Spot: A Natural Language Interface for Geospatial Searches in OSM

Investigative journalists and fact-checkers have found OpenStreetMap (OSM) to be an invaluable resource for their work due to its extensive coverage and intricate details of various locations, which play a crucial role in investigating news scenes. Despite its value, OSM's complexity presents considerable accessibility and usability challenges, especially for those without a technical background. To address this, we introduce 'Spot', a user-friendly natural language interface for querying OSM data. Spot utilizes a semantic mapping from natural language to OSM tags, leveraging artificially generated sentence queries and a T5 transformer. This approach enables Spot to extract relevant information from user-input sentences and display candidate locations matching the descriptions on a map. To foster collaboration and future advancement, all code and generated data is available as an open-source repository.Comment: To be published in the Proceedings of the OSM Science 202

Consultants as legitimizers: exploring their rhetoric

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore how legitimizers invest in their approach to meet the suspicion of being a one-sided advocate. Design/methodology/approach: A multiple case study of four public sector decisions, based on a comparative argumentation analysis of two consulting reports in each case, one written by a legitimizer and one by a devil's advocate. The findings of the document analysis are triangulated with author interviews. Findings: Consultants acting as legitimizers are often suspected of being political allies of a decision maker. To neutralize their reputation as hired guns, these consultants invest in being seen as impartial by making their research approaches transparent and their argumentation balanced to increase their credibility in the eyes of stakeholders, which is necessary to execute their central task: legitimizing a major decision. Research limitations/implications: The number of four cases could limit the possible variation within the legitimizer role. Further research could therefore explore under what conditions consultants are willing to argue more one-sidedly as "advocates". Practical implications: Practitioners, such as consultants or decision makers, can apply the approach used in this research to make their method more transparent and to balance their argumentation to get commitment from stakeholders, while legitimizing a decision. Originality/value: The paper nuances the view on the legitimizer role of consultants in previous studies, by exploring how their arguments are more balanced and transparent than assumed and how they try to contribute to their clients' decision-making process. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited

The Relational Dimension of Feedback Interactions: A Study of Early Feedback Meetings Between Entrepreneurs and Potential Mentors

Entrepreneurs’ responses to feedback are in part determined by how the interactions during which they receive it unfold. Prior studies primarily discuss feedback interactions between entrepreneurs and their mentors or trusted advisors. As a result of this focus on longstanding relationships, there is limited knowledge of ‘early’ meetings – conversations between feedback providers and entrepreneurs who do not know each other well – and the ways in which these shape the relationship between the interactants, as well as the way feedback is received. Our analysis of 54 early feedback interactions suggests that changes in epistemic stance and alignment influence whether there is affiliation, that is, affective cooperation, between entrepreneurs and feedback providers. We theorize that affiliation is necessary for early feedback interactions to develop into longstanding feedback relationships

The Relational Dimension of Feedback Interactions: A Study of Early Feedback Meetings Between Entrepreneurs and Potential Mentors

AbstractEntrepreneurs’ responses to feedback are in part determined by how the interactions during which they receive it unfold. Prior studies primarily discuss feedback interactions between entrepreneurs and their mentors or trusted advisors. As a result of this focus on longstanding relationships, there is limited knowledge of ‘early’ meetings – conversations between feedback providers and entrepreneurs who do not know each other well – and the ways in which these shape the relationship between the interactants, as well as the way feedback is received. Our analysis of 54 early feedback interactions suggests that changes in epistemic stance and alignment influence whether there is affiliation, that is, affective cooperation, between entrepreneurs and feedback providers. We theorize that affiliation is necessary for early feedback interactions to develop into longstanding feedback relationships.</jats:p

Web and Social Media Image Forensics for News Professionals

User-generated content -commonly referred to as "eyewitness media"- has become an essential component in journalism and news reporting. Increasingly more news providers, such as news agencies, broadcasters and Web-only players have set up teams of dedicated investigators or are in the process of training parts of their journalistic workforce to gather and evaluate material from social networks and the Web. If verified, such content can be invaluable in delivering a news story. However, while source checking and verification is as old as journalism itself, the verification of digital material is a relatively young field, with protocols and assisting tools still being developed. In this work, we present our efforts towards a Web-based image verification platform. The platform, currently in its alpha stage, features image tampering detection using a number of state-of-the-art algorithms and image metadata visualization. We discuss the current strengths and limitations of the platform and the implemented state-of-the-art with respect to the specific requirements of the task, resulting from its Web-based nature and its intended use by news investigators with limited expertise in the domain of image forensics

Coral spawning predicted by rapid seasonal rise in ocean temperature

Coral spawning times have been linked to multiple environmental factors; however, to what extent these factors act as generalized cues across multiple species and large spatial scales is unknown. We used a unique dataset of coral spawning from 34 reefs in the Indian and Pacific Oceans to test if month of spawning and peak spawning month in assemblages of Acropora spp. can be predicted by sea surface temperature (SST), photosynthetically available radiation, wind speed, current speed, rainfall or sunset time. Contrary to the classic view that high mean SST initiates coral spawning, we found rapid increases in SST to be the best predictor in both cases (month of spawning: R2 = 0.73, peak: R2 = 0.62). Our findings suggest that a rapid increase in SST provides the dominant proximate cue for coral mass spawning over large geographical scales. We hypothesize that coral spawning is ultimately timed to ensure optimal fertilization success

Reports on the workshops held at the Sixth International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media

The workshops day at the Sixth International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media included three full-day workshops (Social Media Visualization, Real-Time Analysis and Mining of Social Streams, and When the City Meets the Citizen) and one half day workshop (The Potential of Social Media Tools and Data for Journalists in the News Media). Workshops were held on June 4, 2012, the day prior to the first day of the technical conference, in Dublin, Ireland