Why postmortems fail

Most high-profile disasters are followed by demands for an investigation into what went wrong. Even before they start, calls for finding the missed warning signs and an explanation for why people did not “connect the dots” will be common. Unfortunately, however, the same combination of political pressures and the failure to adopt good social science methods that contributed to the initial failure usually lead to postmortems that are badly flawed. The high stakes mean that powerful actors will have strong incentives to see that certain conclusions are—and are not—drawn. Most postmortems also are marred by strong psychological biases, especially the assumption that incorrect inferences must have been the product of wrong ways of thinking, premature cognitive closure, the naive use of hindsight, and the neglect of the comparative method. Given this experience, I predict that the forthcoming inquiries into the January 6, 2021, storming of the US Capitol and the abrupt end to the Afghan government will stumble in many ways.

Support for the provision of “digital immortality” based on physical informatics methods

The improvement of modern computer technology to achieve fundamentally new indicators can be carried out on the basis of various approaches. One of such approaches is the application of methods of physical informatics. Therefore, this paper considers the support of ensuring “digital immortality” based on physical computer science methods. On the basis of Wiener random processes, measures are proposed to ensure the security of computer nodes to ensure “digital immortality”. The calculated ratios from physical informatics adapted to determine the requirements for the design of information systems to ensure the digitalization of the brain are given.

Early Ethical Assessment: An Application to the Sustainability of Swine Body Scanners

An early ethics assessment method was used to evaluate sustainability goals and early findings from an automated body scanning technology for swine production. The project had twin goals of discovering potential pitfalls in the technology and exploring the applicability of the method, derived from the Ethical Matrix, as a tool to aid researchers in product design at very early stages in the research and development (R&D) process. This paper reports results on the second objective. Results of the evaluation workshop were coded and qualitatively analyzed. These results are reported and compared; the exercise is compared to the findings of other researchers using more traditional methods for ethical assessment on similar technologies, as well as standard social science methods for ascertaining economic sustainability and social acceptability of technological innovations. We conclude that the method has promise, especially for its applicability at very early stages in R&D, but that it does not substitute for analyses that occur at a much later stage in product or procedural development.

Do Citizen Science Methods Identify Regions of High Avian Biodiversity?

Citizen science may offer a way to improve our knowledge of the spatial distribution of biodiversity and endemism, as the data collected by this method can be integrated into existing data sources to provide a more robust understanding of broad scale patterns of species richness. We explored whether data collected by citizen scientists agree on identifying regions of high avian species richness in a well-studied state. We compiled and examined the number of bird species detected in each of the 77 counties of Oklahoma based on published range maps, museum collections, and by five citizen science methods: the USGS Breeding Bird Survey, the Oklahoma Breeding Bird Atlas, eBird, the Oklahoma Winter Bird Atlas, and National Audubon Society Christmas Bird Counts. We also quantified the number of species of conservation concern recorded by each method in each county. A total of 460 species were reported across the state, with the total number of species detected by each method ranging from 40% of this total (Winter Bird Atlas) to 94% of this total (eBird). In general, species totals were poorly correlated across methods, with only six of 21 combinations (28.6%) showing significant correlations. Total species numbers recorded in each county were correlated with human population density and county area, but not with mean annual temperature or precipitation. The total number of species of conservation concern was correlated with the total number of species detected, county area, and precipitation. Most of the citizen science methods examined in this study were not explicitly designed to identify regions of high biodiversity and so efforts to use these methods for this purpose should be employed only cautiously and with a thorough understanding of potential biases.

REKONSTRUKSI PENDEKATAN COMPLIANCE RISK MANAGEMENT DI MASA PANDEMI DALAM UPAYA PENGUATAN PENERIMAAN PAJAK

The Covid-19 pandemic has resulted in a problematic impact on the revenue budget of many countries, including Indonesia. However, when most tax revenues had decreased, personal income tax (PIT) in Indonesia increased. Based on this fact and using a qualitative approach, our study aims to document and analyze a Compliance Risk Management (CRM) approach used to monitor taxpayer compliance in Indonesia. This study analyzes the CRM policy using policy science methods modified according to the CRM implementation and administration scope. Our analysis was carried out primarily by linking the CRM implementation policy with the Covid-19 situation. This study concludes that tax authorities should consider implementing policy strategies under international best practices by adjusting to the current pandemic situation in Indonesia without sticking to each phase. Based on the available alternatives, the Indonesian tax authority needs to consider reconstructing its interaction with taxpayers. The orientation is to provide a stimulus for taxpayers and stay to control their level of compliance.

“Why Can’t We?” Disinformation and Right to Self-Determination. The Catalan Conflict on Twitter

Disinformation does not always take the form of a fake news item, it also appears in much less evident formats which are subtly filtered into public opinion, thus making its detection more difficult. A method is proposed in this paper to address the study of “widespread” disinformation by combining social science methods with artificial intelligence and text mining. The case study chosen was the expression “right of self-determination” as a generator of disinformation within the context of the Catalan independence process. The main work hypothesis was that the (intentional or unintentional) confusion around the meaning and scope of this right has become widely extended within the population, generating negative emotions which favour social polarisation. The method utilised had three stages: (1) Description of the disinformation elements surrounding the term with the help of experts; (2) Detection of these elements within a corpus of tweets; (3) Identification of the emotions expressed in the corpus. The results show that the disinformation described by experts clearly dominates the conversation about “self-determination” on Twitter and is associated with a highly negative emotional load in which contempt, hatred, and frustration prevail.

Digital Lighthouse Platform: Understanding the Misinformation Phenomenon on WhatsApp

In the past few years, the large-scale dissemination of misinformation through social media has become a critical issue, harming the trustworthiness of legit information, social stability, democracy and public health. In many developing countries such as Brazil, India, and Mexico, one of the primary sources of misinformation is the messaging application WhatsApp. In February 2020, the Panorama Mobile Time/Opinion Box survey on mobile messaging in Brazil revealed that WhatsApp was installed on 99% of Brazilian smartphones. Among users of the application, 98% said they access it every day or almost every day. In this context, WhatsApp provides an important feature: the public groups. Many of these groups have been used to spread misinformation, especially as part of articulated political or ideological campaigns. Despite this scenario, due to WhatsApp's private messaging nature, few methods were explicitly developed to investigate the misinformation phenomenon on this platform. This tutorial provides an overview of recent developments in monitoring misinformation spreading, automatic misinformation detection, and identifying misinformation spreaders. In addition, we provide an overview of the leading open problems associated with the misinformation phenomenon and briefly examine some of the existing solutions. We hope that our tutorial can help researchers better understand Brazil's misinformation propagation and use data science methods to face this critical phenomenon.