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Privacy-preserving AI-enabled decentralized learning and employment records system
No full textLearning and Employment Record (LER) systems are emerging as critical infrastructure for securely compiling and sharing educational and work achievements. Existing blockchainbased platforms leverage verifiable credentials but typically lack automated skill-credential generation and the ability to incorporate unstructured evidence of learning. In this paper, a privacy-preserving, AI-enabled decentralized LER system is proposed to address these gaps. Digitally signed transcripts from educational institutions are accepted, and verifiable self-issued skill credentials are derived inside a trusted execution environment (TEE) by a natural language processing pipeline that analyzes formal records (e.g., transcripts, syllabi) and informal artifacts. All verification and job–skill matching are performed inside the enclave with selective disclosure, so raw credentials and private keys remain enclave-confined. Job matching relies solely on attested skill vectors and is invariant to non-skill resume fields, thereby reducing opportunities for screening bias. The NLP component was evaluated on sample learner data; the mapping follows the validated Syllabus-to-O*NET methodology, and a stability test across repeated runs observed < 5% variance in top-ranked skills. Formal security statements and proof sketches are provided showing that derived credentials are unforgeable and that sensitive information remains confidential. The proposed system thus supports secure education and employment credentialing, robust transcript verification, and automated, privacy-preserving skill extraction within a decentralized framework
Inconsistency in moral judgements
No full textPolicymakers sometimes need to make decisions that are substantially influenced by moral judgments and, when they do so, they need to be attentive to public morality, otherwise they risk a backlash. While any system of regulations or policies needs to aim for a certain level of coherence, as it is considered one of the key requirements of rationality, extensive psychological research shows that people often hold strong moral views that are mutually inconsistent. This thesis explores whether this tension between the need for policies to be attentive to public morality, with its inconsistencies, and the need for coherence in policies could be addressed by reducing inconsistency in people’s moral judgments. While existing empirical research has documented many shortcomings in people’s initial moral judgments, such as their inconsistency, less attention has been paid to how likely people are to correct such shortcomings if given an opportunity to do so. The thesis thus focuses on how lay people deal with a particular form of moral inconsistency – an inconsistency in their own moral judgments. It comprises four empirical papers that use a predominantly experimental approach, combined with insights from qualitative research. First, it outlines why people’s moral judgments are relevant to policy making and discusses whether an apparent inconsistency between people’s moral judgments and established moral principles (case-principle inconsistency) could be justified via unorthodox moral principles. It then explores a distinct concept of intrapersonal moral inconsistency, case-case inconsistency, and shows that: (i) people are more likely to recognise inconsistency in others’ judgments than in their own; (ii) this difference is not moderated by social accountability; and (iii) people tend to reduce their initial inconsistency, especially if they make judgments in a joint-evaluation mode. In addition, it provides exploratory evidence on what prevents people from addressing their inconsistency and how they go about resolving it
The critique of transitional justice
No full textThis chapter looks into the critique of transitional justice. It explains that historical sensitivity to genealogies of indigenous critique and their afterlives is relevant for developing a better understanding of the political present. Even though Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson expressed the ethos of liberal internationalism that informed the rise of transitional justice in the late twentieth century, the ethos also heralded its decline in the twenty-first century. The chapter considers the meaning and efficacy of the modalities of transitional justice which now range from archives to truth commissions. It also elaborates on the dangers of ideology masked as eschatology
Depression as a disorder of consciousness
No full textFirst-person reports of major depressive disorder reveal that when an individual becomes depressed a profound change or ‘shift’ to one’s conscious experience occurs. The depressed person reports that something fundamental to their experience has been disturbed or shifted, a change associated with the common but elusive claim that when depressed one finds oneself in a ‘different world’ detached from reality and other people. Existing attempts to utilize these phenomenological observations in a psychiatric context are challenged by the fact that this experiential ‘shift’ characteristic of depression appears mysterious and resists analysis in scientific terms. This article offers a way out of this predicament. The hypothesis proposed is that when an individual becomes depressed, the individual departs from a state of ordinary wakeful consciousness and enters a distinctive global state of consciousness akin to dreaming and the psychedelic state. After unpacking and motivating this hypothesis in the context of research in consciousness science, I outline two of its important implications for the neurobiology of depression and psychedelic psychiatry. The upshot is a promising and conceptually well-motivated hypothesis about depression that is apt for empirical uptake and development
Downward rigidity in the wage for new hires
No full textWage rigidity is an important explanation for unemployment fluctuations. In benchmark models wages for new hires are key, but there is limited evidence on this margin. We use wages posted on vacancies, with job and establishment information, to measure the wage for new hires. We show that our measure of the wage for new hires is rigid downward and flexible upward, in two steps. First, wages change infrequently at the job level, and fall especially rarely. Second, wages do not respond to rises in unemployment, but respond strongly to falls in unemployment. Job information is crucial for detecting downward rigidity
The effect of politically homogenous neighbourhoods on affective polarization: evidence from Britain
No full textAffective polarization is increasingly evident around the world. This has been attributed in part to residential segregation by partisanship. The ‘Big Sort’ has meant that neighbourhoods in the United States, and elsewhere, have become more homogenous in terms of vote. Yet there is little systematic evidence on the relationship between homogenous partisan neighbourhoods and affective polarization. Does living among fellow partisans make people more negative towards the other side? In this Research Note, we use unique data from Britain to show that while people accurately recognize that their local area is more or less politically homogenous, neighbourhood political homogeneity is not correlated with any measure of affective polarization. These findings are robust to the type of political divide (partisanship or Brexit identity), the level of geography, length of residence and controls for ideology and social characteristics. We therefore suggest that while geographical sorting is an important phenomenon, it is unlikely to be a major cause of affective polarization
Subtle discrimination
No full textWe introduce the concept of subtle discrimination—biased acts that cannot be objectively ascertained as discriminatory. When candidates compete for promotions by investing in skills, firms' subtle biases induce discriminated candidates to overinvest when promotions are low-stakes (to distinguish themselves from favored candidates) but underinvest in high-stakes settings (anticipating low promotion probabilities). This asymmetry implies that subtle discrimination raises profits in low-productivity firms but lowers them in high-productivity firms. Although subtle biases are small, they generate large gaps in skills and promotion outcomes. We derive further predictions in contexts such as equity analysis, lending, fund flows, banking careers, and entrepreneurial finance
Stochastic impatience and the separation of time and risk preferences
No full textWe study how the separation of time and risk preferences relates to a property called Stochastic Impatience. We show that, within a broad class of models, Stochastic Impatience holds if and only if risk aversion and the inverse elasticity of intertemporal substitution are sufficiently close. In the models of Epstein and Zin (1989) and Hansen and Sargent (1995), Stochastic Impatience is violated for commonly used parameters. Our result also provides a simple, one-question test for the separation of time and risk preferences
Seeking or ignoring ethical certifications in consumer choice
No full textConsumers often encounter, and claim to care about, ethical information concerning the products they purchase. Across three studies, we investigate how the accessibility of this information impacts choice. When consumers must seek out product attribute information, the impact of ethical certifications (Fairtrade and Organic) is diminished relative to other attributes. Both positive and negative framing of certifications increase their impact on choice relative to neutral frames, with negative frames having the strongest effect. However, in contrast to theories of information demand that would predict more willful ignorance of negatively framed content, negative framing has the same impact regardless of information accessibility. Together, our findings suggest that having to seek ethical certification information leads to a small reduction in the use of certifications to guide choice, but that affective framing has a larger impact on the weight placed on certifications in consumer choices regardless of the accessibility of information