In this study, we analyse the public perception of military AI in Estonia, a techno-optimistic country with high support for science and technology. This study involved quantitative survey data from 2021 on the public’s attitudes towards AI-based technology in general, and AI in developing and using weaponised unmanned ground systems (UGS) in particular. UGS are a technology that has been tested in militaries in recent years with the expectation of increasing effectiveness and saving manpower in dangerous military tasks. However, developing (...) weaponised systems often raises questions about their safety and accountability. While there have been public debates about the possible outcomes of AI-based civilian technologies like self-driving cars, equivalent discussions have not been held about military technologies. A discourse on potentially sensitive technologies can diminish biased representations and the distribution of worst-case scenarios. The results of this study reveal that an overall positive attitude towards AI-driven technologies is related to a positive perception of military AI systems. However, trustworthiness and human control are the main aspects that are expected from military technologies. (shrink)

Poems, plays, and pictures are not part of the usual armoury of a climate change activist, but there are signs that a community arts programme in Wales has enabled some participants to deliberate reflexively on what courses of action they should take in response to climate change. Community action has become a key part of UK government policy as it has sought to address climate change. There is, however, limited empirical research that community initiatives work; this study contributes to filling (...) that gap. Applying some key concepts from critical realism and drawing extensively on Margaret Archer's notion of the internal conversation, the study monitors the influence of a change-oriented intervention — in this case a community arts programme — designed to engage people with climate change. Although only exploratory, it finds evidence that the programme had prompted the internal conversation; enabled some participants to take action; and generated a more collective conversation with practical consequences. (shrink)

Competitive state anxiety is an integral feature of sports performance but despite its pervasiveness, there is still much debate concerning the measurement of the construct. Adopting a network approach that conceptualizes symptoms of a construct as paired associations, we proposed re-examining competitive state anxiety as a system of interacting components in a dataset of 485 competitive athletes from the United Kingdom. Following a process of data reduction, we estimated a network structure for 15 items from the modified Three Factor Anxiety (...) Inventory using the graphical LASSO algorithm. We then examined network connectivity using node predictability. Exploratory graph analysis was used to detect communities in the network and bridge expected influence calculated to estimate the influence of items from one community to items in other communities. The resultant network produced a range of node predictability values. Community detection analysis derived three communities that corresponded with previous research and several nodes were identified that bridged these communities. We conclude that network analysis is a useful tool to explore the competitive state anxiety response and we discuss how the results of our analysis might inform the assessment of the construct and how this assessment might inform interventions. (shrink)