1,720,956 research outputs found
Liberty, harm, and health: political and ethical considerations in implementing air pollution policies
No full textThis thesis is concerned with exploring the political and ethical considerations in implementing air pollution policies in liberal democracies, like the United Kingdom. Poor air quality is a serious harm to public health, and this has been overlooked in the political and philosophical literature on pollution, which has focused on the threat of climate change. My aim in this thesis is to bring attention to the harm of air pollution to public health, but also to consider the justifications for state intervention and the ethical challenges related to public health policies. I present this discussion over five chapters. In Chapter One, I will begin by providing a brief definition and explanation of air pollution, followed by an overview of its key sources and the main factors that contribute to poor air quality. I will also outline the severe impacts of air pollution on public health. I conclude Chapter One by arguing that the state should bear the primary responsibility for addressing poor air quality.In Chapter Two, I turn to considering when state intervention that attempts to address air pollution is justified. Chapter Two will also explain my methodological approach. Put briefly, I offer a plausible reading of John Stuart Mill’s harm principle and the arguments of On Liberty (1859), but not a definitive interpretation and I diverge from Mill’s own thoughts. In this Chapter, I will show the harm principle holds that coercive interference is only permitted to prevent harm to others. My ambition here is to show Mill’s arguments serve as a basis for contemporary discussions on how the state should address air pollution. I also argue that harm should be defined as any direct negative consequence. Importantly, I show that justifying state interference requires satisfying a two-stage process. The first stage is that the interference must be permitted by Mill’s harm principle. The second-stage is that benefits and costs of the interference must make it worthwhile.In Chapter Three, I illuminate significant ambiguity in On Liberty (1859). The ambiguity is whether the harm principle permits interference only with conduct that is harmful, or also with conduct that contributes to harm, or more generally to prevent harm. I conclude that the harm principle permits interference more generally to prevent harm. This conclusion provides a more plausible normative principle and permits the state to interfere to enforce positive acts that prevent harm, like compelling witness testimony, enforcing duty to rescue laws, and positive acts that can prevent air pollution.The previous chapters establish that the state can interfere to address air pollution. In Chapter Four, I turn to considering how the state should interfere. I suggest improvements to the prominent Nuffield Council on Bioethics ‘intervention ladder’(2007) and show that policymakers should be concerned with how intrusive a public health intervention is. I offer my own intervention ladder which can serve as a guide for policymakers. However, intrusion is not the only concern policymakers introducing public health interventions should be aware of. In Chapter Five, I offer an ethical evaluation of the public health interventions on my intervention ladder. I also propose some policies that the state should adopt to protect public health from air pollution
Can the internet be designed to protect democracy and human rights?
Full text linkThe internet has given rise to many new opportunities and challenges for the functioning of democracy. This paper suggests that early optimism that the internet would be innately democratic in its effects was replaced over time by the recognition of a wider range of positive and negative effects and potential. It notes that this more mature and pragmatic consensus nevertheless values the internet as a vital support to democracy, and even as a human right. The paper notes that the continual emergence of new technologies, most recently generative artificial intelligence, will generate new opportunities and challenges in the future.While attention is paid to emerging threats, more support for exploring the emerging benefits of the new technologies to democracy would also deliver positives. The paper’s conclusions identify lessons from the use of deliberation tools in the broader context of the continued interactions between the internet and democracy, suggesting that democratic activity online could benefit from integrating expertise in democratic discourse into design, and by incentivising investment in and reward for deliberative use of online platforms
Democracy online: technologies for democratic deliberation
Full text linkThis paper explores the use of online tools to improve democratic participation and deliberation. These tools offer new opportunities for inclusive communication and networking, specifically targeting the participation of diverse groups in decision-making processes. It summarises recent research and published reports by users of these tools and categorises the tools according to functions and objectives. It also draws on testimony and experiences recorded in interviews with some users of these tools in public sector and civil society organisations internationally.The objective is to introduce online deliberation tools to a wider audience, including benefits, limitations and potential disadvantages, in the immediate context of research on democratic deliberation. We identify limitations of tools and of the context and markets in which online deliberation tools are currently being developed. The paper suggests that fostering a collaborative approach among technology developers and democratic practitioners, might improve opportunities for funding and continual optimisation that have been used successfully in other online application sectors
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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