Rebalance the Internet Economy: EXHIBIT

What is art? What is pornography? A contested distinction that was once made by adult stores, galleries, and the classification board, now falls to digital platforms and their automated content moderation algorithms. Censorship debates date back centuries, and our public discussions, legislation, and tech policies are still riddled with moralistic ideology about what is ‘good’, what is ‘bad’ and what the general public should be allowed to see. The EXHIBIT event is the first of our four-part event series as part of our community-based research project to Rebalance the Internet Economy. The EXHIBIT event is centered on the experiences of sex workers, artists, and content creators.The internet was heralded as a place where freedom of expression would thrive, and yet marginalised and minoritised voices continue to be silenced online: sex workers are regularly de-platformed, Black, Brown and Indigenous peoples are more heavily policed, LGBTQ+ content creators are ‘shadow banned’, and nudity policies disproportionately impact some over others. How are these policies communicated? Can individuals have a say when their livelihoods depend on it?The rise in hate speech, misinformation, online abuse, and bullying calls for meaningful policy and regulation but it is essential we get the balance right. All over the world we are seeing an increasing trend toward heavy-handed removal of content based on a moral standing, not an evidence-based or harm reduction one. Australia’s Online Safety Bill is a prime example of when the regulatory focus is too heavily invested in content over context. It’s time we had a frank conversation about what needs to change to better serve individuals

Predicting selected Philippine rural bank failure using logistic approach: A projection model

Recently, there has been a significant number of rural banks that have failed which is alarming because of the possible adverse effects it can bring to the agricultural community and the banking system. Financial ratios and their review has been popularly used as a way to predict bankruptcy by various authors and researchers. In particular, the researchers used logistic regression first used by Ohlson, to come up with a prediction model. The researchers were able to determine six significant ratios among the eleven that were used in the study. The researchers also conducted an interview of officers of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas and the Philippine Deposit Insurance Corporation as part of their data collection method and supplement to the statistical analysis

Reproducibility of fluorescent expression from engineered biological constructs in E. coli

We present results of the first large-scale interlaboratory study carried out in synthetic biology, as part of the 2014 and 2015 International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competitions. Participants at 88 institutions around the world measured fluorescence from three engineered constitutive constructs in E. coli. Few participants were able to measure absolute fluorescence, so data was analyzed in terms of ratios. Precision was strongly related to fluorescent strength, ranging from 1.54-fold standard deviation for the ratio between strong promoters to 5.75-fold for the ratio between the strongest and weakest promoter, and while host strain did not affect expression ratios, choice of instrument did. This result shows that high quantitative precision and reproducibility of results is possible, while at the same time indicating areas needing improved laboratory practices.Peer reviewe