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

Tyler Reinmund, Lars Kunze, Marina Jirotka

Sociotechnical challenges of machine learning in healthcare and social welfare are mismatches between how a machine learning tool functions and the structure of care practices. While prior research has documented many such issues, existing accounts often attribute them either to designers' limited social understanding or to inherent technical constraints, offering limited support for systematic description and comparison across settings. In this paper, we present a framework for conceptualizing sociotechnical challenges of machine learning grounded in qualitative fieldwork, a review of longitudinal deployment studies, and co-design workshops with healthcare and social welfare practitioners. The framework comprises (1) a categorization of eleven sociotechnical challenges organized along an ML-enabled care pathway, and (2) a process-oriented account of the conditions through which these challenges emerge across design and use. By providing a parsimonious vocabulary and an explanatory lens focused on practice, this work supports more precise analysis of how machine learning tools function and malfunction within real-world care delivery.

Pieter Hartel, Marianne Junger, Mark van Staalduinen

Abstract Objective This study examines Bitcoin generator (BG) websites on the clear and dark web. It focuses on their prevalence, revenue, and associated warnings, as these sites are suspected scams. Method Data for the study was gathered from the Dark Web Monitor and Iknaio Cryptoasset Analytics. A four-step process was used to identify BG sites and their Bitcoin addresses from 2 million dark websites. Results We found 832 dark web BG sites. The monetary revenue from a dark web BG site is approximately 1/3 smaller per Bitcoin address than from a clear web BG site. There is a concentration of revenue at a few BG sites. Only 24% of Bitcoin addresses on dark web BG sites have ever had money deposited on them. On the dark web, the top three clusters of crypto addresses account for 35% of the total revenue. On the clear web, the top three clusters account for 52% of the total revenue. The longer BG sites are online, the higher the revenue. There are hardly any warnings against BG sites. Conclusion Our results fit the Rational Choice model of crime: the revenue is modest, but the effort of the offenders is also limited.

Jazmine M. Li, Dawn Gruss, Timothy Hunt et al.

Abstract Background The HEALing Communities Study was a multi-site cluster randomized waitlist-controlled trial evaluating a community-engaged, data-driven intervention to select and deploy evidence-based practices (EBPs) including overdose education and naloxone distribution (OEND), medication for opioid use disorder (MOUD), and safer opioid prescribing. The trial was conducted in 67 highly impacted communities in 4 states, including 8 Rural and 8 urban communities in New York State (NYS). To inform future community-level decision making, we estimated the implementation costs of the EBPs selected by NYS communities. Methods The study was implemented between January 2020-June 2022 (Wave 1, 30 months duration including the peak COVID-19 emergency period) and July 2022-December 2023 (Wave 2, 18 months); each wave included 4 Rural and 4 urban NYS communities. We collected cost data prospectively using invoices, administrative records, and interviews with program staff and stakeholders. We then conducted a micro-costing analysis from the community perspective and compared costs from Waves 1 and 2. Results In both Waves, each community deployed on average 15 EBPs (range 8–25). EBP costs averaged $705,000 (range $320,000-$1.3 million) and $312,000 (range $39,200-$686,300) in Waves 1 and 2, respectively. In Wave 1, 25% of costs were allocated for OEND, 71% for MOUD, and 4% for safer prescribing, compared to 38% for OEND, 60% for MOUD, and 2% for safer prescribing in Wave 2. Average EBP costs per community were $147,600 (range $20,900-$374,000) for those in the OEND category, $345,400 (range $4,100-$1.1 million) for MOUD, and $16,400 (range $360-$105,500) for safer prescribing. Total EBP cost per capita in urban communities was $0.32 compared to $2.65 in Rural communities in Wave 1, and $0.41 urban communities compared to $0.65 in Rural communities in Wave 2. Conclusions The lower EBP costs in Wave 2 resulted from differences in EBP categories and specific EBPs selected and may also reflect differences in the duration of the intervention and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic over time. Higher per capita costs in rural communities indicate that many costs were not directly related to the number of individuals served.

Kaito Fujii

This paper investigates the role of mediators in Bayesian games by examining their impact on social welfare through the price of anarchy (PoA) and price of stability (PoS). Mediators can communicate with players to guide them toward equilibria of varying quality, and different communication protocols lead to a variety of equilibrium concepts collectively known as Bayes (coarse) correlated equilibria. To analyze these equilibrium concepts, we consider a general class of Bayesian games with submodular social welfare, which naturally extends valid utility games and their variant, basic utility games. These frameworks, introduced by Vetta (2002), have been developed to analyze the social welfare guarantees of equilibria in games such as competitive facility location, influence maximization, and other resource allocation problems. We provide upper and lower bounds on the PoA and PoS for a broad class of Bayes (coarse) correlated equilibria. Central to our analysis is the strategy representability gap, which measures the multiplicative gap between the optimal social welfare achievable with and without knowledge of other players' types. For monotone submodular social welfare functions, we show that this gap is $1-1/\mathrm{e}$ for independent priors and $Θ(1/\sqrt{n})$ for correlated priors, where $n$ is the number of players. These bounds directly lead to upper and lower bounds on the PoA and PoS for various equilibrium concepts, while we also derive improved bounds for specific concepts by developing smoothness arguments. Notably, we identify a fundamental gap in the PoA and PoS across different classes of Bayes correlated equilibria, highlighting essential distinctions among these concepts.

Dachun Sun, You Lyu, Jinning Li et al.

This paper introduces SCRAG, a prediction framework inspired by social computing, designed to forecast community responses to real or hypothetical social media posts. SCRAG can be used by public relations specialists (e.g., to craft messaging in ways that avoid unintended misinterpretations) or public figures and influencers (e.g., to anticipate social responses), among other applications related to public sentiment prediction, crisis management, and social what-if analysis. While large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in generating coherent and contextually rich text, their reliance on static training data and susceptibility to hallucinations limit their effectiveness at response forecasting in dynamic social media environments. SCRAG overcomes these challenges by integrating LLMs with a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) technique rooted in social computing. Specifically, our framework retrieves (i) historical responses from the target community to capture their ideological, semantic, and emotional makeup, and (ii) external knowledge from sources such as news articles to inject time-sensitive context. This information is then jointly used to forecast the responses of the target community to new posts or narratives. Extensive experiments across six scenarios on the X platform (formerly Twitter), tested with various embedding models and LLMs, demonstrate over 10% improvements on average in key evaluation metrics. A concrete example further shows its effectiveness in capturing diverse ideologies and nuances. Our work provides a social computing tool for applications where accurate and concrete insights into community responses are crucial.

Meritxell Abellan-Almenara

In December 2021, the government of Denmark entered into a rental agreement with Kosovo whereby 300 non-EU foreign nationals convicted by the Danish criminal justice system would be sent to Kosovo to serve their sentence of imprisonment and await their subsequent deportation. Based on an analysis of the wording of the Agreements on the finances of the Danish Prison Service, the article argues that a conceptualization of prison space as a welfare state's scarce resource makes it possible to explain such rental agreement through the theories of welfare and penal nationalism. In doing so, the article contributes to the growing body of literature that exposes the inherently dual harsh-but-mild nature of the penal regimes of Nordic welfare states. The article concludes with a brief outline of the future challenges that can potentially arise once the Denmark–Kosovo rental agreement enters into force.

Hongzhan Lin, Ziyang Luo, Bo Wang et al.

The exponential growth of social media has profoundly transformed how information is created, disseminated, and absorbed, exceeding any precedent in the digital age. Regrettably, this explosion has also spawned a significant increase in the online abuse of memes. Evaluating the negative impact of memes is notably challenging, owing to their often subtle and implicit meanings, which are not directly conveyed through the overt text and image. In light of this, large multimodal models (LMMs) have emerged as a focal point of interest due to their remarkable capabilities in handling diverse multimodal tasks. In response to this development, our paper aims to thoroughly examine the capacity of various LMMs (e.g., GPT-4o) to discern and respond to the nuanced aspects of social abuse manifested in memes. We introduce the comprehensive meme benchmark, GOAT-Bench, comprising over 6K varied memes encapsulating themes such as implicit hate speech, sexism, and cyberbullying, etc. Utilizing GOAT-Bench, we delve into the ability of LMMs to accurately assess hatefulness, misogyny, offensiveness, sarcasm, and harmful content. Our extensive experiments across a range of LMMs reveal that current models still exhibit a deficiency in safety awareness, showing insensitivity to various forms of implicit abuse. We posit that this shortfall represents a critical impediment to the realization of safe artificial intelligence. The GOAT-Bench and accompanying resources are publicly accessible at https://goatlmm.github.io/, contributing to ongoing research in this vital field.

Edoardo Allegrini, Edoardo Di Paolo, Marinella Petrocchi et al.

Social media platforms continue to struggle with the growing presence of social bots-automated accounts that can influence public opinion and facilitate the spread of disinformation. Over time, these social bots have advanced significantly, making them increasingly difficult to distinguish from genuine users. Recently, new groups of bots have emerged, utilizing Large Language Models to generate content for posting, further complicating detection efforts. This paper proposes a novel approach that uses algorithms to measure the similarity between DNA strings, commonly used in biological contexts, to classify social users as bots or not. Our approach begins by clustering social media users into distinct macro species based on the similarities (and differences) observed in their timelines. These macro species are subsequently classified as either bots or genuine users, using a novel metric we developed that evaluates their behavioral characteristics in a way that mirrors biological comparison methods. This study extends beyond past approaches that focus solely on identical behaviors via analyses of the accounts' timelines. By incorporating new metrics, our approach systematically classifies non-trivial accounts into appropriate categories, effectively peeling back layers to reveal non-obvious species.

Yasuko Kawahata

This paper delves into the history and integration of quantum theory into areas such as opinion dynamics, decision theory, and game theory, offering a novel framework for social simulations. It introduces a quantum perspective for analyzing information transfer and decision-making complexity within social systems, employing a toric code-based method for error discrimination.Central to this research is the use of toric codes, originally for quantum error correction, to detect and correct errors in social simulations, representing uncertainty in opinion formation and decision-making processes. Operator and error syndrome measurement, vital in quantum computation, help identify and analyze errors and uncertainty in social simulations. The paper also discusses fault-tolerant computation employing transversal gates, which protect against errors during quantum computation. In social simulations, transversal gates model protection from external interference and misinformation, enhancing the fidelity of decision-making and strategy formation processes.

Robert Ganian, Thekla Hamm, Dušan Knop et al.

Social distance games have been extensively studied as a coalition formation model where the utilities of agents in each coalition were captured using a utility function $u$ that took into account distances in a given social network. In this paper, we consider a non-normalized score-based definition of social distance games where the utility function $u^s$ depends on a generic scoring vector $s$, which may be customized to match the specifics of each individual application scenario. As our main technical contribution, we establish the tractability of computing a welfare-maximizing partitioning of the agents into coalitions on tree-like networks, for every score-based function $u^s$. We provide more efficient algorithms when dealing with specific choices of $u^s$ or simpler networks, and also extend all of these results to computing coalitions that are Nash stable or individually rational. We view these results as a further strong indication of the usefulness of the proposed score-based utility function: even on very simple networks, the problem of computing a welfare-maximizing partitioning into coalitions remains open for the originally considered canonical function $u$.

Christopher Schneider

Public criminology is concerned with public understandings of crime and policing and public discussions of such matters by criminologists and allied social scientists. For the purposes of this paper, these professionals are individuals identified by journalists on the basis of academic credentials or university affiliation as those who can speak to crime matters. This qualitative study investigates media statements made by criminologists and allied social scientists following the 2020 murder of George Floyd with two questions in mind: How have they responded to debates over reforming, defunding, and abolishing police? What insight can these responses provide about public criminology more generally? I analyze statements offered by criminologists in news reports and on Twitter using Qualitative Media Analysis, an approach that emphasizes the processes through which discourse is presented to audiences. I argue that recent criminological debates in the media concerning the future of policing have exposed unresolvable tensions among scholars who engage in the practice of public criminology, suggesting that the public is not receiving coherent, authoritative messages about these issues. The findings also raise questions about public criminology and illuminate new concerns regarding scholarly expertise related to knowledge claims and credibility relative to social justice.

David Pålsson, Elisabeth Backe-Hansen, Laura Kalliomaa-Puha et al.

Licensing is a public instrument used to control welfare services. One such service is residential care for children, which is targeted at children who experience maltreatment in their home environment and/or have behavioural problems and have been separated from their parents by the authorities. In Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark, residential care may be provided by public or private (not-for-profit or for-profit) providers. The aim of this article is to explore and compare how public authorities in Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Denmark, license residential care for children. The data consist of application forms and instructions for how to apply for a licence as well as interviews with key staff responsible for licensing. The findings show differences in how national agencies license residential care providers. Licensing models may be centralised/general (Sweden, Finland) or regionalised/specialised towards residential care (Norway, Denmark). The process can be more investigative (Sweden, Norway) or consultative (Finland, Denmark), and the review of standards formality-oriented (Sweden, Finland, Norway) or content-oriented (Denmark). Finally, the models of supervision post-licence vary in terms of being non-intervening (Finland), semi-intervening (Sweden, Norway) or intervening (Denmark). The discussion centres on the possible contribution of the different models to the regulation of the residential care markets.

Rajesh Bhusal, Saros Giree, Sumina Machamasi

Using the Participatory Action Research (PAR) method, the article examines the life experiences of transgender women and their cumulative effects on their psychological well-being. The conceptual framework enabled discussion series with the twenty-five respondents, which consisted of seven different discussion topics. The result shows that the participants have both positive and negative aspects of well-being; in particular, it was found that the positive aspects of well-being were higher among them. These findings later discussed the possible implications on social work practice and education in Nepal.

Marta Martí

Abstract Open prisons are low-security penitentiary institutions in which life conditions are less strict than in closed prisons, and where prisoners have more contact with the outside world. Despite sharing important features, some variations can be found in the model of open prisons in different countries. This article describes the Catalan open prison model, characterized by the fact that prisoners serve the sentence in full semi-liberty; that is, by day they work and spend time with their families or doing other activities, but return to prison to sleep. As a contribution to the comparative study of open prisons, I describe here how Catalan open prisons are run and discuss the concept of ‘openness’ with reference, above all, to the open prisons that exist in Scandinavian countries. This work shows that the degree of openness of open prisons varies considerably between different countries – therefore approaching community penalties or closed prisons in a greater or lesser extent – and suggests that the role that open prisons are granted in each penal system is part of the explanation.1 1)Marta Martí holds a PhD in Law (Criminology). Currently, she is working as an external consultant for the International Committee of the Red Cross in El Salvador and she is member of the Research Group in Criminology and Criminal Justice System of Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Spain). This article is based on her PhD dissertation, ‘One foot in and one foot out: serving a prison sentence in an open prison’, which was accepted in November 2018 in Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Spain). The full version of the dissertation (in Spanish) can be found on the following link: https://repositori.upf.edu/handle/10230/36320. This article is part of the project ‘Ejecución y supervisión de la pena: calidad de la intervención, legitimidad y reincidencia’ (DER2015-64403-P), funded by the Spanish Government. Abstract Åbne fængsler har et lavere control-niveau end lukkede fængsler og indsatte i åbne fængsler har mere kontakt til verden uden for fængslet. Trods mange ligheder findes der også en del forskelle imellem åbne fængsler i forskellige lande. I denneartikel præsenteres åbne fængsler i Catalonien. Disse er kendetegnet ved at de indsatte rent faktisk nyder delvis frihed. Det indebærer, at de i dagtimerne går på arbejde uden for fængslet eller tilbringer tid sammen med deres familie eller er beskæftiget på anden måde i lokalområdet. Om aftenen vender de tilbage til fængslet og tilbringer natten dér. I artiklen sammenlignes de catalanske åbne fængsler med åbne fængsler i Skandinavien. Sammenligningen viser, at der er store forskelle i graden af åbenhed i åbne fængsler, nogle steder ligger de tættere på samfunds-straffe og andre steder langt tættere på lukkede fængsler. Der argumenteres for, at en del af forklaringen her på er, hvilken rolle i det samlede nationale straffesystem de åbne fængsler har i forskellige lande.

Joshua Kavner, Lirong Xia

Recent work in iterative voting has defined the additive dynamic price of anarchy (ADPoA) as the difference in social welfare between the truthful and worst-case equilibrium profiles resulting from repeated strategic manipulations. While iterative plurality has been shown to only return alternatives with at most one less initial votes than the truthful winner, it is less understood how agents' welfare changes in equilibrium. To this end, we differentiate agents' utility from their manipulation mechanism and determine iterative plurality's ADPoA in the worst- and average-cases. We first prove that the worst-case ADPoA is linear in the number of agents. To overcome this negative result, we study the average-case ADPoA and prove that equilibrium winners have a constant order welfare advantage over the truthful winner in expectation. Our positive results illustrate the prospect for social welfare to increase due to strategic manipulation.

Mordwa Stanisław, Laskowska Patrycja

The article presents the spatial distribution of environmental crime predictors, valuation of the impact of these factors on local security conditions and spatiotemporal patterns of crime within space of the Stare Bałuty housing estate in Łódź. The purpose of this study was to recognize the impact of spatial distribution of crime predictors on the pattern of urban crime. The main conclusion from this research is that the city space is diverse both in terms of identified crime predictors and the sites of committed offences. It turned out that the distribution patterns of these two phenomena overlap to a large extent, and that there is a tendency to concentration of crime in the immediate surroundings of the identified crime predictors.

Liliana Estupiñán Achury

A pesar de no haberse consagrado un título o capítulo especial sobre los derechos de la naturaleza o la naturaleza como sujeto de protección jurídica en la Constitución Política de Colombia de 1991, algunos principios, derechos de diversas clases, consagraciones especiales o explícitas en materia de derecho ambiental y el bloque de constitucionalidad han permitido la construcción real del concepto que se puede visualizar en diversos movimientos sociales, ambientalistas y de protección de la Madre Tierra, pactos sociales y políticos de diversos actores territoriales y nacionales, y pronunciamientos jurisprudenciales “heréticos”, para la doctrina tradicional, que incluso han permitido pensar en una reforma constitucional para insertar esta novedosa categoría en el Texto Político de 1991.

Juan Cao, Peng Qi, Qiang Sheng et al.

The increasing popularity of social media promotes the proliferation of fake news, which has caused significant negative societal effects. Therefore, fake news detection on social media has recently become an emerging research area of great concern. With the development of multimedia technology, fake news attempts to utilize multimedia content with images or videos to attract and mislead consumers for rapid dissemination, which makes visual content an important part of fake news. Despite the importance of visual content, our understanding of the role of visual content in fake news detection is still limited. This chapter presents a comprehensive review of the visual content in fake news, including the basic concepts, effective visual features, representative detection methods and challenging issues of multimedia fake news detection. This chapter can help readers to understand the role of visual content in fake news detection, and effectively utilize visual content to assist in detecting multimedia fake news.

Gavin Bart, Jeffrey Samet

Veli-Matti Karhulahti, Raine Koskimaa

We bring attention to a notable unreported “gaming addiction” or “problem gaming” prevalence data set that adds significantly to both the DSM-5′s call for further Internet Gaming Disorder research as well as many other scientific encouragements for more wide-ranging reports on the topic. Keywords: Gaming disorder, Internet gaming disorder, Prevalence, Finland