Why I Retweet? Exploring User’s Perspective on Decision-Making of Information Spreading during Disasters

The extensive use of social media during disasters raises an important issue concerning use of social media to spread information, including misinformation. This study explores the underlying behavioral context of disaster information sharing by Twitter users. We conducted a web survey with 999 respondents in Japan to determine what makes people retweet disaster information in disaster situations. As a result of factor analysis, four factors were identified from 36 questions, namely: 1) Willingness to provide relevant and updated information because the information is believable, 2) Want people to know the information they perceive as important, 3) Retweeter subjective feelings and interests, and 4) Want to get feedback and alert other people. The results suggest that two of the factors influenced different groups of people in the community differently; however, everybody can play their role to reduce the negative impact of social media used for future disaster. Based on the findings, we discuss practical and design implications of social media use during disasters

Proceedings of the Vision Zero Summit 2019 12–14 November 2019 Helsinki, Finland

The Vision Zero Summit was held on 12–14 November 2019 in Helsinki Finland, and organized by the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health, with the support of our partners. Vision Zero is a strategy and a holistic mindset. It is continuous improvement of safety, health, and wellbeing at work, not just a numerical goal. This summit focused on discussing different aspects of Vision Zero, taking the Vision Zero thinking and actions to the next level, and sharing best practices and lessons learned. One theme of the Summit was worded as Rethinking Vision Zero, which is a reminder that there are many perspectives to Vision Zero. Vision Zero Summit was one of the side events of Finland’s Presidency of the Council of the EU. One of the Vision Zero Summit’s goal was to provide new ideas and perspectives, as well as strengthen participants professional networks. This Proceedings publication is a compilation of the papers presented on 12–14 November 2019 in the Vision Zero Summit 2019 in Helsinki

ENHANCING USABILITY USING AUTOMATED SECURITY INTERFACE ADAPTATION (ASIA)

2 PUBLISHED CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS PROVIDED IN APPENDIX E.Many users are now significantly dependent upon computer application. Whilst many aspects are now used very successfully, an area in which usability difficulties continue to be encountered is in relation to security. Thus can become particularly acute in situations where users are required to interact and make decisions, and a key context here is typically when they need to respond to security warnings. The current implementation of security warnings can often be considered as an attempt to offer a one size fits all solution. However, it can be argued that many implementations are still lacking the ability to provide meaningful and effective warnings. As such, this research focuses upon achieving a better understanding of the elements that aid end-users in comprehending the warnings, the difficulties with the current approaches, and the resulting requirements in order to improve the design and implementation of such security dialogues. In the early stage of research, a survey was undertaken to investigate perceptions of security dialogues in practice, with a specific focus upon security warnings issued within web browsers. This provided empirical evidence of end-users’ experiences, and revealed notable difficulties in terms of their understanding and interpretation of the security interactions. Building upon this, the follow-up research investigated understanding of application level security warnings in wider contexts, looking firstly at users’ interpretation of what constitutes a security warning and then at their level of comprehension when related warnings occurred. These results confirmed the need to improve the dialogues so that the end-users are able to act appropriately, and consequently promoted the design and prototype implementation of a novel architecture to improve security warnings, which has been titled Automated Security Interface Adaptation (ASIA). The ASIA approach aims to improve security warnings by tailoring the interaction more closely to individual user needs. By automatically adapting the presentation to match each user’s understanding and preferences, security warnings can be modified in ways that enable users to better comprehend them, and thus make more informed security decisions and choices. A comparison of the ASIA-adapted interfaces compared to standard versions of warnings revealed that the modified versions were better understood. As such, the ASIA approach has significant potential to assist (and thereby protect) the end-user community in their future interactions with security.UNIVERSITY SAINS MALAYSIA (USM), MINISTRY OF HIGHER EDUCATION MALAYSIA(MOHE

The distracted robot: what happens when artificial agents behave like us

In everyday life, we are frequently exposed to different smart technologies. From our smartphones to avatars in computer games, and soon perhaps humanoid robots, we are surrounded by artificial agents created to interact with us. Already during the design phase of an artificial agent, engineers often endow it with functions aimed to promote the interaction and engagement with it, ranging from its \u201ccommunicative\u201d abilities to the movements it produces. Still, whether an artificial agent that can behave like a human could boost the spontaneity and naturalness of interaction is still an open question. Even during the interaction with conspecifics, humans rely partially on motion cues when they need to infer the mental states underpinning behavior. Similar processes may be activated during the interaction with embodied artificial agents, such as humanoid robots. At the same time, a humanoid robot that can faithfully reproduce human-like behavior may undermine the interaction, causing a shift in attribution: from being endearing to being uncanny. Furthermore, it is still not clear whether individual biases and prior knowledge related to artificial agents can override perceptual evidence of human-like traits. A relatively new area of research emerged in the context of investigating individuals\u2019 reactions towards robots, widely referred to as Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). HRI is a multidisciplinary community that comprises psychologists, neuroscientists, philosophers as well as roboticists, and engineers. However, HRI research has been often based on explicit measures (i.e. self-report questionnaires, a-posteriori interviews), while more implicit social cognitive processes that are elicited during the interaction with artificial agents took second place behind more qualitative and anecdotal results. The present work aims to demonstrate the usefulness of combining the systematic approach of cognitive neuroscience with HRI paradigms to further investigate social cognition processes evoked by artificial agents. Thus, this thesis aimed at exploring human sensitivity to anthropomorphic characteristics of a humanoid robot's (i.e. iCub robot) behavior, based on motion cues, under different conditions of prior knowledge. To meet this aim, we manipulated the human-likeness of the behaviors displayed by the robot and the explicitness of instructions provided to the participants, in both screen-based and real-time interaction scenarios. Furthermore, we explored some of the individual differences that affect general attitudes towards robots, and the attribution of human-likeness consequently

Eating a nuclear disaster: A vital institutional ethnography of everyday eating in the aftermath of Tokyo Electric Power Company’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster

This project explores the coordination of everyday eating in the aftermath of Tokyo Electric Power Company’s (TEPCO’s) Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster. With the onset of the nuclear disaster in March 2011, imperceptible radionuclides re-emerged as objects of concern for many people living throughout the archipelago of Japan. Falling over homes, farmlands, forests, waterways and oceans, TEPCO’s radionuclides became unwelcomed actors within Japan’s agrifood assemblage, challenging the governance of food safety in Japan and around the world. To ensure the ‘safety’ of food circulating within its agrifood assemblage, the Japanese government initiated an effort to coordinate the activities of human actors in the turbulence of the radiological overflow. Beginning with the troubling experiences of konran (disorder) shared by forty-three people living and eating in Japan’s Kansai region in 2016, this thesis borrows sensibilities from the field of institutional ethnography to explore how everyday eating is hooked up within textually-mediated ruling relations that have emerged since the onset of TEPCO’s nuclear disaster. At the same time, sensibilities form material semiotics are used to attend to myriad other sociomaterial entanglements people find themselves entwined within in the aftermath of the nuclear disaster, particularly their entanglements with imperceptible radionuclides. I refer to this method of inquiry as a ‘vital institutional ethnography.’ With the goal of producing knowledge that will be of use to my participants in situating their own experiences of konran within greater ruling relations, I follow strings from their experiences into various institutional complexes to both explicate ruling relations and explore the monstrous and ghostly sociomaterial entanglements of humans and more-than-humans they relate with in their everyday lives. Beginning with an exploration of historical cases of industrial ruination and the current case of TEPCO’s nuclear disaster, I discover that ruling texts and discourses are enacted in ways to erase or obfuscate the material presence of industrial pollutants. Through explicating the various ruling relations my participants are embedded and participate within following TEPCO’s nuclear disaster, I argue that the Japanese government’s coordination effort attempts to establish a single, ‘correct’ way for humans to understand and relate with radionuclides possibly present in the food and water they ingest. This ‘single reality’ is born out of what I refer to as the ‘transnational nuclear assemblage’—an assemblage of commissions, governments, committees, scientific associations and many other organizations which produce ruling texts that are designed to manage and contain radiological overflows within a vast and ever-expanding textual complex. In exploring the ruling relations involved in the enactment of ‘safe food,’ I discover that while single-reality-wielding coordination efforts may be efficient for maintaining the pace of commerce and in paving the textual-path forward for military and industrial projects, tensions arise when they enter and interfere with the messy, multiple realities of my locally-situated participants

Radioactive Governance: The Politics of Expertise after Fukushima

This dissertation focuses on Japanese public and state responses to the release of radioactive contamination after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. I argue that the Fukushima nuclear disaster has led to the emergence of new forms of expertise in governing radioactive risks. These include techniques of governance that attempt to normalize peoples relationships with nuclear matter as an everyday concern. They also include decentralized strategies that empower victims of the disaster by providing access to technoscientifc practices of radiation monitoring and delegating radiation protection from the state to the citizens. My findings uncover a major shift in how societies have formerly organized responses to radioactive risks. In the aftermath of nuclear accidents, scholars have criticized central authoritarian decisions, in which state management of radioactive hazards was associated with politics of secrecy, victimhood, or public knowledge deficit. At stake in Fukushima is an increased normalization of citizens relationship with residual radioactivity, which is transformed into an everyday concern, rather than being represented as something exceptional. This is not only done by state experts, but equally via the increased activity of citizen scientists that collectively monitor residual radioactivity. My research is a significant departure from traditional sociocultural works that predominantly focus on micro-scale studies, such as how prior sociocultural factors influence a group understanding of radioactive risks. By highlighting major shifts in the structure of expertise and the regulation of life amidst toxic exposure, my research highlights how the management of contamination risks is evolving in an era where the impacts of modernization represent permanent marks on the planet

Bitcoin and the Japanese Retail Investor

The objective of this research is to examine the Bitcoin rally of 2017 as it occurred in Japan and establish a greater context for why it was the Japanese retail investors that propelled the nation to being the largest trader of the cryptocurrency at the end of the year. This dissertation begins with the examination of the technical and economical properties of Bitcoin by classifying it as fulfilling two roles: that of a means of payment and that of an investment commodity. Following that is a description of Bitcoin’s roots and the history of its non-speculative usage. These chapters serve as a base for examining the cryptocurrency’s role in Japan. The third chapter examines the Japanese retail investor and the Japanese retail investment landscape with a focus on the question of the low rates of risk-asset participation in face of a favorable investment environment. Historical context is drawn upon to argue that the present situation, wherein most financial assets are kept as cash, is rather the result of the historical path dependence than the present-day conditions in which Japanese retail investors operate. The final chapter addresses the question of high-risk activities in the form of gambling and margin trading by a group of predominantly middle-aged men and connects this propensity to engage in zero-sum games with Bitcoin’s success in Japan. The author argues that the solitary practice of high-risk financial activities enabled by trusted institutions is separate from the general savings tradition that suffered shocks following the low interest-rate regime and that it was the high-risk gambles that became the primary cause for the popularity of Bitcoin. The dissertation concludes with the argument that the success of Bitcoin in 2017 had been in no small part achieved precisely by inverting the hard-line libertarian values of its creators and making it a centrally-held commodity offered by a banking-like institution with a strong public presence

Power and Pork

Politics and government; Economic policy; Japa

アメリカ人および日本人によるオンラインコミュニケーションの対照分析 ―人気日記ブログにおけるUMCの機能と用法を中心に―

Tohoku University上原聡課