The rapid dynamics of COVID-19 calls for quick and effective tracking of virus transmission chains and early detection of outbreaks, especially in the “phase 2” of the pandemic, when lockdown and other restriction measures are progressively withdrawn, in order to avoid or minimize contagion resurgence. For this purpose, contact-tracing apps are being proposed for large scale adoption by many countries. A centralized approach, where data sensed by the app are all sent to a nation-wide server, raises concerns about citizens’ privacy (...) and needlessly strong digital surveillance, thus alerting us to the need to minimize personal data collection and avoiding location tracking. We advocate the conceptual advantage of a decentralized approach, where both contact and location data are collected exclusively in individual citizens’ “personal data stores”, to be shared separately and selectively, voluntarily, only when the citizen has tested positive for COVID-19, and with a privacy preserving level of granularity. This approach better protects the personal sphere of citizens and affords multiple benefits: it allows for detailed information gathering for infected people in a privacy-preserving fashion; and, in turn this enables both contact tracing, and, the early detection of outbreak hotspots on more finely-granulated geographic scale. The decentralized approach is also scalable to large populations, in that only the data of positive patients need be handled at a central level. Our recommendation is two-fold. First to extend existing decentralized architectures with a light touch, in order to manage the collection of location data locally on the device, and allow the user to share spatio-temporal aggregates—if and when they want and for specific aims—with health authorities, for instance. Second, we favour a longer-term pursuit of realizing a Personal Data Store vision, giving users the opportunity to contribute to collective good in the measure they want, enhancing self-awareness, and cultivating collective efforts for rebuilding society. (shrink)

Farmers’ markets (FMs) represent a crucial player in urban food systems, being the interconnection of local agricultural production and consumption, and serving as spaces for both economic exchange and community building. Despite their transformative potential, there is a scarcity of research that comprehensively investigates the dynamics of FMs network structure and the influence of the actors shaping FMs. The present article delves into the network of relationships within FMs in the Italian city of Bologna. This study adopts the Social Network (...) Analysis (SNA) methodology applied with the Net-Map tool. The research objectives are to visualise the underlying network structure, map the dynamics, and identify the key actors who play pivotal roles in Bologna’s FMs and their level of influence. The research carried out interviews with ten FMs stakeholders, revealing the network of relationships between 54 actors, divided into three categories—civil society, food economy and public administration. Actors were linked by a total of 428 relationships across three types of networks: support, economic, and hindering. Findings indicate a strong support network structure characterised by varying degrees of centrality among different actors. Farmers emerge as a central node due to their pivotal role in providing fresh, local produce. Additionally, local institutions contribute significantly to FMs resilience and growth. Our research demonstrates the importance of recognising the embeddedness of FMs within the local context. By understanding the network structure and influential actors in FMs, policymakers can devise more effective policies for promoting local agriculture, and enhancing the sustainability of urban–rural exchanges. In conclusion, the present study offers valuable insights into the network dynamics of FMs, highlighting their crucial role in the sustainable development of urban and local food systems. (shrink)

The university campus provides the backdrop to a student’s education and social journey. For many students, the transition from secondary school through to graduation can be one of upheaval, geographical, financial and social change. Evidence suggests increasing levels of mental health difficulties among UK university students. The university campus is a possible resource to mitigate wellbeing issues through facilitating the salutogenic effects of engagement with nature. This mixed method research examines the opportunity to integrate nature through interventions for University of (...) Sheffield undergraduate students. It uses a green prescription style activity and a specially designed mobile phone app. Through focus groups the participants’ experience reveals the necessity for a whole university approach that considers intervention and campus design simultaneously. This study’s findings qualify research into young adult’s experience of urban green spaces and their tangible connection to plants such as trees. Policy and practice implications include the requirement for a coherent approach to understanding the place-attachment aspects to nature in the university environment. Further afield, there is a need for collaborative wellbeing interventions and urban green space development within the UK context. (shrink)

In health communication, metaphor can be considered as a reasoning device to let people understand an abstract concept in terms of a concrete one (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Bowdle and Gentner 2005). Both the positive and negative communicative effects of metaphors have been largely pointed out in a variety of medical fields, from oncology (Semino et al. 2016, 2018) to mental health (Frezza and Zoccolotti 2019). The use of metaphors in vaccine communication has been less considered, though it might be (...) crucial to let people understand vaccination as an important collective health phenomenon. A previous study (Scherer et al. 2015) focused on the communicative effects of conventional metaphors for vaccination, but not specifically on novel metaphors deliberately used to explain the concept of population immunity in vaccination. We hypothesized that metaphors used to explain vaccination as a collective phenomenon could improve the communicative aims of pro-vaccination texts in many respects, ranging from understandability to trust in expertise. We designed a study to test the hypothesis: two groups of participants were presented with a text about vaccination as a collective phenomenon, described in either literal or metaphorical terms. They were asked to evaluate the text on different communicative aspects from both an individual and a collective point of view. The results confirmed the hypothesis that metaphor is an effective reasoning device and that it also enhances the overall communicative effects of the message, in terms of understandability, persuasion, feeling of control over the health situation, trust in expertise, and uptake of experts’ advice. However, the results show that this effect is significantly nuanced in the individual vs. collective response type. (shrink)

This volume provides an extensive overview of the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence for the Sustainable Development Goals. The authors are experts contributing with perspectives from different fields. The comprehensive collection of chapters illustrates the pressing governance problems related to using AI for the SDGs, and case studies describing how AI is advancing and can advance the achievement of the Goals. Students, scholars, and practitioners working on AI for SDGs, the ethical governance of AI, sustainability, and the fourth revolution can find (...) this book a helpful reference. (shrink)

This annual edited volume presents an overview of cutting-edge research areas within digital ethics as defined by the Digital Governance Research Group of the University of Oxford. It identifies new challenges and opportunities of influence in setting the research agenda in the field. The 2022 edition of the Yearbook presents research on the following topics: autonomous weapons, cyber weapons, digital sovereignty, smart cities, artificial intelligence for the Sustainable Development Goals, vaccine passports, and sociotechnical pragmatism as an approach to technology. This (...) text appeals to students, researchers, and professionals in the field. (shrink)

The topic tackled in this book is Philo's account of the complex, double-sided nature of God's acting - the two-sided coin of God as transcendent yet immanent, ...

This paper studies internal (or intra-)mathematical explanations, namely those proofs of mathematical theorems that seem to explain the theorem they prove. The goal of the paper is a rigorous analysis of these explanations. This will be done in two steps. First, we will show how to move from informal proofs of mathematical theorems to a formal presentation that involves proof trees, together with a decomposition of their elements; secondly we will show that those mathematical proofs that are regarded as having (...) explanatory power all display an increase of conceptual complexity from the assumptions to the conclusion. (shrink)

Through this contribution I aim to explore the horizons and limits of digital medicine in light of an embodied approach to the issue of care. I will sketch the historical background of digital medicine and show the contemporary status of this interdisciplinary field, as well as its applications and outcomes. Then, I will address a critique of the computational theory of mind (CTM) upon which many contemporary mental health apps are designed. This approach to the mind is inscribed into the (...) modern trend of neuromania, which conceives the embodied, living human being as a mere series of data analyses and algorithms, with the brain as the seat of the person. Drawing on continental philosophy and classical phenomenology I will develop a notion of health conceived as a moral enterprise, showing how wellbeing and vitality are not reducible to a product made by technologies or doctors, but rather they are the results of an embodied encounter. As such, empathy and person-centered care cannot be achieved by digital medicine. They are the result of a journey into the regions of recognition, embodied presence and the aliveness constituting the person. Finally, I will show how the issue of care cannot be separated from an embodied encounter between people, especially in case of dementia. (shrink)

Criminal liability for acts committed by AI systems has recently become a hot legal topic. This paper includes three different contributions. The first contribution is an analysis of the extent to which an AI system can satisfy the requirements for criminal liability: accomplishing an actus reus, having the corresponding mens rea, possessing the cognitive capacities needed for responsibility. The second contribution is a discussion of criminal activity accomplished by an AI entity, with reference to a recent case involving an online (...) bot, the Random Darknet Shopper. This discussion will provide the context for the analysis of commonalities and differences between criminal activities by humans and by artificial systems. The third contribution concerns the evaluation of different ways of addressing criminal activities by AI systems in a regulatory perspective. (shrink)

Metaphor has been considered as a cognitive process, independent of the verbal versus visual mode, through which an unknown conceptual domain is understood in terms of another known conceptual domain. Metaphor might instead be viewed as a cognitive process, dependent on the mode, which leads to genuinely new knowledge via ignorance. First, I argue that there are two main senses of ignorance at stake when we understand a metaphor: we ignore some existing properties of the known domain in the sense (...) that we disregard or neglect them; we ignore some “non-existing” properties of the known domain in the sense that they are not a piece of information belonging to the known domain, but emerge in metaphor interpretation. Secondly, I consider a metaphor as a reasoning device, guiding the interpreters along a path of inferences to a conclusion, which attributes to the target some properties of the source. In this path, interpreters might discover the ignored existing properties of the known domain and/or recover the “non-existing” properties, inferring or imagining the missing piece of information. Finally, I argue that, especially in visual metaphors, this process is guided by a “sentiment of rationality”, tracking a disruption of existing familiar conceptualisations of objects and/or actions and a recovery of ignored properties. (shrink)

In recent years, bioethical discourse around the topic of ‘genetic enhancement’ has become increasingly politicized. We fear there is too much focus on the semantic question of whether we should call particular practices and emerging bio-technologies such as CRISPR ‘eugenics’, rather than the more important question of how we should view them from the perspective of ethics and policy. Here, we address the question of whether ‘eugenics’ can be defended and how proponents and critics of enhancement should engage with each (...) other. (shrink)

Science and language; Axioms; Deduction and induction; Probability and statistics; The methodological structure of the natural sciences.

"Heidegger [...] è uno di quei filosofi che non si possono solo studiare, ma esigono dal proprio lettore uno sforzo interpretativo che, nella più autentica tradizione ermeneutica è anche partecipazione attiva all'impresa del pensiero [...]. Francesca Brencio [...] si presenta, con questo lavoro, come una mente filosofica che bene coglie lo "spirito del proprio tempo", [...] praticando una storia della filosofia che è ermeneutica rigorosa e al tempo stesso non dogmatica [...]. Brencio sta offrendo il proprio importante contributo, modificando (...) in modo originale un approccio e uno stile tipico della tradizione continentale (in senso lato) e tedesca (in senso stretto), ma rimanendo aperta ad altri contributi". Dalla Prefazione di Paolo Diego Bubbio. (shrink)

Developmental System Theory is a theoretical reinterpretation of biological phenomena challenging the conventional gene-centered account of development and evolution. In this paper, I focus on Griffiths and Gray’s version of Developmental Systems Theory and I particularly analyze their reconceptualization of inheritance. First, I present their concept of expanded and diffused inheritance; then, I examine and criticize their refusal of the multiple inheritance system model; finally, I present and contrast Griffiths and Gray’s extension of what they call the “causal parity thesis” (...) from development to evolution. I argue that their proposal is an interesting and programmatic philosophical perspective on biological phenomena but, because of their commitment to holism, fails to provide both more heuristic tools for empirical investigation in biology and a more realistic representation of the biological world. (shrink)

This chapter provides an overview of six topics related to governance, ethical, legal, and social implications of artificial intelligence (AI) for sustainable development goals (SDGs) initiatives. We identified six common challenges and related opportunities to mitigate such challenges, as referred to by the authors analysing the chapters provided in the book The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence for the Sustainable Development Goals. They are (1) governance and collaboration, (2) private investments and the role of big tech companies, (3) AI and communities, (...) (4) AI and individuals, (5) jobs and skills, and (6) impact assessment. (shrink)