Business and Human Rights as a Galaxy of Norms

In the last several years, there has been an increasing tendency to view the impacts of transnational business operations through the lens of human rights law. A major obstacle to holding companies accountable for the harms that they impose, however, has been the separate legal identity of corporate subsidiaries and of contractors in a company\u27s supply chain. France\u27s recently enacted duty of vigilance statute seeks to overcome this obstacle by imposing a duty on companies to identify potential serious human rights violations by their subsidiaries and by companies with which they have an “established commercial relationship.” Failure to engage in such vigilance can subject a company to liability for damages resulting from such failure. This Article situates the new French duty of vigilance within a broader set of norms that can be characterized as the Business and Human Rights Galaxy. This Galaxy consists of five rings that represent standards and expectations ranging from classic enforceable “hard law” to voluntary principles generated by private parties, multi-stakeholder initiatives, and international organizations. The provisions in these rings are related in fluid and dynamic ways and exert varying degrees of gravitational influence on one another. Thus, for instance, what are conventionally regarded as forms of hard law may draw on voluntary private standards in setting expectations for behavior, and soft law norms may be incorporated into legally enforceable contract provisions between companies and their suppliers. This Article suggests that appreciation of these dynamics can furnish guidance in interpreting the novel duty of vigilance that the new French statute establishes. In particular, the common law duty of care and the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights can illuminate the nature and scope of the duty of vigilance. At the same time, the introduction of the new French statute into the Business and Human Rights Galaxy means that it too has the potential to influence provisions in other rings of the Galaxy

Emotion and language: valence and arousal affect word recognition

Emotion influences most aspects of cognition and behavior, but emotional factors are conspicuously absent from current models of word recognition. The influence of emotion on word recognition has mostly been reported in prior studies on the automatic vigilance for negative stimuli, but the precise nature of this relationship is unclear. Various models of automatic vigilance have claimed that the effect of valence on response times is categorical, an inverted U, or interactive with arousal. In the present study, we used a sample of 12,658 words and included many lexical and semantic control factors to determine the precise nature of the effects of arousal and valence on word recognition. Converging empirical patterns observed in word-level and trial-level data from lexical decision and naming indicate that valence and arousal exert independent monotonic effects: Negative words are recognized more slowly than positive words, and arousing words are recognized more slowly than calming words. Valence explained about 2% of the variance in word recognition latencies, whereas the effect of arousal was smaller. Valence and arousal do not interact, but both interact with word frequency, such that valence and arousal exert larger effects among low-frequency words than among high-frequency words. These results necessitate a new model of affective word processing whereby the degree of negativity monotonically and independently predicts the speed of responding. This research also demonstrates that incorporating emotional factors, especially valence, improves the performance of models of word recognition

Detection of Human Vigilance State During Locomotion Using Wearable FNIRS

Human vigilance is a cognitive function that requires sustained attention toward change in the environment. Human vigilance detection is a widely investigated topic which can be accomplished by various approaches. Most studies have focused on stationary vigilance detection due to the high effect of interference such as motion artifacts which are prominent in common movements such as walking. Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy is a preferred modality in vigilance detection due to the safe nature, the low cost and ease of implementation. fNIRS is not immune to motion artifact interference, and therefore human vigilance detection performance would be severely degraded when studied during locomotion. Properly treating and removing walking-induced motion artifacts from the contaminated signals is crucial to ensure accurate vigilance detection. This study compared the vigilance level detection during both stationary and walking states and confirmed that the performance of vigilance level detection during walking is significantly deteriorated (with a

Adaptive scaling of cluster boundaries for large-scale social media data clustering

The large scale and complex nature of social media data raises the need to scale clustering techniques to big data and make them capable of automatically identifying data clusters with few empirical settings. In this paper, we present our investigation and three algorithms based on the fuzzy adaptive resonance theory (Fuzzy ART) that have linear computational complexity, use a single parameter, i.e., the vigilance parameter to identify data clusters, and are robust to modest parameter settings. The contribution of this paper lies in two aspects. First, we theoretically demonstrate how complement coding, commonly known as a normalization method, changes the clustering mechanism of Fuzzy ART, and discover the vigilance region (VR) that essentially determines how a cluster in the Fuzzy ART system recognizes similar patterns in the feature space. The VR gives an intrinsic interpretation of the clustering mechanism and limitations of Fuzzy ART. Second, we introduce the idea of allowing different clusters in the Fuzzy ART system to have different vigilance levels in order to meet the diverse nature of the pattern distribution of social media data. To this end, we propose three vigilance adaptation methods, namely, the activation maximization (AM) rule, the confliction minimization (CM) rule, and the hybrid integration (HI) rule. With an initial vigilance value, the resulting clustering algorithms, namely, the AM-ART, CM-ART, and HI-ART, can automatically adapt the vigilance values of all clusters during the learning epochs in order to produce better cluster boundaries. Experiments on four social media data sets show that AM-ART, CM-ART, and HI-ART are more robust than Fuzzy ART to the initial vigilance value, and they usually achieve better or comparable performance and much faster speed than the state-of-the-art clustering algorithms that also do not require a predefined number of clusters

Pupillometry and the vigilance decrement: Task‐evoked but not baseline pupil measures reflect declining performance in visual vigilance tasks

Baseline and task-evoked pupil measures are known to reflect the activity of the nervous system's central arousal mechanisms. With the increasing availability, affordability and flexibility of video-based eye tracking hardware, these measures may one day find practical application in real-time biobehavioural monitoring systems to assess performance or fitness for duty in tasks requiring vigilant attention. But real-world vigilance tasks are predominantly visual in their nature and most research in this area has taken place in the auditory domain. Here, we explore the relationship between pupil size—both baseline and task-evoked—and behavioural performance measures in two novel vigilance tasks requiring visual target detection: (1) a traditional vigilance task involving prolonged, continuous and uninterrupted performance (n = 28) and (2) a psychomotor vigilance task (n = 25). In both tasks, behavioural performance and task-evoked pupil responses declined as time spent on task increased, corroborating previous reports in the literature of a vigilance decrement with a corresponding reduction in task-evoked pupil measures. Also in line with previous findings, baseline pupil size did not show a consistent relationship with performance measures. Our data offer novel insights into the complex interplay of brain systems involved in vigilant attention and question the validity of the assumption that baseline (prestimulus) pupil size and task-evoked (poststimulus) pupil measures reflect the tonic and phasic firing modes of the locus coeruleus

Stopping the Traffic: the National Vigilance Association and the international fight against the ‘white slave’ trade (1899–c.1909)

The National Vigilance Association was the most prominent organization to take on the fight against sex trafficking in turn-of-the-century Britain. In 1899, it established and presided over the first global multidenominational anti-trafficking task force, the International Bureau for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic (later Traffic in Persons). This article focuses on the configuration of the National Vigilance Association's anti-trafficking work during the formative years of the Bureau, paying particular attention to the relationship between the Association and the state. It sheds new light on the nature and significance of both the Association's role in the Bureau and the Association's domestic anti-trafficking operations. It exposes the way in which, while making notable advancements in the fight against trafficking, the Association brought an assumption of British superiority to its international work, and operated on the basis of a misdiagnosis of ‘sexual exploitation’ informed by a gender- and class-biased xenophobia, such as to detract from its commitment to the suppression of trafficking

Tracking Dengue Epidemics using Twitter Content Classification and Topic Modelling

Detecting and preventing outbreaks of mosquito-borne diseases such as Dengue and Zika in Brasil and other tropical regions has long been a priority for governments in affected areas. Streaming social media content, such as Twitter, is increasingly being used for health vigilance applications such as flu detection. However, previous work has not addressed the complexity of drastic seasonal changes on Twitter content across multiple epidemic outbreaks. In order to address this gap, this paper contrasts two complementary approaches to detecting Twitter content that is relevant for Dengue outbreak detection, namely supervised classification and unsupervised clustering using topic modelling. Each approach has benefits and shortcomings. Our classifier achieves a prediction accuracy of about 80\% based on a small training set of about 1,000 instances, but the need for manual annotation makes it hard to track seasonal changes in the nature of the epidemics, such as the emergence of new types of virus in certain geographical locations. In contrast, LDA-based topic modelling scales well, generating cohesive and well-separated clusters from larger samples. While clusters can be easily re-generated following changes in epidemics, however, this approach makes it hard to clearly segregate relevant tweets into well-defined clusters.Comment: Procs. SoWeMine - co-located with ICWE 2016. 2016, Lugano, Switzerlan

Anxious to see you: Neuroendocrine mechanisms of social vigilance and anxiety during adolescence.

Social vigilance is a behavioral strategy commonly used in adverse or changing social environments. In animals, a combination of avoidance and vigilance allows an individual to evade potentially dangerous confrontations while monitoring the social environment to identify favorable changes. However, prolonged use of this behavioral strategy in humans is associated with increased risk of anxiety disorders, a major burden for human health. Elucidating the mechanisms of social vigilance in animals could provide important clues for new treatment strategies for social anxiety. Importantly, during adolescence the prevalence of social anxiety increases significantly. We hypothesize that many of the actions typically characterized as anxiety behaviors begin to emerge during this time as strategies for navigating more complex social structures. Here, we consider how the social environment and the pubertal transition shape neural circuits that modulate social vigilance, focusing on the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis and prefrontal cortex. The emergence of gonadal hormone secretion during adolescence has important effects on the function and structure of these circuits, and may play a role in the emergence of a notable sex difference in anxiety rates across adolescence. However, the significance of these changes in the context of anxiety is still uncertain, as not enough studies are sufficiently powered to evaluate sex as a biological variable. We conclude that greater integration between human and animal models will aid the development of more effective strategies for treating social anxiety

Acetylcholine neuromodulation in normal and abnormal learning and memory: vigilance control in waking, sleep, autism, amnesia, and Alzheimer's disease

This article provides a unified mechanistic neural explanation of how learning, recognition, and cognition break down during Alzheimer's disease, medial temporal amnesia, and autism. It also clarifies whey there are often sleep disturbances during these disorders. A key mechanism is how acetylcholine modules vigilance control in cortical layer

Altering The Environment: The Effects Of Light And Music On Vigilance Performance And Affective State

Vigilance, otherwise known as a state of alert watchfulness, is a phenomenon that occurs when someone is sustaining their attention on a particular task or environment. Largely, tasks that require a state of vigilance induce negative mood outcomes, result in loss of performance over time, and cause increased disengagement from the task. These tasks involve detecting critical signals which are buried among more frequently occurring neutral signals. While little can be done to change the base nature of the vigilance task, altering the physical environment of the operator may improve working conditions to a point where there are fewer losses of engagement and declines in arousal. Previous research has found that exposure to bright short-wavelength light can improve sleepiness, alertness, and mood. In other research, music has been found to positively impact cognitive function and response times. The first study examined the efficacy of using a bright light therapy lamp during vigilance performance to minimize the decline in alertness and arousal. There were 50 participants placed into two conditions: A bright light therapy lamp and dim light. Results indicated that the therapy light did not prevent a decline in detection of critical signals over time, nor significantly impact workload, sleepiness, or subjective stress state compared to a dim light condition. However, mood questionnaire results suggest that lighting may impact separate constructs of arousal and tiredness, warranting further research. The second study determined differently tempoed music, namely fast and slow tempos, did not significantly impact operator engagement and response time. It also recruited 50 participants but had 3 conditions: fast tempo, slow tempo, and silence. Results indicated that varying music tempo did not influence the typical decline in detection of critical signals, but the fast tempo condition had a modestly positive impact on worry and engagement from pre- to post-task