1,720,985 research outputs found
Relaunching Coase's Paradox in the Age of Social Networks and Covid-19 Pandemic
No full textDisinformation and misleading narratives have been the prominent aspects of polluting
public debate during the last US presidential elections and the Covid-19 pandemic. This
paper attempts to evaluate the problem of freedom of speech through the lens of Ronald
Coase’s paradox about the similarities between the «market for goods» and the «market
for ideas». After discussing the suitability of the Coasian metaphor, according to which
any form of interventionism on one of these spheres will produce outcomes on the other
one, it states that this clearly emerges today insomuch online platforms, such as social
networks, are becoming accountable for polluting (in terms of externalities) pieces of
content shared by users
“Darwinizing Politics”. Politica, regole e società tra evoluzione biologica ed evoluzione culturale
Get PDFIn the last thirty years, it has been identified a theory corresponding to the biological evolution one which concerns the behavioral traits of men and their social organization (institutions, customs, beliefs, social norms, values and technologies). By tracing back the guidelines of cultural evolution and showing how it differs from biological evolution, this paper focuses on the cultural evolution theory and its capability to explain the emergence and the change of rules and institutions at the bottom of social life. In the last part of the paper, recovering F. A. Hayek’s pioneering insights, I will analyze the evolutionary dynamics acting at the level of rules and institutions. I will show, on the one hand, how selection of the rules is driven by a complex process in which emerg-ing macro-systemic effects lend an evolutionary advantage to some human groups and allow us to explain how specific rules have successfully survived over time. On the other hand, I will argue that some behaviors have jointly transformed with the changing of societies by following the increasing degree of complexity in the relationships and human environments
When Political Ignorance is really harmful for Democracy: Moral Intuitions and Biased Attitudes in Voting Behaviour
No full textIgnorance about political related issues has long been considered a threat to democracy. This paper revolves around the concept of political ignorance, focusing especially on Ilya Somin’s book Democracy and Political Ignorance and going beyond his standpoint in two ways. First of all, it moves away from the notion of factual knowledge by showing that political ignorance cannot be limited to a matter of information quality. On the contrary, it shows that ignorance concerns the formation of opinions about political facts, which are the bricks with which disagreement is built. Then, using the insights of the Moral Foundation Theory by Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues, the paper argues that moral intuitions represent an additional source of bias that current research on the problem of voters’ ignorance should address. While Somin argues that biased moral values are the outcome of ignorance, Moral Foundation Theory suggests that moral intuitions are a robust determinant of people’s political views as they make factual knowledge partially irrelevant and also make people with different moral minds unable to understand the basis of reciprocal factual argumentations
Seceding Deliberation. Antivax Propaganda in Democratic Theory
No full textThis paper focuses on opposition to vaccines during the Covid-19 pandemic to investigate democratic deliberation, comprehend the nature of disagreement in society, and conceptualize its possible evolution. The dynamics of antivax propaganda are read as a radical form of disagreement with the biomedical establishment and citizens supporting vaccines. Nonetheless, antivax propaganda is not only an expression of polarized and partisan disagreement. More properly, the antivax approach to deliberation recalls conceptual categories typical of secessions. In particular, the paper tries to show how antivax propaganda can jeopardize the democratic process by leading people to withdraw from deliberative democratic space
Seceding Deliberation. Antivax Propaganda in Democratic Theory
No full textThis paper focuses on opposition to vaccines during the Covid-19 pandemic to investigate democratic deliberation, comprehend the nature of disagreement in society, and conceptualize its possible evolution. The dynamics of antivax propaganda are read as a radical form of disagreement with the biomedical establishment and citizens supporting vaccines. Nonetheless, antivax propaganda is not only an expression of polarized and partisan disagreement. More properly, the antivax approach to deliberation recalls conceptual categories typical of secessions. In particular, the paper tries to show how antivax propaganda can jeopardize the democratic process by leading people to withdraw from deliberative democratic space
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe 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
Get PDF“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
Get PDFWe 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
Get PDFWe 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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