Online Shaming

Online shaming is a subject of import for social philosophy in the Internet age, and not simply because shaming seems generally bad. I argue that social philosophers are well-placed to address the imaginal relationships we entertain when we engage in social media; activity in cyberspace results in more relationships than one previously had, entailing new and more responsibilities, and our relational behaviors admit of ethical assessment. I consider the stresses of social media, including the indefinite expansion of our relationships and responsibilities, and the gap between the experiences of those shamed and the shamers’ appreciation of the magnitude of what they do when they shame; I connect these to the literature suggesting that some intuitions fail to guide our ethics. I conclude that we each have more power than we believe we do or than we think carefully about exerting in our online imaginal relations. Whether we are the shamers or the shamed, we are unable to control the extent to which intangible words in cyberspace take the form of imaginal relationships that burden or brighten our self-perceptions

Identity crisis: how ideological and rhetorical failures cost Egyptians their revolution

Thesis (M.A.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2019The Egyptian uprising, which began on January 25, 2011, and ended on February 11, 2011, culminated in the ending of President Hosni Mubarak's 30-year reign as dictator. After free elections in which the Muslim Brotherhood ascended to power in the country, they were ousted in a military coup d'état only one year after their ascension to power and were replaced by former military general Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi. The symptoms which led the country to rise up against Mubarak continue to exist under el-Sisi today, indicating that no revolution really took place. This paper answers the question, "why did the revolution fail?", offering a rhetorical reason for the revolution's failure. The uprisings, which were billed as decentralized, offer unique opportunities for analysis of rhetorical strategy. This paper uses the reconstitutive-discourse model, a critical model which examines a rhetor's reconstitution of their audience's character, to examine the rhetoric of three different parties in the revolution. First, it examines the rhetoric of all protestors irrespective of source via Twitter and on the ground protestors; next it looks at the rhetoric of Wael Ghonim, who is credited with instigating the uprisings, and Mohammed ElBaradei, an influential figure who became interim vice-president in the aftermath of the uprisings. The study found that first, the uprisings were not really decentralized and indeed has leaders. Further, rhetorical failures on the part of its leaders caused the uprisings to fail in their goal of democratic revolution

Spartan Daily, February 2, 2017

Volume 148, Issue 4https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartan_daily_2017/1003/thumbnail.jp

Spartan Daily, February 2, 2017

Volume 148, Issue 4https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartan_daily_2017/1003/thumbnail.jp

PASSING THE TORCH: NEXT-GENERATION PHILANTHROPISTS | 2017 BNP PARIBAS INDIVIDUAL PHILANTHROPY REPORT

The millennial generation is defined by the emergence of technologies that have transformed the way in which they communicate, act and, perhaps most importantly, view the world. Affluent millennials engaged in philanthropy are relying on a host of new tools available today, including social media and data analytics, to advance environmental and social goals. But for those engaged in family foundations which were established generations before them, there are considerations of family legacy. This report takes a closer look at the motivations and actions of millennials involved in their family foundations, which were created with some of the wealth amassed by high-net-worth individuals and families over the years. The research explores how this generation is striking a balance between the seemingly opposing forces of family legacy and innovation in philanthropy in order to make a measurable impact through their family foundations

Multiresolution Recurrent Neural Networks: An Application to Dialogue Response Generation

We introduce the multiresolution recurrent neural network, which extends the sequence-to-sequence framework to model natural language generation as two parallel discrete stochastic processes: a sequence of high-level coarse tokens, and a sequence of natural language tokens. There are many ways to estimate or learn the high-level coarse tokens, but we argue that a simple extraction procedure is sufficient to capture a wealth of high-level discourse semantics. Such procedure allows training the multiresolution recurrent neural network by maximizing the exact joint log-likelihood over both sequences. In contrast to the standard log- likelihood objective w.r.t. natural language tokens (word perplexity), optimizing the joint log-likelihood biases the model towards modeling high-level abstractions. We apply the proposed model to the task of dialogue response generation in two challenging domains: the Ubuntu technical support domain, and Twitter conversations. On Ubuntu, the model outperforms competing approaches by a substantial margin, achieving state-of-the-art results according to both automatic evaluation metrics and a human evaluation study. On Twitter, the model appears to generate more relevant and on-topic responses according to automatic evaluation metrics. Finally, our experiments demonstrate that the proposed model is more adept at overcoming the sparsity of natural language and is better able to capture long-term structure.Comment: 21 pages, 2 figures, 10 table

Philanthropy and Social Media

We define social media as online or digital technologies that serve to connect people, information and organisations through networks. The term evolved as a way to -distinguish the emerging online -information platforms from traditional "broadcast media" -- TV, radio, film, newspapers -- by highlighting that these new tools -were "socialised" and allowed the audiences to contribute to their content. Social media have therefore become defined in relation to these existing media channels, but in fact they have their ancestry in existing social technologies, like the telephone and the letter. If traditional media connect people to information, social media connect people to people

Extending Reach with Technology: Seattle Opera's Multipronged Experiment to Deepen Relationships and Reach New Audiences

This case study describes the Seattle Opera's four-year-long effort to test which kinds of technology channels work well in audience engagement. Its experiments with technology included a simulcast of Madama Butterfly at an 8,300-capacity sports arena, interactive kiosks in the opera house lobby and online videos that took viewers behind the scenes of the opera's signature production of Wagner's Ring cycle. Every season employed at least some winning engagement tools, driven in large part by the company's efforts to gather information before determining what applications to use. Although the majority of the tools were most effective at enhancing the experience of patrons who already had a deep connection with the company, the simulcast, in project's fourth year, also brought in opera newcomers. One important lesson from the work was that effective strategies required the involvement not just of the marketing department, but of the entire organization, including its union representatives