Research involving and impacting Indigenous Peoples is often of little or no benefit to the communities involved and, in many cases, causes harm. Ensuring that Indigenous research is not only ethical but also of benefit to the communities involved is a long-standing problem that requires fundamental changes in higher education. To address this necessity for change, the authors of this paper, with the help of graduate and Indigenous community research assistants, undertook community consultation across their university to identify the local (...) and national ethical needs of Indigenous researchers, communities, and Elders. This paper provides an overview of the consultation process, the themes that emerged from the consultations, and a model of the Wholistic Indigenous Research Framework that emerged. (shrink)

Discussions about “disruptive” food controversies abound in popular and academic literatures, particularly with respect to meat production and consumption, yet there is little scholarship examining what makes an event disruptive in the first instance. Filling this gap will improve our understanding of how food controversies unfold and why certain issues may be more likely to linger in the public consciousness as opposed to others. I address these questions by using focus groups and in-depth interviews to analyze five potentially upsetting topics: (...) dietary warnings about meat consumption, meat safety recalls, eating meat directly from the skull of the animal, the morality of killing animals for food, and the “pink slime” debate. Findings suggest that disruptive events involve negative affective reactions to safety hazards, disgust-provoking sensory cues, and/or ethical dilemmas. When these cues exist in isolation from one another, consumers’ reactions are quite often short-lived, while the simultaneous presence of multiple disruptive elements in the context of a single issue or event can trigger a far stronger reaction. (shrink)

A new AI system, called AlphaGeometry, trained under synthetic data has demonstrated the ability to solve geometric problems at the International Olympiad level. This essay considers the fact that human abilities to learn and do math as well as many other tasks are increasingly augmented with AI. Clearly, smart technologies like AlphaGeometry are redefining a number of concepts and institutions such as learning, schools, education, teacher-student relationships, creativity, etc, which are so fundamental for what we’ve thought of as modern society, (...) economy, and culture. What are we preparing for in mathematics education in the face of the possibility of the continued emergence of disruptive technologies, signaling the beginning of the end, if a new reality of mathematics is not taken into account? (shrink)

In Beyond Disruption: Technology's Challenge to Governance, experts from academia, media, government, and the military wrestle with understanding the nature of these technologies' threats to our societies and their great potential for our economies. In a series of vivid analyses and colorful commentary from a conference as Stanford University's Hoover Institution, the authors expand upon their first-hand interpretations of what's at stake for the global operating system in the midst of turbulent change. In the dynamic game of world order, (...) it's a primer for decision makers on where the puck is headed. (shrink)

Disruptive technologies can be conceptualized in different ways. Depending on how they are conceptualized, different ethical issues come into play. This article contributes to a general framework to navigate the ethics of disruptive technologies. It proposes three basic distinctions to be included in such a framework. First, emerging technologies may instigate localized “first-order” disruptions, or systemic “second-order” disruptions. The ethical significance of these disruptions differs: first-order disruptions tend to be of modest ethical significance, whereas second-order disruptions are highly significant. (...) Secondly, technologies may be classified as disruptive based on their technological features or based on their societal impact. Depending on which of these classifications one adopts and takes as the starting point of ethical inquiry, different ethical questions are foregrounded. Thirdly, the ethics of disruptive technology raises concerns at four different levels of technology assessment: the technology level, the artifact level, the application level, and the society level. The respective suitability of approaches in technology ethics to address concerns about disruptive technologies co-varies with the respective level of analysis. The article clarifies these distinctions, thereby laying some of the groundwork for an ethical framework tailored for assessing disruptive technologies. (shrink)

Recent work on philosophy of technology emphasises the ways in which technology can disrupt our concepts and conceptual schemes. We analyse and challenge existing accounts of conceptual disruption, criticising views according to which conceptual disruption can be understood in terms of uncertainty for conceptual application, as well as views assuming all instances of conceptual disruption occur at the same level. We proceed to provide our own account of conceptual disruption as an interruption in the normal functioning (...) of concepts and conceptual schemes. Moreover, we offer a multilevel taxonomy thereof, where we distinguish between instances of conceptual disruptions occurring at different levels (conceptual scheme, conceptual clusters, and individual concepts), taking on different forms (conceptual gaps and conceptual conflicts), and leading to different degrees of severity (extending from mild to severe). We also provide detailed accounts through historical examples of how conceptual gaps and conceptual conflicts can occur at different times in the very same process of conceptual disruption. Finally, we make the case that different kinds of conceptual engineering can provide meaningful ways to assess and overcome distinct types of conceptual disruption. (shrink)

Here we consider two ways that nanomedicine might be disruptive. First, low-end disruptions that are intrinsically unpredictable but limited in scope, and second, high end disruptions that involve broader societal issues but can be anticipated, allowing opportunity for ethical reflection.

Many believe that nanotechnology will be disruptive to our society. Presumably, this means that some people and even whole industries will be undermined by technological developments that nanoscience makes possible. This, in turn, implies that we should anticipate potential workforce disruptions, mitigate in advance social problems likely to arise, and work to fairly distribute the future benefits of nanotechnology. This general, somewhat vague sense of disruption, is very difficult to specify – what will it entail? And how can we (...) responsibly anticipate and mitigate any problems? We can't even clearly state what the problems are anticipated to be. In fact, when we move from sweeping policy statements to more concrete accounts, nanotechnology seems to bifurcate into two divergent streams: one is fairly continuous with current developments, extending extant science in a quantitative way; the other is radically new, and includes science fiction-like dreams of molecular manufacturing and assemblers, with their utopian scenarios of absolute plenty. In these cases, “disruption” takes on the valence of Huxley's brave new world. (shrink)

Major events such as the COVID-19 pandemic, Olympic Games, and G20 Summit bring about supplier disruption risks and challenges to supply chain management. To help deal with these risks, a virtual dual-sourcing production-inventory system can be deployed. In this paper, we study such a system which consists of a raw material supplier, a manufacturer, and a virtual dual-sourcing contingency supplier. The manufacturer needs to determine the production, procurement, and inventory plan of raw materials. When its supplier is interrupted, the (...) manufacturer may need to adjust the production and inventory plan and work with the contingency supplier. We develop a system dynamics method to simulate the operations in this production-inventory system to identify the approximately optimal order-up-to-level inventory policies. We find that the virtual dual production-inventory strategy can be the optimal contingency policy to deal with supplier dynamic disruption risks. Furthermore, for disruption risk with low frequency and long duration, the manufacturer should increase the safety inventory level before the disruption. Otherwise, it should increase the safety inventory level in every cycle. (shrink)

Age‐related and cancer‐related epigenomic modifications have been associated with enhanced cell‐to‐cell gene expression variability that characterizes increased cellular stochasticity. Since gene expression variability appears to be highly reduced by—and epigenetic and phenotypic stability acquired through—direct or long‐range cellular interactions during cell differentiation, we propose a common origin for aging and cancer in the failure to control cellular stochasticity by cell–cell interactions. Tissue‐disruption‐induced cellular stochasticity associated with epigenetic drift would be at the origin of organ dysfunction because of an increase (...) in phenotypic variation among cells, ultimately leading to cell death and organ failure through a loss of coordination in cellular functions, and eventually to cancerization. We propose mechanistic research perspectives to corroborate this hypothesis and explore its evolutionary consequences, highlighting a positive correlation between the median age of mass loss onset (a proxy for the onset of organ aging) and the median age at cancer diagnosis. (shrink)

Plant-based milk alternatives–or mylks–have surged in popularity over the past ten years. We consider the politics and consumer subjectivities fostered by mylks as part of the broader trend towards ‘plant-based’ food. We demonstrate how mylk companies inherit and strategically deploy positive framings of milk as wholesome and convenient, as well as negative framings of dairy as environmentally damaging and cruel, to position plant-based as the ‘better’ alternative. By navigating this affective landscape, brands attempt to make mylk as simultaneously palatable and (...) disruptive to the status quo. We examine the politics of mylks through the concept of palatable disruption, where people are encouraged to care about the environment, health, and animal welfare enough to adopt mylks but to ultimately remain consumers of a commodity food. By encouraging consumers to reach for “plant-based” as a way to cope with environmental catastrophe and a life out of balance, mylks promote a neoliberal ethic: they individualize systemic problems and further entrench market mechanisms as solutions, thereby reinforcing the political economy of industrial agriculture. In conclusion, we reflect on the limits of the current plant-based trend for transitioning to more just and sustainable food production and consumption. (shrink)

Biologists increasingly report anthropogenic disruptions of both organisms and ecosystems, suggesting that these processes are a fundamental, qualitative component of the Anthropocene. Nonetheless, the notion of disruption has not yet been theorized in biology. To progress in that regard, we work on a special case. Relatively minor temperature changes impact plant-pollinator synchrony, disrupting mutualistic interaction networks. Understanding this phenomenon requires a specific rationale since models describing them use both historical and systemic reasoning. Specifically, history justifies that the system (...) is initially in a very narrow part of the possibility space where it is viable, and the disruption randomizes this configuration. Building on this rationale, we develop a formal framework inspired by Boltzmann's entropy. With empirical networks, we show historical trends depending on latitude. Then we propose an initial definition of disruption in ecology. When a specific historical outcome contributes to a system's viability, disruption randomizes this outcome, decreasing viability. (shrink)

This article looks through a critical media lens at mediated effects and ethical concerns of virtual reality applications that explore personal and social issues through embodiment and storytelling. In recent years, the press, immersive media practitioners and researchers have promoted the potential of virtual reality storytelling to foster empathy. This research offers an interdisciplinary narrative review, with an evidence-based approach to challenge the assumptions that VR films elicit empathy in the participant—what I refer to as the VR-empathy model. A review (...) of literature from the fields of psychology, computer science, embodiment, medicine, and virtual reality was carried out to question and counter these claims through case studies of both fiction and non-fiction VR experiences. The results reveal that there is little empirical evidence of a correlation between VR exposure and an increase in empathy that motivates pro-social behavior, and a lack of research covering VR films exposure eliciting empathy. Furthermore, the results show an alarming lack of research into the long-term effects of VR films and other VR immersive experiences. This contribution aims to understand and demystify the current “empathy machine” rhetoric and calls for more rigorous, scientific research that can authenticate future claims and systemize ethical best practices. (shrink)

Recent scholarship on technology-induced ‘conceptual disruption’ has spotlighted the notion of a conceptual gap. Conceptual gaps have also been discussed in scholarship on epistemic injustice, yet up until now these bodies of work have remained disconnected. This article shows that ‘gaps’ of interest to both bodies of literature are closely related, and argues that a joint examination of conceptual disruption and epistemic injustice is fruitful for both fields. I argue that hermeneutical marginalization—a skewed division of hermeneutical resources, which (...) serves to diminish the experiences of marginalized folk—does not only transpire because of conceptual gaps, but also because of two other kinds of conceptual disruption: conceptual overlaps and conceptual misalignments. Hence, there are multiple kinds of conceptual disruption that can be usefully studied through the normative lens of epistemic injustice. Technology can play different roles vis-a-vis epistemic injustices, both as a causal trigger of conceptual disruption, but also as a mediator of hermeneutical resources. Its role is normatively significant, in particular because socially disruptive technologies can have different epistemic implications for different groups: they may amplify the epistemic resources of some groups, while diminishing those of others. (shrink)

In this paper I attempt to show how my graduate work in interpretive studies transformed my previous work as a special education consultant. Using Hans-Georg Gadamer's hermeneutics, as well as Ivan Illich's notions of iatrogenesis and counter-productivity, I discuss my work with a school team as they struggled throughout a school year with a special education classroom for students with diagnosed mental health disorders.

A trenchant and wide-ranging look at this alarming national trend, _Disrupting the School-to-Prison Pipeline_ is unsparing in its account of the problem while pointing in the direction of meaningful and much-needed reforms. The “school-to-prison pipeline” has received much attention in the education world over the past few years. A fast-growing and disturbing development, it describes a range of circumstances whereby “children are funneled out of public schools and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems.” Scholars, educators, parents, students, and organizers (...) across the country have pointed to this shocking trend, insisting that it be identified and understood—and that it be addressed as an urgent matter by the larger community. This new volume from the _Harvard Educational Review _features essays from scholars, educators, students, and community activists who are working to disrupt, reverse, and redirect the pipeline. Alongside these authors are contributions from the people most affected: youth and adults who have been incarcerated, or whose lives have been shaped by the school-to-prison pipeline. Through stories, essays, and poems, these individuals add to the book’s comprehensive portrait of how our education and justice systems function—and how they fail to serve the interests of many young people.". (shrink)

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly expected to disrupt the ordinary functioning of society. From how we fight wars or govern society, to how we work and play, and from how we create to how we teach and learn, there is almost no field of human activity which is believed to be entirely immune from the impact of this emerging technology. This poses a multifaceted problem when it comes to designing and understanding regulatory responses to AI. This article aims to: (i) (...) defend the need for a novel conceptual model for understanding the systemic legal disruption caused by new technologies such as AI; (ii) to situate this model in relation to preceding debates about the interaction of regulation with new technologies (particularly the ‘cyberlaw’ and ‘robolaw’ debates); and (iii) to set out a detailed model for understanding the legal disruption precipitated by AI, examining both pathways stemming from new affordances that can give rise to a regulatory ‘disruptive moment’, as well as the Legal Development, Displacement or Destruction that can ensue. The article proposes that this model of legal disruption can be broadly generalisable to understanding the legal effects and challenges of other emerging technologies. (shrink)

SummaryThe recent years have seen a surge in elite athlete activism. This article examines how Olympic athletes are currently challenging the stability of central institutions of the Olympic Movement as collective political actors. The study builds on explanations of stability and change stemming from punctuated equilibrium theory and path dependency. Applying a multiple mini case study design, it is first illustrated how these mechanisms have been in play in the reproduction and disruption of historic Olympic institutions. The main analysis (...) then shows how Olympic athletes, through their different organizational forms, challenge institutions that are detrimental to their interest. The findings illustrate that Olympic athletes have increased their power resources and apply strategies to defy institutions, which are reproduced on the basis of path-dependent explanations. In doing so, athletes have the potential to severely destabilize the system if their interests remain unaccounted for by those governing the Olympic Movement. (shrink)

A growing body of evidence suggests that cognition is embodied and grounded. Abstract concepts, though, remain a significant theoretical chal- lenge. A number of researchers have proposed that language makes an important contribution to our capacity to acquire and employ concepts, particularly abstract ones. In this essay, I critically examine this suggestion and ultimately defend a version of it. I argue that a successful account of how language augments cognition should emphasize its symbolic properties and incorporate a view of embodiment (...) that recognizes the flexible, multi- modal and task-related nature of action, emotion and perception systems. On this view, language is an ontogenetically disruptive cognitive technology that expands our conceptual reach. (shrink)

What is the cultural value of illegal works that violate the copyrights of popular fiction? Why do they persist despite clear and stringent intellectual property laws? Drawing on the disciplines of new media, law, and literary studies, Illegal Literature suggests that extralegal works such as fan fiction are critical to a system that spurs the evolution of culture. Reconsidering voices relegated to the cultural periphery, David S. Roh shows how infrastructure--in the form of legal policy and network distribution--slows or accelerates (...) the rate of change. He analyzes the relationship between intellectual property rights and American literature in two recent copyright disputes. And, in comparing American fan fiction and Japanese dojinshi, he illustrates how infrastructure and legal climates detract from or encourage fledgling creativity. Illegal Literature fills a crucial gap between the scholarly and the popular by closely examining several modes of marginalized cultural production. Roh makes the case for protecting an environment conducive to literary heresy, the articulation of an accretive rather than solitary authorial genius, and the idea that letting go rather than holding on is important to a generative creative process. In a media ecology inundated by unauthorized materials, Illegal Literature argues that the proliferation of unsanctioned texts may actually benefit literary and cultural development. (shrink)

This book starts with the proposition that digital media invite play and indeed need to be played by their everyday users. Play is probably one of the most visible and powerful ways to appropriate the digital world. The diverse, emerging practices of digital media appear to be essentially playful: Users are involved and active, produce form and content, spread, exchange and consume it, take risks, are conscious of their own goals and the possibilities of achieving them, are skilled and know (...) how to acquire more skills. They share a perspective of can-do, a curiosity of what happens next? Play can be observed in social, economic, political, artistic, educational and criminal contexts and endeavours. It is employed as a strategy, for tacit or open resistance, as a method and productive practice, and something people do for fun. The book aims to define a particular contemporary attitude, a playful approach to media. It identifies some common ground and key principles in this novel terrain. Instead of looking at play and how it branches into different disciplines like business and education, the phenomenon of play in digital media is approached unconstrained by disciplinary boundaries. The contributions in this book provide a glimpse of a playful technological revolution that is a joyful celebration of possibilities that new media afford. This book is not a practical guide on how to hack a system or to pirate music, but provides critical insights into the unintended, artistic, fun, subversive, and sometimes dodgy applications of digital media. Contributions from Chris Crawford, Mathias Fuchs, Rilla Khaled, Sybille Lammes, Eva and Franco Mattes, Florian 'Floyd' Mueller, Michael Nitsche, Julian Oliver, and others cover and address topics such as reflective game design, identity and people's engagement in online media, conflicts and challenging opportunities for play, playing with cartographical interfaces, player-emergent production practices, the re-purposing of data, game creation as an educational approach, the ludification of society, the creation of meaning within and without play, the internalisation and subversion of roles through play, and the boundaries of play. (shrink)

This paper examines the development and technological mediation of the concept of solidarity. We focus on the workplace as a focal point of solidarity relations, and utilise a phenomenological approach to describe and analyse those relations. Workplace solidarity, which has been historically concretised through social objects such as labor unions, is of particular political relevance since it has played an outsize role in the broader struggle for social, economic, and political rights, recognition, and equality. We argue that the use of (...) automated decision support systems in labor process management may negatively affect the formation of these relations. As solidarity motivates collective political action and risk-taking, the mediation and potential obstruction of solidarity relations by ADS is politically significant. We contribute to the growing literature on the “future of work” problem in elucidating the technological mediation of workplace solidarity. (shrink)

A key focus for agri-food scholars today pertains to emerging “alternative food movements,” particularly their long-term viability, and their potential to induce transitions in our prevailing conventional global agri-food systems. One under-studied element in recent research on sustainability transitions more broadly is the role of disruptive events in the emergence or expansion of these movements. We present the findings of a case study of the effect of a sudden acute food safety crisis—bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease—on alternative beef (...) production in the Province of Alberta, Canada. Employing the conceptual lens of Sustainability Transition Theory, we explore the perspectives of conventional and alternative beef producers, treating alternative beef production as a niche operating within the dominant regime of global industrial agri-business. Three key findings are presented here. First, food safety risks and disruptive events can emerge as a direct consequence of the socio-ecological contradictions embedded in industrial agriculture, representing an opportunity for expansion of agricultural niches. Second, certain features of socio-economic regimes can also contribute to niche emergence, such as an economic system that disenfranchises beef-producing families. Finally, our study highlights the high level of diversity among niche agents and the complex and nuanced nature of their support for the niche. (shrink)

Factors affecting transcriptional elongation have been characterized extensively in in vitro, single cell (yeast) and cell culture systems; however, data from the context of multicellular organisms has been relatively scarce. While studies in homogeneous cell populations have been highly informative about the underlying molecular mechanisms and prevalence of polymerase pausing, they do not reveal the biological impact of perturbing this regulation in an animal. The core components regulating pausing are expressed in all animal cells and are recruited to the majority (...) of genes, however, disrupting their function often results in discrete phenotypic effects. Mutations in genes encoding key regulators of transcriptional pausing have been recovered from several genetic screens for specific phenotypes or interactions with specific factors in mice, zebrafish and flies. Analysis of these mutations has revealed that control of transcriptional pausing is critical for a diverse range of biological pathways essential for animal development and survival. (shrink)

The paper describes an innovative structured workshop methodology in garden-based-learning called “Nature in Your Face” aimed at provoking a change in citizens behavior and engagement as a consequence of the emotional activation in response to disruptive artistic messages. The methodology challenges the assumption that the change needed to meet the carbon targets can be reached with incremental, non-invasive behavior engineering techniques such as nudging or gamification. Instead, it explores the potential of disruptive communication to push citizens out of their comfort (...) zones and into creative modes of re-creating futures. This is done by confronting us with consequences of consumption by means of art and eco-visualizations. The aim being to achieve awareness, mental flexibility, and spurring debate. Thus, we invite them to react – and act upon these reactions by communicating their feelings or thoughts. This is used as an entrance point for broader and/or deeper engagement in a structured three-step methodology; Framing: A disruptive element is introduced into the local environment. This triggers an emotional reaction, which then is taken up in a process of framing the problem and working with solutions. Twisting: in a guided process, the initial energy from the emotional confrontation is twisted into a creative exploration of innovative solutions, from the perspective of the children. Using: The last stage is using the developed solutions in the local social system. The methodology is being applied in cooperation with a primary school, and is iteratively adjusted and evaluated in a formative, action-research based approach scenario. NiYF is to stimulate societal engagement through deliberately confronting stakeholders with unexpected and potentially upsetting appearances of nature, climate effects, or carbon-neutral lifestyle scenarios. We have verified the practical usefulness and potential of the methodology and found that NiYF triggers societal engagement and transition, negotiating responsibilities and unlocking action potentials. We also found that eco-anxiety, denial, self-efficacy and cognitive dissonance form children’s understanding of plastic. The project marks a paradigm shift from creating knowledge to using knowledge to create action, and a focus on learning from evaluating and adapting the approach in the field. (shrink)

This article describes the historical emergence of vital systems security, analyzing it as a significant mutation in biopolitical modernity. The story begins in the early 20th century, when planners and policy-makers recognized the increasing dependence of collective life on interlinked systems such as transportation, electricity, and water. Over the following decades, new security mechanisms were invented to mitigate the vulnerability of these vital systems. While these techniques were initially developed as part of Cold War preparedness for nuclear war, they eventually (...) migrated to domains beyond national security to address a range of anticipated emergencies, such as large-scale natural disasters, pandemic disease outbreaks, and disruptions of critical infrastructure. In these various contexts, vital systems security operates as a form of reflexive biopolitics, managing risks that have arisen as the result of modernization processes. This analysis sheds new light on current discussions of the government of emergency and ‘states of exception’. Vital systems security does not require recourse to extraordinary executive powers. Rather, as an anticipatory technology for mitigating vulnerabilities and closing gaps in preparedness, it provides a ready-to-hand toolkit for administering emergencies as a normal part of constitutional government. (shrink)

The increasing awareness of the incommensurability between voters’ attitudes about voting and the reality of voting are contributing to the much written-about voter malaise which plagues U.S. elections. Voters who assume their role is to determine the ideal, right, or best candidate confront an election system in our current communication environment that attempts to market candidates to match voters’ ideals, while also providing a surfeit of information that both contradicts the ideal depictions while also making transparent the process by which (...) candidates are packaged. This essay identifies four communication phenomena that contribute to this malaise: campaign transparency; bifurcation of issue and candidate; the abstracted nature of news content; and the glut of information that characterizes our present communication environment. (shrink)

Crisis requires society to renew itself, albeit in a disruptive way. The current Covid-19 pandemic is transforming ways of working, living, and relating to each other on a global level, suddenly and dramatically. This paper focuses on the field of education to show how higher education institutions are undergoing radical transformations driven by the need to digitalize education and training processes in record time with academics who lack innate technological capabilities for online teaching. The university system must strive to overcome (...) this situation to be competitive and provide high-quality education in a scenario of digital transformation, disruptive technological innovations, and accelerated change. To achieve these goals, this paper explains some barriers and challenges that universities encounter, as well as technological resources and methodologies they have used in the current scenario to transform higher education to face Covid-19 disruption. The discussion and conclusion synthesize significant insights that can be applied to the digitalization of education in the foreseeable future. (shrink)

Recommender Systems (RecSys) have been around since the early days of the Internet, helping users navigate the vast ocean of information and the increasingly available options that have been available for us ever since. The range of tasks for which one could use a RecSys is expanding as the technical capabilities grow, with the disruption of Machine Learning representing a tipping point in this domain, as in many others. However, the increase of the technical capabilities of AI-powered RecSys did (...) not come with a thorough consideration of their ethical implications and, despite being a well-established technical domain, the potential impacts of RecSys on their users are still under-assessed. This paper aims at filling this gap in regards to one of the main impacts of RecSys: personal autonomy. We first describe how technology can affect human values and a suitable methodology to identify these effects and mitigate potential harms: Value Sensitive Design (VSD). We use VSD to carry out a conceptual investigation of personal autonomy in the context of a generic RecSys and draw on a nuanced account of procedural autonomy to focus on two components: competence and authenticity. We provide the results of our inquiry as a value hierarchy and apply it to the design of a speculative RecSys as an example. (shrink)

By drawing up a model of the internal communication system of Bangladeshi ready-made garment factories, Helene Blumer identifies the existence and intensity of its communication flows. She furthermore discloses a connection from this communication system to labor unrest. The absence of a functioning formal channel within the factory, the lack of effective labor representation and the rare physical presence of the factory owners confirm the existence of a communication barrier. As symptom of a flawed communication system, this barrier confirms a (...) connection to labor unrest and the management's unawareness of its emergence, which would thwart any modes to predict and prevent work disruptions. Contents - Introduction to the Bangladeshi ready-made garment sector - Illustration of the internal communication system of Bangladeshi ready-made garment factories - Display of a communication barrier and its connection to labor unrest Target Groups - Academics in the fields of corporate responsibility and corporate/internal communication - Practitioners in the fields of corporate responsibility, corporate communication, development cooperation and garment industry About the Author Helene Blumer obtained her Master of Science in Business Administration (major in New Business Development) at the University of Applied Sciences HTW Chur. She currently works at the Swiss Institute for Entrepreneurship (SIFE) in the fields of corporate responsibility and business internationalization. (shrink)

From February 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic led to closures of educational institutions to reduce the spread of infectious disease. This forced the U.S. education system into a massive experiment with online education. Despite conducting online bioethics education for nearly twenty years, our bioethics program, a joint endeavor of Clarkson University and Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, was not immune to this disruption because our curriculum features intensive, one-week onsite courses. Even in the face of historic disruptions, it (...) is vital to ensure minimal interruptions to teaching and assessing students to provide effective education. This paper reviews the steps we took to successfully convert the onsite components of our curriculum to a synchronous online format, and it focuses on how we preserved instruction and assessment of practical skills that comprise these courses’ core. It also explains how we fostered interactive classroom environments. (shrink)

The design of collaborative robotics, such as driver-assisted operations, engineer a potential automation of decision-making predicated on unobtrusive data gathering of human users. This form of ‘somatic surveillance’ increasingly relies on behavioural biometrics and sensory algorithms to verify the physiology of bodies in cabin interiors. Such processes secure cyber-physical space, but also register user capabilities for control that yield data as insured risk. In this technical re-formation of human–machine interactions for control and communication ‘a dissonance of attribution’ :7684, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1805770115) (...) is created between perceptions of phenomena, materials and decision-making. This reconfigures relations not only between humans and machines, objects and subjects, but possibly disrupts attributive functions in the social system of Law. What it requires is shifting a legal accountability for action from a sovereignty of the human to a new materialist account based on a ‘cognitive assemblage’ between physiological data, computation and algorithmic sensing. This paper investigates the function of law as a guidance system to acknowledge this account of sensory and algorithmic computation as autonomous ‘sensing agents’ that may be accountable in situations of risk. This assemblage of robotic computation and sensory determination requires a clearer legal differentiation across the current static terminologies of person, property, liability and rights that maintain strict separations of object from subject. To neglect this, we argue, law will solely impute attributions of error to humans despite evidence of operation via mutual control. (shrink)

Nursing work centers around attending to a person's health during many of life's most vulnerable moments, from birth to death. Given the high‐stakes nature of this work, it is essential for nurses to critically reflect on their individual and collective impact, which can range from healing to harmful. The purpose of this paper is to use a philosophical inquiry approach and a critical lens to explore the potential influence of critical pedagogy (how we learn what we learn) on nursing praxis (...) (why we do what we do) with the aim of disrupting stigma and discrimination within the profession. This paper draws on the works of Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux, and bell hooks to alert readers to particular windows of opportunity where an intentional adoption of critical pedagogy in nursing praxis may help the profession think differently about two important and related topics: relational violence and peer‐led knowledge mobilization. As a practice‐based and theoretically grounded profession, nurses often strive to bridge the theoretical with the practical and the individual with the systemic. Thus, developing a robust and philosophically rooted disciplinary body of knowledge is particularly important to help us defensibly grapple with the notions of truth and ethics that shape our work's very essence and impact. (shrink)

RESUMEN Al reconstruir el cambio en la figura del otro entre la escuela del sentido moral y el sistema de la simpatía, es posible establecer una diferencia importante entre A. Smith y sus antecesores en la Ilustración escocesa, y explorar desde un nuevo ángulo el lugar que ocupa la política en la obra de Smith. Al pasar de una figura universal y abstracta, a una concreta y real, el sistema de la simpatía permite pensar en la continuidad que hay entre (...) la comunidad moral y la comunidad política y también en su ruptura, cuando la segunda se convierte en el espacio que permite manejar la exclusión que puede generar la primera. La invisibilidad de algunos miembros de la comunidad moral exige la creación de un espacio de tolerancia para evitar la violencia simbólica que implica la negación de participar en la comunicación afectiva de la simpatía. ABSTRACT The system of sympathy introduces a change in the figure of the other with respect to the school of moral sense. The reconstruction of this change reveals an important difference between A. Smith and his Scottish Enlightenment predecessors, which allows for the examination of the role of politics in Smith's work from a new angle. By replacing an abstract, universal figure with a concrete, actual one, the system of sympathy makes it possible to think the continuity between the moral community and the political community, but also its disruption, whenever the latter becomes a space to handle the exclusion that might be generated by the former. The invisibility of some of the members of the moral community requires the creation of a space of tolerance in order to avoid the symbolic violence entailed by the refusal to participate in the affective communication of sympathy. RESUMO Ao reconstruir a mudança na figura do outro entre a escola do sentido moral e o sistema da simpatia, é possível estabelecer uma diferença importante entre A. Smith e seus antecessores na Ilustração escocesa e explorar, sob um novo ângulo, o lugar que a política ocupa na obra de Smith. Ao passar de uma figura universal e abstrata para uma concreta e real, o sistema da simpatia permite pensar na continuidade que há entre a comunidade moral e a comunidade política e também em sua ruptura, quando a segunda se converte no espaço que permite manejar a exclusão que pode gerar a primeira. A invisibilidade de alguns membros da comunidade moral exige a criação de um espaço de tolerância para evitar a violência simbólica que implica a negação de participar na comunicação afetiva da simpatia. (shrink)

Lockean views of personal identity maintain that we are essentially persons who persist diachronically by virtue of being psychologically continuous with our former selves. In this article, I present a novel objection to this variant of psychological accounts, which is based on neurophysiological characteristics of the brain. While the mental states that constitute said psychological continuity reside in the cerebral hemispheres, so that for the former to persist only the upper brain must remain intact, being conscious additionally requires that a (...) structure originating in the brainstem—the ascending reticular activating system—be functional. Hence, there can be situations in which even small brainstem lesions render individuals irreversibly comatose and thus forever preclude access to their mental states, while the neural correlates of the states themselves are retained. In these situations, Lockeans are forced to regard as fulfilled their criterion of diachronic persistence since psychological continuity, as they construe it, is not disrupted. Deeming an entity that is never again going to have any mental experiences to be a person, however, is an untenable position for a psychological account to adopt. In their current form, Lockean views of personal identity are therefore incompatible with human neurophysiology. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe visual system has been found to prioritise emotional stimuli so robustly that their presence can temporarily “blind” people to non-emotional targets in their direct line of vision. This...

Many scholars have rejected cultural evolutionary theory on the grounds that cultural variation is directed and intentionally created, rather than incremental and blind with respect to function, as is the case for novel genetic variation in genetic evolution. Meanwhile, some cultural evolution researchers insist that cultural variation is blind and undirected, and the only directional force is selection of randomly-generated variants. Here I argue that neither of these positions are tenable. Cultural variation is directed in various ways. While this does (...) not invalidate cultural evolution, more attention should be paid to the different sources of non-randomness in culturally evolving systems. (shrink)

Farm to school is a popular approach to food systems education in K-12 schools across the United States. FTS programs are highly heterogeneous, but generally include serving locally grown fruits and vegetables in school nutrition programs, planting and maintaining school gardens, and engaging students in garden and food-based learning across the school curriculum. While FTS has been promoted as a “win–win–win” for children, farmers, and communities, it has also been critiqued for reinscribing neoliberal trends that exacerbate social inequalities. Through a (...) year-long, ethnographic study of FTS within one public middle school in the Southeast US, this paper contributes to these debates. Drawing upon theoretical frameworks of materiality and affective labor, we investigate how engagement with FTS activities can transform the social practice of everyday life in school for students, staff, and teachers. We find that FTS can reframe success in collaborative terms, engage the school around collective responsibility, and foster relationships across socioeconomic and racial difference. Although there is continued need to expand policies to ensure equitable funding for FTS, our research demonstrates that the hands-on work and collective subjectivities produced through FTS can mitigate the harms of neoliberalism and be a force for positive social change within a school. (shrink)

Background Given that AI-driven decision support systems (AI-DSS) are intended to assist in medical decision making, it is essential that clinicians are willing to incorporate AI-DSS into their practice. This study takes as a case study the use of AI-driven cardiotography (CTG), a type of AI-DSS, in the context of intrapartum care. Focusing on the perspectives of obstetricians and midwives regarding the ethical and trust-related issues of incorporating AI-driven tools in their practice, this paper explores the conditions that AI-driven CTG (...) must fulfill for clinicians to feel justified in incorporating this assistive technology into their decision-making processes regarding interventions in labor. Methods This study is based on semi-structured interviews conducted online with eight obstetricians and five midwives based in England. Participants were asked about their current decision-making processes about when to intervene in labor, how AI-driven CTG might enhance or disrupt this process, and what it would take for them to trust this kind of technology. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and analyzed with thematic analysis. NVivo software was used to organize thematic codes that recurred in interviews to identify the issues that mattered most to participants. Topics and themes that were repeated across interviews were identified to form the basis of the analysis and conclusions of this paper. Results There were four major themes that emerged from our interviews with obstetricians and midwives regarding the conditions that AI-driven CTG must fulfill: (1) the importance of accurate and efficient risk assessments; (2) the capacity for personalization and individualized medicine; (3) the lack of significance regarding the type of institution that develops technology; and (4) the need for transparency in the development process. Conclusions Accuracy, efficiency, personalization abilities, transparency, and clear evidence that it can improve outcomes are conditions that clinicians deem necessary for AI-DSS to meet in order to be considered reliable and therefore worthy of being incorporated into the decision-making process. Importantly, healthcare professionals considered themselves as the epistemic authorities in the clinical context and the bearers of responsibility for delivering appropriate care. Therefore, what mattered to them was being able to evaluate the reliability of AI-DSS on their own terms, and have confidence in implementing them in their practice. (shrink)

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) to aid legal decision making has become prominent. This paper investigates the use of AI in a critical issue in employment law, the determination of a worker’s status—employee vs. independent contractor—in two common law countries (the U.S. and Canada). This legal question has been a contentious labor issue insofar as independent contractors are not eligible for the same benefits as employees. It has become an important societal issue due to the ubiquity of the gig (...) economy and the recent disruptions in employment arrangements. To address this problem, we collected, annotated, and structured the data for all Canadian and Californian court cases related to this legal question between 2002 and 2021, resulting in 538 Canadian cases and 217 U.S. cases. In contrast to legal literature focusing on complex and correlated characteristics of the employment relationship, our statistical analyses of the data show very strong correlations between the worker’s status and a small subset of quantifiable characteristics of the employment relationship. In fact, despite the variety of situations in the case law, we show that simple, off-the-shelf AI models classify the cases with an out-of-sample accuracy of more than 90%. Interestingly, the analysis of misclassified cases reveals consistent misclassification patterns by most algorithms. Legal analyses of these cases led us to identify how equity is ensured by judges in ambiguous situations. Finally, our findings have practical implications for access to legal advice and justice. We deployed our AI model via the open-access platform, https://MyOpenCourt.org/, to help users answer employment legal questions. This platform has already assisted many Canadian users, and we hope it will help democratize access to legal advice to large crowds. (shrink)

In the main body of colleges and universities, the effect of college teaching psychology management is an important standard to test the quality of college teaching psychology management and its effects on the development of college teaching psychology management. However, the psychology management system used by traditional colleges and universities is challenging to meet the needs of the innovation of the new talent training model of higher vocational education. The construction of the new micro-level teaching organization inevitably requires the psychology (...) management practice, structure, process, and technology at the medium and macro-levels to adapt to it. However, there are many mismatches in Higher Vocational Colleges’ internal and external administrative systems in China, such as low administrative efficiency, generalization of administrative power, low degree of specialization in administrative psychology management, and unreasonable administrative and organizational structure. This paper innovates the psychology management of colleges and universities reforms in combination with the characteristics of the digital age. Based on the collaborative innovation theory of colleges and universities, this paper puts forward the collaborative psychology management innovation network model of colleges and universities. The model combines the psychology management theory with the practical research of collaborative innovation in colleges and universities, expands the application and research field of innovation network theory, constructs the evaluation index system of students’ satisfaction in teaching psychology management in colleges and universities, and discusses it through reading and consulting materials and communication with teachers and students. A questionnaire of college teaching psychology management based on student satisfaction is formed. The experiment shows that teaching satisfaction is improved by nearly 31% compared with before innovation and reform. It can initially get the effect of innovation and reform, meet students’ needs, and promote the improvement of teaching psychology management quality. (shrink)

Culture-as-situated cognition theory provides insight into the system 1 monitoring algorithm. Culture provides people with an organizing framework, facilitating predictions, focusing attention, and providing experiential signals of certainty and uncertainty as system 1 inputs. When culture-based signals convey that something is amiss, system 2 reasoning is triggered and engaged when resources allow; otherwise, system 1 reasoning dominates.

This paper questions the extension of the common notion of violence, i.e., “subjective violence,” involving the intentional use of force to inflict injury or damage, towards social injustice as “systemic violence.” Systemic violence is altogether unlike subjective violence and the work of Slavoj Žižek illustrates that conceptual obfuscation in this regard may lead to an overly broad and facile justification of revolutionary violence as counter-violence to systemic violence, appealing to the ethics of self-defense. I argue that revolutionary (...) violence is only justified to counter subjective violence inflicted or organized by the state. Thus I reject in conclusion Žižek’s further defense of revolutionary violence as retributive and as “shock therapy” necessary to disrupt the old society. (shrink)

Selective protein degradation maintains cellular homeostasis, but this process is disrupted in many diseases. Targeted protein degradation (TPD) approaches, built upon existing cellular mechanisms, are promising methods for therapeutically regulating protein levels. Here, we review the diverse palette of tools that are now available for doing so throughout the gene expression pathway and in specific cellular compartments. These include methods for directly removing targeted proteins via the ubiquitin proteasome system with proteolysis targeting chimeras (PROTACs) or dephosphorylation targeting chimeras (DEPTACs). Similar (...) effects can also be achieved through the lysosomal system with autophagy‐targeting chimeras (AUTACs), autophagosome tethering compounds (ATTECs), and lysosome targeting chimeras (LYTACs). Other methods act upstream to degrade RNAs (ribonuclease targeting chimeras; RIBOTACs) or transcription factors (transcription factor targeting chimeras; TRAFTACs), offering control throughout the gene expression process. We highlight the evolution and function of these methods and discuss their clinical implications in diverse disease contexts. (shrink)