The second information revolution: digitalization brings opportunities and concerns for public health.

The spread of the written word, facilitated by the introduction of the printing press, was an information revolution with profound implications for European society. Now, a second information revolution is underway, a digital transformation that is shaping the way Europeans live and interact with each other and the world around them. We are confronted with an unprecedented expansion in ways to share and access information and experiences, to express ourselves and communicate. Yet while these changes have undoubtedly provided many benefits for health, from information sharing to improved surveillance and diagnostics, they also open up many potential threats. These come in many forms. Here we review some the pressing issues of concern; discrimination; breaches of privacy; iatrogenesis; disinformation and misinformation or 'fake news' and cyber-attacks. These have the potential to impact negatively on the health and wellbeing of individuals as well as entire communities and nations. We call for a concerted European response to maximize the benefits of the digital revolution while minimizing the harms, arguably one of the greatest challenges facing the public health community today

Information in the Context of Philosophy and Cognitive Sciences

This textbook briefly maps as many as possible areas and contexts in which information plays an important role. It attempts an approach that also seeks to explore areas of research that are not commonly associated, such as informatics, information and library science, information physics, or information ethics. Given that the text is intended especially for students of the Master's Degree in Cognitive Studies, emphasis is placed on a humane, philosophical and interdisciplinary approach. It offers rather directions of thought, questions, and contexts than a complete theory developed into mathematical and technical details

Mitigations to Reduce the Law of Unintended Consequences for Autonomy and Other Technological Advances

The United Nations states that Earths population is expected to reach just under 10 billion people (9.7) by the year 2050. To meet the demands of 10 billion people, governments, multinational corporations and global leaders are relying on autonomy and technological advances to augment and/or accommodate human efforts to meet the required needs of daily living. Genetically modified organisms (GMOs), Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats (CRISPR) gene-edited plants and cloning will be utilized to expand human food supply. Biomimetic implants are expected to improve life expectancy with 3D printed body parts. Human functioning will be extended with wearables and cybernetic implants continuing humanitys path toward transhumanism. Families will be strengthened with 3 parent households. Disease will surely be eradicated using the CRISPR-CAS9 genetic engineering revolution to design out undesirable human traits and to design in new capabilities. With autonomous cars, trucks and buses on our roads and on-demand autonomous aircraft delivering pizzas, medical prescriptions and groceries in the air and multi-planet vehicles traversing space, utopia will finally arrive! Or will it? All of these powerful, man-made, technological systems will experience unintended consequences with certainty. Instead of over-reacting with hysteria and fear, we should be seeking answers to the following questions - What skills are required to architect socially-healthy technological systems for 2050? What mindsets should we embody to ameliorate hubris syndrome and to build our future technological systems with deliberation, soberness and social responsibility

Information Technology in education – hopes and fears

Modern technologies whose development defines the beginning of the twenty-first century information civilization create entirely new possibilities for organizing and delivering educational processes. Thanks to them an opportunity for education opens up, which is a move away from the narrowly conceived encyclopaedism in education to independent work, revealing activities, and sometimes creativity. The paper will consider the benefits that can be associated with the use of IT in teaching on the one hand understood as a set of devices, on the other as education software packages. At the same time features which entails risks for the organization of teaching and learning processes as well as for themselves educated will be indicated

Governing the Networks of the Information Society. Prospects and limits of policy in a complex technical system

This paper examines the prospects and limits of policies towards information and communications technologies (ICTs). The co-evolution of technological, economic, and political factors that has affected the information network infrastructure during the past three decades has transformed it from a relatively closed to more open system. As a consequence, the degree of complexity of the ICT infrastructure has increased with far-reaching implications for its governance. Paradoxically, policy was better able to control important performance characteristics, such as prices or investment levels, during the past monopoly era. However, the ability to control came at the high price of the inefficiencies associated with monopoly organization. In the present more competitive framework, many feasible policy instruments only work indirectly. Sector performance is an emergent property resulting from decentralized decisions in markets. It is influenced but not fully determined by policy choices. These changes need to be recognized more explicitly in the theoretical foundations, the formation and the implementation of policy. Applying concepts from the theory of complex evolving systems, the paper develops lessons for the design of effective information and communications policy.Information and communication technology, governance, complexity, incomplete information, institutions, feasible policy

A New application of Social Impact in Social Media for overcoming fake news in health

One of the challenges today is to face fake news (false information) in health due to its potential impact on people's lives. This article contributes to a new application of social impact in social media (SISM) methodology. This study focuses on the social impact of the research to identify what type of health information is false and what type of information is evidence of the social impact shared in social media. The analysis of social media includes Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter. This analysis contributes to identifying how interactions in these forms of social media depend on the type of information shared. The results indicate that messages focused on fake health information are mostly aggressive, those based on evidence of social impact are respectful and transformative, and finally, deliberation contexts promoted in social media overcome false information about health. These results contribute to advancing knowledge in overcoming fake health-related news shared in social media

Price and information. Whose Power? Lessons from the early 19th century

Trading and exchange of goods are playing more important role in human history, than their chapters in economic history books can imply and instantiate. Prices are regulating the market behavior, while price information generates the moment of decision making for every actors of the scene. In the mainstream history literature the velocity and exclusivity of price information transmission is a source of merchants’ power: the higher the price, the greater their benefits. James R. Beniger’s brilliant book (The Control Revolution, 1986) provides a sophisticated historical reconstruction of the 19th century paradigm shift: the rationalization of distributional control through different transition stages, like the factor/jobber system, new information platforms (Price Currents and early tele-distribution services), auction systems, fixed prices and price catalogs. „Better information, in short” as Beniger (1986:159) states, „meant better control of the distributional system by all actors involved”. But these improvements (and their „teleology” for higher possible prices) reveal themselves only on the level of purposeful actions, and within a cybernetic control/ communication conceptual frame. But it is also Beniger, who illustrates, that the new infrastructure of price-information created an integrated information ecosystem of actors, generating common rules, regulations and protocols, setting up new cooperation patterns. From this broader perspective shaping prices is always a part of an overall, metacybernetic control mechanism, which regulates the full material metabolism of interconnected people as social macrosystem, governing through hidden imperatives, derived from future planning priorities. The results of Uebele, Grünebaum and Kopsidis (2013:26-27) amazingly illustrate this correspondence. Observing price elasticity in proto-industrialized Saxony between 1790 and 1830, they found, that “demographic and socio-economic change was accompanied with defensive strategies by low income households to reduce the risk of hunger”. Storage decisions “were a mix of commercial and precautionary behavior”, based on both prices and harvest shocks – while prices were forcefully influenced by storage decisions