Development of an Algorithm for Carrying Out Geophysical and Geological Works Using Automated Systems and GIS Technologies

During the whole period of existing a modern geological industry, the issues of its computerization have been a priority, both in terms of providing employees of enterprises and organizations with computer equipment, and in terms of arranging information exchange and telecommunications between interacting information agents. It should be noted that there is a correlation between the increasing complexity of mining projects and the need to provide work with more and more developed software and hardware, information technologies, increasing complexity and growing number of software systems used to solve geological problems. The list of enterprises with positive experience in the development and operation of systems and complexes used in geology, geophysics and for subsurface use is also expanding very effectively. We propose the development of an algorithm for conducting geophysical and geological works using automated systems and GIS technologies, aimed at ensuring the rational development of the mineral resource potential of the region and ensuring the stage-by-stage nature of the geological exploration process. The testing was carried out using software product Diafond, which is available at the Russian Federal Geological Fund. This work was financially supported by the grant of the President of the Russian Federation No. MD- 2409.2020.5.

RUMOURS AND INFODEMICS: JOURNALIST'S SOCIAL MEDIA VERIFICATION PRACTICES DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

The spread of rumors and infodemics on the Internet and social media during the Covid-19 pandemic which is unstoppable and usually believed to be the truth is more dangerous than the transmission of the Covid-19 outbreak because it has the potential to threaten safety, cause racism, and hatred of the community. It is the duty of journalists to doing fact-checking and corrects any rumors or infodemics. Fact-checking is one of the most important elements of professional journalism. Technological advances have made infodemics spread rapidly which has become a new challenge for professional journalists as information agents and spearheads of accurate reporting. This became the basis for mass media companies such as Kompas.com and Solopos.com to form journalism team checks to verify the facts and infodemics rumors that circulated widely on the Internet and social media during the Covid-19 pandemic. Fact-checking journalism is a new trend in digital journalism studies. This paper reviews the work practices of fact-checking journalists in verifying infodemics from social media content as the spearhead of accurate reporting as well as a manifestation of hypermedia organizations. A series of qualitative interviews were conducted with journalists at Solopos.com and Kompas.com who were in charge of the fact-check section. The results showed that journalists carried out a series of processes both manually and utilizing digital technology in verifying content and checking several facts to ensure rumors and infodemics on social media about Covid-19 that were spread on social media be compiled into news using journalistic principles. The work process of fact-checking journalists is often done collaboratively to form hypermedia organizations.Keywords: rumors, infodemics, online journalism, fact-check, covid-19, journalism, journalists Abstrak. Persebaran rumor dan infodemik di Internet dan media sosial selama pandemi Covid-19 yang tidak terbendung dan sering kali diyakini sebagai kebenaran oleh masyarakat dinilai jauh lebih berbahaya daripada penularan wabah Covid-19, karena berpotensi mengancam keselamatan, menimbulkan rasisme, serta kebencian terhadap suatu golongan. Sudah menjadi tugas jurnalis dan untuk mengecek fakta dan meluruskan setiap rumor serta infodemik yang beredar di masyarakat. Pengecekan fakta adalah salah satu elemen penting dalam jurnalisme profesional. Kemajuan teknologi membuat infodemik tersebar dengan cepat yang kemudian menjadi tantangan baru bagi jurnalis profesional sebagai agen informasi dan ujung tombak pemberitaan yang akurat. Hal ini menjadi landasan bagi perusahaan media massa berskala nasional seperti Kompas.com maupun lokal, yaitu Solopos.com membentuk tim jurnalisme cek fakta untuk memverifikasi rumor serta infodemik yang beredar luas di internet dan media sosial. Jurnalisme cek fakta merupakan tren baru dalam perkembangan jurnalisme digital. Tulisan ini mengulas praktik kerja jurnalis pemeriksa fakta dalam memverifikasi infodemik dari konten media sosial sebagai ujung tombak pemberitaan yang akurat sekaligus sebagai manifestasi organisasi organisasi hipermedia. Serangkaian wawancara kualitatif dilakukan kepada jurnalis di Solopos.com dan Kompas.com yang bertugas sebagai jurnalis pemeriksa fakta. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan para jurnalis melakukan serangkaian proses verifikasi konten dan pengecekan fakta baik secara manual maupun memanfaatkan teknologi digital untuk mengkonfirmasi rumor serta infodemik tentang Covid-19 yang tersebar di media sosial untuk disusun dalam berita sesuai kaidah jurnalistik. Proses kerja jurnalis pemeriksa fakta ini sering kali dilakukan secara kolaboratif yang membentuk organisasi hipermedia.Kata kunci: rumor, infodemik, jurnalisme online, cek fakta, covid-19, jurnalisme, jurnalis

An integrated framework for online news quality assurance

This paper introduced a synthesized theoretical framework of online news quality assurance. The framework includes conceptual models of quality evaluation, value assessment, and intervention. The framework also provides typologies of user activities, information agents, and the relationships among them. The framework is grounded in prior frameworks of information quality and the analysis of two cases of large-scale online news aggregators: Google News and Facebook News. The framework can be used as a knowledge source to guide the design and evaluation of quality assurance processes of online news providers and aggregator ecosystems.

Comparing online travel review platforms as destination image information agents

Online travel reviews have been extensively used as an important data source in tourism research. Typically, data for online travel review research is collected only from one platform. However, drawing definite conclusions based on single platform analyses may thus produce biases and lead to erroneous conclusions and decisions. Therefore, this research verifies whether or not there are discrepancies and commonalities between different travel review platforms. In this study, five native Chinese travel review platforms were selected: Ctrip; Qyer; Mafengwo; Tuniu; and Qunar. Using a mixed content analysis method, the destination image of Finland was extracted from 10,197 travel reviews in Simplified Chinese as the destination image is a popular topic in online review research. Results show Finland’s destination image representation varies between Chinese travel review platforms. This discrepancy is especially prominent in the dimension of functional and mixed functional-psychological destination attributes. Significant theoretical contributions and managerial implications for the analysis of online travel reviews and destination image research are discussed.

Five-Month-Old Infants Attribute Inferences Based on General Knowledge to Agents

To make sense of others’ actions, we generally consider what information is available to them. This information may come from different sources, including perception and inference. Like adults, young infants track what information agents can obtain through perception: If an agent directly observes an event, for example, they expect her to have information about it. However, no investigation has yet examined whether young infants also track what information agents can obtain through inference, by bringing to bear relevant general knowledge. Building on the finding that by 4 months of age, most infants have acquired the physical rule that wide objects can fit into wide but not narrow containers, we asked whether 5-month-olds would expect an agent who was searching for a wide toy hidden in her absence to reach for a wide as opposed to a narrow box. Infants looked significantly longer when the agent selected the narrow box, suggesting that they expected her (a) to share the physical knowledge that wide objects can fit only into wide containers and (b) to infer that the wide toy must be hidden in the wide box. Three additional conditions supported this interpretation. Together, these results cast doubt on two-system accounts of early psychological reasoning, which claim that infants’ early-developing system is too inflexible and encapsulated to integrate inputs from other cognitive processes, such as physical reasoning. Instead, the results support one-system accounts and provide new evidence that young infants’ burgeoning psychological-reasoning system is qualitatively similar to that of older children and adults.

Judging accidental harm: Due care and foreseeability of side effects

Both in philosophy and in cognitive psychology, models of moral judgment posit that individuals take into account both agents’ intentions and actions’ outcomes. The present research focused on a third crucial piece of information, agents’ negligence. In Study 1, participants judged the moral wrongness and punishability of agents’ actions that resulted in negative side effects. In the scenarios, we orthogonally manipulated whether the agent acted with or without due care and whether she had or did not have information to foresee the negative side effects of her actions. Participants judged careless agents more condemnable than careful agents, especially when negative side effects could have been easily foreseen. In Study 2, we manipulated due care in acting in cases where the agent’s primary intention was to bring about a certain outcome without knowing that such outcome would actually be harmful. Here information about the foreseeability of negative outcomes was not provided, and participants judged actions performed with care more wrong and punishable than actions performed without care. This suggests that sometimes acting carefully and nevertheless causing harm may constitute evidence of the presence of negative intentions in the agents or evidence of the fact that agents indeed could have foreseen the negative effects of their actions. Together, these findings indicate that carefulness in acting and foreseeability are highly intertwined in moral judgment, and highlight the need to improve existing processing models of moral judgment to account for people’s evaluation of agents and actions whenever negligence can be attributed.

Game of operation of a telecommunication network of agents with directional antennae

The paper studies a non-cooperative repeated game that describes the behaviour of mobile agents with directional antennae or a wireless sensor network. Periodically, agents should direct their antennae towards each other to exchange information. However, the actions to turn the antenna are energy-consuming and agents should maintain a balance between the actuality of the information and the energy consumption for maintaining the actuality of the information. Agents receive lesser payoff on the stage in which they decide to exchange information but win in subsequent stages by increasing the actuality of the information.

The nexus between perceptions of inequality and preferences for redistribution

This paper shows that perceptions of inequality are a key factor in the formation of preferences for redistribution and thereby in the determination of the equilibrium redistribution level. We build on the novel stylized facts provided by the survey experimental literature on perceptions of income inequality, highlighting that agents incorrectly estimate the shape of the income distribution because of limited information. Agents with income above the mean believe they are poorer than they actually are, and agents with income below the mean believe themselves to be richer. We revisit the standard framework on the political economy of redistribution and extend it in two ways. First, we introduce a more general two-sided inequality aversion. Second, we incorporate perceptions of income inequality, modeled by assuming that agents form expectations on the income level of the richest and the poorest in society. We show analytically that the equilibrium redistribution level is crucially determined by the interplay between the information treatment correcting the bias in perceptions of inequality and fairness considerations specified by the degree of inequality aversion. By doing this, we add (biased) perceptions of inequality to the list of potential factors explaining why, notwithstanding high inequality, an increase in the desire for redistribution has not been observed in many countries.

Information: a missing component in understanding and mitigating social epidemics

Social epidemics or behaviorally based non-communicable diseases are becoming an increasingly important problem in developed countries including the United States. It is the aim of our paper to propose a previously understudied aspect of the spread of social epidemics, the role of information in both causing and mitigating social epidemics. In this paper, we ask, can information be harmful, contagious, and a causal factor in social epidemics? In the spread of biological epidemics, the causal agents are biological pathogens such as bacteria or viruses. We propose that in the spread of social epidemics, one of the causal agents is harmful information, which is increasing exponentially in the age of the internet. We ground our idea in the concept of the meme and define the concept of an infopathogen as harmful information that can spread or intensify a social epidemic. Second, we ask, what are the best tools to understand the role of information in the spread of social epidemics? The epidemiological triad that includes a host, agents (and vectors), and the environment is extended into a quad by including information agents. The quad includes the role of information technologies as vectors and the impact of the social environment. The “life cycles” of pathogens in biological epidemics and infopathogens in social epidemics are compared, along with mitigations suggested by the epidemiological quad. Challenges to the theory of infopathogens, including the complexities associated with the spread of memes and the role of behavior in the spread of epidemics are discussed. Implications of the theory including the classification of harmfulness, the freedom of speech, and the treatment of infected individuals are also considered. We believe the application of the epidemiological quad provides insights into social epidemics and potential mitigations. Finally, we stress that infopathogens are only part of social epidemic development; susceptible hosts, a favorable environment, and availability of physical agents are all also required.