Reconsidering online reputation systems

Social and socioeconomic interactions and transactions often require trust. In digital spaces, the main approach to facilitating trust has effectively been to try to reduce or even remove the need for it through the implementation of reputation systems. These generate metrics based on digital data such as ratings and reviews submitted by users, interaction histories, and so on, that are intended to label individuals as more or less reliable or trustworthy in a particular interaction context. We suggest that conventional approaches to the design of such systems are rooted in a capitalist, competitive paradigm, relying on methodological individualism, and that the reputation technologies themselves thus embody and enact this paradigm in whatever space they operate in. We question whether the politics, ethics and philosophy that contribute to this paradigm align with those of some of the contexts in which reputation systems are now being used, and suggest that alternative approaches to the establishment of trust and reputation in digital spaces need to be considered for alternative contexts

Redescribing Health Privacy: The Importance of Health Policy

Current conversations about health information policy often tend to be based on three broad assumptions. First, many perceive a tension between regulation and innovation. We often hear that privacy regulations are keeping researchers, companies, and providers from aggregating the data they need to promote innovation. Second, aggregation of fragmented data is seen as a threat to its proper regulation, creating the risk of breaches and other misuse. Third, a prime directive for technicians and policymakers is to give patients ever more granular methods of control over data. This article questions and complicates those assumptions, which I deem (respectively) the Privacy Threat to Research, the Aggregation Threat to Privacy, and the Control Solution. This article is also intended to enrich our concepts of “fragmentation” and “integration” in health care. There is a good deal of sloganeering around “firewalls” and “vertical integration” as idealized implementations of “fragmentation” and “integration” (respective). The problem, though, is that terms like these (as well as “disruption”) are insufficiently normative to guide large-scale health system change. They describe, but they do not adequately prescribe. By examining those instances where: a) regulation promotes innovation, and b) increasing (some kinds of) availability of data actually enhances security, confidentiality, and privacy protections, this article attempts to give a richer account of the ethics of fragmentation and integration in the U.S. health care system. But, it also has a darker side, highlighting the inevitable conflicts of values created in a “reputation society” driven by stigmatizing social sorting systems. Personal data control may exacerbate social inequalities. Data aggregation may increase both our powers of research and our vulnerability to breach. The health data policymaking landscape of the next decade will feature a series of intractable conflicts between these important social values

Developing a capacity to make "English for Everyone" worthwhile: Reconsidering outcomes and how to start achieving them

Past decades have seen a growing assumption worldwide that national governments should provide ‘English for Everyone’ (EFE) as a core component of their school curricula. Personal and national benefits expected from such English provision are generally expressed in terms of developing learners’ abilities to communicate in English. Despite enormous financial and human investment, actual outcomes are often disappointing. One reason for this, in many contexts, is policy makers’ wholesale appropriation of ‘native speakerist’ (Holliday, A., 2005. The Struggle to Teach English as an International Language. Oxford University Press, Oxford). EFE curriculum rhetoric and teaching-learning outcomes, without adequate consideration of the demands made on English teachers’ existing professional understandings and practices. A new phase of international activity is urgently required in which national EFE curriculum outcomes are readjusted to more closely ‘fit’ existing contextual realities and priorities, and teacher educator capacity is developed in a manner that will enable most classroom teachers to help most learners feel that their language-learning efforts are worthwhile

Principles for Accountable Leadership — The AA1000 Series

Author Daniel Waistell, Standards Manager of London-based AccountAbility, has provided the most recent benchmarks of identifying stakeholders for businesses to pursue greater sustainability in their respective operations. These standards are often coupled with world protocol reporting guidelines, including Global Reporting Initiative headquartered in Amsterdam (a United Nations-based program voluntarily used by the majority of Fortune 1000 companies as well as myriad small and medium enterprises). Waistell demonstrates the need for more transparency in business operations and reporting activities to achieve greater accountability for a wider array of non-traditional stakeholders

FIRM CELEBRITY, REPUTATION AND PERFORMANCE: A SOCIAL MEDIA PERSPECTIVE

Firm celebrity and reputation are considered as valuable intangible resources leading to competitive advantages. Past research usually uses indirect measures, such as Fortune ratings or questionnaire surveys to examine the relationship between celebrity and reputation with firm financial performance. The follow-ship on microblogging services, such as Twitter, provides us an opportunity to measure the two assets directly. Constructing firm celebrity as the number of followers a firm has and firm eputation as the PageRank score of the firm, we discovered that both reputation and celebrity derived from social media have shown negative effects on firms\u27 return on assets, but have positive relationships with market capitalization. This is to say, despite of their relative inabilities to generate profits, the management of firms with high reputation and level of celebrity achieved higher market values, which is one of the most important goals for all companies. Furthermore, we also compared the different effects between reputation and celebrity on firm financial performance. The results showed that the level of celebrity has a stronger positive relation with market capitalization than firm reputation. On the other hand, firm reputation has a stronger impact on cost of goods sold than celebrity