Remixing Cinema: The case of the Brighton Swarm of Angels

Disintermediation, web 2.0, distributed problem solving, collaborative creation/art, user-centred innovation, creative common

Blockchain and sustainability disclosure: A scenario-based application for supply chains

This paper presents the implications of blockchain technologies on sustainability reporting and disclosure, and specifically proposes blockchain use-cases as a possible solution for problems experienced in the field of supply chain carbon information. This study addresses how the reliability of supply chains’ carbon-related information can become more transparent and reliable through a decentralized approach based on blockchain thinking (BT), issues that have been identified as a gap in the literature and in the practice. Scenario analysis and design science research (DSR) are used as a methodological driver to conceptualize over the nature of practical solutions using unified modeling language (UML) diagrams. The resulting use-case focuses on data retrieval in the supply chain. The paper also presents implications for the audit industry and their role in the assurance of such technological architecture implementations. The study is visionary as it offers a conceptualization based on scenario analysis. Developing a scenario enables researchers to depict a prospective situation, develop ability to solve future problems, and to back cast them in current policies, technologies, and actions

Digital Economy and Labor

Digital Economy and Labo

Analysis and critics of a professional service compagny's corporate social responsibility report

The thesis explores a topic that has been insignificantly addressed in Corporate Social Reporting (CSR) literature: CSR within professional service companies, more specifically the quality of CSR reporting within a professional service company. Considering that Sustainability and CSR have become hot topics in the recent years, it is with no surprise that CSR reporting, which measures and reports sustainable impacts, has become a worldwide mainstream business practice. Companies engage in CSR for several reasons, such as for competitive advantage, to be an attractive place to work in or to reduce cost. However, considering that CSR is not mandatory in many countries and for all companies, many still drag their feet in implementing CSR. PwC UK is one of the rare PwC firms within the PwC Network to publish a CR report. Using a Grid Analysis specifically created for the purpose of this thesis, the analysis performed on the report shows that the company produces a qualitative CR report in terms of content and quality. However, to be able to provide its stakeholders with the best CR report, the company should add certain factors, which have not been found in its CR report, include more details and update certain information disclosed. Improvements, such as updating its vision statement to include the company’s environmental concern, revising its objectives to be measurable, implementing an economic, social and environmental risk assessment and reporting on the results, are part of the thesis’ recommendations. Moreover, the thesis suggests switching to an Integrated Reporting method, in order to provide the company’s stakeholders with a broader view of the value creation, and encourages the company to take advantage of its leading position to be a “catalyst for change” (Appendix 1: 3) and engage its customers and employees to embrace sustainability. Finally, to raise the overall quality of its CR report, the thesis proposes to the company to be critical in its CR report and to offer a balanced CR report to its stakeholders

Costs and benefits of superfast broadband in the UK

This paper was commissioned from LSE Enterprise by Convergys Smart Revenue Solutions to stimulate an open and constructive debate among the main stakeholders about the balance between the costs, the revenues, and the societal benefits of ‘superfast’ broadband. The intent has been to analyse the available facts and to propose wider perspectives on economic and social interactions. The paper has two parts: one concentrates on superfast broadband deployment and the associated economic and social implications (for the UK and its service providers), and the other considers alternative social science approaches to these implications. Both parts consider the potential contribution of smart solutions to superfast broadband provision and use. Whereas Part I takes the “national perspective” and the “service provider perspective”, which deal with the implications of superfast broadband for the UK and for service providers, Part II views matters in other ways, particularly by looking at how to realise values beyond the market economy, such as those inherent in neighbourliness, trust and democrac

Finding Divinity in Fortran

Thesis advisor: Richard SpinelloThesis advisor: Stephen PopeThe information revolution is the single most important change in society since the printing press. At no other time has our society benefited from nearly limitless access to information and communication, and the changes brought on by this access have changed, and are changing, society in fundamental ways. Our homes, our workplaces, and our democracy have all been transformed by information and communication technologies.However, our ethics have not kept pace with our technological progress, and the immense changes brought by this this revolution have posed some equally immense moral questions. Indeed, there has been an almost total lack of religious discourse regarding the problems which have arisen out of the information revolution. This thesis is an attempt to change that.The thesis itself is structured as a series of essays on four key problems:1. Intellectual Property, as it relates to Scripture2. Information Ethics, the novel moral theory arising from Computer Ethics3. Robotic Ethics, especially the ethics of robotic warfare4. Hacker Culture, and its implicit spiritualityEach of these essays attempts to tackle one of these key problems, and demonstrate how a religious perspective illuminates some aspect of it. As befits a thesis from a Jesuit, Catholic university, most of the essays are drawn from a Catholic, Christian perspective.Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2011.Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: Theology Honors Program.Discipline: Philosophy Honors Program.Discipline: Theology

Website Design and Liability

Two regrettable behaviors have emerged online: the posting of content about others without their consent; and impulsive postings with no consideration of long-term consequences. Website operators can either encourage or discourage these regrettable behaviors and influence their consequences through the design of their website and by the fostering of norms and codes of conduct. Unfortunately, courts interpret section 230 of the Communications Decency Act as providing websites with broad immunity. In an earlier article, I argued that a proprietorship standard should be imposed upon websites, which would require them to take reasonable measures to prevent foreseeable harm. This article further champions the concept of website proprietorship liability and proposes that section 230 should be amended to recognize such liability with provisions for the following safe harbors for website operators that: (1) permit only postings by identified posters; (2) have nonprofit status and do not accept ad revenue; and (3) remove postings upon request of the victim. This article also addresses anticipated objections that are based upon market concerns and free speech concerns

Big Data for Qualitative Research

Big Data for Qualitative Research covers everything small data researchers need to know about big data, from the potentials of big data analytics to its methodological and ethical challenges. The data that we generate in everyday life is now digitally mediated, stored, and analyzed by web sites, companies, institutions, and governments. Big data is large volume, rapidly generated, digitally encoded information that is often related to other networked data, and can provide valuable evidence for study of phenomena. This book explores the potentials of qualitative methods and analysis for big data, including text mining, sentiment analysis, information and data visualization, netnography, follow-the-thing methods, mobile research methods, multimodal analysis, and rhythmanalysis. It debates new concerns about ethics, privacy, and dataveillance for big data qualitative researchers. This book is essential reading for those who do qualitative and mixed methods research, and are curious, excited, or even skeptical about big data and what it means for future research. Now is the time for researchers to understand, debate, and envisage the new possibilities and challenges of the rapidly developing and dynamic field of big data from the vantage point of the qualitative researcher

FinBook: literary content as digital commodity

This short essay explains the significance of the FinBook intervention, and invites the reader to participate. We have associated each chapter within this book with a financial robot (FinBot), and created a market whereby book content will be traded with financial securities. As human labour increasingly consists of unstable and uncertain work practices and as algorithms replace people on the virtual trading floors of the worlds markets, we see members of society taking advantage of FinBots to invest and make extra funds. Bots of all kinds are making financial decisions for us, searching online on our behalf to help us invest, to consume products and services. Our contribution to this compilation is to turn the collection of chapters in this book into a dynamic investment portfolio, and thereby play out what might happen to the process of buying and consuming literature in the not-so-distant future. By attaching identities (through QR codes) to each chapter, we create a market in which the chapter can ‘perform’. Our FinBots will trade based on features extracted from the authors’ words in this book: the political, ethical and cultural values embedded in the work, and the extent to which the FinBots share authors’ concerns; and the performance of chapters amongst those human and non-human actors that make up the market, and readership. In short, the FinBook model turns our work and the work of our co-authors into an investment portfolio, mediated by the market and the attention of readers. By creating a digital economy specifically around the content of online texts, our chapter and the FinBook platform aims to challenge the reader to consider how their personal values align them with individual articles, and how these become contested as they perform different value judgements about the financial performance of each chapter and the book as a whole. At the same time, by introducing ‘autonomous’ trading bots, we also explore the different ‘network’ affordances that differ between paper based books that’s scarcity is developed through analogue form, and digital forms of books whose uniqueness is reached through encryption. We thereby speak to wider questions about the conditions of an aggressive market in which algorithms subject cultural and intellectual items – books – to economic parameters, and the increasing ubiquity of data bots as actors in our social, political, economic and cultural lives. We understand that our marketization of literature may be an uncomfortable juxtaposition against the conventionally-imagined way a book is created, enjoyed and shared: it is intended to be