Improving Labor Inspections Systems: Design Options

[Excerpt] The following paper identifies experimental designs for the evaluation of labor inspection systems in Latin America. It includes six principal sections. Section 1 discusses the main differences between the “Latin model” (Piore and Schrank 2008) of labor inspection and the more familiar approach adopted by enforcement agencies like OSHA and the Wage and Hour Division in the US. Section 2 discusses theories of regulatory noncompliance and develops a logic model that links enforcement strategies to compliance outcomes in the region. Section 3 discusses some of the strategies that are available to Latin American labor inspectors and sets the stage for a discussion of their assignment to experimental subjects. Section 4 identifies five possible subjects of experimentation (e.g., inspectors, firms, jurisdictions) and discusses their respective receptivity to both random assignment and counterfactual analysis (e.g., data needs, estimation procedures, etc.). Section 5 addresses practical considerations involved in the design and conduct of experiments on inspection systems—including their utility, ethics, and viability—and introduces a checklist designed to facilitate their assessment. And Section 6 describes three potential experiments—labeled “professionals v. partisans,” “risk-based targeting v. randomized inspection,” and “carrots v. sticks” respectively—and discusses their principal goals and limitations in light of the checklist

Computational Sociolinguistics: A Survey

Language is a social phenomenon and variation is inherent to its social nature. Recently, there has been a surge of interest within the computational linguistics (CL) community in the social dimension of language. In this article we present a survey of the emerging field of "Computational Sociolinguistics" that reflects this increased interest. We aim to provide a comprehensive overview of CL research on sociolinguistic themes, featuring topics such as the relation between language and social identity, language use in social interaction and multilingual communication. Moreover, we demonstrate the potential for synergy between the research communities involved, by showing how the large-scale data-driven methods that are widely used in CL can complement existing sociolinguistic studies, and how sociolinguistics can inform and challenge the methods and assumptions employed in CL studies. We hope to convey the possible benefits of a closer collaboration between the two communities and conclude with a discussion of open challenges.Comment: To appear in Computational Linguistics. Accepted for publication: 18th February, 201

Social media, political polarization, and political disinformation: a review of the scientific literature

The following report is intended to provide an overview of the current state of the literature on the relationship between social media; political polarization; and political “disinformation,” a term used to encompass a wide range of types of information about politics found online, including “fake news,” rumors, deliberately factually incorrect information, inadvertently factually incorrect information, politically slanted information, and “hyperpartisan” news. The review of the literature is provided in six separate sections, each of which can be read individually but that cumulatively are intended to provide an overview of what is known — and unknown — about the relationship between social media, political polarization, and disinformation. The report concludes by identifying key gaps in our understanding of these phenomena and the data that are needed to address them

Social media, political polarization, and political disinformation: a review of the scientific literature

The following report is intended to provide an overview of the current state of the literature on the relationship between social media; political polarization; and political “disinformation,” a term used to encompass a wide range of types of information about politics found online, including “fake news,” rumors, deliberately factually incorrect information, inadvertently factually incorrect information, politically slanted information, and “hyperpartisan” news. The review of the literature is provided in six separate sections, each of which can be read individually but that cumulatively are intended to provide an overview of what is known — and unknown — about the relationship between social media, political polarization, and disinformation. The report concludes by identifying key gaps in our understanding of these phenomena and the data that are needed to address them

Pathways to Online Hate: Behavioural, Technical, Economic, Legal, Political & Ethical Analysis.

The Alfred Landecker Foundation seeks to create a safer digital space for all. The work of the Foundation helps to develop research, convene stakeholders to share valuable insights, and support entities that combat online harms, specifically online hate, extremism, and disinformation. Overall, the Foundation seeks to reduce hate and harm tangibly and measurably in the digital space by using its resources in the most impactful way. It also aims to assist in building an ecosystem that can prevent, minimise, and mitigate online harms while at the same time preserving open societies and healthy democracies. A non-exhaustive literature review was undertaken to explore the main facets of harm and hate speech in the evolving online landscape and to analyse behavioural, technical, economic, legal, political and ethical drivers; key findings are detailed in this report

Understanding the effects of topic factors and threat exposure on motivation to participate in knowledge artefacts: The case of Wikipedia

Wikipedia’s unique feature that prompts voluntary knowledge creation makes it relevant for researchers to examine what motivates editors to contribute to the platform when there are no obvious compensations that they could receive in exchange of their efforts. Earlier studies have identified various encouraging factors of Wikipedia participation (e.g., fun, ideology, community aspect). In this dissertation, I undertook a psychology perspective and examined the issue with a focus on person-object-environment paradigm that has not been previously studied within the context of Wikipedia motivation. This paradigm explains the human behavior as a product of a person’s interest-oriented relationship with an object and with her/his environment. The aim of this dissertation was then to investigate motivation to work with Wikipedia (in terms of willingness to contribute to the articles and production of article measures) in relation to topic factors (object) and threat exposure (environment). Two laboratory and one Wikipedia textual analysis studies suggested that general (i.e., topic familiarity and controversiality) and specific characteristics (i.e., sentiment and psychological content) of a topic played significant roles in Wikipedia motivation. Specifically, working with familiar and controversial topics that had sociopolitical references increased engagement to Wikipedia articles. Results also suggested that Wikipedia community produced article measures (e.g., longer articles) related to content with both positive and negative sentiments. A closer examination on psychological content showed that affective (positive and negative emotion) and drive states (achievement, reward, power, affiliation and risk) were the best predictors of article production. With regards to threat exposure, although threat manipulations induced in the forms of mortality salience and uncertainty salience led to negative mood states, they did not result in any changes in people’s willingness to work with the articles. Overall, the findings suggest that Wikipedia motivation was significantly influenced by general familiar and controversial characteristics of the presented topic as well as positive/negative polarity and specific psychological orientations of the content. Threat-evoking environmental cues during Wikipedia use, on the other hand, did not seem to affect the motivation levels. These results support the human-oriented aspect of Wikipedia platform that is distinctively fostered by editors’ psychological, social and emotional interests

CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines

Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective. The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines. From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research