Hasil untuk "Social pathology. Social and public welfare. Criminology"

Domenico Palmisano, Giuseppe Palestra, Berardina Nadja De Carolis

As artificial intelligence continues to advance and becomes more integrated into sensitive areas like healthcare, education, and everyday life, it's crucial for these systems to be both resilient and robust. This paper shows how resilience is a fundamental characteristic of social robots, which, through it, ensure trust in the robot itself-an essential element especially when operating in contexts with elderly people, who often have low trust in these systems. Resilience is therefore the ability to operate under adverse or stressful conditions, even when degraded or weakened, while maintaining essential operational capabilities.

Suparna De, Ionut Bostan, Nishanth Sastry

Recent studies have outlined the accessibility challenges faced by blind or visually impaired, and less-literate people, in interacting with social networks, in-spite of facilitating technologies such as monotone text-to-speech (TTS) screen readers and audio narration of visual elements such as emojis. Emotional speech generation traditionally relies on human input of the expected emotion together with the text to synthesise, with additional challenges around data simplification (causing information loss) and duration inaccuracy, leading to lack of expressive emotional rendering. In real-life communications, the duration of phonemes can vary since the same sentence might be spoken in a variety of ways depending on the speakers' emotional states or accents (referred to as the one-to-many problem of text to speech generation). As a result, an advanced voice synthesis system is required to account for this unpredictability. We propose an end-to-end context-aware Text-to-Speech (TTS) synthesis system that derives the conveyed emotion from text input and synthesises audio that focuses on emotions and speaker features for natural and expressive speech, integrating advanced natural language processing (NLP) and speech synthesis techniques for real-time applications. Our system also showcases competitive inference time performance when benchmarked against the state-of-the-art TTS models, making it suitable for real-time accessibility applications.

Saeed Masoodipoor, Fatemeh Masoumi

IntroductionVoluntary organizations play an important role in today's society (Alfes, 2018:1-2). In Iran, an important part of the economy is dedicated to the non-profit sector (Ayodo, 2021). In all organizations, weakness in management weakens non-profit organizations (Pyanov et al., 2021). Accordingly, it is very important to better understand the factors that influence the decision-making of organization managers (Cyr et al., 2022:1-2). Charitable organizations should strive to demonstrate the highest level of performance; Because a well-managed charity organization will ensure a higher reputation and more donations (Crettez et al., 2021:26). Charitable organizations, as spontaneous support institutions, have a significant impact on the process of poverty alleviation and social harm (Nayeri et al., 2021:2). Part of the challenges of charities, at the micro level, include people's lack of trust in how to spend donations and poor communication between charities and donors (Ayodo, 2021) and limited resources (Alfes, 2018:1-2). Considering the diversity of charitable organizations, the necessity of designing a large system of charity is felt twice. The design of this system should be based on the opinions of actors and activists in the field of charity affairs. Therefore, improving and reforming the governance system of charity affairs should be based on the views and experiences of non-governmental and governmental charities, which requires a general understanding of their approaches and mindsets. In the theoretical literature, topics such as charity in the economy, the definition of charity, the ratio of government and non-government sectors in charity affairs, and issues and problems of governance of charity affairs in the country are discussed.Research MethodologyIn the current research, Q methodology was used, which is included in the category of applied research. This method is mixed and exploratory and has no hypothesis. For the current research, in the stage of gathering the discourse space and cue cards, the interview tool was used, and in the quantitative stage, the cue table was used, and for the quantitative data analysis, exploratory factor analysis was used. To understand the discourse environment, due to the limited number of interviews and reports published on the Internet, and also for further accreditation, interviews were conducted with 23 managers of governmental and non-governmental charities and several expert professors in this field.Research FindingsIn this research, in the first stage of selecting the Q sample phrase, 87 selected phrases were obtained. Finally, 31 terms have been selected. In the next step, 23 experts were studied and were given Q statements and tables to complete, and finally, 18 Q answers were used for analysis. In the mentioned research, face validity was used and Cronbach's alpha method was used to measure the reliability of the study, and the present value was 0.96. In the current study, the value of the KMO index is equal to 546. In Q methodology, the pebble diagram is used to show the most important factors in terms of the determined amount of variance. From the first factor onwards, the explanatory variance suddenly drops sharply. Therefore, the previous six factors will be used for factor analysis. In general, for the current research, the rotated matrix has been applied using the Varimax method. Participants No. 6, 9, and 11 form the first mental model, participants No. 1, 2, 5, 15, and 18 form the second mental model, participants No. 7, 10, and 12 form the third mental model, participants No. 4 and 14 form the fourth mental model, participants Number 3 and 17 form the fifth mental model and participants number 8, 10, 13, and 16 form the sixth mental model jointly. Six types of mentality were obtained, which include, 1) those who support popularization with a focus on government regulation, 2) those who support the performance of charities, 3) those who support the transparent presence of the people, 4) opponents of government administration, 5) the sovereigntists, and 6) propagandists.Discussion and ConclusionBased on the results obtained in the current research, six types of thinking and mentality were obtained. The first group believes in the principle of popularization of charity affairs and considers it an important issue, but they think that this popularization should be under the supervision and guidance of the government as the supervising, controlling, and guiding authority. The second group pays more attention to issues that lead to the improvement of the performance and effectiveness of charities, and they believe that the solution to poverty is to promote and solve these problems within charities. The third group, believing in the weakness of the government and the lack of public trust in it, emphasizes mechanisms to attract the attention of the people, and unlike the first group, they do not believe much in government intervention in the regulatory debate. The fourth group's mindset is based on strong opposition to the entry of the government and its administration, and they introduce the best work of the government to collect taxes from the rich to allocate to the deprived. The sovereigntists and those who say full government ownership form the fifth mentality, who are very cautious about people's participation and consider a minor role for them. According to them, the performance of non-governmental charities should be under the supervision and full control of the government. Finally, the sixth mentality emphasizes the element of advertising and promotion of the good deed, as well as efforts to attract people's participation. According to the results of the present research, the common element that exists among all mentalities, although with intensity and weakness, is the need for better and more involvement of the non-governmental sector and public charities. This issue can be taken into consideration as a common axis for discussion to reach a favorable governance structure. Other issues such as the level of government influence and tenure, how to design the propaganda system, etc. are among the issues about which there are differences of opinion.

Nicolo Cesa-Bianchi, Roberto Colomboni, Maximilian Kasy

We consider the problem of repeatedly choosing policies to maximize social welfare. Welfare is a weighted sum of private utility and public revenue. Earlier outcomes inform later policies. Utility is not observed, but indirectly inferred. Response functions are learned through experimentation. We derive a lower bound on regret, and a matching adversarial upper bound for a variant of the Exp3 algorithm. Cumulative regret grows at a rate of $T^{2/3}$. This implies that (i) welfare maximization is harder than the multi-armed bandit problem (with a rate of $T^{1/2}$ for finite policy sets), and (ii) our algorithm achieves the optimal rate. For the stochastic setting, if social welfare is concave, we can achieve a rate of $T^{1/2}$ (for continuous policy sets), using a dyadic search algorithm. We analyze an extension to nonlinear income taxation, and sketch an extension to commodity taxation. We compare our setting to monopoly pricing (which is easier), and price setting for bilateral trade (which is harder).

Ester Blay, Ignacio González Sánchez

Este trabajo busca contribuir a explicar el desequilibrio de género en la judicatura española. Aunque las mujeres constituyen el 54% de los integrantes de la carrera judicial, su presencia se concentra en los órganos unipersonales y es escasa en la cúpula del poder judicial. El trabajo se articula a partir de las explicaciones de las propias magistradas sobre este desequilibrio, extraídas de una investigación basada en entrevistas biográficas a 20 magistradas, con un mínimo de 20 años de experiencia como jueces profesionales. Las explicaciones son tratadas como hipótesis explicativas que se contrastan con otros datos publicados por el Consejo General del Poder Judicial (CGPJ). Las explicaciones examinadas son tres: la reciente incorporación de las mujeres a la carrera judicial; la autoexclusión de las mujeres de puestos de libre designación por parte del CGPJ y puestos gubernativos; la exclusión de las mujeres de los puestos discrecionales a través de los mecanismos selectivos. La revisión de las estadísticas y el análisis de las trayectorias profesionales de las magistradas permiten descartar el argumento de que el acceso tardío de las mujeres a la carrera judicial explica su escasa presencia en la alta magistratura y los puestos discrecionales. Parece más prometedor, sin embargo, profundizar en las hipótesis basadas en la autoexclusión y la existencia de sesgos de género en los procesos selectivos, así como en su relación.  

Johana Kunin

This article provides an ethnographic analysis of the agency of women who reside in the rural areas of the Argentine Pampas, based on their promotion and production of agroecological family horticulture. The recognition of these women’s agency through care – care of their children, global care, and green care – offers a significant challenge to some metrocentric and Eurocentric feminist perspectives that claim care work can only be oppressive for women. The first of these types of care empowers women to improve the nutrition of their children. It also relates to another underlying type of care, which is to provide a sufficiently robust education as to ensure their children have a better and alternative future. The second type of care has the power to socially transform the territorial space of the district’s countryside and its marginalized populations which, through care, acquire greater public and political attention. The third type of care empowers women to transform and care for the environment, and is exercised by not using pesticides in horticultural production and by disseminating knowledge on the matter. In line with discussions of postcolonial feminism (Abu-Lughod, 1986; Mahmood, 2001; Suárez Navaz, 2008), I argue that certain properties that are attributed to women relative to caregiving – by way of a dichotomous view of gender relations – fuel their agency: for these women the cultivation of vegetables is a form of agency that actively combats food, training and labor inequality.

Anish K. Vallapuram, Young D. Kwon, Lik-Hang Lee et al.

A particular phenomenon of interest in Retail Economics is the spillover effect of anchor stores (specific stores with a reputable brand) to non-anchor stores in terms of customer traffic. Prior works in this area rely on small and survey-based datasets that are often confidential or expensive to collect on a large scale. Also, very few works study the underlying causal mechanisms between factors that underpin the spillover effect. In this work, we analyse the causal relationship between anchor stores and customer traffic to non-anchor stores and employ a propensity score matching framework to investigate this effect more efficiently. First of all, to demonstrate the effect, we leverage open and mobile data from London Datastore and Location-Based Social Networks (LBSNs) such as Foursquare. We then perform a large-scale empirical analysis on customer visit patterns from anchor stores to non-anchor stores(e.g., non-chain restaurants) located in the Greater London area as a case study. By studying over 600 neighbourhoods in the GreaterLondon Area, we find that anchor stores cause a 14.2-26.5% increase in customer traffic for the non-anchor stores reinforcing the established economic theory. Moreover, we evaluate the efficiency of our methodology by studying the confounder balance, dose difference and performance of matching framework on synthetic data. Through this work, we point decision-makers in the retail industry to a more systematic approach to estimate the anchor store effect and pave the way for further research to discover more complex causal relationships underlying this effect with open data.

Jianan Chen, Qin Hu, Honglu Jiang

As one of the typical settings of Federated Learning (FL), cross-silo FL allows organizations to jointly train an optimal Machine Learning (ML) model. In this case, some organizations may try to obtain the global model without contributing their local training power, lowering the social welfare. In this paper, we model the interactions among organizations in cross-silo FL as a public goods game and theoretically prove that there exists a social dilemma where the maximum social welfare is not achieved in Nash equilibrium. To overcome this dilemma, we employ the Multi-player Multi-action Zero-Determinant (MMZD) strategy to maximize the social welfare. With the help of the MMZD, an individual organization can unilaterally control the social welfare without extra cost. Since the MMZD strategy can be adopted by all organizations, we further study the case of multiple organizations jointly adopting the MMZD strategy to form an MMZD Alliance (MMZDA). We prove that the MMZDA strategy can strengthen the control of the maximum social welfare. Experimental results validate that the MMZD strategy is effective in obtaining the maximum social welfare and the MMZDA can achieve a larger maximum value.

David P. Kennedy, Elizabeth J. D’Amico, Ryan A. Brown et al.

Abstract Background Coupling social network visualizations with Motivational Interviewing in substance use interventions has been shown to be acceptable and feasible in several pilot tests, and has been associated with changes in participants’ substance use and social networks. The objective of this study was to assess acceptability and feasibility of an adaptation of this behavior change approach into a culturally centered behavior change intervention for American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) emerging adults living in urban areas. AI/AN populations experience high rates of health disparities and substance use. Although 70% of AI/AN people live outside of tribal lands, there are few culturally tailored health interventions for these AI/AN populations. Social networks can both increase and discourage substance use. Leveraging healthy social networks and increasing protective factors among urban AI/AN emerging adults may help increase resilience. Methods We conducted thirteen focus groups with 91 male and female participants (32 urban AI/AN emerging adults ages 18–25, 26 parents, and 33 providers) and one pilot test of the three workshop sessions with 15 AI/AN emerging adults. Focus group participants provided feedback on a proposed workshop-based intervention curriculum that combined group Motivational Interviewing (MI) and social network visualizations. Pilot workshop participants viewed their own social networks during group MI sessions focused on substance use and traditional practices and discussed their reactions to viewing and discussing their networks during these sessions. We used a combination of open coding of focus group and workshop session transcripts to identify themes across the group sessions and content analysis of comments entered into an online social network interview platform to assess the extent that participants had an intuitive understanding of the information conveyed through network diagrams. Results Focus group and pilot test participants reacted positively to the intervention content and approach and provided constructive feedback on components that should be changed. Themes that emerged included feasibility, acceptability, relevance, understandability, and usefulness of viewing personal network visualizations and discussing social networks during group MI workshops. Workshop participants demonstrated an intuitive understanding of network concepts (network composition and structure) when viewing their diagrams for the first time. Conclusions Social network visualizations are a promising tool for increasing awareness of social challenges and sources of resilience for urban AI/AN emerging adults. Coupled with Motivational Interviewing in a group context, social network visualizations may enhance discussions of network influences on substance use and engagement in traditional practices. Trial Registration: ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT04617938. Registered October 26, 2020

Yudi Chen, Angel Umana, Chaowei Yang et al.

Timely and reliable sensing of infrastructure conditions is critical in disaster management for planning effective infrastructure restorations. Social media, a near real-time information source, has been widely used in disasters for forming timely situational awareness. Yet, using social media to sense electricity infrastructure conditions has not been explored. This study aims to address the research gap through mining public topics from social media. To achieve this purpose, we proposed a systematic and customized approach wherein (1) electricity-related social media data is extracted by the classifier developed based on Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT); and (2) public topics are modeled with unigrams, bigrams, and trigrams to incorporate the formulaic expressions of infrastructure conditions in social media. Electricity infrastructures in Florida impacted by Hurricane Irma are studied for illustration and demonstration. Results show that the proposed approach is capable of sensing the temporal evolutions and geographic differences of electricity infrastructure conditions.

Chiyu Zhang, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed

Masked language models (MLMs) are pre-trained with a denoising objective that is in a mismatch with the objective of downstream fine-tuning. We propose pragmatic masking and surrogate fine-tuning as two complementing strategies that exploit social cues to drive pre-trained representations toward a broad set of concepts useful for a wide class of social meaning tasks. We test our models on $15$ different Twitter datasets for social meaning detection. Our methods achieve $2.34\%$ $F_1$ over a competitive baseline, while outperforming domain-specific language models pre-trained on large datasets. Our methods also excel in few-shot learning: with only $5\%$ of training data (severely few-shot), our methods enable an impressive $68.54\%$ average $F_1$. The methods are also language agnostic, as we show in a zero-shot setting involving six datasets from three different languages.

Andréa Pires Rocha, Rita de Cássia Cavaldante Lima, Daniela Ferrugem

Este artigo toma as políticas de drogas como mirante de análise sobre a racionalidade governamental que incrementa respostas autoritárias à crise do capital. Esta resposta em período de neoliberalismo e de neoconservadorismo é seletiva e requisita apreender dois componentes do racismo estrutural − o racismo institucional e o religioso que se atualizam na política de drogas. A destituição da Presidenta Dilma Rousseff indicou uma crise geral de autoridade que fortaleceu a ascensão neopentecostal na organização das massas populares no Brasil a favor de um projeto necroeconômico e necropolítico abertamente antidemocrático. Com autores críticos, recupera-se a disputa materializada com o uso da força punitiva do Estado e com a atuação fundamentalista de segmentos neopentecostais. Apontamos que no interior do Estado neoliberal de cunho penal, o conservadorismo, racismo e ódio de classe recrudescem mecanismos de controle justificado pela guerra às drogas, incidindo sobre os corpos e qualquer vestígio de vida de negros e pobres.

Propuestas Críticas en Trabajo Social - Critical Proposals in Social Work

María Belén Ortega-Senet

Este artículo es una invitación a movernos juntos hacia la construcción de espacios creativos, expresivos y nutritivos de reflexión-acción, a través de una estrategia determinada, la que nos convoca ahora: la Sistematización de Experiencias. A esta estrategia le hemos dado también el apellido de investigativa, porque queremos posicionarla como una oportunidad de construir articulación teórica-práctica, con reales poderes para generar conocimiento situado, relevando saberes que germinan en las relaciones cotidianas de la praxis social. En el texto, revisaremos cómo desde la posición de subalternidad (el baile de los que sobran) vamos batiendo tierra para configurar nuevos escenarios y posibilidades en los que la Sistematización puede jugar papeles interesantes. Pretendemos provocar el deseo de seguir buscando, de no cejar en la exploración de alternativas que nos liberen, a quienes participamos en el Trabajo Social, de convertirnos en gobernados, en técnicos y en usuarios. Compartimos también una experiencia, una propuesta incipiente de Sistematización que nos está permitiendo quebrar algunos aparatajes en la formación de la profesión y en la forma de relacionarnos con los procesos de prácticas pre-profesionales.

Francesca Greselin, Simone Pellegrino, Achille Vernizzi

We introduce the social welfare implications of the Zenga index, a recently proposed index of inequality. Our proposal is derived by following the seminal book by Son (2011) and the recent working paper by Kakwani and Son (2019). We compare the Zenga based approach with the classical one, based on the Lorenz curve and the Gini coefficient, as well as the Bonferroni index. We show that the social welfare specification based on the Zenga uniformity curve presents some peculiarities that distinguish it from the other considered indexes. The social welfare specification presented here provides a deeper understanding of how the Zenga index evaluates the inequality in a distribution.

Sidsel Natland, Asbjørn Johannessen

Hvordan vurderer arbeidsgivere innen helse- og sosialfeltet søkere til stillinger? Hvilke kompetanser og ferdigheter forventer de at søkerne har? Denne studien er basert på funn fra kvalitative forskningsintervjuer med rekrutteringsansvarlige innen helse-/omsorgssektoren samt sosiale tjenester (Nav). Analysen viser hvordan de skilte mellom «formell» og «uformell» kompetanse. Formell kompetanse innebar oftest bachelorgrad innen yrkesfeltet og ble vurdert som noe som ble «tatt-for-gitt». Det var den uformelle kompetansen som var avgjørende i vurderingen av en søker som ansettelsesbar, og her brukte informantene begrepet «personlig egnethet». Deres innholdsbestemmelse av begrepet indikerer at de knytter personlig egnethet til fire kategorier: kommunikasjon; selvstendighet; samarbeid; utviklingspotensial. Denne meningsskapingen drøftes i lys av teorier om kompetanser og ansettelsesbarhet med et særlig blikk på hvorvidt personlig egnethet er «medfødt» eller en kompetanse som kan læres. Resultatene viser hvordan informantene forstår personlig egnethet som en kombinasjon av noe psykologisk (som kan predikere framtidig adferd) og som en kompetanse (som kan utvikles og læres), og at det er denne forståelsen de forholder seg til i vurdering av arbeidssøkere som mer eller mindre ansettelsesbare. Resultatene understreker betydningen av å forstå begrepene kompetanser og ansettelsesbarhet både prosessuelt og innenfor sin aktuelle profesjonelle kontekst.

Iftikhar Ali, Abuzar Siraj, Zair Hassan et al.

Artem Zakharchenko, Yuliia Maksimtsova, Valentyn Iurchenko et al.

Owing to its history and challenging circumstances, social networks community in Ukraine is a very interesting polygon for the study of communications in the constantly changing environment, especially in the political discourse. This unique environment requires three dimensions to ascertain the political position of its participant. But 2019 presidential elections made this object even more spectacular. The winner of elections comedian Volodymyr Zelenskyi reached 73% of votes without any issue ownership, with empty agenda, and this influenced the electoral content of social networks and their authors behavior. We saw, that the issue ownership by other candidates succeeds in making their issues more salient in social networks. But the new phenomena, the non-agenda ownership, overcome any ideological influence, especially under the conditions of punishment mechanism applied to old politicians. Analyzing social media content and users behavior in the period between two rounds of elections, we found considerable overlaps between this campaign and the 2016 Trump campaign. We approved the widespread of filter bubbles, negative campaign messages, fake news and conspiracy theories. Active and powerful core of Ukrainian Facebook that was responsible for the Revolution of dignity now became less significant and even turns into the huge filter bubble of active people. We also proved that manipulations and fake news in the environment of private groups may be as much powerful as in a case of classical communication based around the opinion leaders.

Marko Valenta, Marianne Garvik

I de siste årene har man sett en kraftig økning i antall avslag på asylsøknader fra enslige mindreårige asylsøkere, kombinert med en økt bruk av midlertidige oppholdstillatelser og uttransporteringer. Denne artikkelen diskuterer hvordan enslige mindreårige asylsøkere opplever og håndterer usikkerheten som midlertidige oppholdstillatelser, avslag og frykt for uttransporteringer medfører. Artikkelen bidrar til feltet ved å forklare mekanismene som fører til forskjellige opplevelser av midlertidighet, og den identifiserer kognitive og handlingsrettede strategier som enslige mindreårige asylsøkere tar i bruk for å håndtere disse opplevelsene. Det argumenteres for at valg av strategier avhenger av deres vurdering av situasjonen, fremtidshåp og ressurser, og at disse henger nøye sammen med deres status i asylsystemet.

I. S. Taubkin, A. R. Saklantiy

The article presents an analysis of the Russian Federal Centre of Forensic Science of the Russian Ministry of Justice publication ‘Expert study of copper conductors withdrawn from the site of a fre. Learner’s guide’ 2015. It is shown that this Learner’s guide cannot provide the method of conducting forensic fre examination and methodological references of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of Emergency Situations on establishing a causal relationship between emergency modes in copper wiring and fre ignition require considerable refnement.