scholarly journals Algorithmic Television in the Age of Large-scale Customization

2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (6) ◽  
pp. 658-663
Author(s):  
Stephen Shapiro

One challenge that Television Studies faces today is how to respond to the rise of an industry increasingly organized by what Antoinette Rouvroy calls “data behavioralism.” The rise of streaming prestige television, exemplified by Netflix, has significant implications within the U.S. screen industry, but the “Netflix effect,” as McDonald and Smith-Rowsey call it, is more than just a change in the industrial mode of production, means of distribution, and method of consumption. The datalogic turn on which Netflixism is based also undermines the theoretical models on which Television Studies was largely built, including theories of representation, visual interpellation and pleasure, and power as “productive.” Hence, the rise of algorithmic television is not simply a new “object” or “wave” for us to study and comment upon; it challenges the mode of knowledge-production (or dispositif) on which the field has grounded itself.

Author(s):  
Kahler W. Stone ◽  
Kristina W. Kintziger ◽  
Meredith A. Jagger ◽  
Jennifer A. Horney

While the health impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on frontline health care workers have been well described, the effects of the COVID-19 response on the U.S. public health workforce, which has been impacted by the prolonged public health response to the pandemic, has not been adequately characterized. A cross-sectional survey of public health professionals was conducted to assess mental and physical health, risk and protective factors for burnout, and short- and long-term career decisions during the pandemic response. The survey was completed online using the Qualtrics survey platform. Descriptive statistics and prevalence ratios (95% confidence intervals) were calculated. Among responses received from 23 August and 11 September 2020, 66.2% of public health workers reported burnout. Those with more work experience (1–4 vs. <1 years: prevalence ratio (PR) = 1.90, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 1.08−3.36; 5–9 vs. <1 years: PR = 1.89, CI = 1.07−3.34) or working in academic settings (vs. practice: PR = 1.31, CI = 1.08–1.58) were most likely to report burnout. As of September 2020, 23.6% fewer respondents planned to remain in the U.S. public health workforce for three or more years compared to their retrospectively reported January 2020 plans. A large-scale public health emergency response places unsustainable burdens on an already underfunded and understaffed public health workforce. Pandemic-related burnout threatens the U.S. public health workforce’s future when many challenges related to the ongoing COVID-19 response remain unaddressed.


2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
Rediet Abebe ◽  
T.-H. HUBERT Chan ◽  
Jon Kleinberg ◽  
Zhibin Liang ◽  
David Parkes ◽  
...  

A long line of work in social psychology has studied variations in people’s susceptibility to persuasion—the extent to which they are willing to modify their opinions on a topic. This body of literature suggests an interesting perspective on theoretical models of opinion formation by interacting parties in a network: in addition to considering interventions that directly modify people’s intrinsic opinions, it is also natural to consider interventions that modify people’s susceptibility to persuasion. In this work, motivated by this fact, we propose an influence optimization problem. Specifically, we adopt a popular model for social opinion dynamics, where each agent has some fixed innate opinion, and a resistance that measures the importance it places on its innate opinion; agents influence one another’s opinions through an iterative process. Under certain conditions, this iterative process converges to some equilibrium opinion vector. For the unbudgeted variant of the problem, the goal is to modify the resistance of any number of agents (within some given range) such that the sum of the equilibrium opinions is minimized; for the budgeted variant, in addition the algorithm is given upfront a restriction on the number of agents whose resistance may be modified. We prove that the objective function is in general non-convex. Hence, formulating the problem as a convex program as in an early version of this work (Abebe et al., KDD’18) might have potential correctness issues. We instead analyze the structure of the objective function, and show that any local optimum is also a global optimum, which is somehow surprising as the objective function might not be convex. Furthermore, we combine the iterative process and the local search paradigm to design very efficient algorithms that can solve the unbudgeted variant of the problem optimally on large-scale graphs containing millions of nodes. Finally, we propose and evaluate experimentally a family of heuristics for the budgeted variant of the problem.


2006 ◽  
Vol 33 (6) ◽  
pp. 719-725 ◽  
Author(s):  
Branko Ladanyi

Owing to climate warming trends, there has been an increasing interest in recent years in the accelerating creep of rock glaciers and frozen slopes. In the field of glaciology, the creep of glaciers has been extensively studied, observed, and analyzed for more than 100 years. Many valuable and detailed theoretical models have been proposed through the years for simulating the creep behavior of glaciers. This synthesis paper has no intention of proposing another one. Its purpose is only to supply to these models a potential geotechnical background, borrowed from the connected fields of frozen ground mechanics, rock mechanics, and the mechanics of mixtures. In particular, this paper attempts to extend some known models of mechanical behavior of unfrozen soil and rock masses to masses containing ice and to apply these models to large-scale creep of ice–rock mixtures and ice–rock interface problems under variable temperature and stress conditions.Key words: ice, rock, mixture, rock joints, slope stability, creep, temperature.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gunnar Ellingsen ◽  
Bente Christensen ◽  
Morten Hertzum

Large-scale electronic health record (EHR) suites have the potential to cover a broad range of use needs across various healthcare domains. However, a challenge that must be solved is the distributed governance structure of public healthcare: Regional health authorities regulate hospitals, municipalities are responsible for first-line healthcare services, and general practitioners (GPs) have an independent entrepreneurial role. In such settings, EHR program owners cannot enforce municipalities and GPs to come on board. Thus, we examine what tactics owners of large-scale EHR suite programs apply to persuade municipalities to participate, how strongly these tactics are enforced, and the consequences. Empirically, we focus on the Health Platform program in Central Norway where the goal is to implement the U.S. Epic EHR suite in 2022. Theoretically, the paper is positioned in the socio-technical literature.


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 368
Author(s):  
Shaoan Zhang ◽  
Andromeda Hightower ◽  
Qingmin Shi

Using the Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) 2018, this study examines U.S. and Japanese new teachers’ initial teacher preparation (ITP), feelings of preparedness, motivations, and self-efficacy. The analysis of 355 U.S. and 433 Japanese new secondary teachers provided several findings. First, ITP in the U.S. more often included teaching in mixed-ability and multicultural settings, cross-curricular skills, and technology than Japan, and U.S. teachers felt more prepared than Japanese teachers in every category of preparation. Second, Japanese teachers were more likely to declare teaching as their first career choice and reportedly scored significantly higher on motivations to become a teacher of personal utility value, while U.S. new teachers scored higher on social utility value. Third, there were no significant differences in self-efficacy between U.S. and Japanese new teachers. This study contributes to the gap of large-scale, comparative literature between the U.S. and Japanese initial teacher preparation. Implications for practice and directions for future research are discussed.


Author(s):  
Maria Belodubrovskaya

Throughout the Stalin period cinema experienced a perpetual “scenario crisis,” or a shortage of suitable screenplays. This was due to the lack of professionalization in Soviet screenwriting and to the director-centered mode of production. Studios had no personnel to convert potential stories into solid, censorship-proof scripts, and directors had an outsized role in screenwriting through the practice of the director’s scenarios. Lacking a large contingent of professional screenwriters who could write on order, the industry focused on mobilizing established writers to author high-quality literary screenplays. Writers did not deliver masterpieces, while weakening censorship and making it only more difficult to produce films on a large scale.


<em>Abstract.</em>—Large-scale commercial fisheries for Atlantic sturgeon <em>Acipenser oxyrinchus</em> in the late 1880s eventually led to substantial reductions in the population size. The coastwide Atlantic sturgeon population of the United States has not recovered to the levels seen prior to the 1900s. A number of factors have contributed to the slow recovery or continued decline of Atlantic sturgeon populations, including continued commercial fishing and the targeting of females for caviar, bycatch in other fisheries, and changes in habitat due to dam construction and water quality degradation. The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) developed the first coastwide management plan for Atlantic sturgeon in 1990. In response to the shortcomings of that plan, the ASMFC applied new standards and the authority granted to it by the U.S. Congress to adopt a coastwide moratorium on all harvesting in 1998. A federal status review conducted in 1998 concluded that the continued existence of Atlantic sturgeon was not threatened given the situation at the time. Since then, monitoring programs have indicated varying levels of relative abundance in several water bodies along the Atlantic coast. The U.S. government is responsible for undertaking a status review to document any changes since the last review and determining whether those findings warrant a threatened or endangered listing for the species. The government’s findings may have far-reaching effects on many other Atlantic coastal fisheries.


Author(s):  
Ping Lan ◽  
David C. Yen

There have been a very limited number of systematic studies of how a region is turning digital opportunities into a development force. In theory, major advances in information and communication technology (ICT) have successfully transformed traditional businesses and markets, revolutionized learning and knowledge-sharing, generated global information flows, and empowered citizens and communities in new ways to redefine governance (Afuah, 2003; Mullaney et al., 2003). At a regional level, this “digital revolution” could offer enormous opportunities to support sustainable local prosperity, and thus help to achieve the broader development goals (DOT Force, 2001). Alaska is one state that can be positioned to take advantage of Internet and e-commerce technologies. Isolated from the U.S. main economic centers and heavily reliant on the export of commodities in its economy, e-commerce or business via the Internet is an ideal choice for Alaska. However, the available statistics do not support this claim. Most economic indicators show a downward trend in Alaska since 1995, in spite of the fact that the federal government expenditure has been increasing (ASTF, 2002). This chapter is dedicated to measuring the usage of the Internet in Alaska. It hypothesizes that geographical limitations help a region like Alaska embrace ICT and its applications without much hesitation, but also hinders the region to fully exploit the potential of ICT due to the limitations of resources. A large-scale survey was conducted to reveal the characteristics of Internet usage among individuals, government agencies, local communities, and private firms in Alaska. This research is of interest in two aspects: It could offer help for policymakers and enterprises within Alaska to realize the potential development brought about by the current digital revolution, and it could help enterprises outside Alaska to target this market more effectively. Theoretically, it could shed light on issues related to technology adoption and local innovation. Besides that, the platform-dependent approach used in this research can be applied in a broader context.


2020 ◽  
pp. 109-146
Author(s):  
Pierre-Hugues Verdier

This chapter examines the rise of financial sanctions as a tool of U.S. foreign policy and the role of U.S. prosecutors in enforcing sanctions against global banks. It describes how the United States developed its financial sanctions capabilities against terrorist groups, then turned them against state actors such as North Korea, culminating with elaborate sanctions programs against Iran and Russia. It shows how U.S. federal and state prosecutors uncovered large-scale sanctions evasion efforts at numerous global banks that processed U.S. dollar payments. This enforcement campaign led to some of the largest criminal fines ever levied, and global banks such as HSBC and BNP Paribas agreed to implement U.S. sanctions and anti-money laundering controls in their worldwide operations, thus broadening the reach of U.S. policy. Although U.S. enforcement actions faced strong criticism by U.S. allies, banks facing large fines, negative publicity, and potential loss of access to essential U.S. dollar payment infrastructure complied with U.S. demands. Unlike other cases, U.S. sanctions did not lead to multilateral reforms, instead triggering efforts by sanctioned states and bystanders to reduce their dependence on the U.S. dollar and U.S. payment systems.


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