily lives, making them prime targets for attacks that can compromise their training data and the confidentiality of their data sources. The paper delves into the nuanced ethical repercussions of such security threats on society and individual privacy. We scrutinize five major threats--prompt injection, jailbreaking, Personal Identifiable Information (PII) exposure, sexually explicit content, and hate-based content--going beyond mere identification to assess their critical ethical consequences and the urgency they create for robust defensive strategies. The escalating reliance on LLMs underscores the crucial need for ensuring these systems operate within the bounds of ethical norms, particularly as their misuse can lead to significant societal and individual harm. We propose conceptualizing and developing an evaluative tool tailored for LLMs, which would serve a dual purpose: guiding developers and designers in preemptive fortification of backend systems and scrutinizing the ethical dimensions of LLM chatbot responses during the testing phase. By comparing LLM responses with those expected from humans in a moral context, we aim to discern the degree to which AI behaviors align with the ethical values held by a broader society. Ultimately, this paper not only underscores the ethical troubles presented by LLMs; it also highlights a path toward cultivating trust in these systems.