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Understanding political divisiveness using online participation data from the 2022 French and Brazilian presidential elections
Get PDFDigital technologies can augment civic participation by facilitating the expression of detailed political preferences. Yet, digital participation efforts often rely on methods optimized for elections involving a few candidates. Here we present data collected in an online experiment where participants built personalized government programmes by combining policies proposed by the candidates of the 2022 French and Brazilian presidential elections. We use this data to explore aggregates complementing those used in social choice theory, finding that a metric of divisiveness, which is uncorrelated with traditional aggregation functions, can identify polarizing proposals. These metrics provide a score for the divisiveness of each proposal that can be estimated in the absence of data on the demographic characteristics of participants and that explains the issues that divide a population. These findings suggest that divisiveness metrics can be useful complements to traditional aggregation functions in direct forms of digital participation
Harnessing collective intelligence for the future of learning--a co-constructed research and development agenda
Get PDFLearning, defined as the process of constructing meaning and developing competencies to act on it, is instrumental in helping individuals, communities, and organizations tackle challenges. When these challenges increase in complexity and require domain knowledge from diverse areas of expertise, it becomes difficult for single individuals to address them. In this context, collective intelligence, a capacity of groups of people to act together and solve problems using their collective knowledge, becomes of great importance. Technologies are instrumental both to support and understand learning and collective intelligence, hence the need for innovations in the area of technologies that can support user needs to learn and tackle collective challenges. Use-inspired research is a fitting paradigm that spans applied solutions and scientific explanations of the processes of learning and collective intelligence, and that can improve the technologies that may support them. Although some conceptual and theoretical work explaining and linking learning with collective intelligence is emerging, technological infrastructures as well as methodologies that employ and evidence that support them are nascent. We convened a group of experts to create a middleground and engage with the priorities for use-inspired research. Here we detail directions and methods they put forward as most promising for advancing a scientific agenda around learning and collective intelligence
Academic Mobility as a Driver of Productivity: A Gender-centric Approach
Get PDFpSTEM fields (Physical Sciences, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) are known for showing a gender imbalance favouring men. This imbalance can be seen at several levels, including in university and industry, where men are the majority of the posts. Academic success is partly dependent on the value of the researchers' co-authorship networks. One of the ways to enrich one's network is through academic movement; the change of institutions in search of better opportunities within the same country or internationally. In this paper, we look at the data for one specific pSTEM field, Computer Science, and describe the productivity and co-authorship patterns that emerge as a function of academic mobility. We find that women and men both benefit from national and international mobility, women who never change affiliations over their careers are rarely well-cited or highly productive, and women are not well-represented in the overall top-ranking researchers
Lydia Davis / Maurice Blanchot, invisible
No full textThis article examines translation as represented in Lydia Davis's work, and as it represented as a distinct writing practice. This double work of translation circles around the idea of visibility. Invisibility, rather than visibility, is where Davis's translations lead – an invisibility encoded in many ways by her engagement with and translation of theorist Maurice Blanchot. Reading between these two writers, reading that translation inbetween, this article explores the invisibility of translation as it, nonetheless, presents itself in writing
The Politics of Memory in the Italian Populist Radical Right From Mare Nostrum to Mare Vostrum
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Dynamic survival analysis for non-Markovian epidemic models
Get PDFWe present a new method for analysing stochastic epidemic models under minimal assumptions. The method, dubbed dynamic survival analysis (DSA), is based on a simple yet powerful observation, namely that population-level mean-field trajectories described by a system of partial differential equations may also approximate individual-level times of infection and recovery. This idea gives rise to a certain non-Markovian agent-based model and provides an agent-level likelihood function for a random sample of infection and/or recovery times. Extensive numerical analyses on both synthetic and real epidemic data from foot-and-mouth disease in the UK (2001) and COVID-19 in India (2020) show good accuracy and confirm the method’s versatility in likelihood-based parameter estimation. The accompanying software package gives prospective users a practical tool for modelling, analysing and interpreting epidemic data with the help of the DSA approach
Maps to Arkham: Lovecraft, Landscape and Visual Poetry
Get PDFThe horror writer H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) is an enduring figure in contemporary genre writing and his legacy continues to shape the field of weird fiction. But he is a controversial character and, on a line by line level, a poor writer, and responding to his work prompts multiple challenges for the contemporary creative writer. My collection, Maps to Arkham, seeks to understand and disrupt this legendary figure through a series of visual poems which respond to Lovecraft’s attitudes towards language, walking and the landscape. This essay examines the artistic process of détournement, as theorized by the avant-garde Situationist group, and other visual poet’s approach to the concept, and contextualizes my own digital appropriation of Lovecraft’s fiction. This approach provides a framework by which experimental poetry can write through a historical figure, both confronting and parodying them, and poses questions for the role of design software in visual poetry
