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Introducing sociodata in virtual museums : a holistic approach for sustainable development in cultural landscapes
Get PDFFunding: This project has received funding by the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under Grant Agreement No. 101132628 – CULTURALITY.Topic: Virtual museums are powerful tools for preserving and promoting cultural heritage (CH) while enhancing accessibility and engagement. Yet, many focus on digitised artefacts without fully capturing their socio-cultural relevance or their connection to sustainable development. The Virtual European Rural Artisans (VERA) Platform addresses this gap by creating digital cultural landscapes that connect heritage, community, and sustainable development. It links the public with artisans and cultural institutions, encouraging a holistic understanding of heritage as a dynamic socio-cultural phenomenon. Context: The development of European Data Spaces enables broader sharing of heritage data. Projects such as Europeana and the ECCCH demonstrate the potential of interoperable, open-access cultural data and services. VERA aligns with these by embedding ‘sociodata’ – a new layer of contextual data that captures the relationship between the community and the heritage artefact, sustainability aspects, and evolving narratives surrounding heritage objects. Relevance: Sustainable development and CH are deeply interconnected. The SDGs emphasise safeguarding CH (SDG11.4), inclusive economic growth (SDG8) and quality education (SDG4). However, many virtual heritage initiatives lack a direct link to socio-economic sustainability. By allowing community groups to interact within a shared digital space, the VERA Platform promotes cultural sustainability, creative heritage tourism, and economic development. Its integration with EU data spaces ensures open, reusable cultural data for research, education, and policy. Innovation: The unique contribution of this research is the emphasis on social metadata collected through a holistic sustainability-oriented virtual museum infrastructure. This research introduces ‘sociodata’ which captures threats and actions that promote sustainable development within cultural landscapes. The VERA Platform is an example of sociodata being utilised in a digital cultural space. This article illustrates how various stakeholders are utilising VERA to share knowledge, showcase craftsmanship, and promote sustainable practices
Imagination as a process
Get PDFAccording to recent orthodoxy, imagination is best characterised in terms of distinctive imaginative states. But this view is ill-suited to characterisation of the full range of imaginative activities—creation, fantasy, conceiving, and so on. It would be better to characterise imagination in terms of a distinctive imaginative process, with the various imaginative activities as more determinate implementations of the determinable process.Peer reviewe
A wrong turn on the way to Troy : Samson and the classical tradition in medieval Ireland
Get PDFThis article examines the sources and style of a short narrative found in RIA MS D iv 2 (1223) and edited by Carl Marstrander as How Samson Slew the Gesteda. I argue that this text adapts the myths of Hercules and Busiris, and Philomela, retelling them to star the biblical Samson as the protagonist. This process of creative adaptation draws on late antique synchronisms and medieval Irish pseudohistorical traditions, linking Classical and biblical characters and events; this article offers suggestions as to the textual sources that influenced the production of the narrative and analyses its medieval Irish cultural context.How SamsonSlew the Gesteda has received very little critical attention to date, but a careful consideration of its contents and context helps to illuminate our understanding of the processes of reception and intellectual innovation at work in twelfth-century Ireland.Peer reviewe
Unmeasured prior viability selection resolves the paradox of stasis for body size in wild Soay sheep
Get PDFFunding: The long-term Soay sheep project is funded by the United Kingdom Natural Environment Research Council. E.A.M. was supported by a Natural Environment Research Council research grant awarded to M.B.M. (NE/R011109/1) and a European Research Council Advanced Grant (101020503—EVOWILD—ERC-2020-ADG) to L.E.B.K. M.B.M. was supported by a University Research Fellowship from the Royal Society (London).The estimation of natural selection is used to understand ecological and evolutionary processes in wild populations, and is often used to predict change. However, the direct application of quantitative genetic methods, originally developed in animal breeding, has been less successful in the wild; in particular, predictions of evolutionary change are often made that are not observed. This misprediction, known as the ’paradox of stasis’, can arise due to bias in estimates of selection via non-random missing data in phenotypes if viability selection has previously occurred on correlated traits. Here, we check for this bias in a wild population of Soay sheep where estimates of selection suggest that ’bigger is better’ for adult size, but evolutionary change of the predicted magnitude does not occur. We establish that standard procedures for estimating total lifetime selection are biased by prior viability selection. In particular, while phenotypically large lambs have high first year survival, we also show that lambs that are genetically predisposed to large adult size traits also suffer elevated juvenile mortality. While the phenotypic traits driving early life selection against large adult body size are unknown, our genetic analysis reveals correlated selection against larger adult sizes that essentially resolves the paradox of stasis for adult body size traits in this wild population. The pattern we reveal is potentially widespread in nature; previous results showing predominantly positive selection of large body size could in general be explained by this kind of antagonistic prior viability selection.Peer reviewe
Community acceptance of nature‐based solutions for coastal flood risk management
Get PDFFunding: This work was part of the project ‘Resilient Coasts: Optimising Co-benefit Solutions (Co-Opt)’ funded through the NERC-ESRC Sustainable Management of Marine Resources Programme (NCR10332). This study was supported by the grant NE/V016245/1.1. Coastal areas are increasingly vulnerable to climate change impacts, such as rising sea levels and more frequent storm events, necessitating urgent adaptation strategies. Various adaptation approaches exist, including hard engineering solutions and nature-based solutions, but whether these strategies are implemented often depends on social acceptance by local communities. Understanding the factors that influence community acceptance, such as trust, knowledge and perceived effectiveness, is vital for coastal risk management. 2. This study employed a mixed methods approach across four diverse case study sites in the United Kingdom—St Andrews (Scotland), Airth (Scotland), Hesketh Bank (England) and Pensarn (Wales). We employed a postal survey and focus groups to gather both quantitative and qualitative data, ensuring a comprehensive understanding of local perceptions and values. 3. A total of 328 valid responses were gathered across four sites, with variations in response rates and demographic characteristics, notably age and education. Awareness of Nature-based Solutions (NbS) was low in Hesketh Bank, Pensarn and Airth, only respondents in St Andrews were more familiar with the term. Qualitative analysis identified 68 community and individual-level factors, scheme characteristics and sociopolitical factors that influence social acceptance of coastal flood risk schemes. 4. Participants emphasised the importance of local knowledge and landscape values but expressed low trust in government authorities and a lack of confidence in influencing local decisions. The study highlights the complexity of community acceptance of NbS for coastal flood risk management, indicating that local perceptions are influenced by a combination individual factors such as trust; the characteristics of schemes; and the ways in which governance systems interact with local communities. Context is also important with certain factors being site specific. 5. Synthesis and applications. Community acceptance plays a crucial role in implementing coastal schemes, highlighting the importance of addressing the interests, values and experiences of local communities. Building trust and engaging stakeholders early in the planning stages to overcome potential push back due to uncertainties is critical. Collaborative and whole-systems approaches are also essential to ensure that the benefits of NbS are effectively communicated and integrated.Peer reviewe
DiffProtect: generative adversarial examples using diffusion models for facial privacy protection
Get PDFFunding: This work was supported by the DARPA GARD Program HR001119S0026-GARD-FP-052 and Amazon AI2AI fellowship.The increasingly pervasive facial recognition (FR) systems raise serious concerns about personal privacy, especially for billions of users who have publicly shared their photos on social media. To address this challenge, several adversarial attack methods have been proposed to protect individuals from being identified by unauthorized FR systems with perturbed facial images. However, these approaches suffer from poor visual quality or low attack success rates, which limit their practical utility. Recently, diffusion models have achieved tremendous success in image generation. In this work, we ask: can diffusion models be used to generate adversarial examples against FR systems to improve both visual quality and attack performance? We propose DiffProtect, a novel method leveraging a diffusion autoencoder to generate semantically meaningful perturbations on FR systems. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DiffProtect produces more natural-looking encrypted images than state-of-the-art methods while achieving significantly higher attack success rates, e.g., 24.5 % and 25.1 % absolute improvements on the CelebA-HQ and FFHQ datasets. We further evaluate the effectiveness of DiffProtect in the real world using a commercial FR API and validate its usefulness in practice through a user study. Our code is available at https://github.com/joellliu/DiffProtect.Peer reviewe
The evolution of infant-directed communication : comparing vocal input across all great apes
Get PDFFunding: This research was funded by the NCCR Evolving Language, SwCSS NSF agreement Nr.51nF40_180888 (F.W., c.F., J.S., K.Z., C.P.v.S., S.S., and S.W.T.), the SNSF grant PP00P3_198912 (S.W.t), the SNSF grant 310030_185324 (L.N. and K.Z.),the Leverhulme Trust Research Leadership Award F/00 268/AP (M.L. and K.Z.), and the Transversal Action of Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 (S.M.and L.N.).Human language is unique among communication systems since many elements are learned and transmitted across generations. Previous research suggests that this process is best predicted by infant-directed communication, i.e., a mode of communication directed by caregivers to children. Despite its importance for language, whether infant-directed communication is unique to humans or rooted more deeply in the primate lineage remains unclear. To assess this, we investigated directed and surrounding vocal communication in human infants and infants of wild nonhuman great apes. Our findings reveal that human infants receive dramatically more infant-directed communication than nonhuman great ape infants. These data suggest that the earliest hominins likely relied more on surrounding communication to become communicatively competent, while infant-directed vocal communication became considerably more prominent with human language. Human infants receive more directed communication than other great ape infants, indicating that it evolved alongside language.Peer reviewe
Kin-discriminating partner choice promotes the evolution of helping
Get PDFFunding: ERC (834164 & 771387), NERC (NE/V011537/1) and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (RGPIN-2019-06626).Kin selection theory predicts that individuals should evolve to help relatives, either by helping indiscriminately in a population where they do not move very far from their relatives, or by discriminating kin and conditionally helping them. It has been argued that, because kin discrimination enables individuals to reduce how helpful they are with some social partners as well increase how helpful they are with others, this could lead to an increase or a decrease in the overall level of helping. Specifically, it was argued that kin discrimination would increase the overall level of helping if the function relating the optimal level of help and genetic relatedness is convex, but kin discrimination would decrease the overall level of helping if the function relating the optimal level of help and genetic relatedness is concave. However, this prediction was based on a model in which individuals were not able to choose their social partners but only adjust how helpful they should be toward those social partners they have been allocated. Here, we perform a mathematical analysis showing that being able to choose social partners increases the overall level of helping. Consequently, if kin discriminators are allowed to choose whom they help, kin discrimination is more likely to increase the overall level of helping than previously anticipated. We obtained these results in two complementary theoretical settings: one more general, which makes few demographic assumptions, and the other more specific and concrete, which assumes a patch-structured population with complete dispersal.Peer reviewe
Ensuring appropriate representation in artificial intelligence – generated medical imagery : protocol for a methodological approach to address skin tone bias
No full textBackground: In medical education, particularly in anatomy and dermatology, generative artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to create customized illustrations. However, the underrepresentation of darker skin tones in medical textbooks and elsewhere, which serve as training data for AI, poses a significant challenge in ensuring diverse and inclusive educational materials. Objective: This study aims to evaluate the extent of skin tone diversity in AI-generated medical images and to test whether the representation of skin tones can be improved by modifying AI prompts to better reflect the demographic makeup of the US population. Methods: In total, 2 standard AI models (Dall-E [OpenAI] and Midjourney [Midjourney Inc]) each generated 100 images of people with psoriasis. In addition, a custom model was developed that incorporated a prompt injection aimed at “forcing” the AI (Dall-E 3) to reflect the skin tone distribution of the US population according to the 2012 American National Election Survey. This custom model generated another set of 100 images. The skin tones in these images were assessed by 3 researchers using the New Immigrant Survey skin tone scale, with the median value representing each image. A chi-square goodness of fit analysis compared the skin tone distributions from each set of images to that of the US population. Results: The standard AI models (Dalle-3 and Midjourney) demonstrated a significant difference between the expected skin tones of the US population and the observed tones in the generated images (P<.001). Both standard AI models overrepresented lighter skin. Conversely, the custom model with the modified prompt yielded a distribution of skin tones that closely matched the expected demographic representation, showing no significant difference (P=.04). Conclusions: This study reveals a notable bias in AI-generated medical images, predominantly underrepresenting darker skin tones. This bias can be effectively addressed by modifying AI prompts to incorporate real-life demographic distributions. The findings emphasize the need for conscious efforts in AI development to ensure diverse and representative outputs, particularly in educational and medical contexts. Users of generative AI tools should be aware that these biases exist, and that similar tendencies may also exist in other types of generative AI (eg, large language models) and in other characteristics (eg, sex, gender, culture, and ethnicity). Injecting demographic data into AI prompts may effectively counteract these biases, ensuring a more accurate representation of the general population.Peer reviewe
British arguments in favour of American independence : the patriotic anti-imperialism of Josiah Tucker, Thomas Tod, and James Anderson
No full textThis thesis examines British arguments in favour of American independence, not as a lesser evil, but as directly beneficial to Britain, an interesting but largely overlooked aspect of eighteenth-century thought. When not overlooked, the focus has usually been on Josiah Tucker, an Anglican cleric renowned as a political economist in his day who is now best known for zealously and prolifically advocating separation from the colonies, but he has usually been described as having been virtually alone in making such arguments. This thesis argues otherwise; although Tucker was the most prolific expounder of these ideas, he was far from alone. Several scholars have pointed out that both David Hume and Adam Smith agreed with Tucker’s diagnosis and concurred that the best remedy was for Britain to relinquish or lose its colonial possessions. This thesis, however, focuses primarily on two lesser-known thinkers. It has very occasionally been acknowledged that James Anderson, the Scottish agriculturalist and political economist, published similar arguments. Even less well known is that Thomas Tod, a largely forgotten Edinburgh merchant and philanthropist of some contemporary significance, also published similar arguments. This thesis provides the first serious, in-depth analyses of these thinkers’ arguments in favour of American independence. It demonstrates that their arguments were based on the same underlying beliefs as Tucker’s, and that these thinkers all saw the loss of America as an opportunity for Britain to change its ways, to flourish by embracing more or less free trade and eschewing the pursuit of empire. Moreover, it argues that these ideas were probably considerably more prevalent in the later eighteenth century than has previously been recognised. It thereby supplements scholarship on Britain and the American Revolution and on eighteenth-century political thought."This work was supported by the University of St Andrews (St Leonard’s Postgraduate College). This work was supported by the University of St Andrews (School of History)."--Fundin
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