Deconstructing climate misinformation to identify reasoning errors

Misinformation can have significant societal consequences. For example, misinformation about climate change has confused the public and stalled support for mitigation policies. When people lack the expertise and skill to evaluate the science behind a claim, they typically rely on heuristics such as substituting judgment about something complex (i.e. climate science) with judgment about something simple (i.e. the character of people who speak about climate science) and are therefore vulnerable to misleading information. Inoculation theory offers one approach to effectively neutralize the influence of misinformation. Typically, inoculations convey resistance by providing people with information that counters misinformation. In contrast, we propose inoculating against misinformation by explaining the fallacious reasoning within misleading denialist claims. We offer a strategy based on critical thinking methods to analyse and detect poor reasoning within denialist claims. This strategy includes detailing argument structure, determining the truth of the premises, and checking for validity, hidden premises, or ambiguous language. Focusing on argument structure also facilitates the identification of reasoning fallacies by locating them in the reasoning process. Because this reason-based form of inoculation is based on general critical thinking methods, it offers the distinct advantage of being accessible to those who lack expertise in climate science. We applied this approach to 42 common denialist claims and find that they all demonstrate fallacious reasoning and fail to refute the scientific consensus regarding anthropogenic global warming. This comprehensive deconstruction and refutation of the most common denialist claims about climate change is designed to act as a resource for communicators and educators who teach climate science and/or critical thinking

Internal vs. External IT Capabilities: When to Hire Consultants?

External IT consultants are specialists who bring in skills that may be lacking within a firm. However, a lack of firm specific knowledge, low legitimacy, and a host of other factors may limit the effectiveness of IT consultants. From a resource-based perspective, consultants can represent a rich source of short term, valuable capabilities. These capabilities, however, may be at odds with exiting internal capabilities. Institutional theory suggests that external consultants may not share the same norms and beliefs held by the internal staff and consequently their efforts will be ineffective in achieving organizational goals. The paper explores this tension using survey data to track the benefits accruing from the use of internal and external IT capabilities in the adoption of Internet business solutions. The results show that firms see tangible benefits from using external IT consultants but that these benefits are moderated by the level of existing internal IT capabilities

Differences in Class Rank Between Boys and Girls in Graduating Classes of Iowa Public Secondary Schools

For many years, educators have noted that girls seem to attain higher class rank than boys while attending secondary schools. It appears that this idea has been accepted a priori and that little research effort has been put forth to determine the magnitude of the differences which exist. It is a matter of conjecture at the present time as to how great the differences must be before they will be considered to be serious problems. It was the purpose of this study (1) to determine whether significant differences existed between the class standing of boys and the class standing of girls in graduating classes of Iowa public secondary schools and (2) to apply these determinations to representative problems such as the admission requirements for freshman students at the State College of Iowa and to a recommendation of Conant in reference to the class standing of secondary school pupils for recruitment of teachers

Battery Train Fire Risk on a Steel Warehouse Structure

Lithium ion battery fire hazard has been well-documented in a variety of applications. Recently, battery train technology has been introduced as a clean energy concept for railway. In the case of heavy locomotives such as trains, the massive collection of battery stacks required to meet energy demands may pose a significant hazard. The objective of this paper is to review the risk evaluation processes for train fires and investigate the propagation of lithium ion battery fire to a neighboring steel warehouse structure at a rail repair shop through a case study. The methodology of the analyses conducted include a Monte Carlo-based dynamic modeling of fire propagation potentials, an expert-based fire impact analysis, and a finite element (FE) nonlinear fire analysis on the structural frame. The case study is presented as a demonstration of a holistic fire risk analysis for the lithium ion battery fire and results indicate that significant battery fire mitigations strategies should be considered

Retrieval of Broadcast News Documents with the THISL System

This paper describes a spoken document retrieval system, combining the ABBOT large vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR) system developed by Cambridge University, Sheffield University and SoftSound, and the PRISE information retrieval engine developed by NIST. The system was constructed to enable us to participate in the TREC 6 Spoken Document Retrieval experimental evaluation. Our key aims in this work were to produce a complete system for the SDR task, to investigate the effect of a word error rate of 30-50% on retrieval performance and to investigate the integration of LVCSR and word spotting in a retrieval task

Palmitoylethanolamide and Cannabidiol Prevent Inflammation-induced Hyperpermeability of the Human Gut In Vitro and In Vivo—A Randomized, Placebo-controlled, Double-blind Controlled Trial

Background and aimsWe aimed to examine, for the first time, the effect of cannabidiol (CBD) and palmitoylethanolamide (PEA) on the permeability of the human gastrointestinal tract in vitro, ex vivo, and in vivo.MethodsFlux measurements of fluorescein-labeled dextrans 10 (FD10) and fluorescein-labeled dextrans 4 (FD4) dextran across Caco-2 cultures treated for 24 hours with interferon gamma (IFNγ) and tumour necrosis factor alpha (TNFα) (10 ng·mL−1) were measured, with or without the presence of CBD and PEA. Mechanisms were investigated using cannabinoid receptor 1 (CB1), cannabinoid receptor 2 (CB2), transient receptor potential vanilloid 1 (TRPV1), and proliferator activated receptors (PPAR) antagonists and protein kinase A (PKA), nitric oxide synthase, phosphoinositide 3-kinases, extracellular signal–regulated kinases (MEK/ERK), adenylyl cyclase, and protein kinase C (PKC) inhibitors. Human colonic mucosal samples collected from bowel resections were treated as previously stated. The receptors TRPV1, PPARα, PPARδ, PPARγ, CB1, CB2, G-coupled protein receptor 55 (GPR55), G-coupled protein receptor 119 (GPR119), and claudins-1, -2, -3, -4, -5, -7, and -8 mRNA were measured using multiplex. Aquaporin 3 and 4 were measured using enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). A randomized, double-blind, controlled-trial assessed the effect of PEA or CBD on the absorption of lactulose and mannitol in humans taking 600 mg of aspirin. Urinary concentrations of these sugars were measured using liquid chromatography mass spectrometry.ResultsIn vitro, PEA, and CBD decreased the inflammation-induced flux of dextrans (P < 0.0001), sensitive to PPARα and CB1 antagonism, respectively. Both PEA and CBD were prevented by PKA, MEK/ERK, and adenylyl cyclase inhibition (P < 0.001). In human mucosa, inflammation decreased claudin-5 mRNA, which was prevented by CBD (P < 0.05). Palmitoylethanolamide and cannabidiol prevented an inflammation-induced fall in TRPV1 and increase in PPARα transcription (P < 0.0001). In vivo, aspirin caused an increase in the absorption of lactulose and mannitol, which were reduced by PEA or CBD (P < 0.001).ConclusionCannabidiol and palmitoylethanolamide reduce permeability in the human colon. These findings have implications in disorders associated with increased gut permeability, such as inflammatory bowel disease

Remote Work, Work Measurement and the State of Work Research in Human-Centred Computing

Over the past few decades, a small but growing group of people have worked remotely from their homes. With the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic, millions of people found themselves joining this group overnight. In this position paper, we examine the kinds of work that ‘went remote’ in response to the pandemic, and consider the ways in which this transition was influenced by (and in turn came to influence) contemporary trends in digital workplace measurement and evaluation. We see that employers appeared reluctant to let certain classes of employee work remotely. When the pandemic forced staff home, employers compensated by turning to digital surveillance tools, even though, as we argue, these tools seem unable to overcome the significant conceptual barriers to understanding how people are working. We also observed that, in the United Kingdom context, the pandemic didn’t mean remote work for a significant proportion of the population. We assert that, to maximize its impact, ‘future of work’ research in human-centred computing must be more inclusive and representative of work, rather than focusing on the experiences of knowledge workers and those involved in new forms of work

Retrieval of broadcast news documents with the THISL system.

This paper describes the THISL system that participated in the TREC-7 evaluation, Spoken Document Retrieval (SDR) Track, and presents the results obtained, together with some analysis. The THISL system is based on the Abbot speech recognition system and the thislIR text retrieval system. In this evaluation we were concerned with investigating the suitability for SDR of a recognizer running at less than ten times realtime, the use of multiple transcriptions and word graphs, the effect of simple query expansion algorithms and the effect of varying standard IR parameters

The THISL Spoken Document Retrieval System

The THISL spoken document retrieval system is based on the Abbot Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition (LVCSR) system developed by Cambridge University, Sheffield University and SoftSound, and uses PRISE (NIST) for indexing and retrieval. We participated in full SDR mode. Our approach was to transcribe the spoken documents at the word level using Abbot, indexing the resulting text transcriptions using PRISE. The LVCSR system uses a recurrent network-based acoustic model (with no adaptation to different conditions) trained on the 50 hour Broadcast News training set, a 65,000 word vocabulary and a trigram language model derived from Broadcast News text. Words in queries which were out-of-vocabulary (OOV) were word spotted at query time (utilizing the posterior phone probabilities output by the acoustic model), added to the transcriptions of the relevant documents and the collection was then re-indexed. We generated pronunciations at run-time for OOV words using the Festival TTS system (University of Edinburgh)

Loughborough University SKInS: wearable simulations of occupational health – defining specifications and product development

A previous paper presented at CIB W099 2009 reported the authors’ aim to develop wearable devices to simulate occupational health effects, and their consequential impacts on both working and home life, as experienced by older construction workers. The rationale for the research is that, when worn, the Loughborough University SKInS (Sensory and Kinaesthetic Interactive Simulations) will enable younger workers to directly experience age-related occupational ill-health conditions and so encourage behavioural change and improve future occupational health. Furthermore, other industry stakeholders (managers, architects, equipment designers, etc) should be able to better appreciate the challenges faced by older workers and, through this improved awareness, contribute to an attitude-shift to occupational health within the industry. This paper describes the progress of the project in defining the specifications for five given health conditions that are frequently encountered in construction. The specifications were defined at mild, moderate and severe levels thereby enabling wearers to appreciate the progression of the conditions and their resultant impacts at each stage. The paper further describes how the Loughborough University SKInS were then developed to meet these specifications and discusses the limiting factors which shaped the ultimate designs. Initial reviews by health professionals and industry representatives regarding their fidelity and potential contribution to the industry are also presented