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Highly engaging events reveal semantic and temporal compression in online community discourse
Full text linkPeople nowadays express their opinions in online spaces, using different forms of interactions such as posting, sharing and discussing with one another. How do these digital traces change in response to events happening in the real world? We leverage Reddit conversation data, exploiting its community-based structure, to elucidate how offline events influence online user interactions and behavior. Online conversations, as posts and comments, are analysed along their temporal and semantic dimensions. Conversations tend to become repetitive with a more limited vocabulary, develop at a faster pace, and feature heightened emotions. As the event approaches, the shifts occurring in conversations are reflected in the users’ dynamics. Users become more active and they exchange information with a growing audience, despite using a less rich vocabulary and repetitive messages. The recurring patterns we discovered are persistent across a wide range of events and several contexts, representing a fingerprint of how online dynamics change in response to real-world occurrences
Moral Judgment and Generative AI in the Creative Industries
Full text linkThis paper combines literature analysis and focus group discussion to explore the role of moral judgments in generative AI use within the creative industries, focusing on whether professionals perceive it as morally acceptable. Utilising literature to inform our focus group questions, we sought to understand how creatives use generative AI, if at all, the ethical barriers to adoption, the perceptions of the generative AI creative output and the broader implications of generative AI use. In our focus group, we found there was a range of generative AI use cases, and how it was used had a bearing on whether it was deemed morally acceptable. Ethical barriers ranged from individual moral objections (e.g. a sense of copying others’ work), collective moral objections (negative impact on creative education and industry as a whole), and broader ethical concerns about energy usage. The qualitative analysis and literature review have helped to form a theoretical framework which we aim to empirically test
Distinguishing mechanisms of social contagion from local network view
Full text linkThe adoption of individual behavioural patterns is largely determined by stimuli arriving from peers via social interactions or from external sources. Based on these influences, individuals are commonly assumed to follow simple or complex adoption rules, inducing social contagion processes. In reality, multiple adoption rules may coexist even within the same social contagion process, introducing additional complexity into the spreading phenomena. Our goal is to understand whether coexisting adoption mechanisms can be distinguished from a microscopic view, at the egocentric network level, without requiring global information about the underlying network, or the unfolding spreading process. We formulate this question as a classification problem, and study it through a likelihood approach and with random forest classifiers in various synthetic and data-driven experiments. This study offers a novel perspective on the observations of propagation processes at the egocentric level and a better understanding of landmark contagion mechanisms from a local view
A Name on the Line: David Fincher’s 'Mank' (2020)
Full text linkIt seems fitting that the first name to appear on screen in David Fincher’s 2020 biopic, 'Mank', is not that of its protagonist but of the towering figure who for so long supposedly overshadowed him: Orson Welles. ‘In 1940’, the film’s prologue informs us, Welles was given the chance to ‘make any movie, about any subject, with any collaborator he wished’. That collaborator, and the screenplay they produced together, are the focus of Fincher’s film, which provides a fictionalized re-imagining of the genesis of Citizen Kane (1941), told from the perspective of that most marginal of figures, the Hollywood screenwriter, in the visual style of the film that did not make his name
The EU’s Digital Footprint: Shaping Data Governance in Japan and Singapore
Full text linkThe rapid development of the Internet and information and communication technologies (ICTs) over the past few decades has led to the emergence of a new digital order, attracting significant attention from both academia and policymakers. In the global digital domain, the European Union (EU) has assumed a distinctive role in shaping and influencing digital norms and standards. This status stems from the EU’s pioneering efforts, ranging from the Council of Europe’s Convention 108 (1981) to the more recent General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which have exerted far-reaching extraterritorial effects, influencing data laws and regulatory practices beyond the EU’s borders. However, there remains a lack of sufficient research on how these actors have progressively enacted and revised their data regulations in response to evolving EU standards. To address this gap, this article adopts a qualitative approach to examine how the EU’s evolving data regulations have diffused to and been adopted by two Asian countries – Japan and Singapore. By categorising diffusion mechanisms into incentive, socialisation, learning, competition, and emulation, this research further explores the operative mechanisms underpinning the diffusion process. This research argues that the EU’s diffuse-ability in Japan has demonstrated a gradual strengthening trend, with socialisation functioning as the primary mechanism driving this process. In contrast, the EU’s diffuse-ability in Singapore has remained relatively weak, with competition served as the dominant mechanism
Samuel Johnson on Shakespeare and John Keats's 'On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again' (1818)
No full textThis article presents a new reading of the relationship between the poetry of John Keats, and the work of Samuel Jonson, and the two writers’ readings of Shakespeare. Keats is known to have been critical of Johnson’s approach to Shakespeare; he owned a copy of Shakespeare’s plays containing Johnson’s commentary, and Keats’s marginal annotations make his disagreements with Johnson apparent. But this article shows that Keats’s sonnet ‘On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again’ (1818) praises Shakespeare by alluding to Johnson’s ‘A Preface to Shakespeare’ (1765), and suggests that Keats’s conception of what poetry ought to achieve more broadly appears to be indebted to Johnson, as well. The article therefore makes the case for unexpected common ground between the way that Johnson and Keats think about Shakespeare, and about the significance of poetry at large
Exploring AI-powered Digital Innovations from A Transnational Governance Perspective: Implications for Market Acceptance and Digital Accountability
Full text linkThis study explores the application of the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) to AI-powered digital innovations within a transnational governance framework. By integrating Latourian actor-network theory (ANT), this study examines how institutional motivations, regulatory compliance, and ethical and cultural acceptance drive organisations to develop and adopt AI innovations, enhancing their market acceptance and transnational accountability. We extend the TAM framework by incorporating regulatory, ethical, and socio-technical considerations as key social pressures shaping AI adoption. Recognizing that AI is embedded within complex actor-networks, we argue that accountability is co-constructed among organisations, regulators, and societal actors rather than being confined to individual developers or adopters. To address these challenges, we propose two key solutions: (1) internal resource reconfiguration, where organisations restructure their governance and compliance mechanisms to align with global standards; and (2) reshaping organisational boundaries through actor-network management, fostering engagement with external stakeholders, regulatory bodies, and transnational governance institutions. These approaches allow organisations to enhance AI accountability, foster ethical and regulatory alignment, and improve market acceptance on a global scale
Emerging Trends in Palladium Nanoparticles: Sustainable Approaches for Enhanced Cross-Coupling Catalysis
Full text linkPalladium nanoparticles (PdNPs) are transforming the landscape of modern catalysis and offer sustainable and efficient alternatives to traditional catalysts for cross-coupling reactions. Owing to their exceptional surface area-to-volume ratio, PdNPs exhibit superior catalytic activity, selectivity, and recyclability, making them ideal for greener chemical processes. Recent innovations have focused on improving the stability and reusability of PdNPs through environmentally benign approaches, such as water-based reactions, renewable stabilizers, and magnetic nanoparticle supports. Advances in catalyst design, including PdNP immobilization on magnetic nanosilica for enhanced recyclability in Suzuki–Miyaura reactions, nitrogen-doped carbon nanosheets achieving up to ninefold improvements in turnover frequencies, and biodegradable biopolymer matrices that reduce environmental impact, have effectively addressed key challenges such as catalyst leaching, support degradation, and agglomeration. The shift from conventional catalysis to these cutting-edge nanocatalytic techniques signifies a critical movement toward sustainable chemistry, positioning PdNPs at the forefront of industrial applications and the future of eco-friendly chemical synthesis
Accurate Density Determination of Various Natural Stones Employing Archimedes Principle and a New Non-Destructive Liquid Pycnometer for Solids
Full text linkHonour, Competition and Cooperation across 13 Societies
Full text linkEffectively addressing societal challenges often requires unrelated individuals to reduce conflict and successfully coordinate actions. The cultural logic of ‘honour’ is frequently studied in relation to conflict, but its role in competition and cooperation remains underexplored. The current study investigates how perceived normative and personally endorsed honour values predict competition and cooperation behaviours. In an online experiment testing preregistered hypotheses, 3,371 participants from 13 societies made incentivized competition decisions in a contest game and cooperation decisions for coordination in a step-level public goods game. Perceived normative honour values were associated with greater competition and greater cooperation at both societal and individual levels. Personally endorsing values tied to defence of family reputation was associated with greater coordinative efforts, whereas endorsing self-promotion and retaliation was associated with weaker engagement in coordination. These findings highlight the role of honour as a cultural logic (in its different forms) in shaping competition and cooperation across societies