Diminishing Transparency: A Critical Analysis of India’s Right to Information Act and Lessons from Nepal
Dr. Sanjay Bang and Navodita Kaushik
Although it is a notable legislative intervention of India’s transparency architecture, the Right to Information Act of 2005 demonstrates a clear disconnect between effectiveness in operation and statutory sophistication. This paper synthesizes and assesses academic scholarship that includes doctoral jurisprudence, empirical studies, comparative institutional analysis, and critical policy values in order to examine the constitutional history, implementation strategies, and systematic barriers of RTI over its two decades of existence. The research reveals a crucial impasse: India’s RTI loss rank sixth globally for statutory quality, yet their effectiveness and implementation rank sixty-sixth, indicating several enforcement flaws that seriously undermine the law’s capacity to achieve transformative social changes. The evolution of informational rights under legal framework demonstrated how judicial activism translated implicit rights under Article 19(1)(a)1 into explicit statutory architecture, redefining transparency as a normative standard of democracy rather than a legislative peculiarity. The effectiveness of RTI is perpetually undermined by seven significant operational pathologies; the 2019 amendment’s2 erosion of Information Commission’s independence through executive control over tenure and compensation; the strategic deployment of exemption provisions as obfuscation mechanisms; the continued exemption of publicly-funded political parties from disclosure requirements despite explicit judicial directives; the ineffectiveness of penalty provisions as deterrents; widespread bureaucratic resistance manifested through personal vacancies, procedural delays and antiquated record management processes, complete non-compliance with proactive disclosure mandates under Section 43; and the absence of adequate whistleblower protections framework highlighted by documented activist deaths. Comparative analysis with Nepal’s RTI framework reveals instructive lessons regarding institutional device design, enforcement mechanisms and civil society mobilization. Important gaps remain in present research including comparative institutional studies and evaluating progressive transparency models; intersectional analyses investigating disparate access patterns among marginal communities; technological integration evaluations assessing digital governance applications; and longitudinal econometric analyses linking RTI utilization with corruption indices. Realizing the RTI’s democratic potential necessitates prioritizing sectoral efficiency evaluations, technology-enabled transparency innovations, rigorous impact assessments, and comprehensive enforcement architecture reconstitution beyond merely symbolic legislative compliance
Potencialidades y limitaciones de la aplicación de la reconstrucción cráneo-facial en la investigación forense
Gustavo Faúndez Salinas
La evidencia en una investigación forense, exige el desarrollo y la aplicación de un análisis crítico de las imágenes, así como el estudio de su circulación y transformación.
Este trabajo plantea la necesidad de contextualizar el desarrollo histórico de la reconstrucción cráneo-facial, en el marco de las técnicas biométricas y de identificación facial y evaluar las posibilidades y limitaciones, que trae consigo su aplicación forense.
Se propone una puesta en contexto de las aplicaciones más recientes de la antropometría, así como la realización de un análisis de fortalezas, oportunidades, debilidades y amenazas, con el fin de alcanzar claridad, respecto de las condiciones en que resulta pertinente utilizarla y cuáles son profesionales forenses idóneos, a quienes solicitar su aplicación.
Finalmente, se concluye que, con el objeto de sacar el máximo provecho del empleo de la reconstrucción cráneo-facial forense, es necesario tener claros sus límites, contar con un perfil de los profesionales idóneos y moderar las expectativas respecto de sus alcances.
Criminal law and procedure, Medical legislation
Behind Bars: An In-depth Analysis of Women Prisoners in India
A. Mateen
Female criminality has historically been overlooked, largely due to prevailing stereotypes that portray women as inherently more honest and less prone to criminal behavior. The dominant societal narrative continues to frame crime as a predominantly male phenomenon. Consequently, women who commit crimes are often marginalized, and when incarcerated, they are subjected to prison systems designed primarily for male inmates. Female prisoners face a unique set of challenges within the penal system, encompassing social, economic, cultural, physical, and psychological dimensions. Although women constitute a minority of the prison population, data indicate a concerning upward trend in female criminality. The proportion of women arrested for various crimes rose from 5.4% in 2001 to 6.2% in 2011. Despite their growing numbers, female prisoners often remain peripheral in criminological discourse, and their rights are frequently violated within systems that fail to account for gender-specific needs and experiences. Long-term incarceration tends to reinforce and magnify the oppressive mechanisms that women already endure in broader society. Understanding how women experience imprisonment—especially long sentences—requires a recognition of the abuse many have endured in their communities, as well as the emotional and biographical contexts that shape their lives. Importantly, incarceration does not strip individuals of their human rights. As affirmed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), limitations on a prisoner’s rights must align with the principles of morality, public order, and the general welfare in a democratic society. This paper employs both qualitative and quantitative methods to examine the lived experiences of female convicts. It aims to challenge the notion that criminality is inherently masculine by centering on the voices and narratives of incarcerated women. In doing so, it sheds light on their vulnerabilities, institutional struggles, and the broader neglect of their rights and realities in both academic and policy discussions.
The role of law enforcement in protecting elder rights in Thailand: findings from a mixed methods study
Kraiwoot Wattanasin, Sahaphat Homjan
The change in Thailand to a super-aged society means that elder protection has become a national priority. Although elder abuse is reported to the police and law enforcement is usually the first responder, they are not trained in protecting older people, particularly in cases of emotional abuse and economic exploitation. This study aims to present the prevalence of elder abuse in urban Thailand and examine the role, perception and limitations of law enforcement in elder protection. The authors used a sequential, explanatory, mixed-methods design to collect survey data, specifically with 500 older adults, stratified randomly. Face-to-face surveys explored elder abuse, legal knowledge and awareness, and perceptions of police involvement in elder protection. Qualitative data were obtained through 20 key informant interviews (police, social workers, medical personnel and legal professionals). Quantitative data analysis included t-tests, ANOVA and regression; qualitative knowledge was thematically coded. The form of elder abuse most commonly observed by older adults was emotional (44.2%) and economic (39.8%); rates were higher for emotional and economic abuse among female older adults and those with lower education. The best predictor of how older adults viewed police effectiveness was the level of education, legal knowledge, and previous engagement with police. The qualitative findings revealed challenges related to legal ambiguity, poor inter-agency coordination, and officer burnout. Cultural restrictions on families with elder abuse and the privatization of family violence were also issues to address. The study focused solely on urban contexts located in Bangkok; therefore, it may not consider rural or minority ethnospecific experiences. While this limits representational validity, sampling of key informants in this study created a selection bias across institutional perspectives. Although limitations impacted the representational validity of the general findings, the mixed-methods approach permitted strong data triangulation to imply, point to recommendations and generate future work with action. Future studies should concern rural–urban disparity, longitudinal movements in elder abuse and comparisons as to how law enforcement protections vulnerable elderly individuals in the local or international contexts. The importance of implementing integrated Elder Protection Units within the Royal Thai Police, standardized inter-agency referral protocols in elder protection cases and training in elder rights and trauma-informed policing can effectuate real change in elder protection. The call for policy reform based on systemic gaps in public legal education, community awareness of empowering older persons through volunteers, is an actionable strategy with immediate implications to boost elder protection in Thailand and improve the consideration of older individuals’ dignity and rights through their engagement with social justice. Elder abuse identified within social structures by culture and silence is difficult to amend in Thailand. This research indicated that systemic deficits in policing, social protection and factors beyond themselves impacted individual factors in reporting elder abuse or neglect, endorsed normalization through silent family structures and spell blindness through the lack of responses by police as a symptom of systemic failures. Framing elder abuse as human rights concerns instead of individual ones promotes reformulation of police responder roles and behavior, catalyses engagement of community in the matter and promotes protection of elder persons' rights and dignity toward aging respectfully together. This research is one of the few studies in Thailand to use amixed-methods design to investigate elder abuse and the role of law enforcement. The topic of this study focuses on a seldom discussed venue of the police as operational and perception lenses in how to contribute to restoring elder protection and protection in an aging society. The theoretical framework draws from social ecology, routine activity theories, victimology and costs that create nodes between criminology points of view and social welfare policy. The evidence draws on local and global lessons learned in monitoring and creating actionable recommendations with a reorganization of the role of police in elder protection matters contributing globally to the conversation of aging rights, and policing in the Asian region.
Avatar Communication Provides More Efficient Online Social Support Than Text Communication
Masanori Takano, Kenji Yokotani, Takahiro Kato
et al.
Online communication via avatars provides a richer online social experience than text communication. This reinforces the importance of online social support. Online social support is effective for people who lack social resources because of the anonymity of online communities. We aimed to understand online social support via avatars and their social relationships to provide better social support to avatar users. Therefore, we administered a questionnaire to three avatar communication service users (Second Life, ZEPETO, and Pigg Party) and three text communication service users (Facebook, X, and Instagram) (N=8,947). There was no duplication of users for each service. By comparing avatar and text communication users, we examined the amount of online social support, stability of online relationships, and the relationships between online social support and offline social resources (e.g., offline social support). We observed that avatar communication service users received more online social support, had more stable relationships, and had fewer offline social resources than text communication service users. However, the positive association between online and offline social support for avatar communication users was more substantial than for text communication users. These findings highlight the significance of realistic online communication experiences through avatars, including nonverbal and real-time interactions with co-presence. The findings also highlighted avatar communication service users' problems in the physical world, such as the lack of offline social resources. This study suggests that enhancing online social support through avatars can address these issues. This could help resolve social resource problems, both online and offline in future metaverse societies.
Whose Values? Measuring the (Subjective) Expression of Basic Human Values in Social Media
Ziv Epstein, Farnaz Jahanbakhsh, Tiziano Piccardi
et al.
The value alignment of sociotechnical systems has become a central debate, but progress depends on how human values are perceived in the content these systems surface and how such perceptions can be measured at scale. Social media platforms are a prominent class of sociotechnical systems where algorithmic curation shapes exposure to value-laden content at scale. Large-language models offer new opportunities for measuring expressions of human values (e.g., humility or equality) in social media data, but value expressions can be subjective: different people will annotate the same post with different values. In this paper, we draw on the Schwartz value system as a broadly encompassing and theoretically grounded set of basic human values, and introduce a framework to personalize the measurement of expressions of Schwartz values in social media posts at scale. We collect 32,370 ground truth value expression annotations from N=1,079 people on 5,211 social media posts representative of real users' feeds. Due to the subjectivity of the task, we observe low levels of inter-rater agreement between people, and low agreement between human raters and LLM-based methods. In response, we construct a personalization architecture for classifying value expressions by learning from a small number of highly informative calibration annotations per user. In evaluation, we find that modeling these differences successfully yields value expression predictions that people agree with more than they agree with other people. These results contribute new methods and understanding for the measurement of human values in social media data.
A supressão da garantia do habeas corpus no caso Kiss
Theuan Carvalho Gomes
A tragédia da Boate Kiss ganhou repercussão nacional e, no último mês de dezembro, foi julgada no Tribunal do Júri. Todavia, a principal controvérsia que decorreu do julgamento veio justamente do Supremo Tribunal Federal. No último dia 16 de dezembro, o Ministro Luiz Fux, a bem da verdade, impediu que o Tribunal de Justiça do Rio Grande do Sul concedesse Habeas Corpus aos acusados. No limite, houve supressão da garantia do Habeas Corpus. Se mantida tal decisão pelo plenário, todavia, o Brasil poderá ser condenado no Sistema Interamericano de Direitos Humanos. Diante desse quadro, à luz da Constituição Federal, evidencia-se o fundamental papel que o Plenário do Supremo desempenhará no julgamento do caso concreto.
Criminal law and procedure, Social pathology. Social and public welfare. Criminology
Interpreting
L. Bowker, Dorothy Kenny, Jennifer Pearson
Stephanie Jo Kent University of Massachusetts Amherst Multilingual, and Multicultural Education Commons, Business Administration, Management, and Operations Commons, Business and Corporate Communications Commons, Business Law, Public Responsibility, and Ethics Commons, Civil Law Commons, Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons, Communications Law Commons, Communication Technology and New Media Commons, Comparative and Foreign Law Commons, Controls and Control Theory Commons, Criminology and Criminal Justice Commons, Critical and Cultural Studies Commons, Cultural History Commons, Cultural Resource Management and Policy Analysis Commons, Curriculum and Social Inquiry Commons, Digital Communications and Networking Commons, Disability Law Commons, European History Commons, European Languages and Societies Commons, European Law Commons, Game Design Commons, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine Commons, Human Geography Commons, Human Rights Law Commons, Immigration Law Commons, Indian and Aboriginal Law Commons, Industrial Organization Commons, Inequality and Stratification Commons, Intellectual History Commons, Interactive Arts Commons, International and Intercultural Communication Commons, International Business Commons, International Economics Commons, International Law Commons, Interpersonal and Small Group Communication Commons, Labor History Commons, Law and Politics Commons, Law and Society Commons, Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility Commons, Linguistic Anthropology Commons, Mental and Social Health Commons, Models and Methods Commons, Modern Languages Commons, Nonfiction Commons, Operational Research Commons, Organizational Behavior and Theory Commons, Organizational Communication Commons, Organizations Law Commons, Other American Studies Commons, Other Languages, Societies, and Cultures Commons, Peace and Conflict Studies Commons, Performance Studies Commons, Philosophy of Language Commons, Philosophy of Mind Commons, Philosophy of Science Commons, Policy Design, Analysis, and Evaluation Commons, Political Economy Commons, Political History Commons, Political Theory Commons, Politics and Social Change Commons, Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics Commons, Public Administration Commons, Public Affairs Commons, Public Economics Commons, Public Health Commons, Public Law and Legal Theory Commons, Public Policy Commons, Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies Commons, Risk Analysis Commons, Science and Technology Law Commons, Science and Technology Policy Commons, Science and Technology Studies Commons, Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons, Social History Commons, Social Influence and Political Communication Commons, Social Policy Commons, Social Psychology Commons, Social Psychology and Interaction Commons, Social Welfare Commons, Social Welfare Law Commons, Sociology of Culture Commons, Speech and Rhetorical Studies Commons, State and Local Government Law Commons, Systems and Communications Commons, Systems Engineering Commons, Teacher Education and Professional Development Commons, Theory, Knowledge and Science Commons, Training and Development Commons, Transnational Law Commons, Typological Linguistics and Linguistic Diversity Commons, Urban Studies Commons, and the Work, Economy and Organizations Commons
KEBIJAKAN PENEGAKAN HUKUM PIDANA DALAM MENANGGULANGI PERJUDIAN
Ida Arodatul Jannah, A. Burhan, Kebijakan Penegakan
et al.
Criminal law is often used to solve social problems, especially in crime prevention. In particular, the problem of gambling as a form of social disease, a form of social pathology. Enforcement of criminal law to tackle gambling as deviant behavior must continue to be carried out. This is very reasonable because gambling is a threat a real threat to social norms that can lead to individual tensions as well as social tensions. Gambling is a real or potential threat to the nation. Thus gambling can become an obstacle to national development with material-spiritual aspects. Because gambling educates people to make a living in an unreasonable manner and forming a "lazy" character. While development requires individuals who are active, hard working and mentally strong. It is very reasonable then gambling must immediately find ways and rational solutions for a solution. Because it is clear that gambling is a social problem that can interfere with the social functions of society. One of the rational efforts used to tackle gambling is the criminal law policy approach.The use of legal remedies, including criminal law, as an effort to overcome social problems, including in the field of law enforcement policies. Besides that, because the goal is to achieve public welfare in general, law enforcement policies are also included in the field of social policy, namely all rational efforts to achieve public welfare.
Il bisogno affettivo e l’inganno dei social: i presupposti e le pratiche del Romance Scam
Mariangela D'Ambrosio, Davide Barba
In today's society, love becomes an escape from loneliness and an object of digital relationships that often seem to replace “human” relationships in an already very complex sentimental dynamic, but even more complex after the experience of SARS-CoV-2. Such “emotional sensitivity” (Condorelli, 2021) is part of the broader, current, and renewed debate on the affective bond of the love type that, from the individual space with tangible characteristics, is manifested on the stage of online estimity (Tisseron, 2011; Stanton et al., 2016). Indeed, according to the Postal Police in 2021, there was +118% of sentimental scams in Italy (Polizia Postale, 2022). In particular, among these dangers, there is the Romance Scam (Love Scam or also known as sweetheart swindles), as to say a criminal practice in which a user is lured by scammers who use a fake or stolen identity on social networks in order to extort, scam or blackmail the victim who believes they are experiencing a real love relationship (Whitty, 2015; 2018; Carter, 2021; Cassandra, Lee, 2022; Suleman et al., 2023). Therefore, the essay aims to reflect on the online dynamic from a socio-criminological point of view, starting from the theories to arriving at the most recent and current implications of the phenomenon with particular attention to the underlying and emerging emotional dynamics.
Social pathology. Social and public welfare. Criminology
Poner(nos) en común: Producción de conocimientos y narrativas en/desde el trabajo social
Mitzi Duboy Luengo, Cory Duarte Hidalgo, Natalia Hernández Mary
En este artículo desarrollamos un ejercicio reflexivo respecto de la producción de conocimientos en trabajo social, sus entramados con el poder, y la forma en que está geo y corpo-políticamente situado, destacando en ello una propuesta metodológica para la producción de conocimiento: las Producciones Narrativas. Para ello, planteamos la necesidad de ampliar los márgenes hegemónicos, saliendo de la presunción de objetividad que algunos modelos de generación de conocimiento, sostenidos por un ethos neoliberal, colonial y patriarcal, reafirman. Desde ahí,revisamos las relaciones de poder, sus articulaciones con las lógicas de producción de conocimiento en las Ciencias Sociales en general y en trabajo social en particular, cuestionando la producción académica y las prácticas habituales de conocimiento a las que acude la disciplina. Proponemos entrelazar al trabajo social con las prácticas y teorías feministas, materializadas en la integración de las Producciones Narrativas como una estrategia metodológica feminista, cuyo principal valor es que nos permite tejernos en común, generando procesos de co-labor, deconstruyendo los espacios naturalizados e integrando elementos afectivos, colaborativos y corporeizados.
Social pathology. Social and public welfare. Criminology
Some coordination problems are harder than others
Argyrios Deligkas, E. Eiben, G. Gutin
et al.
In order to coordinate players in a game must first identify a target pattern of behaviour. In this paper we investigate the difficulty of identifying prominent outcomes in two kinds of binary action coordination problems in social networks: pure coordination games and anti-coordination games. For both environments, we determine the computational complexity of finding a strategy profile that (i) maximises welfare, (ii) maximises welfare subject to being an equilibrium, and (iii) maximises potential. We show that the complexity of these objectives can vary with the type of coordination problem. Objectives (i) and (iii) are tractable problems in pure coordination games, but for anti-coordination games are NP-hard. Objective (ii), finding the best Nash equilibrium, is NP-hard for both. Our results support the idea that environments in which actions are strategic complements (e.g., technology adoption) facilitate successful coordination more readily than those in which actions are strategic substitutes (e.g., public good provision).
en
Economics, Computer Science
Creating a Systematic ESG (Environmental Social Governance) Scoring System Using Social Network Analysis and Machine Learning for More Sustainable Company Practices
Aarav Patel, Peter Gloor
Environmental Social Governance (ESG) is a widely used metric that measures the sustainability of a company practices. Currently, ESG is determined using self-reported corporate filings, which allows companies to portray themselves in an artificially positive light. As a result, ESG evaluation is subjective and inconsistent across raters, giving executives mixed signals on what to improve. This project aims to create a data-driven ESG evaluation system that can provide better guidance and more systemized scores by incorporating social sentiment. Social sentiment allows for more balanced perspectives which directly highlight public opinion, helping companies create more focused and impactful initiatives. To build this, Python web scrapers were developed to collect data from Wikipedia, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google News for the S&P 500 companies. Data was then cleaned and passed through NLP algorithms to obtain sentiment scores for ESG subcategories. Using these features, machine-learning algorithms were trained and calibrated to S&P Global ESG Ratings to test their predictive capabilities. The Random-Forest model was the strongest model with a mean absolute error of 13.4% and a correlation of 26.1% (p-value 0.0372), showing encouraging results. Overall, measuring ESG social sentiment across sub-categories can help executives focus efforts on areas people care about most. Furthermore, this data-driven methodology can provide ratings for companies without coverage, allowing more socially responsible firms to thrive.
Gender Gaps in Online Social Connectivity, Promotion and Relocation Reports on LinkedIn
Ghazal Kalhor, Hannah Gardner, Ingmar Weber
et al.
Online professional social networking platforms provide opportunities to expand networks strategically for job opportunities and career advancement. A large body of research shows that women's offline networks are less advantageous than men's. How online platforms such as LinkedIn may reflect or reproduce gendered networking behaviours, or how online social connectivity may affect outcomes differentially by gender is not well understood. This paper analyses aggregate, anonymised data from almost 10 million LinkedIn users in the UK and US information technology (IT) sector collected from the site's advertising platform to explore how being connected to Big Tech companies ('social connectivity') varies by gender, and how gender, age, seniority and social connectivity shape the propensity to report job promotions or relocations. Consistent with previous studies, we find there are fewer women compared to men on LinkedIn in IT. Furthermore, female users are less likely to be connected to Big Tech companies than men. However, when we further analyse recent promotion or relocation reports, we find women are more likely than men to have reported a recent promotion at work, suggesting high-achieving women may be self-selecting onto LinkedIn. Even among this positively selected group, though, we find men are more likely to report a recent relocation. Social connectivity emerges as a significant predictor of promotion and relocation reports, with an interaction effect between gender and social connectivity indicating the payoffs to social connectivity for promotion and relocation reports are larger for women. This suggests that online networking has the potential for larger impacts for women, who experience greater disadvantage in traditional networking contexts, and calls for further research to understand differential impacts of online networking for socially disadvantaged groups.
A note from the new Editor-in-Chief
Sébastien Tutenges
Nordic Journal of Criminology important institution in the study of crime and society. For it as a platform to present new scientific knowledge, feed into public debates, inform policy makers and solidify the Nordic community with a shared interest in things criminological. is important, in of the special character of the Nordic context. Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden are renowned worldwide as welfare strongholds with steep taxation systems, generous social services, high levels of trust, low levels of incarceration and widespread confidence in personal safety, alongside persistent problems with various types of crime & Tonry, 2011). The Nordic welfare model facilitates certain crimes while impeding others, and this calls for particular interventions and policies that would be unfeasible or ineffective in other parts of the world (Aromaa, 2000). Criminological exchanges across the Nordic countries are needed in order to understand the common challenges we are facing and find better ways to deal with them.
ÁLVAREZ ALARCÓN, Arturo (Dir.), Abogacía y proceso contencioso-administrativo, Tirant lo Blanch, Valencia, 1ª ed., 2019, 743 páginas
Cristina Alonso Salgado
Law, Social pathology. Social and public welfare. Criminology
Future destinations and social inclusion scoping review: how people cured of hepatitis C (HCV) using direct- acting antiviral drugs progress in a new HCV-free world
Sarah R. Donaldson, Andrew Radley, John F. Dillon
Abstract Background There has been a paradigm shift in the treatment of Hepatitis C (HCV) from the interferon-era to direct-acting antiviral (DAA) drugs. Cure of HCV for the key risk group, those with a history of injecting drug use, may provide a range of benefits to an individual’s quality of life that can be additional to that of a clinical cure. The interferon-era provided evidence that cure of HCV can be a turning point for those who use drugs, supporting a recovery journey. There remains a question if DAAs can provide the same opportunity. Methods We employed a scoping review methodology to consider the additional non-clinical benefits that HCV cure may provide. We used the theoretical construct of recovery capital to consider how these benefits may support a recovery journey in the DAA-era. Results Our search provided 2095 articles, from which 35 were included in the analysis. We developed a thematic synthesis of the non-clinical outcomes identified based on the four over-arching themes of recovery capital: physical, cultural, social and human capital. Our review suggests that identity change is a constituent part of each of the recovery capital domains in relation to HCV treatment. Conclusion We identified Social Identity Model Of Recovery (SIMOR) as a mechanism through which DAAs may provide non-clinical outcomes to increase recovery capital domains. Further research is required to develop an understanding of the impact a cure of HCV with DAAs may have on identity, overall health and wellbeing and social inclusion to support recovery journeys.
Public aspects of medicine, Social pathology. Social and public welfare. Criminology
Evaluation of feasibility and user acceptance of lateral-flow self-testing for viral illness in a residential treatment rehabilitation facility
Benjamin L. Sievers, James Klotzle, Tipu V. Khan
Abstract Background The role of rapid testing has proven vital in reducing infection incidence in communities through swift identification and isolation of infected individuals. The COVID-19 pandemic has been particularly catastrophic for residential carceral and rehabilitation facilities that are high-risk settings for transmission of contagious diseases. Centralized provider-based viral testing employing conventional diagnostic techniques is labor-intensive and time-consuming. There is a marked unmet need for quick, inexpensive, and simple viral testing strategies. We hypothesized that rehabilitation residents could successfully test themselves employing inexpensive, disposable, antigen-based influenza lateral-flow tests and would be willing to self-isolate and self-report to health authorities if positive. Methods We evaluated self-testing among 50 rehabilitation residents ages 18 and older in Pomona, California, where participants self-administered influenza lateral-flow diagnostic test (without specimen collection) with the goal of appropriately observing a control line and completed two brief written surveys on self-testing and COVID-19, one before self-administering the lateral-flow test and one after, to determine the overall feasibility of viral self-testing and to characterize attitudes comparing self-testing and provider-based testing. Findings A total of 50 rehabilitation residents were enrolled in this study and all 50 conducted a lateral-flow test and answered the provided surveys. Among the participants, 96% (48 of 50) achieved a positive-control line from their lateral-flow test. Most participants, 83% (34 of 41) indicated that they would prefer to perform their own rapid test instead of having a health care provider administer the test. Notably, 98% (49 of 50) indicated that they would self-isolate if the lateral-flow test returned a positive indicator suggesting the presence of a viral infection and 96% (48 of 50) would report positive results to their corresponding public health department. Interpretation Residents in a residential rehabilitation center were widely able to successfully self-administer standard lateral-flow antigen-based rapid diagnostic kits. Self-testing was strongly preferred over tests administered by a healthcare provider. Reassuringly, almost every resident indicated that they would report any positive test result to the health department and self-isolate accordingly. Self-testing offers a promising adjunct to centralized testing, potentially better enabling swift and effective management of life-threatening infectious outbreaks among those living in high-risk congregate living settings.
Public aspects of medicine, Social pathology. Social and public welfare. Criminology
From an Authentication Question to a Public Social Event: Characterizing Birthday Sharing on Twitter
Dilara Keküllüoğlu, Walid Magdy, Kami Vaniea
Date of birth (DOB) has historically been considered as private information and safe to use for authentication, but recent years have seen a shift towards wide public sharing. In this work we characterize how modern social media users are approaching the sharing of birthday wishes publicly online. Over 45 days, we collected over 2.8M tweets wishing happy birthday to 724K Twitter accounts. For 50K accounts, their age was likely mentioned revealing their DOB, and 10% were protected accounts. Our findings show that the majority of both public and protected accounts seem to be accepting of their birthdays and DOB being revealed online by their friends even when they do not have it listed on their profiles. We further complemented our findings through a survey to measure awareness of DOB disclosure issues and how people think about sharing different types of birthday-related information. Our analysis shows that giving birthday wishes to others online is considered a celebration and many users are quite comfortable with it. This view matches the trend also seen in security where the use of DOB in authentication process is no longer considered best practice.
Botometer 101: Social bot practicum for computational social scientists
Kai-Cheng Yang, Emilio Ferrara, Filippo Menczer
Social bots have become an important component of online social media. Deceptive bots, in particular, can manipulate online discussions of important issues ranging from elections to public health, threatening the constructive exchange of information. Their ubiquity makes them an interesting research subject and requires researchers to properly handle them when conducting studies using social media data. Therefore, it is important for researchers to gain access to bot detection tools that are reliable and easy to use. This paper aims to provide an introductory tutorial of Botometer, a public tool for bot detection on Twitter, for readers who are new to this topic and may not be familiar with programming and machine learning. We introduce how Botometer works, the different ways users can access it, and present a case study as a demonstration. Readers can use the case study code as a template for their own research. We also discuss recommended practice for using Botometer.