There and Back: Vindicating the Listener’s Interests in Targeted Advertising in the Internet Information Economy

This Note argues first, that the Commercial Speech Doctrine as currently conceived is an ill-fitting tool for resolving difficult free speech questions in the context of data, privacy, and the modern Internet Information Economy. The application of the Commercial Speech Doctrine to a particular economic interaction should not be a nigh-complete bar to the regulation of Internet platforms that profit from data collection and transmission. For this reason, qualified constitutional protection appropriately accounts for the speaker’s interests while not short-changing those of the listener/consumer. This Note proposes that regulators and reviewing tribunals consider the context surrounding the data collection and transmission process, including: method of collection, relationship between miner and mined party, and whether the user has consented to such collection in justifying the relative need for regulation. Second, in order to vindicate the Commercial Speech Doctrine’s initial purposes, more transparency of data collection procedures for use in targeted advertising is warranted and indeed possible as a regulatory hook to protect consumers, despite the Court’s move towards according more protection to commercial speakers. In so doing, this Note builds upon Erin Bernstein and Theresa J. Lee’s Where the Consumer Is the Commodity: The Difficulty with the Current Definition of Commercial Speech, which proposes that the “rise of new non-linear commercial transactions” necessitates a shift in the definition of commercial speech to accommodate the seismic change in the modern online economy. The stakes are not inconsequential: failure to expand the scope of commercial speech would foreclose the use of many tools in a legislature’s arsenal to address current concerns related to consumer privacy and eliminating advertisements that seek to capitalize on discriminatory indicia, among other salient policy issues. Part I details the Court’s jurisprudence regarding both personal solicitations and data practices and considers the shift away from a bifurcated speech paradigm that treats commercial speech as speech of “lesser value.” Part II illustrates the most common forms of data collection and transmission. Part III locates these methods of data collection and transmission within the current commercial speech framework to conclude that qualified constitutional protection is the coherent tier of scrutiny that should apply. Part IV proposes policy recommendations that fit within the Court’s current approach to commercial speech and alternatives that would require a departure from the present doctrine

There and Back: Vindicating the Listener\u27s Interests in Targeted Advertising in the Internet Information Economy

Targeted advertising — the process by which advertisers direct their message at a specific demographic — is neither a recent1 nor an irrational phenomenon.2 One industry executive has proclaimed it the “rare win for everyone” because it serves producers, advertisers, and consumers alike. It should be no surprise that the Information sector of the online economy — particularly new and social media platforms with robust access to consumer data — has structured revenue streams to benefit from targeted advertising. These platforms generate “substantially all of [their] revenue from advertising,” which in turn rely on active user engagement. The Internet Information Economy is premised on the free flowing exchange of data and limited barriers to its collection and transmission. New and social media, including Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn, sustain themselves on a quid pro quo exchange of monetizable user data for a wide array of nominally gratuitous services. This free flow of data has revolutionized how marketers reach their desired audiences. Advertisers are willing to pay a premium for targeted advertisements with the expectation that the investment yields dividends. Currently, the technological prowess of new and social media platforms outpaces the existing regulatory landscape. However, these businesses contend with risks relating to the nature of targeted advertising, including the propensity to mislead consumers, and concomitant concerns about user privacy. Acknowledging the ubiquity of targeted advertising and Internet Information Economy participants’ market share and political will, this Note proposes several policies for regulating such data collection and transmission practices. Calls for regulations on targeted advertisements — particularly those linked to new and social media — are likely to be met with claims of a First Amendment violation, and invocations of the Commercial Speech Doctrine. While the core of the Commercial Speech Doctrine captures speech proposing a commercial transaction, it also encompasses “expression related solely to the economic interests of the speaker and its audience.” Targeted advertising hosted on Internet Information Economy platforms poses a unique challenge to this paradigm. Its reliance on consumer data directly implicates the consumer more so than with “traditional” commercial speech

The Essence of Transpersonal Psychology Contemporary Views

The authors compiled 80 chronologically ordered passages from the contemporary psychology literature that address the essence of transpersonal psychology. A thematic analysis of these passages revealed that the two most frequent categories, occurring 53 (66.2%) and 49 (61.2%) times respectively, were: (a) Going beyond or transcending the individual, ego, self, the personal, personality, or personal identity; existence of a deeper, true, or authentic Self; and (b) Spirituality, psychospiritual, psychospiritual development, the spiritual, spirit. Other, less frequent, themes included: special states of consciousness; interconnectivity/unity; going beyond other schools of psychology; emphasis on a scientific approach; mysticism; full range of consciousness; greater potential; inclusion of non-Western psychologies; meditation; and existence of a wider reality

Semantics-driven Abstractive Document Summarization

The evolution of the Web over the last three decades has led to a deluge of scientific and news articles on the Internet. Harnessing these publications in different fields of study is critical to effective end user information consumption. Similarly, in the domain of healthcare, one of the key challenges with the adoption of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) for clinical practice has been the tremendous amount of clinical notes generated that can be summarized without which clinical decision making and communication will be inefficient and costly. In spite of the rapid advances in information retrieval and deep learning techniques towards abstractive document summarization, the results of these efforts continue to resemble extractive summaries, achieving promising results predominantly on lexical metrics but performing poorly on semantic metrics. Thus, abstractive summarization that is driven by intrinsic and extrinsic semantics of documents is not adequately explored. Resources that can be used for generating semantics-driven abstractive summaries include: • Abstracts of multiple scientific articles published in a given technical field of study to generate an abstractive summary for topically-related abstracts within the field, thus reducing the load of having to read semantically duplicate abstracts on a given topic. • Citation contexts from different authoritative papers citing a reference paper can be used to generate utility-oriented abstractive summary for a scientific article. • Biomedical articles and the named entities characterizing the biomedical articles along with background knowledge bases to generate entity and fact-aware abstractive summaries. • Clinical notes of patients and clinical knowledge bases for abstractive clinical text summarization using knowledge-driven multi-objective optimization. In this dissertation, we develop semantics-driven abstractive models based on intra- document and inter-document semantic analyses along with facts of named entities retrieved from domain-specific knowledge bases to produce summaries. Concretely, we propose a sequence of frameworks leveraging semantics at various granularity (e.g., word, sentence, document, topic, citations, and named entities) levels, by utilizing external resources. The proposed frameworks have been applied to a range of tasks including 1. Abstractive summarization of topic-centric multi-document scientific articles and news articles. 2. Abstractive summarization of scientific articles using crowd-sourced citation contexts. 3. Abstractive summarization of biomedical articles clustered based on entity-relatedness. 4. Abstractive summarization of clinical notes of patients with heart failure and Chest X-Rays recordings. The proposed approaches achieve impressive performance in terms of preserving semantics in abstractive summarization while paraphrasing. For summarization of topic-centric multiple scientific/news articles, we propose a three-stage approach where abstracts of scientific articles or news articles are clustered based on their topical similarity determined from topics generated using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), followed by extractive phase and abstractive phase. Then, in the next stage, we focus on abstractive summarization of biomedical literature where we leverage named entities in biomedical articles to 1) cluster related articles; and 2) leverage the named entities towards guiding abstractive summarization. Finally, in the last stage, we turn to external resources such as citation contexts pointing to a scientific article to generate a comprehensive and utility-centric abstractive summary of a scientific article, domain-specific knowledge bases to fill gaps in information about entities in a biomedical article to summarize and clinical notes to guide abstractive summarization of clinical text. Thus, the bottom-up progression of exploring semantics towards abstractive summarization in this dissertation starts with (i) Semantic Analysis of Latent Topics; builds on (ii) Internal and External Knowledge-I (gleaned from abstracts and Citation Contexts); and extends it to make it comprehensive using (iii) Internal and External Knowledge-II (Named Entities and Knowledge Bases)

Blue Economy and Resilient Development: Natural Resources, Shipping, People, and Environment

This book is a pivotal publication that seeks to address contemporary challenges to the blue economy in view of the growth in exploration and utilization of natural resources, transport connectivity, effects of climate change, sustainable fisheries management, food security, and social and economic issues of human well-being in coastal areas. Coastal territories and water areas are changing at an unprecedented pace in ways that fundamentally affect ecosystems, people, biodiversity, and sustainability. Such changes are driven primarily by rapid social and economic developments, economic disparities between countries, the internationalization of production and value chains, and industrialization. In this context, this publication supplements the existing literature by summoning political, economic, environmental, and social factors that influence various dimensions of the sustainable development of blue economy, as well as translating the findings into workable approaches and policies for the benefit of the economic actors, people, and the environment

CRP Commissioned External Evaluation of the CGIAR Research Program on Dryland Cereals

This external evaluation of the CGIAR Research Programme on Dryland Cereals (hereafter referred to as Dryland Cereals) was conducted with quality assurance support and advice from the Independent Evaluation Arrangement (IEA). It is intended to provide accountability for the progress of the CRP and to generate lessons and recommendations to enhance management decision making and program improvement, and to contribute to the design for the second phase of the program

A comparison of methods for assessing groundwater vulnerability in karst aquifers: the case study of Terminio Mt. aquifer (Southern Italy)

The assessment of groundwater vulnerability to pollution is becoming even more important all over the world due to the increase of impacts of human activities on groundwater resources and the related risks to the human health, economics, and the environment. Owing to the variability of methods known for estimating groundwater vulnerability, basically depending on hydrogeological parameters considered and the scale of analysis, the comparison of results of different methods appears straightforward for identifying the best approach in a given hydrogeological condition and reference scale. In such a view, this work attempts to assess the groundwater vulnerability of the Terminio Mt. karst aquifer, by applying four different groundwater vulnerability methods, index-based, and comparing results in order to identify the best performing one in karst environments. The study aquifer, located in the Picentini Mts Regional Park (Campania region, southern Italy) represents a strategic drinking water resource since Roman times and hosts massive groundwater resources which outflow mainly from tapped basal and subordinately perched springs. The peculiar characters of the study karst aquifer, which favour direct infiltration and groundwater recharge processes, as well as the occurrence of industrial, agricultural and grazing activities, make it very vulnerable to groundwater pollution, thus requiring a proper and careful territorial management. Beside the most frequently and generally used methods for assessing groundwater vulnerability, such as the DRASTIC and SINTACS, also DAC and COP methods specifically designed for karst aquifers were applied and mutually compared. Results of SINTACS, DRASTIC and DAC methods show groundwater vulnerability maps of the Terminio Mt. karst aquifer as chiefly characterized by two classes of intrinsic groundwater vulnerability, varying between the medium and high degrees. Furthermore, high and extremely high values of groundwater vulnerability were found in areas controlled by the shallow depth of the water-table. Instead, the COP method resulted as the most effective in identifying the endorheic areas and the related karst morphologies as very high groundwater vulnerability zones, therefore the most suitable in capturing specific hydrogeological features of karst areas that control groundwater pollution and vulnerability. Results obtained will support decision tools aimed at the land use planning and protection of karst aquifers from pollution in karst areas