Disclosive ethics and information technology: disclosing facial recognition systems

This paper is an attempt to present disclosive ethics as a framework for computer and information ethics � in line with the suggestions by Brey, but also in quite a different manner. The potential of such an approach is demonstrated through a disclosive analysis of facial recognition systems. The paper argues that the politics of information technology is a particularly powerful politics since information technology is an opaque technology � i.e. relatively closed to scrutiny. It presents the design of technology as a process of closure in which design and use decisions become black-boxed and progressively enclosed in increasingly complex sociotechnical networks. It further argues for a disclosive ethics that aims to disclose the nondisclosure of politics by claiming a place for ethics in every actual operation of power � as manifested in actual design and use decisions and practices. It also proposes that disclosive ethics would aim to trace and disclose the intentional and emerging enclosure of politics from the very minute technical detail through to social practices and complex social-technical networks. The paper then proceeds to do a disclosive analysis of facial recognition systems. This analysis discloses that seemingly trivial biases in recognition rates of FRSs can emerge as very significant political acts when these systems become used in practice

Time-consistent policy and politics: does voting matter when individuals are identical?

We consider the implications of a lack of policy commitment when policies are chosen through a political process and individuals are ex-ante identical. We show that politics, by allowing ex-post distributional tensions to shape policy, can make it possible to sustain non-trivial equilibria in which the commitment problem is alleviated or fully eliminated. How effective politics can be at countering collective commitment problems in homogeneous groups depends on the nature of the political process and on the extent to which private choices are public information

E-politics from the citizens’ perspective. The role of social networking tools in influencing citizens

The progress of civilization, supported by the development of new technologies, has led to a series of social, economic and political changes. The information society, in its expectations and through access to knowledge, has significantly affected a change in the model of democracy, causing a kind of return to the original forms of communication in citizen-government relations. This has been accompanied by a shift of social and civic activism from the real to the virtual world. In literature, the use of information and communication technologies in the democratic system is named electronic democracy. One of its forms is e-politics, which is implemented at several levels: institutional, system and civil. A good example of the last type are the new social movements that in recent years have had a significant impact on politics. The basic research problem in this paper concerns e-politics from the citizens’ perspective, through the activities of the new social movements, especially of a political nature. The main research goal is therefore to present the role of social networking tools in influencing citizens and their subsequent activities that have triggered changes in the political system. The methods used in the paper are case study and comparative analysis

Islamic Organizations in North Sumatra A Historical Analysis on Newspaper Publication in 1915-1942

Newspapers are an important historical source in a historical writing that contains information about past events. Information about Islamic organizations in its activities in North Sumatra is found in newspapers from 1915 to 1942, considering that Islamic organizations have a long struggle in Indonesian history because it has contributed to the dynamics of Indonesian politics. The purpose of this paper is to track the progression of Islamic organizations in North Sumatra and its activities in various aspects based on newspapers ever published in North Sumatra in 1915-1942. The method used is the historical method with social history approach. Information had been obtained in a number of newspapers including the activities of several Islamic organizations in North Sumatra from the aspects of politics, education, social, and economics. The conclusion is Islamic organizations had contributions as the embryo of the independence movement of Indonesia, but some of them were still have not been highlighted in the tradition of Indonesian historiography. These findings support that some Islamic organizations in Indonesia should be more highlighted in the historical writings in Indonesia

For What it’s Worth: The Political Construction of Quality in French and Italian Wine Markets

At the heart of political organization, we find weak and atomized individuals who aggregate their power to challenge concentrated power. Wine politics show us that within market economies we find the same political movements. Markets, like politics, consist of institutions that differentially embed, codify and distribute power. In the case of France, small, individually weak wine producers became powerful in the aggregate; unified French grape growers came together to force a deal with the economically dominant wine merchants. Their joint political power was institutionalized in power-sharing, state-backed corporatist producer organizations. In contrast, small Italian producers failed to cooperate systematically and aggregate their power. Stronger organization enabled the construction of an institutional comparative advantage and higher prices for regulated French terroir wines. Economic sociologists claim markets are ‘socially embedded’. This article demonstrates markets are ‘politically embedded’: French market dominance results from effective power sharing mechanisms across the supply chain.1. Introduction 2. Information and power: previous literature on quality signaling, supply chain structure and producer organization 3. Data and methods 4. A comparison of the French and Italian wine markets 5. Market failures in the supply chain 6. French wine: the politics of value construction 7. Italian wine politics 8. Conclusions Footnotes Acknowledgements Reference

Globalization and Legal Information Management

Draft of Chapter 2 of the IALL International Handbook of Legal Information Management by Jules Winterton, Associate Director and Librarian, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London. This chapter is a relatively brief survey of what globalization means in the field of legal information management and what effect it has had and will have on a range of activities and policy areas relevant to the practice of legal information management. There are firstly some comments towards a definition of globalization for the purposes of this chapter and then a survey of the following in the light of that definition: legal systems, information consumers, legal information needs, information and management, legal publishing, digitization, intellectual property rights, lobbying and advocacy on policy issues (the politics of law librarianship), international networking, and legal information managers and law librarians of the future

Understanding Internal Capital Markets and Corporate Policies

This study looks inside a large retail-banking group to understand how corporate politics affect internal capital allocation. The group consists of a headquarters organization and about 150 member banks which own the headquarters. Our data is from the firm’s managerial accounting system and covers all cash flows, internal capital transfers, and investments at the local member bank level. We first show that a member bank’s investment (net loan growth) is generally not fully independent from its own cash flow (net deposit growth). Then we show that such constraints are not apparent at more influential member banks, where influence is measured by the divergence of voting rights from ownership rights. The more influential banks are allocated more funds from the headquarters, but also show more restraints in investments when experiencing large deposit inflows. Influence matters more among member banks requiring more information exchanges with the headquarters as a result of more volatile funding requests. Influence also matters more for small business loans, which contain more soft information, than for standardized residential mortgage loans. These results suggest that corporate politics can be used to address allocation inefficiencies resulting from information asymmetries between the headquarters and divisions (member banks in our case).internal capital markets;capital markets;retail banking;corporate politics

The Transparency of Politics and the Quality of Politicians

Politics has always attracted the attention of the media, citizens organizations, and the general public. Recent years have also witnessed a global process of “spectacularization” of politics, which, among other things, has resulted in a dramatic increase in the amount of information available about many facets of political life. Politicians, for example, are public figures, and much of what they do is now the object of close public scrutiny. Nevertheless, the extent to which various aspects of what goes on within the political sector are observable from the outside, which we refer to as the transparency of politics, still varies a great deal across countries. For example, while in some countries all individual votes in the legislature are part of the public record (e.g., the United States and Sweden), this is not the case in others (e.g., Italy and Spain). Also, while many democracies have adopted disclosure laws that require political parties and politicians to report all the contributions they receive (e.g., Canada and the United Kingdom), such laws are not in place in several other countries (e.g., Austria and Finland). It is therefore interesting to ask whether the transparency of politics may be systematically related to political outcomes, and whether more transparency would lead to better outcomes. In particular, in this article, we analyze the relationship between the transparency of politics and the quality of politicians, and focus on the recruitment of politicians by political parties. Parties represent a fundamental institution of representative democracy, and are the political-sector analogues of firms in the market sector. By and large, politicians are affiliated with a party, and typically start their political careers by working for party organizations (see, e.g., Heinrich Best and Maurizio Cotta 2000). Hence, the recruiting decisions of parties determine the quality of the pool of politicians

The political imaginaries of blockchain projects: discerning the expressions of an emerging ecosystem

There is a wealth of information, hype around, and research into blockchain’s ‘disruptive’ and ‘transformative’ potential concerning every industry. However, there is an absence of scholarly attention given to identifying and analyzing the political premises and consequences of blockchain projects. Through digital ethnography and participatory action research, this article shows how blockchain experiments personify ‘prefigurative politics’ by design: they embody the politics and power structures which they want to enable in society. By showing how these prefigurative embodiments are informed and determined by the underlying political imaginaries, the article proposes a basic typology of blockchain projects. Furthermore, it outlines a frame to question, cluster, and analyze the expressions of political imaginaries intrinsic to the design and operationalization of blockchain projects on three analytic levels: users, intermediaries, and institutions.</p