Big Data in Psychology: Introduction to the Special Issue

The introduction to this special issue on psychological research involving big data summarizes the highlights of 10 articles that address a number of important and inspiring perspectives, issues, and applications. Four common themes that emerge in the articles with respect to psychological research conducted in the area of big data are mentioned, including: 1. The benefits of collaboration across disciplines, such as those in the social sciences, applied statistics, and computer science. Doing so assists in grounding big data research in sound theory and practice, as well as in affording effective data retrieval and analysis. 2. Availability of large datasets on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites that provide a psychological window into the attitudes and behaviors of a broad spectrum of the population. 3. Identifying, addressing, and being sensitive to ethical considerations when analyzing large datasets gained from public or private sources. 4. The unavoidable necessity of validating predictive models in big data by applying a model developed on one dataset to a separate set of data or hold-out sample. Translational abstracts that summarize the articles in very clear and understandable terms are included in Appendix A, and a glossary of terms relevant to big data research discussed in the articles is presented in Appendix B. Keywords: big data, machine learning, statistical learning theory, social media data, digital footprint, decision trees and forests

Introduction to the themed issue - Corporate power : agency, communication, influence and social policy

This paper introduces this themed issue of Critical Social Policy on the question of corporate power. Corporate power is recognized as an important agent in social policy making and delivery. However, to date there has been comparatively little attention to the crucial role that lobbying and corporate 'spin' play in helping to shape policy making contexts. This special issue of Critical Social Policy is concerned to bring such issues to the mainstream of social policy analysis. It is argued here that the rise of spin and public relations is a key feature of neoliberalism in the past two decades. These have worked to reshape policy making, resulting in pronounced changes in the content and process of policy making and it is argued that these have tended to marginalize or undermine democratic processes

Conceptual models of urban environmental information systems - toward improved information provision

Cities are the hub of European society - for over a millennium, they are the locus of social, political and economic development. As the core of intensive and creative human activity, they are also the place where the environmental externalities that accompany rapid development are most visible. The environmental consequences of urban development have been recognised long ago, as in the case of London, where in 1388 legislation was introduced to control pollutant emissions (Lowenthal, 1990). Similar historical environmental regulations can be demonstrated for many cities in Europe. However, while for most of history those who govern the city (be it the sovereign, city elders or local government) where responsible for the control, mitigation and management of the common environment in the city, the last 30 years are a period of profound change. This is due to the trend toward improved participation in environmental decision making . a more inclusive and open approach to decisions that deal with the city commons. This change did not occurre overnight but rather gradually. For example, in the United Kingdom, it was the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947 which introduced public scrutiny to changes in the urban form (Rydin, 1998), or the development of public involvement in environmental impact assessment of urban projects as developed in many countries throughout the developed world during the 1970s and 1980s (Gilpin 1995). These changes accelerate within the last three decades, and especially since the publication of .Our Common Future. (WCED and Brundtland 1987), the acceptance of the .Sustainable Development. principles and the Rio conference. A quiet (mini) revolution happened in Europe not long ago, toward the end of 1998 when the members of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UN/ECE) signed the .Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision Making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters. - the Aarhus Convention (UN/ECE 1998). The convention is expected to come into force by the end of 2001, and calls the governments and public authorities to open up access to environmental information as a means to improve public participation in environmental decision making and awareness of environmental issues (UN/ECE, 1998). However, these declarations on the value and importance of environmental information do not match our level of understanding on the role of environmental information in decision making processes, and especially on the role of information in improving awareness and participation. Therefore, it is useful to take a step back, and to try and evaluate how environmental information and access to it and its use support public involvement in such processes. This paper is aimed to offer a framework that can assist us in the analytical process of understanding environmental information use. It focuses on public access and assumes that environmental information will be delivered to the public through the Internet. Such assumption is based on the current trend within public authorities is to use Information and Communication Technology (ICT) as a major delivery medium and it seems that it will become more so in the near future (OECD 2000). The framework which this paper presents, is based on Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) study which unpacked some of the core issues relating to public access and use of environmental information (Haklay, 2001). Although the aim here is not to discuss the merits of SSM, but to focus on the conceptual models, some introduction to the techniques that are used here is needed. Therefore, the following section opens with introduction to SSM and its techniques. The core of the paper is dedicated to the development of conceptual models. After presenting the conceptual models, some conclusions about these models and their applications are drown

Living Wage Special Initiative Evaluation Final Report

The £1 million Living Wage Special Initiative, launched by Trust for London in 2009, aimed to deliver "a step-change" in the number of employers signing up to the living wage and a consequent increase in the numbers of employees benefi ting from higher incomes. The Living Wage Special Initiative has used a combination of research, awareness raising and targeted campaigns, capacity building with other organisations in the voluntary and community sector to support the campaign and an accreditation process to provide formal recognition to employers adopting the living wage.This report brings together the final round of research on the Living Wage Special Initiative undertaken over the summer of 2013 and shortly after the Living Wage Week in November 2013 with our evaluation findings over the previous four years of the programme

Introduction: The Challenge of Risk Communication in a Democratic Society

The symposium editors review key issues concerning the relationship between risk communication and public participation

Testing the securitization paradigm of the so-called Copenhagen school in the case study of europe migrant crisis in 2015

Migration is an international phenomenon and contentious concept. Although people have been moving by political, economic and cultural motivations since the beginning of the human history; particularly recently, migration fuels traditional fears over national and societal security. Because, migration, a normal or typical political issue can be altered to a security threat by repetitive and successful speech acts. This fact has often been referred to as ‘the securitization of migration’, which means the presentation of migration as a security threat. In this regard, the arrival of more than one million refugees to the EU in 2015 -Migrant (Refugee) Crisis- constitutes an important milestone. The starting point of this study is to depict “How the securitization process of the ‘Migrant Crisis’ was operated”. It will be in charge of defining not only the key-concepts, such as “securitization move” and “securitization”, but also of what are the success criteria are. According to this study, securitizing actors and their speech acts have opened the way for the success of securitization by providing the perfect ground for altering the question of Migrants into a survival issue. To analyze the characteristics and the implications of securitizing the migration issue within the EU, this article primarily engages with the theoretical approach developed by the so-called Copenhagen School, which outlines how issues become threats those need to be handled by extra-ordinary measures.La migración es un fenómeno internacional y un concepto polémico. Aunque las personas se han trasladado por motivos políticos, económicos o culturales a lo largo de los siglos; la migración alimenta en la actualidad antiguos temores sobre seguridad nacional y social. Dado que la migración, un problema político normal, puede transformarse en amenaza de seguridad por cómo se habla de él -actos de habla-.Este hecho se ha denominado a menudo como "la seguritización de la migración"; es decir, el considerar la migración como una amenaza existencial. En este sentido, la llegada de más de un millón de refugiados a la UE en 2015, la crisis de los inmigrantes (refugiados), constituye un hito importante. El punto de partida de este estudio es describir "Cómo se llevó a cabo el proceso de seguritización de la 'Crisis Migratoria'". Se tratará de definir no solo conceptos claves, como "seguritización" y "acto de habla", sino también cuáles son los criterios que contribuyen a construir con éxito dicha seguritización. Según el presente estudio, actores securitizadores y sus actos de habla han abierto el camino para su triunfo, al proporcionar el terreno perfecto para transformar la cuestión de los migrantes en una cuestión de supervivencia. Para analizar las características y las implicaciones de la seguritización de la cuestión migratoria dentro de la UE, este trabajo aborda principalmente el enfoque teórico desarrollado por la llamada Escuela de Copenhague, que describe cómo los problemas se convierten en amenazas que deben manejarse con medidas extraordinarias

Towards the construction of new audiences: ‘Fictions’ in contemporary media

In this paper I aim to work with a concept that I defined as “fictions” or better, “Hegemonic fictions”. The concept of fiction is based not on a “lie”, but on a hegemonic representation that media produce and reproduce in every show, game, interaction or presentation. That is why I chose to call them fictions: the ways through which media build hegemonic representations about everything that should matter in a specific moment of time and history. I identified four different fictions and, through them, I propose to analyze different aspects of both the contemporary media and their audiences. The first one is the fiction of choice. The analysis that I made of this fiction is based on the diversity of available electronic devices and the real possibilities that audiences have to choose. The second one is the fiction of participation. The emphasis in the so called “decision of the audience” is built upon a new fiction: we do not get to choose who participates on a show, a survey or a contest but we are summoned to “vote” or answer questions in order to construct a feeling that we are participating. The third fiction is the one of the objectivity. The aim of this fiction is to analyze the operations through which media present their sayings, images, news and opinions as “objective”. In the same line, the fourth fiction is about the reception stage. I do not sustain that reception is a fiction but I will analyze the variables and the mediations that exist between media messages and the audiences who receive, read, write and listen to those messages. New audiences and new media seem to be changing and developing at the same time in the same space. We aim to question the naturalization of the different and varied relationships between media and audiences in order to present possible new approaches that might lead to new questions and researches.Fil: Duek, Sara Carolina. Universidad de Buenos Aires; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentin