Sport is king: an investigation into local media coverage of women's sport in the UK East Midlands

There has been a recent interest in research into national media coverage of female sport, particularly single events, but on-going sporting activities by women are rarely reported. This paper attempts to examine this subject at the local level, looking in general at women’s sport and in particular at women’s football in the East Midlands region of the UK. Quantitative methods were used to survey local newspapers and radio stations and interviews were carried out with a range of people relevant to the field of study. The topic of sports media is framed here with reference to research into masculinities and a socialist feminist approach is used to address problems. The data showed there was a significant and on-going imbalance in the amount of coverage and even some signs of a decline in women’s football reporting, in spite of a national resurgence of the sport itself. The authors try to account for this and suggest further areas of future study

Defining and Identifying the Legal Culpability of Side Effects Using Causal Graphs

Deployed algorithms can cause certain negative side effects on the world in pursuit of their objective. It is important to define precisely what an algorithmic side-effect is in a way which is compatible with the wider folk concept to avoid future misunderstandings and to aid analysis in the event of harm being caused. This article argues that current treatments of side-effects in AI research are often not sufficiently precise. By considering the medical idea of side effect, this article will argue that the concept of algorithm side effect can only exist once the intent or purpose of the algorithm is known and the relevant causal mechanisms are understood and mapped. It presents a method to apply widely accepted legal concepts (The Model Penal Code or MPC) along with causal reasoning to identify side effects and then determine their associated culpability

What criminal and civil law tells us about Safe RL techniques to generate law-abiding behaviour

Safe Reinforcement Learning (Safe RL) aims to produce constrained policies with constraints typically motivated by issues of physical safety. This paper considers the issues that arise from regulatory constraints or issues of legal safety. Without guarantees of safety, autonomous systems or agents (A-bots) trained through RL are expensive or dangerous to train and deploy. Many potential applications for RL involve acting in regulated environments and here existing research is thin. Regulations impose behavioural restrictions which can be more complex than those engendered by considerations of physical safety. They are often inter-temporal, require planning on behalf of the learner and involve concepts of causality and intent. By examining the typical types of laws present in a regulated arena, this paper identifies design features that the RL learning process should possess in order to ensure that it is able to generate legally safe or compliant policies

Human information processing research in auditing A review and synthesis

https://egrove.olemiss.edu/dl_proceedings/1144/thumbnail.jp

Therapist, Heal Thyself? A Study of Self-Care Practices among Therapeutic Service Providers

Missoula, Montana, is the largest city in western Montana and a social service hub for more than 110,000 residents of the surrounding county and beyond. Whether nonprofit, government agency, or individual provider, each social service offering has its own model of change and form of therapeutic services designed to ensure the best life possible for its clients— but how do the leaders of these organizations also try to make the best lives for themselves and their staff? In this research project, I will investigate this question, analyzing and comparing the self-care practices—formal and informal, public and private, personal and institutional—of five Missoula leaders whose professional settings offer therapeutic services

Rescuing the Hero: The Ramifications of Expanding the Duty to Rescue on Society and the Law

The ongoing debate about the legal duty to rescue another person in peril is fraught with a familiar tension. On one side stands the traditional and distinctly American determination that freedom from such a duty is essential, that the technical rules of tort law and self-preservation instincts disdain such a requirement, and that the postulates of religion and morality are sure to fill in any legal gaps. On the other, a more recent humanitarian perspective-seen in revisions to the Restatement, case law, and some state statutes-advocates for requiring easy rescue, positing that religiously inspired morality and public good-doing are unlikely, and citing highly publicized incidents in which bystanders remained callously, though lawfully, inactive. But the classic dialogue between an autonomist\u27s protection of the rescuer and the humanitarian protection of the rescuee has thus far neglected a thorough treatment of a figure viscerally affected by the slow erosion of the historical no-duty rule: the hero. The hero derives his meaning by acting in ways that are not legally required; in other words, the hero is valuable because he acts not as the law\u27s reasonable man, but as a figure wholly outside of it. This Note argues that as the duty to rescue expands, the moral realm in which the hero acts consequently shrinks, and that the values a hero inspires in society-hope, exemplary conduct, public celebration, societal reflection, and spiritual absolution-are likely to suffer as well. In this way, increasing the duty to rescue not only affects society but also runs the risk of confusing the law by deeming potentially heroic: action reasonable. This dual distortion of social and legal values merits a new and invigorated examination of the role of the hero as a real and meaningful concept-a concept that risks danger should the duty to rescue continue to expand

The problem of behaviour and preference manipulation in AI systems

Statistical AI or Machine learning can be applied to user data in order to understand user preferences in an effort to improve various services. This involves making assumptions about either stated or revealed preferences. Human preferences are susceptible to manipulation and change over time. When iterative AI/ML is applied, it becomes difficult to ascertain whether the system has learned something about its users, whether its users have changed/learned something or whether it has taught its users to behave in a certain way in order to maximise its objective function. This article discusses the relationship between behaviour and preferences in AI/ML, existing mechanisms that manipulate human preferences and behaviour and relates them to the topic of value alignment

Mechanics and rates of tidal inlet migration : modeling and application to natural examples

Author Posting. © American Geophysical Union, 2016. This article is posted here by permission of American Geophysical Union for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface 121 (2016): 2118–2139, doi:10.1002/2016JF004035.Tidal inlets on barrier coasts can migrate alongshore hundreds of meters per year, often presenting great management and engineering challenges. Here we perform model experiments with migrating tidal inlets in Delft3D-SWAN to investigate the mechanics and rates of inlet migration. Model experiments with obliquely approaching waves suggest that tidal inlet migration occurs due to three mechanisms: (1) littoral sediment deposition along the updrift inlet bank, (2) wave-driven sediment transport preferentially eroding the downdrift bank of the inlet, and (3) flood-tide-driven flow preferentially cutting along the downdrift inlet bank because it is less obstructed by flood-tidal delta deposits. To quantify tidal inlet migration, we propose and apply a simple mass balance framework of sediment fluxes around inlets that includes alongshore sediment bypassing and flood-tidal delta deposition. In model experiments, both updrift littoral sediment and the eroded downdrift inlet bank are sediment sources to the growing updrift barrier and the flood-tidal delta, such that tidal inlets can be net sink of up to 150% of the littoral sediment flux. Our mass balance framework demonstrates how, with flood-tidal deltas acting as a littoral sediment sink, migrating tidal inlets can drive erosion of the downdrift barrier beach. Parameterizing model experiments, we propose a predictive model of tidal inlet migration rates based upon the relative momentum flux of the inlet jet and the alongshore radiation stress; we then compare these predicted migration rates to 22 natural tidal inlets along the U.S. East Coast and find good agreement.National Science Foundation Grant Number: EAR-14247282017-05-1

Using and evaluating audit decision aids

https://egrove.olemiss.edu/dl_proceedings/1031/thumbnail.jp

Depletion potentials in highly size-asymmetric binary hard-sphere mixtures: Comparison of accurate simulation results with theory

We report a detailed study, using state-of-the-art simulation and theoretical methods, of the depletion potential between a pair of big hard spheres immersed in a reservoir of much smaller hard spheres, the size disparity being measured by the ratio of diameters q=\sigma_s/\sigma_b. Small particles are treated grand canonically, their influence being parameterized in terms of their packing fraction in the reservoir, \eta_s^r. Two specialized Monte Carlo simulation schemes --the geometrical cluster algorithm, and staged particle insertion-- are deployed to obtain accurate depletion potentials for a number of combinations of q\leq 0.1 and \eta_s^r. After applying corrections for simulation finite-size effects, the depletion potentials are compared with the prediction of new density functional theory (DFT) calculations based on the insertion trick using the Rosenfeld functional and several subsequent modifications. While agreement between the DFT and simulation is generally good, significant discrepancies are evident at the largest reservoir packing fraction accessible to our simulation methods, namely \eta_s^r=0.35. These discrepancies are, however, small compared to those between simulation and the much poorer predictions of the Derjaguin approximation at this \eta_s^r. The recently proposed morphometric approximation performs better than Derjaguin but is somewhat poorer than DFT for the size ratios and small sphere packing fractions that we consider. The effective potentials from simulation, DFT and the morphometric approximation were used to compute the second virial coefficient B_2 as a function of \eta_s^r. Comparison of the results enables an assessment of the extent to which DFT can be expected to correctly predict the propensity towards fluid fluid phase separation in additive binary hard sphere mixtures with q\leq 0.1.Comment: 16 pages, 9 figures, revised treatment of morphometric approximation and reordered some materia