The Impact on Public Trust of Image Manipulation in Science

Aim/PurposeIn this paper, we address the theoretical challenges today’s scientific community faces to precisely draw linesbetween true and false pictures. In particular, we focus onproblems related to the hiddenwonders ofscience and the shiny im-ages produced for scientific papers or to appeal towider audiences. BackgroundAs rumors (hoaxes) and false news (fake news)explode acrosssociety and the current network, severalinitiatives using current technologyhave been launched to study this phenomena and limit the social impact. Over the last two decades, inappropriate scientific behavior has raisedmore questions about whether some scientific images are valid.MethodologyThis work is not about analyzing whethertoday’s imagesare objective.Instead,weadvocate for a general approach thatmakes it easier to truly believe in all kinds of knowledge, scientific or otherwise (Goldman, 1967; Goldman, & Ol-son, 2009). This need to believe is closely related to social order (Shapin, 1994). ContributionWe conclude that we must ultimately move away from older ideas about truth and objectivity in research to broadly approach howscience and knowledge are represented and move forward with this theoretical approach when communi-catingscience tothe public.FindingsContemporary visual culture suggests that our world is expressed through im-ages, which areall around us. Therefore,we need to promote thereliability of scientific pictures, which visually represent knowledge, to add meaning in a world of complex high-tech science (Allamel-Raffin, 2011; Greenberg, 2004; Rosenberger, 2009). Since the time of Galileo, and today more than ever, scien-tific activity should be understood as knowledgeproduced toreveal, and there-fore inform us of, (Wise, 2006) all that remains unexplained in our world , as well as everything beyond our senses

Bundling Equilibrium in Combinatorial auctions

This paper analyzes individually-rational ex post equilibrium in the VC (Vickrey-Clarke) combinatorial auctions. If $\Sigma$ is a family of bundles of goods, the organizer may restrict the participants by requiring them to submit their bids only for bundles in $\Sigma$. The $\Sigma$-VC combinatorial auctions (multi-good auctions) obtained in this way are known to be individually-rational truth-telling mechanisms. In contrast, this paper deals with non-restricted VC auctions, in which the buyers restrict themselves to bids on bundles in $\Sigma$, because it is rational for them to do so. That is, it may be that when the buyers report their valuation of the bundles in $\Sigma$, they are in an equilibrium. We fully characterize those $\Sigma$ that induce individually rational equilibrium in every VC auction, and we refer to the associated equilibrium as a bundling equilibrium. The number of bundles in $\Sigma$ represents the communication complexity of the equilibrium. A special case of bundling equilibrium is partition-based equilibrium, in which $\Sigma$ is a field, that is, it is generated by a partition. We analyze the tradeoff between communication complexity and economic efficiency of bundling equilibrium, focusing in particular on partition-based equilibrium

Women, Gender and Peacebuilding

YesJoel Joffe Trus

Software-Architecture Recovery from Machine Code

In this paper, we present a tool, called Lego, which recovers object-oriented software architecture from stripped binaries. Lego takes a stripped binary as input, and uses information obtained from dynamic analysis to (i) group the functions in the binary into classes, and (ii) identify inheritance and composition relationships between the inferred classes. The information obtained by Lego can be used for reengineering legacy software, and for understanding the architecture of software systems that lack documentation and source code. Our experiments show that the class hierarchies recovered by Lego have a high degree of agreement---measured in terms of precision and recall---with the hierarchy defined in the source code

Creativity out of chaos

Creativity is said to be highly desired in post-modern and post-industrial organizations Creativity and anarchy on the one hand, and managerialism, on the other, can be seen as different forms of knowledge, two opposed ideals. In many organizational as well as societal reforms we currently observe it is the managerialist ideal that wins over the anarchic. In this paper, we wonder if people fear anarchy? We reflect on the possible reasons for the fear, and we also try to explain why we believe that anarchic organizing should not be avoided or feared