infonet-economy

Bolli, Thomas; Pusterla, Filippo

Funk, Anne Kathrin

Measuring the polarization of legislators and parties is a key step in understanding how politics develops over time. But in parliamentary systems—where ideological positions estimated from roll calls may not be informative—producing valid estimates is extremely challenging. We suggest a new measurement strategy that makes innovative use of the "accuracy" of machine classifiers, i.e., the number of correct predictions made as a proportion of all predictions. In our case, the “labels” are the party identifications of the members of parliament, predicted from their speeches along with some information on debate subjects. Intuitively, when the learner is able to discriminate members in the two main Westminster parties well, we claim we are in a period of “high” polarization. By contrast, when the classifier has low accuracy—and makes a relatively large number of mistakes in terms of allocating members to parties based on the data—we argue parliament is in an era of "low" polarization. This approach is fast and substantively valid, and we demonstrate its merits with simulations, and by comparing the estimates from 78 years of House of Commons speeches with qualitative and quantitative historical accounts of the same. As a headline finding, we note that contemporary British politics is approximately as polarized as it was in the mid-1960s—that is, in the middle of the "postwar consensus". More broadly, we show that the technical performance of supervised learning algorithms can be directly informative about substantive matters in social science.

When digital evidence is presented in front of a court of law, it is seldom associated with a scientific evaluation of its relevance, or significance. When experts are challenged about the validity of the digital evidence, the general answer is “yes, to a reasonable degree of scientific certainty”. Which means all and nothing at the same time, since no scientific metric is volunteered. In this paper we aim at providing courts of law with weighted digital evidence. Each digital evidence is assigned with a confidence rating that eventually helps juries and magistrates in their endeavor. This paper presents a novel methodology in order to: - Provide digital forensics experts with the ability to form a digital evidence chain, the Digital Evidence Inventory (DEI), in a way similar to an evidence “block chain”, in order to capture evidence; - Give experts the ability to rate the level of confidence for each evidence in a Forensics Confidence Rating (FCR) structure; - Provide experts with a Global Digital Timeline (GDT) to order evidence through time. As a result, this methodology provides courts of law with sound digital evidences, having a confidence level expressed in metrics and ordered through a timeline. The objective of this work is to add a reliable pinch of scientific certainty when dealing with digital evidence.

The Commons discussion proliferates on natural resources and material reproduction. When this discussion happens, it tends to distance itself from the “digital commons”, as the latter should be understood as something different: an area of instability, of undefined laws, or even of abuse. We would like to contribute to a law of the commons discussion with an approach that considers the digital, as a potential state of any resource that can be thought and transcribed under a binary process. In this sense, (de)materialization is never definite or stable, it is, primarily, a view of how differentiation and relationships between private, public and common property are constructed. Our starting point is that debt follows this exact line of thinking: it is, at the same time, material and immaterial, local and transnational, private and public.In sociological theory, all money is debt (Ingham, 2004) and for any debt, the collateral guarantees to the lender that if the debt is not repaid the value of what was lent is not lost. We would like to push this idea further by examining mutual credit, as an endogenous money creation process, particularly under the context of Sardex Mutual Credit System: an electronic B2B mutual credit system that has been operating on the island of Sardinia since 2009 as a complementary currency (Dini, 2016). Although mutual credit is not a “comm ons credit” it is view of how credit commons could be. Revisiting an existing mutual credit system is a first step allowing us to understand Law around financial transactions and debt in its current state. Mutual credit does not oppose or change Law it makes it more livable and functional. Repositioning it in an impossible “networked” state where we are not sure of its transactions, support and motivation, governance, communities assemblage, utility, is an another effort that could help us move beyond the existing Law to a situation where a Law of Commons could emerge. Thus, our objective is to move beyond mutual credit with expected, functional, solutions and venture with the monsters of commoning debt and credit. As Dana Haraway (2016) explains regarding “the embeddedness in an infrastructure that makes the global appear as a work-object”, we can consider mutual credit contributing to such a dominant direction: the existing Law (infrastructure) is acceptable as mutual credit provides individually understood and accepted local solutions, alternative ways to apply and live with it. Credit commons with its open design, its community oriented approach destabilizes this process and recasts debt in the unknown area of a global commons potential: this could be crucial as it would makes us forget the work-object understanding of debt and provide us with an opportunity further explore its commoning process.

Since the early 90’s, three dimensional virtual reality has raised interest as it appeared to allow users to feel immersed in virtual environments. Yet, expensive and cumbersome equipment were required and this technology has never delivered on its promises. In the last two years, affordable head mounted displays, which have very recently, or will very soon be launched on the market, have revived the hope that virtual reality might now really be up for a breakthrough. Although in the early 2000’s research in the use of Virtual Reality in teaching or in Marketing, had shown interesting results, no literature could be found on the sense of being there experienced by users of the new head mounted displays. This research aims at looking into the sense of presence perceived by users of these new affordable devices. It observes that all those who participated in this research experienced a high sense of presence for two different types of devices, and that although on average, participants were only moderately inspired in suggesting possible uses of the technology in the future, marketing students were by far, those who were the most creative. These results are encouraging for the use of this technology for both marketing and marketing teaching.