Introducing a global planetary ecosystem accounting in the wake of the Amazon Forest fires

Since the 19th century, rapid urbanisation coupled with a demographic boom has increased pressures on the global exploitation of natural resources leading to an array of issues at planetary scale. Even though there have been significant ecologically driven human policy efforts, with frameworks addressing ecosystem accounting and management, such are principally constricted at sub-global levels; being regionally focussed, and hence lacking both cohesivity and accountability. Resource management viewed through this lens leads to a number of geopolitical factors as demonstrated recently with the Amazon Forest fires. This incident witnessed calls from numerous countries calling for rapid remediation even though their own policies are harbingers of equally damaging the environments through other means. This disparity in resource accounting and management on a planetary scale is apparent from diverse local and regional groups and needs to be addressed in order to sustain a truly sustainable and liveable ecosystem and their failures in realising a viable ecosystem accounting system. This perspective paper explores this theme and proposes a ‘Global Planetary Ecosystem Accounting’ system based on the principle that ecologically sensitive areas benefiting the global ecosystem need to be economically weighted and its preservation equated to a revenue-generating activity.

A Surrogate Assisted Multi-objective Approach to Social Work Planning

Planning social tasks are essential jobs of every organization, business, and government. With increasing challenges of society, the organization and effective implementation depend on optimizing the plans of the organization and efficient operations of the professional teams in order, time, and specific requirements. In the context of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on social activities, developing strategies for the organization and operation of working teams in implementing disease prevention, control, and elimination are research issues that should be raised. This paper model the plan to organize and operate the social-mission working group problem with a multi-objective approach. The problem includes organizing and planning the health workforce to perform tasks in epidemic prevention and implementing guidelines of the Ministry of Health under the administration of the government. These pose a requirement to balance resources, medical equipment, and ancillary equipment to perform tasks according to different priority levels: disease prevention; vaccination; sterilization, isolation, treatment by different locations, and time to ensure effectiveness. The problem is modeled by approaching the multi-objective optimization with three objectives: makespan, performance efficiency, and rate of human resource usage. We also propose a guidance technique to improve the surrogate-assisted multi-objective optimization algorithms on analyzing the factors that influence finding solutions and maintain a balance between local exploration and global exploitation. The enhanced algorithms confirm the proposed model for social tasks against the COVID-19 pandemic.

Waiting for robots: the ever-elusive myth of automation and the global exploitation of digital labor

Discourses of robotic replacement and of the end of work have survived to the present day. But more and more voices now challenge the very idea that technological innovation is necessarily conducive to job loss. According to several studies, new high-tech jobs is accompanied by an even bigger low-tech job creation, and AI can be expected to be no exception. Based on new evidence about the role of human-annotated data in machine learning and algorithmic solutions, a new generation of scholars are now studying the germane phenomena of “heteromation”, “automation last mile” or, more simply, platform-based digital labor needed to generate, train, verify, and sometimes modify in real-time huge quantities of examples that machines are supposed to learn from. Digital labor designates datified and taskified human activities. The first type of platform occupation ison-demand labor. The second type of platform-based digital labor ismicrowork. Finally, the third type of digital labor issocial networked labor.

The Mountain Sanctuary of Matzanni in Sardinia: Project Motivations and Preliminary Research Results

The Matzanni Project tracks the role of the large mountain sanctuary of Matzanni-Vallermosa (southwestern Sardinia) in a scalar network from the local to, potentially, the Bronze Age global. Exploitation of metals in the mountainous setting of the sanctuary constitutes a major research focus together with understanding how metal extraction and religion may have intersected.

Mailer, Doctorow, Roth. A Cross-Generational Reading of the American Berserk

Of all American paradoxes, none is greater than this: that the typical American cherishes free speech but is almost mortally offended by public protest, which he regards as at best lacking in taste and at worst an outright crime. A nation founded on dissent, America is exquisitely uncomfortable with ill-mannered disagreement. More than freedom itself, an American is likely to value moral insularity and absolution: he wants to live his life free from ethical challenge. He seeks suburban anesthesia, a life of commercial abundance untroubled by the pain inflicted elsewhere to maintain it, whether through military aggression or the global exploitation of labor. The American hopes to be reminded that he is good and blameless — and quickly condemns his critics as envious or mad or driven by dark agendas. As by an unwritten law, he denounces protest as an offense against his amour propre. This condemnation, ipso facto, makes a figurative criminal of the protester, who, when her efforts are scorned, finds herself not trying to persuade, but acting in a spirit of resentment and self-vindication. She sees any act by her countryman that does not challenge the social system as intolerable evidence of complicity and collaboration. The spirit of compromise vanishes, and the protester risks falling into the attitude described by Philip Roth as “the American berserk.” My address examines this process of polarization through three indispensable American novels of protest: Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night; E.L. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel; and Philip Roth’s American Pastoral.

Transnational Exploitation Cinema in Southeast Asia

Under authoritarian rule, Indonesia and the Philippines developed production systems to facilitate the export of films to the global exploitation and B-grade markets. Framed by the colonial relationship with the United States, independent Filipino producers in the 1950s began working with mostly American partners on diverse low-cost titles. By the 1970s, the Philippines had become the choice location for many foreign co-productions. In Indonesia in the early 1980s, a group of local producers similarly pursued exploitation production for global export as a means to generate income. Production in both countries is framed by the Manila International Film Festivals (1982-1983), which marked Imelda Marcos’s attempt to formalize the co-production industry and make Southeast Asia a new hub for co-production and export.

Political Reconciliation in Light of Global Injustices

This article applies the idea of political reconciliation (and with it the rationale of restorative justice) to current debates on global injustices. My underlying thesis is that the idea of reconciliation fits better to the nonideal circumstances of global exploitation and domination. Originally, political reconciliation defines a transitional process from a state of severe injustice to a state of renewed social peace and cooperation under conditions of serious disagreement and in the absence of a well-ordered social structure. What the theory of political reconciliation has to add to nonideal theorizing is that political stability and unity (both domestically and globally) are to be based on a societal healing process that depends on institutional measures of trust-building, truth telling and forgiveness.

Impact of Seasonal Changes of Precipitation and Air Temperature on Clay Excavation

Excavation of clay soil is one of the most important economic branches in the northern part of Croatia. The impact of clay soil in Croatia compared to the global exploitation fields of clay soil is negligible. Modern methods of clay excavation during winter months due to negligible amounts are not profitable. Therefore, it is important to optimize clay soil excavation throughout the year to increase the efficiency of exploitation and increase profits. In the case of large amounts of precipitation (rain), clay absorbs water and becomes grain. For this reason, access to the exploitation field and excavation itself becomes impossible. Air temperature also plays an important role in excavation. Long-lasting low air temperatures below 0 °C during the winter months result in clay frost. As a result, excavation cannot occur at that time. The paper describes a new method of modeling the precipitation and air temperature on the exploitation fields of clay in Northwest Croatia on the exploitation fields of Cukavec and Cukavec II. The method involves the calculation of the drought index and use of the rescaled adjusted partial sums (RAPS) statistical method and its application on a time series of total daily precipitation and average daily temperatures as a climatic indicator of any observed area. Using this process, it is possible to determine the time period of the year when clay soil can be excavated.

Circuits of Apartheid

This keynote address is about the supply, maintenance and allocation of fungible, vulnerable human bodies—what American President Donald Trump would categorize as the shitholes of the world. Underlying our modern times is a large, unsolved problem about what is really going on in the world. I use the novel theoretical lens of Apartheid Studies to appreciate how we have neglected to read, recognize and call out the persistent circuits of apartheid that are at the heart of global capitalist modernity. Our contemporary age, built on interoperable digital networks, tends to reinforce global forms of apartheid. Apartheid Studies is a new field of studies that makes it possible to expose these circuits. Whereas human beings are human because we all possess a kind of strongly encrypted password which we reserve to give or not to give—so that we feel relatively protected and free to be what we want—this password protection has been eroded by institutions and powerful elites. Modernity itself, by its very nature, emerges when we start to share our passwords with strangers. Passing on the control of the passwords of our being to strangers causes global apartheid. Global capitalist modernity, expressed in invasive technology, generally undermines human beings’ sense of self, immunity, inviolability, indivisibility, and replaces it with social media and an internet of things which are predicated on sharing our privacy with strangers. I propose new emphases on restorative forensics and literacies that are appropriate to the task of generating a scholarship of the future that is ethical and opposed to systemic injustice, that exposes global exploitation, racism, deception, and corruption, and that promotes just worlds.