223 research outputs found
The BIRD Study:How should best interests decisions concerning end-stage kidney disease care for adults be made?
This thesis investigates “best interests” decisions concerning the care of adults with or approaching end-stage kidney failure. I focus on the ethico-legal dimensions of questions of dialysis provision versus conservative kidney management. Through an empirical bioethics approach, I complement my normative inquiry with qualitative exploration of the views and experiences of three stakeholder groups: nephrologists, renal nurses, and “consultees” (family members).Limited existing literature lacks consensus on how these decisions should be made, but overwhelmingly recognises difficulties in involving various stakeholders and manoeuvring towards an appropriate decision without conflict. There is acknowledgement of the complexity of balancing medical and non-medical factors, with particular reference to what the patient might value. Participants in my own empirical research similarly highlighted areas of conflict in their own experiences. Whilst wanting to respect the patient’s own care preferences, healthcare professionals and consultees alike spoke of a difficulty in accurately identifying such preferences. For professionals, resulting disagreements had the potential to lead them down the “path of least resistance” in trying to maintain relationships with those close to the patient.Employing a process of reflective equilibrium, I combine my own intuitions with the perspectives identified in the literature and my empirical data to reach a set of coherent positions on how these best interests decisions should be made. I argue that active discussions should begin in advance of any significant care decision arising. These should focus on exploring not only what care options the patient might want, but also how the patient might want any future best interests decision to be approached. Further, these discussions should include the clarification of stakeholder roles in best interests decisions and sensitively set expectations – following which, strong communication should remain consistent. In addition, I highlight where research is needed to supplement my recommendations
Cyberbullying in educational context
Kustenmacher and Seiwert (2004) explain a man’s inclination to resort to technology in his interaction with the environment and society. Thus, the solution to the negative consequences of Cyberbullying in a technologically dominated society is represented by technology as part of the technological paradox (Tugui, 2009), in which man has a dual role, both slave and master, in the interaction with it. In this respect, it is noted that, notably after 2010, there have been many attempts to involve artificial intelligence (AI) to recognize, identify, limit or avoid the manifestation of aggressive behaviours of the CBB type. For an overview of the use of artificial intelligence in solving various problems related to CBB, we extracted works from the Scopus database that respond to the criterion of the existence of the words “cyberbullying” and “artificial intelligence” in the Title, Keywords and Abstract. These articles were the subject of the content analysis of the title and, subsequently, only those that are identified as a solution in the process of recognizing, identifying, limiting or avoiding the manifestation of CBB were kept in the following Table where we have these data synthesized and organized by years
A Network Resource Allocation Recommendation Method with An Improved Similarity Measure
Recommender systems have been acknowledged as efficacious tools for managing
information overload. Nevertheless, conventional algorithms adopted in such
systems primarily emphasize precise recommendations and, consequently, overlook
other vital aspects like the coverage, diversity, and novelty of items. This
approach results in less exposure for long-tail items. In this paper, to
personalize the recommendations and allocate recommendation resources more
purposively, a method named PIM+RA is proposed. This method utilizes a
bipartite network that incorporates self-connecting edges and weights.
Furthermore, an improved Pearson correlation coefficient is employed for better
redistribution. The evaluation of PIM+RA demonstrates a significant enhancement
not only in accuracy but also in coverage, diversity, and novelty of the
recommendation. It leads to a better balance in recommendation frequency by
providing effective exposure to long-tail items, while allowing customized
parameters to adjust the recommendation list bias
Is Transparency Enough? An Examination of the Effect of the Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative (EITI) on Accountability, Corruption and Trust in Zambia
The Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative (EITI) is the leading global transparency
standard for the extractive industry. It aims to improve governance standards in the
extractive industry by providing a public platform for information sharing and multi-stakeholder dialogue. However, the success of the initiative has been brought into question
by numerous scholars. This paper aims to shed new light on this work by presenting a
unique analytical framework. The framework hypothesises that improved transparency,
through the EITI, can lead to improved extractive industry governance: increased
accountability, reduced corruption and increased trust. However, this improvement of
governance can only take place when combined with three scope conditions: 1) transparency
condition, 2) publicity condition, and 3) accountability condition. The paper applies this
framework to the single case study of Zambia, and finds that the EITI has failed to
meaningfully improve these three governance outcomes in the extractive industry in Zambia.
The paper argues that the reason for this is that none of the three necessary scope
conditions are sufficiently present. The paper advocates for policymakers to support the
growth of these three conditions in contexts of poor extractive industry governance, to ensure
transparency standards have meaningful impact.Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development OfficeBill and Melinda Gates FoundationNorwegian Agency for Development Cooperatio
Single-User Injection for Invisible Shilling Attack against Recommender Systems
Recommendation systems (RS) are crucial for alleviating the information
overload problem. Due to its pivotal role in guiding users to make decisions,
unscrupulous parties are lured to launch attacks against RS to affect the
decisions of normal users and gain illegal profits. Among various types of
attacks, shilling attack is one of the most subsistent and profitable attacks.
In shilling attack, an adversarial party injects a number of well-designed fake
user profiles into the system to mislead RS so that the attack goal can be
achieved. Although existing shilling attack methods have achieved promising
results, they all adopt the attack paradigm of multi-user injection, where some
fake user profiles are required. This paper provides the first study of
shilling attack in an extremely limited scenario: only one fake user profile is
injected into the victim RS to launch shilling attacks (i.e., single-user
injection). We propose a novel single-user injection method SUI-Attack for
invisible shilling attack. SUI-Attack is a graph based attack method that
models shilling attack as a node generation task over the user-item bipartite
graph of the victim RS, and it constructs the fake user profile by generating
user features and edges that link the fake user to items. Extensive experiments
demonstrate that SUI-Attack can achieve promising attack results in single-user
injection. In addition to its attack power, SUI-Attack increases the
stealthiness of shilling attack and reduces the risk of being detected. We
provide our implementation at: https://github.com/KDEGroup/SUI-Attack.Comment: CIKM 2023. 10 pages, 5 figure
Putin\u27s Survival: War of Attrition as a Double-Edged Sword
Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. It was a blatant war of aggression led by a revanchist autocrat, Vladimir Putin. The war has not gone according to Russia’s plan. It has stagnated into a war of attrition. The question of whether the world is witnessing the last act of Putin as president of Russia has become relevant. To answer this question, three variables were identified, (1) the character of the war; (2) Putin’s relationship with the people of Russia and; (3) Putin’s relationship with his inner circle. This paper is a content analysis of academic and popular sources of information to review the war in Ukraine and modern Russia as it relates to these variables. The case is made that Putin doubling down on the current war of attrition is a double-edged sword as it relates to him surviving as president. Russia could outnumber Ukraine and achieve territorial gains. Putin could spin those territorial gains and taking on the entire West at once as a victory through nationalized media. Russia is never as strong or as weak as it seems. On the other hand, if the war drags on and the sanctions imposed hurt the Russian economy it could eat away at Putin’s popular support. If stressed, the fragile set of compromises a personalist autocrat has made between the country’s people and the country’s insiders could lead to a popular uprising or a coup
Public Defenders as Gatekeepers of Freedom
Nearly half a million people are currently held in pretrial detention across the United States. Legal scholarship has explored many of the actors and factors contributing to the deprivation of freedom of those presumed innocent. And while the scholarship in these areas is rich, it has primarily focused on certain system actors—including judges, prosecutors, and profit-seeking sheriffs—structural concerns, such as the role race plays in who is being held in pretrial detention, or critiques of the failed promise of algorithms to deliver on bias-free bail determinations. But relatively little scholarship exists about the contributions of public defenders to this deprivation. This Article discusses those contributions. Specifically, it discusses public defenders who act as gatekeepers of bail litigation by substituting their own beliefs and values for those of the people they represent and who, consequently, decide for their clients whether to challenge pretrial detention. Through an exploration of the silence around bail litigation in relevant case law, statutes, and ethical rules, this Article identifies how the rules governing indigent representation have promoted and accommodated this dynamic between public defenders and persons charged with crimes. It explores the implications of this gatekeeping, including the dangers that arise when predominantly white public defenders make decisions for predominantly Black and Brown indigent people charged with crimes. Finally, it calls for a change in the norms and ethics of criminal defense practice as a first step toward rectifying these problems
The construction of operator stress and wellbeing in Aotearoa New Zealand’s logging industry
The forest industry in Aotearoa New Zealand is pursuing a strategy of increasing the use of mechanised harvesting systems as a way of both increasing crew productivity and reducing the number of serious injury and fatal accidents amongst those working on the felling face. While this will reduce exposure to physical hazards, hazards in the psychosocial environment (such as low job control and conflict between work, home and community life) also impact worker behaviour and wellbeing. Yet little is known about the psychosocial risks and coping adaptations in operation within the industry. Given the relationship between stress and risky and dangerous behaviour, it is imperative the industry develops an understanding of how stress operates within the lives of this group of workers to ensure the desired safety outcomes are achieved.
The first objective of this research, therefore, was to explore how machine operators working in the forest industry construct their wellbeing within their work life. Stress is a subjective process where the meanings an individual attribute to an event and their ability to cope with that event influences the stress experience. Understanding stress, therefore, means being able to encapsulate the impacts of social and institutional issues such as power, control and ethics and their impact on the perceptions individuals have of their stress experience. As little is known about these phenomena within this context, constructivist grounded theory methods were used to provide a substantive explanation of the processes in operation. Developing this substantive explanation was the second objective of the research.
Twenty-seven operators were recruited from three regions to participate in a semi-structured interview to explore their experiences of stress and wellbeing. Analysis consisted of three steps – initial coding, intermediate coding and theoretical coding. Within this process, interview text was first dissected into incidents and then organised into concepts with increasing levels of abstraction. That continued iteratively until a core category was identified. This was a category that encapsulated the process that was evident in the concepts and connections that emerged from the analysis. A grounded theory was explicated by conceptualising the narrative inherent in the core category and explained using extant theory.
The data revealed that wellbeing could be explained by the concepts and connections encapsulated in the core category securing a place in a hierarchical world. Within this core category, operator wellbeing was an outcome of the adaptations operators used to secure a sense of place within the various contextual and socio-cultural hierarchies in which their lives unfold. The level of wellbeing the operators experienced was a function of the resources they were able to access from their position of disadvantage within that context. Most of the workplace resources were controlled by the other parties active within the setting, namely the forest owner / manager and contractor. Those resources were deployed in the interests of the controlling actor. While each of the actors were dependent on the others for their social position, the implication was that achieving improvement in wellbeing outcomes would be based on greater recognition of that mutual dependence and a subsequent re-alignment of each actors’ interests
The 7th Annual Conference on "Relooking at Development, Value for Money and Public Service Delivery"
The fire services are a salient contestation which are often overlooked by the Social Science scholars. The Department of Cooperative Governance has ultimately promulgated a White Paper on fire services in May 2020. This study therefore aims to review and examine the legislation with a purpose of traversing the intricacies entrenched within the fire landscape. The review and analysis of policies have the potential to analyse the realities and the misnomer which are a perfect avenue to create dialogue. The theoretical framework of manipulation and elitism are employed for attributing meaning towards the study perspectives for practicality and simplicity. The paper follows a systematic procedure of reviewing documents, and policies to elicit information as a methodology adopted for the study. Gaps identified in the White Paper are uncovered and fully discussed. The content was studied, contextualised, and synthesised intellectually to derive meaning on all the aspects. It is the contention of this paper to attribute meaning to policy improvement in the fire services with a consequential contribution to the world of science for sustainable development.University of South AfricaDevelopment Studie
Transforming Assessment and Learning: Making the System Work. Proceeding of the 2022 International Conference on Assessment and Learning
https://research.acer.edu.au/ical/1000/thumbnail.jp
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