Halting indigenous biodiversity decline: ambiguity, equity, and outcomes in RMA assessment of significance

In New Zealand, assessment of ‘significance’ is undertaken to give effect to a legal requirement for local authorities to provide for protection of significant sites under the Resource Management Act (1991). The ambiguity of the statute enables different interests to define significance according to their goals: vested interests (developers), local authorities, and non-vested interests in pursuit of protection of environmental public goods may advance different definitions. We examine two sets of criteria used for assessment of significance for biological diversity under the Act. Criteria adapted from the 1980s Protected Natural Areas Programme are inadequate to achieve the maintenance of biological diversity if ranking is used to identify only highest priority sites. Norton and Roper-Lindsay (2004) propose a narrow definition of significance and criteria that identify only a few high-quality sites as significant. Both sets are likely to serve the interests of developers and local authorities, but place the penalty of uncertainty on non-vested interests seeking to maintain biological diversity, and are likely to exacerbate the decline of biological diversity and the loss of landscape-scale processes required for its persistence. When adopting criteria for assessment of significance, we suggest local authorities should consider whose interests are served by different criteria sets, and who will bear the penalty of uncertainty regarding biological diversity outcomes. They should also ask whether significance criteria are adequate, and sufficiently robust to the uncertainty inherent in the assessment of natural values, to halt the decline of indigenous biological diversity

The Disparate Effects of Strategic Manipulation

When consequential decisions are informed by algorithmic input, individuals may feel compelled to alter their behavior in order to gain a system's approval. Models of agent responsiveness, termed "strategic manipulation," analyze the interaction between a learner and agents in a world where all agents are equally able to manipulate their features in an attempt to "trick" a published classifier. In cases of real world classification, however, an agent's ability to adapt to an algorithm is not simply a function of her personal interest in receiving a positive classification, but is bound up in a complex web of social factors that affect her ability to pursue certain action responses. In this paper, we adapt models of strategic manipulation to capture dynamics that may arise in a setting of social inequality wherein candidate groups face different costs to manipulation. We find that whenever one group's costs are higher than the other's, the learner's equilibrium strategy exhibits an inequality-reinforcing phenomenon wherein the learner erroneously admits some members of the advantaged group, while erroneously excluding some members of the disadvantaged group. We also consider the effects of interventions in which a learner subsidizes members of the disadvantaged group, lowering their costs in order to improve her own classification performance. Here we encounter a paradoxical result: there exist cases in which providing a subsidy improves only the learner's utility while actually making both candidate groups worse-off--even the group receiving the subsidy. Our results reveal the potentially adverse social ramifications of deploying tools that attempt to evaluate an individual's "quality" when agents' capacities to adaptively respond differ.Comment: 29 pages, 4 figure

Children or athletes? Best practice for safeguarding elite young athletes

This address explores the status confusion between “child” and “athlete” that arises in elite sport for young people and discuss some of the challenges that this presents to sport providers. It reviews the evidence about breaches of child welfare in sport around the world and considers how the sport community can respond positively to this evidence in both policy and practice

Count the Limbs: Designing Robust Aggregation Clauses in Sovereign Bonds

On August 29, 2014, the International Capital Market Association (ICMA) published new recommended terms for sovereign bond contracts governed by English law. One of the new terms would allow a super majority of creditors to approve a debtor’s restructuring proposal in one vote across multiple bond series. The vote could bind all bond holders, even if a series voted unanimously against restructuring, so long as enough holders in the other series voted for it. An apparently technical change, awkwardly named “single-limb aggregated collective action clauses (CACs)” promised to eliminate free-riders for the first time in the history of sovereign bond restructuring. It could also open up new possibilities for abuse. The markets might have rebelled. Instead, they yawned … and proceeded to adopt the new terms. We consider why such consequential contract change met with less resistance than its relatively modest predecessors, series-by-series and two-limb aggregated CACs. We focus on contract design, and the process by which it came about. Most of the essay is devoted to analyzing the key features of single-limb aggregated CACs and the considerations that shaped decisions about these features. We conclude with observations on contract reform in sovereign debt restructuring and the challenges ahead

Technology diffusion in communication networks

The deployment of new technologies in the Internet is notoriously difficult, as evidence by the myriad of well-developed networking technologies that still have not seen widespread adoption (e.g., secure routing, IPv6, etc.) A key hurdle is the fact that the Internet lacks a centralized authority that can mandate the deployment of a new technology. Instead, the Internet consists of thousands of nodes, each controlled by an autonomous, profit-seeking firm, that will deploy a new networking technology only if it obtains sufficient local utility by doing so. For the technologies we study here, local utility depends on the set of nodes that can be reached by traversing paths consisting only of nodes that have already deployed the new technology. To understand technology diffusion in the Internet, we propose a new model inspired by work on the spread of influence in social networks. Unlike traditional models, where a node's utility depends only its immediate neighbors, in our model, a node can be influenced by the actions of remote nodes. Specifically, we assume node v activates (i.e. deploys the new technology) when it is adjacent to a sufficiently large connected component in the subgraph induced by the set of active nodes; namely, of size exceeding node v's threshold value \theta(v). We are interested in the problem of choosing the right seedset of nodes to activate initially, so that the rest of the nodes in the network have sufficient local utility to follow suit. We take the graph and thresholds values as input to our problem. We show that our problem is both NP-hard and does not admit an (1-o(1) ln|V| approximation on general graphs. Then, we restrict our study to technology diffusion problems where (a) maximum distance between any pair of nodes in the graph is r, and (b) there are at most \ell possible threshold values. Our set of restrictions is quite natural, given that (a) the Internet graph has constant diameter, and (b) the fact that limiting the granularity of the threshold values makes sense given the difficulty in obtaining empirical data that parameterizes deployment costs and benefits. We present algorithm that obtains a solution with guaranteed approximation rate of O(r^2 \ell \log|V|) which is asymptotically optimal, given our hardness results. Our approximation algorithm is a linear-programming relaxation of an 0-1 integer program along with a novel randomized rounding scheme.National Science Foundation (S-1017907, CCF-0915922

New Methods in Human Subjects Research: Do We Need a New Ethics?

Online surveys and interviews, the observations of chat rooms or online games, data mining, knowledge discovery in databases (KDD), collecting biomarkers, employing biometrics, using RFID technology - even as implants in the human body - and other related processes all seem to be more promising, cheaper, faster, and comprehensive than conventional methods of human subjects research. But at the same time these new means of gathering information may pose powerful threats to privacy, autonomy, and informed consent. Online research, particularly involving children and minors but also other vulnerable groups such as ethnic or religious minorities, is in urgent need of an adequate research ethics that can provide reasonable and morally justified constraints for human subjects research. The paper at hand seeks to provide some clarification of these new means of information gathering and the challenges they present to moral concepts like -privacy, autonomy, informed consent, beneficence, and justice. Some existing codes of conduct and ethical guidelines are examined to determine whether they provide answers to those challenges and/or whether they can be helpful in the development of principles and regulations governing human subjects research. Finally, some conclusions and recommendations are presented that can help in the ask of formulating an adequate research ethics for human subjects research.Human Subjects Research, Online Research, Biomarkers, Biometrics, Autonomy, Privacy, Informed Consent, Research Ethics

The interplay between societal concerns and the regulatory frame on GM crops in the European Union

Recapitulating how genetic modification technology and its agro-food products aroused strong societal opposition in the European Union, this paper demonstrates how this opposition contributed to shape the European regulatory frame on GM crops. More specifically, it describes how this opposition contributed to a de facto moratorium on the commercialization of new GM crop events in the end of the nineties. From this period onwards, the regulatory frame has been continuously revised in order to slow down further erosion of public and market confidence. Various scientific and technical reforms were made to meet societal concerns relating to the safety of GM crops. In this context, the precautionary principle, environmental post-market monitoring and traceability were adopted as ways to cope with scientific uncertainties. Labeling, traceability, co-existence and public information were installed in an attempt to meet the general public request for more information about GM agro-food products, and the specific demand to respect the consumers' and farmers' freedom of choice. Despite these efforts, today, the explicit role of public participation and/or ethical consultation during authorization procedures is at best minimal. Moreover, no legal room was created to progress to an integral sustainability evaluation during market procedures. It remains to be seen whether the recent policy shift towards greater transparency about value judgments, plural viewpoints and scientific uncertainties will be one step forward in integrating ethical concerns more explicitly in risk analysis. As such, the regulatory frame stands open for further interpretation, reflecting in various degrees a continued interplay with societal concerns relating to GM agro-food products. In this regard, both societal concerns and diversely interpreted regulatory criteria can be inferred as signaling a request – and even a quest – to render more explicit the broader-than-scientific dimension of the actual risk analysis

A Seat at the Table: Including the Poor in Decisions for Development and Environment

Presents case studies of the access to information, public participation, and justice for the poor in environmental decision-making processes and barriers, including issues of literacy, costs, risk, and cultural context. Makes policy recommendations