Pattern Discrimination

Algorithmic identity politics reinstate old forms of social segregation - in a digital world, identity politics is pattern discrimination. It is by recognizing patterns in input data that Artificial Intelligence algorithms create bias and practice racial exclusions thereby inscribing power relations into media. How can we filter information out of data without reinserting racist, sexist, and classist beliefs

Citation Networks, Linguistics-Based Cues, and Logic-Based Approaches to Understanding What Persuades a Judge to Forsake Bias

Questions regarding what persuades jurists—and how legal decisionmakers actually do their work—are profound, motivating, and complex. The Public Law subfield has worked diligently to obtain empirically principled answers, but the gaps that remain provide an opportunity for this project to (hopefully) make a contribution. After discussing the nature of judicial decisionmaking, it is reasoned that rather than trying to understand jurists based upon the ways that their biases come into their work, a more effective approach is to isolate the occasions where they make unbiased decisions. In the interest of furthering the argument, a theoretical framework is offered that aims to isolate the major factors that will influence a jurist to “follow the law.” After a review of the state of the empirical study of judicial decisionmaking, three subprojects are presented, two of which tie directly to terms in the theoretical framework. The first is a novel effort to construct a network of case citations based upon specific language used in majority opinions. The second examines the propensity of Supreme Court Justices to cite to more “central” opinions when they are tending towards moderation in terms of ideology. The third subproject focuses on the often overlooked difficulty that scholars have when attempting to state with definitive certainty what an “unbiased” legal opinion actually is. These three subprojects are modest efforts to open new directions in research. Not all of the results that have been obtained fully square with the theoretical expectations that preceded them

Pattern Discrimination

Algorithmic identity politics reinstate old forms of social segregation—in a digital world, identity politics is pattern discrimination. It is by recognizing patterns in input data that Artificial Intelligence algorithms create bias and practice racial exclusions thereby inscribing power relations into media. How can we filter information out of data without reinserting racist, sexist, and classist beliefs

The citizen-user and the crowd-mediated politics of the Five Star Movement

This thesis described the trajectory of the Italy’s Five Star Movement (M5S, 2005- 2014) from the perspective of the citizens who, as Internet users, participated in in the political enterprise. Citizen-users, enabled and empowered by Internet and mobile technologies, shaped and sustained the identity and evolution of the movement that became the M5S. The case study selected for this research, the M5S, is exceptional due to the magnitude of its success; but its features (Internet-centered and fluid ideology) are becoming more common among political organisations in Western democracies. The goal of the thesis is to assess the impact of the Internet on the political process, through its connecting, mobilising, organising, and to characterise the shape of political talk among citizens. This is achieved by applying quantitative methods, including network analysis and natural language processing, on 10 years of user-generated data collected mainly from four sources: the blog of the Movement’s founder, the M5S official forum, Facebook and Meetup.com. The thesis finds that the online discussion fora fostered diversity without fragmentation, and contributed on at least one occasion to shape the policy agenda of the M5S. Furthermore, the meetups of the Movement maintained their capacity to attract and mobilise users, and their territorial distribution clearly correlate with local results of the M5S in two elections, suggesting a positive impact of Internet-enabled mobilisation. Finally, given the votes received in the 2013 general election, the political communication generated over the Internet offset the low attention dedicated by TV news broadcast to the Movement during the electoral campaign. As Internet and mobile technologies are routinised, it is easy to see how their importance in political organisation and deliberation will grow. By studying the application of ICTs in the case of the M5S, this thesis offers insights into their use in practice, as well as pointing to possible democratic risks if online deliberation is non controlled to guarantee its fairness and openness but instead steered by the leadership, turning a deliberating community of citizen-users into a noisy crowd

Toward Digital Twin Oriented Modeling of Complex Networked Systems and Their Dynamics: A Comprehensive Survey

This paper aims to provide a comprehensive critical overview on how entities and their interactions in Complex Networked Systems (CNS) are modelled across disciplines as they approach their ultimate goal of creating a Digital Twin (DT) that perfectly matches the reality. We propose four complexity dimensions for the network representation and five generations of models for the dynamics modelling to describe the increasing complexity level of the CNS that will be developed towards achieving DT (e.g. CNS dynamics modelled offline in the 1st generation v.s. CNS dynamics modelled simultaneously with a two-way real time feedback between reality and the CNS in the 5th generation). Based on that, we propose a new framework to conceptually compare diverse existing modelling paradigms from different perspectives and create unified assessment criteria to evaluate their respective capabilities of reaching such an ultimate goal. Using the proposed criteria, we also appraise how far the reviewed current state-of-the-art approaches are from the idealised DTs. Finally, we identify and propose potential directions and ways of building a DT-orientated CNS based on the convergence and integration of CNS and DT utilising a variety of cross-disciplinary techniques

Globalistics And Globalization Studies: Aspects & Dimensions Of Global Views

Nowadays globalization processes have become all-embracing. But at the same time, despite the ever-increasing flow of publications on globalization, our understanding and knowledge of it still leaves much to be desired. Especially it concerns the global processes in general, of which globalization is a part. We also need to systematize our ideas about globalization and Global Studies to somehow fit the realities. In particular, this concerns the education process, because the current state of education will determine the way people will perceive reality in the forthcoming decades. This yearbook aims at contributing to the solution of these important tasks. It is the third in the series of yearbooks titled Globalistics and Globalization Studies. This year it has the following subtitle: Aspects & Dimensions of Global Views. Its authors consider globalization and Global Studies in different dimensions and aspects: philosophical, methodological, and pedagogical, in terms of various processes, problems and perspectives. Of course, to some extent this means that this yearbook presents rather diverse materials. But globalization itself is very diverse. And its comprehension may proceed in the framework of different theoretical approaches and points of view. In the present yearbook one can find perceptions of globalization and Global Studies by a number of scholars from different countries of the world and learn rather peculiar visions of globalization by the Russian scientists and educators. The yearbook will be interesting to a wide range of researchers, teachers, students and all those who pay attention to global issues

History & Mathematics: Trends and Cycles

The present yearbook (which is the fourth in the series) is subtitled Trends & Cycles. It is devoted to cyclical and trend dynamics in society and nature; special attention is paid to economic and demographic aspects, in particular to the mathematical modeling of the Malthusian and post-Malthusian traps' dynamics. An increasingly important role is played by new directions in historical research that study long-term dynamic processes and quantitative changes. This kind of history can hardly develop without the application of mathematical methods. There is a tendency to study history as a system of various processes, within which one can detect waves and cycles of different lengths – from a few years to several centuries, or even millennia. The contributions to this yearbook present a qualitative and quantitative analysis of global historical, political, economic and demographic processes, as well as their mathematical models. This issue of the yearbook consists of three main sections: (I) Long-Term Trends in Nature and Society; (II) Cyclical Processes in Pre-industrial Societies; (III) Contemporary History and Processes. We hope that this issue of the yearbook will be interesting and useful both for historians and mathematicians, as well as for all those dealing with various social and natural science

A Connected World: Social Networks and Organizations

This Element synthesizes the current state of research on organizational social networks from its early foundations to contemporary debates. It highlights the characteristics that make the social network perspective distinctive in the organizational research landscape, including its emphasis on structure and outcomes. It covers the main theoretical developments and summarizes the research design questions that organizational researchers face when collecting and analyzing network data. Then, it discusses current debates ranging from agency and structure to network volatility and personality. Finally, the Element envisages future research directions on the role of brokerage for individuals and communities, network cognition, and the importance of past ties. Overall, the Element provides an innovative angle for understanding organizational social networks, engaging in empirical network research, and nurturing further theoretical development on the role of social interactions and connectedness in modern organizations

Structuring the State’s Voice of Contention in Harmonious Society: How Party Newspapers Cover Social Protests in China

During the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) campaign of building a ‘harmonious society’, how do the official newspapers cover the instances of social contention on the ground? Answering this question will shed light not only on how the party press works but also on how the state and the society interact in today’s China. This thesis conceptualises this phenomenon with a multi-faceted and multi-levelled notion of ‘state-initiated contentious public sphere’ to capture the complexity of mediated relations between the state and social contention in the party press. Adopting a relational approach, this thesis analyses 1758 news reports of ‘mass incident’ in the People’s Daily and the Guangming Daily between 2004 and 2020, employing cluster analysis, qualitative comparative analysis, and social network analysis. The thesis finds significant differences in the patterns of contentious coverage in the party press at the level of event and province and an uneven distribution of attention to social contention across incidents and regions. For ‘reported regions’, the thesis distinguishes four types of coverage and presents how party press responds differently to social contention in different scenarios at the provincial level. For ‘identified incidents’, the thesis distinguishes a cumulative type of visibility based on the quantity of coverage from a relational visibility based on the structure emerging from coverage and explains how different news-making rationales determine whether instances receive similar amounts of coverage or occupy similar positions within coverage. Eventually, by demonstrating how the Chinese state strategically uses party press to respond to social contention and how social contention is journalistically placed in different positions in the state’s eyes, this thesis argues that what social contention leads to is the establishment of complex state-contention relations channelled through the party press