1,721,144 research outputs found
Certifying Health: The Unequal Legal Geographies of COVID-19 Certificates
Full text linkThis article discusses some of the challenges posed by the introduction of COVID-19 certificates as a privileged tool for opening up mobility and access in order to restore a semblance of normality to social life. While at present there is no international consensus either on how - or why - such certificates should be used or on how they should be designed and applied, a growing number of countries have already introduced COVID-19 certificates in one form or another. Yet the scientific community as well as the World Health Organisation (WHO) have expressed caution, noting that such certificates might disproportionately discriminate against people on the basis of race, religion and socioeconomic background, as well as on the basis of age due to the sequencing of the vaccine rollout. Indeed, while the new COVID-19 certificates may appear to promise a magical solution enabling us to free up global mobility and reopen economies, they actually risk creating new borders and new forms of inequality through an exclusionary sorting and profiling mechanism that delimits "safe" from "unsafe" bodies, based on differential access to "immuno-privilege"- but also differential forms of "bio-securitisation". They also provide an illusion of pandemic safety - assuring citizens that through the "fetish" of the certificate "safe travel" can magically be reinstated. Securing territories and populations has always been, in Foucauldian terms, a matter of "making a division between good and bad circulation and maximizing the good circulation by diminishing the bad". We can therefore reasonably expect growing contestation, including before courts, around COVID-19 certificates in their different national and international iterations, as their inherently discriminatory nature and other unintended consequences such as those stemming from the use of persuasive - as opposed to the more traditional coercive - governmental power begin to unfold in their performative trajectory.</p
Comparing Regulatory Oversight Bodies Across the Atlantic: The Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the US and the Impact Assessment Board in the EU
Full text link‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?’ asked the Roman poet Juvenal – ‘who will watch the watchers, who will guard the guardians?’1 As legislative and regulatory processes around the globe progressively put greater emphasis on impact assessment and accountability, (Verschuuren and van Gestel 2009, Hahn and Tetlock 2007), we ask: who oversees the regulators? Although regulation can often be necessary and beneficial, it can also impose its own costs. As a result, many governments have embraced, or are considering embracing, regulatory oversight--frequently relying on economic analysis as a tool of evaluation.We are especially interested in the emergence over the last four decades of a new set of institutional actors, the Regulatory Oversight Bodies (ROBs). These bodies tend to be located in the executive (or sometimes the legislative) branch of government. They review the flow of new regulations using impact assessment and benefit-cost analysis, and they sometimes also appraise existing regulations to measure and reduce regulatory burdens. Through these procedures of regulatory review, ROBs have become an integral aspect not only of regulatory reform programs in many countries, but also of their respective administrative systems. Although most academic attention focuses on the analytical tools used to improve the quality of legislation, such as regulatory impact assessment (RIA) or benefit-cost analysis, this chapter instead identifies the key concepts and issues surrounding the establishment and operation of ROBs across governance systems. It does so by examining and comparing the oversight mechanisms that have been established in the United States and in the EU and by critically looking into their origins, rationales, mandates, institutional designs and scope of oversight.
Lobbying for change as a new theory and practice of active citizenship: author interview with Alberto Alemanno
Full text linkDo you believe that lobbying is a vehicle for representing the interests of some rather than all, meaning its actors can never be a force for good? Alberto Alemanno, author of Lobbying for Change: Find Your Voice to Create a Better Society, might convince you of the contrary. This interview with Barbara Aubin, LSE Public Affairs, reflects on the importance of engaging with our political representatives, holding them accountable and lobbying for the causes we deeply care about as fundamental elements of a healthy democracy
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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