Modal Logic and Its Applications, Explained Using Puzzles and Examples

1.We shall be concerned, at first, with alethicmodal logic, or modal logic tout court. 2.The starting point, once again, is Aristotle, who was the first to study the relationship between modal statements and their validity. 3.However, the great discussion it enjoyed in the Middle Ages. 4.The official birth date of modal logic is 1921, when Clarence Irving Lewis wrote a famous essay on implication

Managing Future Challenges for Safety

This open access book addresses the future of work and industry by 2040—a core interest for many disciplines inspiring a strong momentum for employment and training within the industrial world. The future of industrial safety in terms of technological risk-management, although of obvious concern to international actors in various industries, has been quite sparsely addressed. This brief reflects the viewpoints of experts who come from different academic disciplines and various sectors such as oil and gas, energy, transportation, and the digital and even the military worlds, as expressed in debates and discussions during a two-day international seminar. The contributors address such questions as: What influence will ageing and lack of digital skills in the workforce of the occidental world have on safety culture? What are the likely impacts of big data, artificial intelligence and autonomous technologies on decision-making, and on the roles and responsibilities of individual actors and whole organizations? What role have human beings in a world of accelerating changes? What effects will societal concerns and the entrance of new players have on technological risk management and governance? Managing Future Challenges for Safety will interest and influence researchers considering the future effects of a number of currently developing technologies and their practitioner counterparts working in industry and regulation

Managing Future Challenges for Safety

This open access book addresses the future of work and industry by 2040—a core interest for many disciplines inspiring a strong momentum for employment and training within the industrial world. The future of industrial safety in terms of technological risk-management, although of obvious concern to international actors in various industries, has been quite sparsely addressed. This brief reflects the viewpoints of experts who come from different academic disciplines and various sectors such as oil and gas, energy, transportation, and the digital and even the military worlds, as expressed in debates and discussions during a two-day international seminar. The contributors address such questions as: What influence will ageing and lack of digital skills in the workforce of the occidental world have on safety culture? What are the likely impacts of big data, artificial intelligence and autonomous technologies on decision-making, and on the roles and responsibilities of individual actors and whole organizations? What role have human beings in a world of accelerating changes? What effects will societal concerns and the entrance of new players have on technological risk management and governance? Managing Future Challenges for Safety will interest and influence researchers considering the future effects of a number of currently developing technologies and their practitioner counterparts working in industry and regulation

Machine Medical Ethics

In medical settings, machines are in close proximity with human beings: with patients who are in vulnerable states of health, who have disabilities of various kinds, with the very young or very old, and with medical professionals. Machines in these contexts are undertaking important medical tasks that require emotional sensitivity, knowledge of medical codes, human dignity, and privacy. As machine technology advances, ethical concerns become more urgent: should medical machines be programmed to follow a code of medical ethics? What theory or theories should constrain medical machine conduct? What design features are required? Should machines share responsibility with humans for the ethical consequences of medical actions? How ought clinical relationships involving machines to be modeled? Is a capacity for empathy and emotion detection necessary? What about consciousness? The essays in this collection by researchers from both humanities and science describe various theoretical and experimental approaches to adding medical ethics to a machine, what design features are necessary in order to achieve this, philosophical and practical questions concerning justice, rights, decision-making and responsibility, and accurately modeling essential physician-machine-patient relationships. This collection is the first book to address these 21st-century concerns

“Be a Pattern for the World”: The Development of a Dark Patterns Detection Tool to Prevent Online User Loss

Dark Patterns are designed to trick users into sharing more information or spending more money than they had intended to do, by configuring online interactions to confuse or add pressure to the users. They are highly varied in their form, and are therefore difficult to classify and detect. Therefore, this research is designed to develop a framework for the automated detection of potential instances of web-based dark patterns, and from there to develop a software tool that will provide a highly useful defensive tool that helps detect and highlight these patterns

Minding the Gap: Computing Ethics and the Political Economy of Big Tech

In 1988 Michael Mahoney wrote that “[w]hat is truly revolutionary about the computer will become clear only when computing acquires a proper history, one that ties it to other technologies and thus uncovers the precedents that make its innovations significant” (Mahoney, 1988). Today, over thirty years after this quote was written, we are living right in the middle of the information age and computing technology is constantly transforming modern living in revolutionary ways and in such a high degree that is giving rise to many ethical considerations, dilemmas, and social disruption. To explore the myriad of issues associated with the ethical challenges of computers using the lens of political economy it is important to explore the history and development of computer technology

Technical Debt is an Ethical Issue

We introduce the problem of technical debt, with particular focus on critical infrastructure, and put forward our view that this is a digital ethics issue. We propose that the software engineering process must adapt its current notion of technical debt – focusing on technical costs – to include the potential cost to society if the technical debt is not addressed, and the cost of analysing, modelling and understanding this ethical debt. Finally, we provide an overview of the development of educational material – based on a collection of technical debt case studies - in order to teach about technical debt and its ethical implication

Unmet goals of tracking: within-track heterogeneity of students' expectations for

Educational systems are often characterized by some form(s) of ability grouping, like tracking. Although substantial variation in the implementation of these practices exists, it is always the aim to improve teaching efficiency by creating homogeneous groups of students in terms of capabilities and performances as well as expected pathways. If students’ expected pathways (university, graduate school, or working) are in line with the goals of tracking, one might presume that these expectations are rather homogeneous within tracks and heterogeneous between tracks. In Flanders (the northern region of Belgium), the educational system consists of four tracks. Many students start out in the most prestigious, academic track. If they fail to gain the necessary credentials, they move to the less esteemed technical and vocational tracks. Therefore, the educational system has been called a 'cascade system'. We presume that this cascade system creates homogeneous expectations in the academic track, though heterogeneous expectations in the technical and vocational tracks. We use data from the International Study of City Youth (ISCY), gathered during the 2013-2014 school year from 2354 pupils of the tenth grade across 30 secondary schools in the city of Ghent, Flanders. Preliminary results suggest that the technical and vocational tracks show more heterogeneity in student’s expectations than the academic track. If tracking does not fulfill the desired goals in some tracks, tracking practices should be questioned as tracking occurs along social and ethnic lines, causing social inequality