Paola Tubaro, Antonio A Casilli, Maxime Cornet
et al.
This article examines the organisational and geographical forces that shape the supply chains of artificial intelligence (AI) through outsourced and offshored data work. Bridging sociological theories of relational inequalities and embeddedness with critical approaches to Global Value Chains, we conduct a global case study of the digitally enabled organisation of data work in France, Madagascar, and Venezuela. The AI supply chains procure data work via a mix of arm's length contracts through marketplace-like platforms, and of embedded firm-like structures that offer greater stability but less flexibility, with multiple intermediate arrangements. Each solution suits specific types and purposes of data work in AI preparation, verification, and impersonation. While all forms reproduce well-known patterns of exclusion that harm externalised workers especially in the Global South, disadvantage manifests unevenly in different supply chain structures, with repercussions on remunerations, job security and working conditions. Unveiling these processes of contemporary technology development provides insights into possible policy implications.
The Constitution of the Republic of Serbia safeguards the right to privacy through several aspects, as does the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. The cornerstone in this area is the Law on Personal Data Protection from 2018. In line with the ultima ratio principle of criminal law, the Criminal Code protects these data when the most severe violations occur, pursuant to the Criminal Procedure Code. However, with the daily expansion of science, technology, and innovative means of communication and recording, this takes on a different, "digital" dimension. Naturally, this trend calls for certain adjustments in regulations, as well as in their interpretation and application. In this paper, the authors aim to highlight key provisions of the aforementioned regulations and their current and future interpretation within the context of digital society, with a particular focus on criminal law aspects. This complexity is further amplified by the development of artificial intelligence, which inherently relies on the use of vast amounts of data. The aim of this paper is to identify some of the critical elements in the protection of privacy rights, particularly those related to personal data most closely linked to individuals, and to raise the question of potential legislative amendments.
Whether racial disparities in enrollment in advanced high school coursework can be attributed to differences in prior academic preparation is a central question in sociological research and education policy. However, previous investigations face methodological limitations, for they compare race-specific enrollment rates of students after adjusting for characteristics only partially related to their academic preparedness for advanced coursework. Informed by a recently-developed statistical technique, we propose and estimate a novel measure of students' academic preparedness and use administrative data from the New York City Department of Education to measure differences in AP mathematics enrollment rates among similarly prepared students of different races. We find that preexisting differences in academic preparation do not fully explain the under-representation of Black students relative to White students in AP mathematics. Our results imply that achieving equal opportunities for AP enrollment not only requires equalizing earlier academic experiences, but also addressing inequities that emerge from coursework placement processes.
In this paper we explore the digital security experiences of marginalised populations in Lebanon such as LGBTQI+ identifying people, refugees and women. We situate our work in the post-conflict Lebanese context, which is shaped by sectarian divides, failing governance and economic collapse. We do so through an ethnographically informed study conducted in Beirut, Lebanon, in July 2022 and through interviews with 13 people with Lebanese digital and human rights expertise. Our research highlights how LGBTQI+ identifying people and refugees are scapegoated for the failings of the Lebanese government, while women who speak out against such failings are silenced. We show how government-supported incitements of violence aimed at transferring blame from the political leadership to these groups lead to amplified digital security risks for already at-risk populations. Positioning our work in broader sociological understandings of security, we discuss how the Lebanese context impacts identity and ontological security. We conclude by proposing to design for and with positive security in post-conflict settings.
Administrative boundaries are ubiquitous. A vital technology of power within the modern nation-state’s mode of bureaucratic governance, they carve up and abstract land and water alike into conceptual totalities that, in their simplification, render them legible to centralised administrative bodies. This is a foundational tool of state planning, the impact of which permeates all aspects of socio-economic life. These boundaries are not passive; they do not simply define a geographical area. Rather, they are selective in what they encompass and, as a result, what they include and exclude and what is rendered visible and, hence, valuable. This article describes an example of the real-world impact of this selectivity through discussion of the experiences of a community-led charity (Ardagh Community Trust) and the community group that founded it (Friends of Horfield Common). In their work to demonstrate that an administrative-boundary-spanning public green space (Horfield Common) and leisure facility (the Ardagh) was a vital community resource and hub, this article focuses on the work of Friends of Horfield Common/Ardagh Community Trust to ensure that their local community, one dissected by multiple administrative boundaries, was recognised and acknowledged when, in 2008, Bristol City Council in the UK proposed the sale of multiple publicly owned green spaces through their Parks and Green Space Strategy. Administrative boundaries played a key role in defining and determining which sites in the city were proposed for sale and in structuring the accompanying public consultation process, thereby determining which communities were recognised as communities in relation to this policy and, hence, which communities’ opinions were actively sought and heard. This article concludes by highlighting some of the potential political and economic costs attendant on reifying administrative boundaries rather than lived communities in both planning and consultation processes.
Architecture, Urban groups. The city. Urban sociology
Israel Casado-Hernández, Ricardo Becerro-de-Bengoa-Vallejo, Marta Losa-Iglesias
et al.
Background: Adult acquired flatfoot is characterized by a medial arch collapse during monopodal support in the stance phase, developing eversion of the calcaneus and abduction of the forefoot linked to the hindfoot. The purpose of our research was to analyze the dynamic symmetry index in the lower limbs comparing patients with flatfoot and normal foot.Methods: A case-control study was carried out with a sample of 62 participants divided into two groups consisting of 31 participants were overweight with bilateral flatfoot and 31 participants with healthy feet. A portable plantar pressure platform with piezoresistive sensors was used to measure the load symmetry index in the lower limbs in the foot areas and gait phases.Results: Gait pattern analysis showed statistically significant differences in the symmetry index for lateral load (p = 0.004), the initial contact phase (p = 0.025) and the forefoot phase (p < 0.001).Conclusion: The adults were overweight with bilateral flatfoot evidenced alterations in the symmetry index in the lateral load and in the initial contact and flatfoot contact phases, showing greater instability in overweight adult flatfoot compared to the people with normal feet.
The National Science Foundation-supported CONVERGE facility was established in 2018 as the first social science-led component of the Natural Hazards Engineering Research Infrastructure (NHERI). Headquartered at the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado Boulder, CONVERGE identifies, trains, connects, and funds researchers across disciplines in the hazards and disaster field. This article provides an overview of one of our most widely used tools, the CONVERGE Training Modules. These free, interactive, online trainings are designed for students, early career professionals, and others who are new to hazards and disaster research and practice. Since July 2019, our team has released 10 modules that cover a range of foundational topics in hazards and disaster research, including Institutional Review Board procedures, conducting emotionally challenging research, cultural competence, collecting and sharing perishable data, social vulnerability, and disaster mental health. In addition, CONVERGE offers advanced trainings in specialized topics such as broader ethical considerations for hazards and disaster researchers, reciprocity, gender-based violence in fieldwork, and public health implications of hazards and disaster research. Between July 2019 and November 2022, 6,311 unique users registered for the modules, and these users logged 7,222 module completions. Of the module completions to date, the largest percentage of users completed only one (46.0%) of the available trainings, although a small group of “superusers”—whom we surveyed for this article—have completed all or almost all of the available modules. When asked why they planned to complete the modules at the time of registration, most users indicated that it was to fulfill a classroom or other educational requirement (51.2%), for personal interest/to learn more (9.0%), or to prepare for or to support research (7.1%) or practice-oriented activities (5.8%). In addition to providing more information regarding module users, this article details the development of the technology and discusses the impact and success of this tool for transferring knowledge and skills to the hazards and disaster research and practice community. We conclude with a discussion of future directions for this research-based educational intervention.
Engineering (General). Civil engineering (General), City planning
We compare face-to-face interaction data recorded by wearable sensors in various sociological environments. The interactions among individuals display a clear environment-dependent diversity in agreement with previous analyses. The contact durations follow heavy-tailed distributions although not exactly of power-law type as previously suggested. Guided by the common patterns observed for each relation, we introduce a variable named the duration contrast, which reveals a common behavior among all datasets. This suggests that our tendency to spend more or less time than usual with a given individual in a face-to-face relation is not governed by social rules but by a common human trait. Additional data shows that it is the same for baboons. Furthermore, we propose a new kind of model to describe the contacts in a given relation based on the recently introduced concept of Levy Geometric Graphs. It reproduces the data at an impressive level. The associated Levy index is found to be alpha = 1.1 on all the datasets, suggesting a universal law for primates and opening many exciting perspectives.
In High Energy Physics (HEP), analysis metadata comes in many forms -- from theoretical cross-sections, to calibration corrections, to details about file processing. Correctly applying metadata is a crucial and often time-consuming step in an analysis, but designing analysis metadata systems has historically received little direct attention. Among other considerations, an ideal metadata tool should be easy to use by new analysers, should scale to large data volumes and diverse processing paradigms, and should enable future analysis reinterpretation. This document, which is the product of community discussions organised by the HEP Software Foundation, categorises types of metadata by scope and format and gives examples of current metadata solutions. Important design considerations for metadata systems, including sociological factors, analysis preservation efforts, and technical factors, are discussed. A list of best practices and technical requirements for future analysis metadata systems is presented. These best practices could guide the development of a future cross-experimental effort for analysis metadata tools.
De nature et à tous les niveaux, l’école à toujours été un milieu de garde, de protection des enfants contre tout accident, toute mauvaise influence ; lieu de puisement des connaissances par l’instruction et de socialisation par excellence à travers l’éducation, après la famille. Des parents envoient leurs enfants à l’école dans ces buts-là. Cependant, à Oïcha, dans leur cursus scolaire, prises au piège des enseignants ou de leurs condisciples de classe, des apprenants filles sont une proie à l’immoralité sexuelle à l’école : acte odieux et criminel. Cette réalité phénoménale fini parfois par des négociations, des arrangements, des couvertures ; défiant le droit et l’éthique sociale dans leur rigueur, aux conséquences fâcheusement directes et indirectes sur la scolarité et la vie des victimes. L’étude est réalisée sur les filles victimes des écoles secondaires d’Oïcha afin de les influencer à rompre avec la peur de dénoncer, la honte et le silence.
In general, many dynamic processes are involved with interacting variables, from physical systems to sociological analysis. The interplay of components in the system can give rise to confounding dynamic behavior. Many approaches model temporal sequences holistically ignoring the internal interaction which are impotent in capturing the protogenic actuation. Differently, our goal is to represent a system with a part-whole hierarchy and discover the implied dependencies among intra-system variables: inferring the interactions that possess causal effects on the sub-system behavior with REcurrent partItioned Network (REIN). The proposed architecture consists of (i) a perceptive module that extracts a hierarchical and temporally consistent representation of the observation at multiple levels, (ii) a deductive module for determining the relational connection between neurons at each level, and (iii) a statistical module that can predict the future by conditioning on the temporal distributional estimation. Our model is demonstrated to be effective in identifying the componential interactions with limited observation and stable in long-term future predictions experimented with diverse physical systems.
Kiran Manku, Janet Nakigudde, Rosemary Musesengwa
et al.
The Africa Ethics Working Group (AEWG) is a South-South-North collaboration of bioethics and mental health researchers from sub-Saharan Africa, working to tackle emerging ethical challenges in global mental health research. Initially formed to provide ethical guidance for a neuro-psychiatric genomics research project, AEWG has evolved to address cross cutting ethical issues in mental health research aimed at addressing equity in North-South collaborations. Global South refers to economically developing countries (sub-Saharan Africa in this context) and Global North to economically developed countries (primarily Europe, UK and North America). In this letter we discuss lessons that as a group we have learnt over the last three years; lessons that similar collaborations could draw on. With increasing expertise from Global South as an outcome of several capacity strengthening initiatives, it is expected that the nature of scientific collaborations will shift to a truly equitable partnership. The AEWG provides a model to rethink contributions that each partner could make in these collaborations.
Having proposed a 10-point summary of her book Des valeurs. Une approche sociologique ( Values: A Sociological Approach), Nathalie Heinich responds to the comments of Laurence Kaufmann and Philippe Gonzalez, Danilo Martuccelli, and Louis Quéré, as well as to Hervé Glevarec’s review published in the same issue of Questions de communication. Nine themes are successively addressed: issues of vocabulary, the relevance or irrelevance of certain problems (nature, religion), the issue of emotions, the ontological status of valuation, the epistemological status of an ‘axiological grammar’ and its explanatory or comprehensive purpose, the historicity and contextuality of values, the place of the sociology of power relations, the issue of behaviour and empirical observability, and, finally, the controversy about ‘axiological neutrality’.
Nowadays, the utilization of the ever expanding amount of data has made a huge impact on web technologies while also causing various types of security concerns. On one hand, potential gains are highly anticipated if different organizations could somehow collaboratively share their data for technological improvements. On the other hand, data security concerns may arise for both data holders and data providers due to commercial or sociological concerns. To make a balance between technical improvements and security limitations, we implement secure and scalable protocols for multiple data holders to train linear regression and logistic regression models. We build our protocols based on the secret sharing scheme, which is scalable and efficient in applications. Moreover, our proposed paradigm can be generalized to any secure multiparty training scenarios where only matrix summation and matrix multiplications are used. We demonstrate our approach by experiments which shows the scalability and efficiency of our proposed protocols, and finally present its real-world applications.
This paper deals with the modeling and estimation of the sociological phenomena called echo chambers and segregation in social networks. Specifically, we present a novel community-based graph model that represents the emergence of segregated echo chambers as a Markov bridge process. A Markov bridge is a one-dimensional Markov random field that facilitates modeling the formation and disassociation of communities at deterministic times which is important in social networks with known timed events. We justify the proposed model with six real world examples and examine its performance on a recent Twitter dataset. We provide model parameter estimation algorithm based on maximum likelihood and, a Bayesian filtering algorithm for recursively estimating the level of segregation using noisy samples obtained from the network. Numerical results indicate that the proposed filtering algorithm outperforms the conventional hidden Markov modeling in terms of the mean-squared error. The proposed filtering method is useful in computational social science where data-driven estimation of the level of segregation from noisy data is required.
This article assesses the experience with i-Log at the European Big Data Hackathon 2019, a satellite event of the New Techniques and Technologies for Statistics (NTTS) conference, organised by Eurostat. i-Log is a system that allows to capture personal big data from smartphones' internal sensors to be used for time use measurement. It allows the collection of heterogeneous types of data, enabling new possibilities for sociological urban field studies. Sensor data such as those related to the location or the movements of the user can be used to investigate and have insights on the time diaries' answers and assess their overall quality. The key idea is that the users' answers are used to train machine-learning algorithms, allowing the system to learn from the user's habits and to generate new time diaries' answers. In turn, these new labels can be used to assess the quality of existing ones, or to fill the gaps when the user does not provide an answer. The aim of this paper is to introduce the pilot study, the i-Log system and the methodological evidence that arose during the survey.
The inclusive basketball program of the National Sports Academy is a compilation of adapted and unified basketball where persons with intellectual and physical disabilities together with students and volunteers are training and competing together.
PURPOSE of this study is to explore the extent of contribution of our program for the building of social capital. The concept of social capital is drawn from psychology, sociology and economy. It is defined as controversial due to many theories and cultural diversity behind.
METHODS: Participants in the study were all persons involved in the adapted basketball program. Data was collected using interviews, life-story techniques, field notes and tests batteries for basketball skills.
RESULTS are showing improvement in personal development domain for the athletes with disabilities where sport specific skills, building trust and communications were the leading components. For the students in the same domain the leading components of improvement were attitudes and relationships. Positive change was found in the domains of social inclusion, micro-culture and participation. We also found that there is direct and indirect production of social capital.
CONCLUSION: inclusive sport practice like our adapted basketball program could be considered as a powerful contributor to the building of social capital.