The social amplification of risk and the hazard sequence: The October 1995 oral contraceptive pill scare

Hazard notifications routinely occur as part of the identification or management of a hazard. It is argued that a series of such notifications - a hazard sequence - may affect public responses to future notifications about that hazard and also that hazard sequences can help explain patterns of risk amplification, particularly how a risk becomes normalised. Exploration of the hazard sequence also means exploring hazard templates: frameworks through which people make sense of risk information across the lifetime of the hazard. Events surrounding the 1995 oral contraceptive 'pill scare' are used to illustrate the way in which a hazard sequence might operate

Impact of smartphone notification display choice in a typing task

External displays have the potential to make smartphone notifications less obtrusive when a user has committed their attention to a primary task. We compare six notification displays, and evaluate the impact that negotiating smartphone interruptions has on a typing task when the number of notifications to ignore and act on are equal. A lab experiment with 30 participants is conducted, and initial results show that desktop pop-ups are preferred significantly more, where they require the fewest actions to read. Managing notifications via the notification bar is least preferred, despite requiring fewer actions to respond. This work is a well-controlled pre-cursor to the application of notification displays in social scenarios. The results motivate the use of external displays to manage attention around smartphone interruptions

Enabling Confidentiality in Content-Based Publish/Subscribe Infrastructures

Content-Based Publish/Subscribe (CBPS) is an interaction model where the interests of subscribers are stored in a content-based forwarding infrastructure to guide routing of notifications to interested parties. In this paper, we focus on answering the following question: Can we implement content-based publish/subscribe while keeping subscriptions and notifications confidential from the forwarding brokers? Our contributions include a systematic analysis of the problem, providing a formal security model and showing that the maximum level of attainable security in this setting is restricted. We focus on enabling provable confidentiality for commonly used applications and subscription languages in CBPS and present a series of practical provably secure protocols, some of which are novel and others adapted from existing work. We have implemented these protocols in SIENA, a popular CBPS system. Evaluation results show that confidential content-based publish/subscribe is practical: A single broker serving 1000 subscribers is able to route more than 100 notifications per second with our solutions

Mismatch in notifications reveal a worrying problem in our abortion statistics

A discussion of a 2014 Department of Health report concerning abortion notifications in England & Wale

Fulfilled lives, supportive communities: implementation of the Children and Young Persons Act 2008: notifications to be sent by Care and Social Services Inspectorate Wales (CSSIW) to local authorities about children’s social care providers (under Section 30A of the Care Standards Act 2000).

"This is a consultation about the information Care and Social Services Inspectorate Wales (CSSIW) are required to notify to all local authorities in Wales and England when they take specific actions against providers of children's homes, residential family centres, fostering agencies, voluntary adoption agencies and adoption support agencies. Actions include such things as restricting new admissions to children's homes or residential family centres or cancelling a provider's registration. The consultation asks whether the detail to be provided to local authorities within notifications is appropriate and whether the circumstances where notifications are made to local authorities are appropriate." - overview

Notifications

The notification system is essential in our daily life. It grabs the user\u27s attention to a specific situation that needs the user\u27s action. Such as responding to an important message. However, the notification system can be less effective due to the limited features and frequently failing to display enough appropriate information. What if the notification system can allow users to respond, share and save notifications? The current notification system directs us to apps that divert our focus away, where there is no way to respond to all types of notifications within the notification. Long and unorganized notification pages created by a high volume of notifications can cause discomfort to the users. It also has limited features where the user can not share or save the received notifications. This project will build an experience that allows users to respond, save and share notifications within the notification system. Creating a bold design to emphasize the content in a notification will help the user focus on one notification at a time. The added features will allow the user to finish an entire task without leaving the notification system. It will help to build a notification system that is focused and connected

Remedy for Now but Prohibit for Tomorrow: The Deterrence Effects of Merger Policy Tools

Antitrust policy involves not just the regulation of anti-competitive behavior, but also an important deterrence effect. Neither scholars nor policymakers have fully researched the deterrence effects of merger policy tools, as they have been unable to empirically measure these effects. We consider the ability of different antitrust actions – Prohibitions, Remedies, and Monitorings – to deter firms from engaging in mergers. We employ cross-jurisdiction/pan-time data on merger policy to empirically estimate the impact of antitrust actions on future merger frequencies. We find merger prohibitions to lead to decreased merger notifications in subsequent periods, and remedies to weakly increase future merger notifications: in other words, prohibitions involve a deterrence effect but remedies do not

Journal Notifications

Notifications at the end of the Journal. Fieldwork Calendar and Notes for Contributors