Living shorelines are a type of estuarine shoreline erosion control that incorporates native vegetation and preserves native habitats. Because they provide the ecosystem services associated with ...natural coastal wetlands while also increasing shoreline resilience, living shorelines are part of the natural and hybrid infrastructure approach to coastal resiliency. Marshes created as living shorelines are typically narrow (< 30 m) fringing marshes with sandy substrates that are well flushed by tides. These characteristics distinguish living shorelines from the larger meadow marshes in which most of the current knowledge about created marshes was developed. The value of living shorelines for providing both erosion control and habitat for estuarine organisms has been documented but their capacity for carbon sequestration has not. We measured carbon sequestration rates in living shorelines and sandy transplanted Spartina alterniflora marshes in the Newport River Estuary, North Carolina. The marshes sampled here range in age from 12 to 38 years and represent a continuum of soil development. Carbon sequestration rates ranged from 58 to 283 g C m-2 yr-1 and decreased with marsh age. The pattern of lower sequestration rates in older marshes is hypothesized to be the result of a relative enrichment of labile organic matter in younger sites and illustrates the importance of choosing mature marshes for determination of long-term carbon sequestration potential. The data presented here are within the range of published carbon sequestration rates for S. alterniflora marshes and suggest that wide-scale use of the living shoreline approach to shoreline management may come with a substantial carbon benefit.
The collapsing of social contexts together has emerged as an important topic with the rise of social media that so often blurs the public and private, professional and personal, and the many ...different selves and situations in which individuals find themselves. Academic literature is starting to address how the meshing of social contexts online has many potentially beneficial as well as problematic consequences. In an effort to further theorize context collapse, we draw on this literature to consider the conditions under which context collapse occurs, offering key conceptual tools with which to address these conditions. Specifically, we distinguish two different types of context collapse, splitting collapse into context collusions and context collisions. The former is an intentional collapsing of contexts, while the latter is unintentional. We further examine the ways in which both technological architectures and agentic user practices combine to facilitate and mitigate the various effects of collapsing contexts.
WEIRD populations, or those categorized as Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic, are sampled in the majority of quantitative human subjects research. Although this oversampling is ...criticized in some corners of social science research, it is not always clear what we are critiquing. In this article, we make three interventions into the WEIRD concept and its common usage. First, we seek to better operationalize the terms within WEIRD to avoid erasing people with varying identities who also live within WEIRD contexts. Second, we name whiteness as the factor that most strongly unites WEIRD research and researchers yet typically goes unacknowledged. We show how reflexivity is a tool that can help social scientists better understand the effects of whiteness within the scientific enterprise. Third, we look at the positionality of biological anthropology, as not cultural anthropology and not psychology, and how that offers both promise and pitfalls to the study of human variation. We offer other perspectives on what constitutes worthy and rigorous biological anthropology research that does not always prioritize replicability and statistical power, but rather emphasizes the full spectrum of the human experience. From here, we offer several ways forward to produce more inclusive human subjects research, particularly around existing methodologies such as grounded theory, Indigenous methodologies, and participatory action research, and call on biological anthropology to contribute to our understanding of whiteness.
Systems based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) are increasingly normalized as part of work, leisure, and governance in contemporary societies. Although ethics in AI has received significant attention, ...it remains unclear where the burden of responsibility lies. Through twenty-one interviews with AI practitioners in Australia, this research seeks to understand how ethical attributions figure into the professional imagination. As institutionally embedded technical experts, AI practitioners act as a connective tissue linking the range of actors that come in contact with, and have effects upon, AI products and services. Findings highlight that practitioners distribute ethical responsibility across a range of actors and factors, reserving a portion of responsibility for themselves, albeit constrained. Characterized by imbalances of decision-making power and technical expertise, practitioners position themselves as mediators between powerful bodies that set parameters for production; users who engage with products once they leave the proverbial workbench; and AI systems that evolve and develop beyond practitioner control. Distributing responsibility throughout complex sociotechnical networks, practitioners preclude simple attributions of accountability for the social effects of AI. This indicates that AI ethics are not the purview of any singular player but instead, derive from collectivities that require critical guidance and oversight at all stages of conception, production, distribution, and use.
Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies pervade myriad decision systems, mobilising data at a scale, speed, and scope that far exceed human capacities. Although it may be tempting to displace ...humans with these automated decision systems, doing so in high-stakes settings would be a mistake. Anchored by the example of states' resort to force, I argue that human expertise should be elevated-not relegated-within high-stakes decision contexts that incorporate AI tools. This argument builds from an empirical reality in which defence institutions increasingly rely on and invest in AI capabilities, an active debate about how (and if) humans should figure into automated decision loops, and a socio-technical landscape marked by both promise and peril. The argument proceeds through a primary claim about the amplified relevance of expert humans in light of AI, underpinned by the assumed risks of omitting human experts, together motivating a tripartite call to action. The position presented herein speaks directly to the military domain, but also generalises to a broader worldbuilding project that preserves humanism amidst suffusive AI.
Curation: a theoretical treatment Davis, Jenny L.
Information, communication & society,
05/2017, Letnik:
20, Številka:
5
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Curation is a key mechanism of sociality in a digital era. With an abundance of information, sifting, sorting, selecting, hiding, and standing out become laborious tasks. While researchers have ...diligently documented people's curatorial strategies, digital curation remains undertheorized in its own right. I therefore theorize digital curation by disentangling productive curation from consumptive curation, addressing how people curate content that they share, and that which they consume. I embed these agentic curatorial practices within structural bounds, both social and technological. In doing so, I offer a basic theoretical model that captures a dynamic relationship between individual curators, their social networks, and technological design.
For parents of children with disabilities, stigmatization is part of everyday life. To resist the negative social and emotional consequences of stigma, parents both challenge and deflect social ...devaluations. Challenges work to upend the stigmatizing structure, while deflections maintain the interaction order. We examine how parents of children with disabilities deploy deflections and challenges, and how their stigma resistance strategies combine with available models of disability discourse. Disability discourse falls into two broad categories: medical and social. The medical model emphasizes diagnostic labels and treats impairment as an individual deficit, while the social model centralizes unaccommodating social structures. The social model's activist underpinnings make it a logical frame for parents to use as they challenge disability stigma. In turn, the medical model's focus on individual “improvement” seems to most closely align with stigma deflections. However, the relationship between stigma resistance strategies and models of disability is an empirical question not yet addressed in the literature. In this study, we examine 117 instances of stigmatization from 40 interviews with 43 parents, and document how parents respond. We find that challenges and deflections do not map cleanly onto the social or medical models. Rather, parents invoke medical and social meanings in ways that serve diverse ends, sometimes centralizing a medical label to challenge stigma, and sometimes recognizing disabling social structures, but deflecting stigma nonetheless.
•We interview 43 parents of children with disabilities.•We analyze parents' descriptions of stigmatization.•Parents flexibly entwine medical and social understandings of disability.•Medical and social meanings serve diverse forms of stigma management.•Stigma encounters reveal a novel synthesis between disability and stigma studies.
Research shows a clear intersection between humor and political communication online as “big data” analyses demonstrate humorous content achieving disproportionate attention across social media ...platforms. What remains unclear is the degree to which politics are fodder for “silly” content production vis-à-vis humor as a serious political tool. To answer this question, we scraped Twitter data from two cases in which humor and politics converged during the 2016 US presidential election: Hillary Clinton referring to Trump supporters as a “basket of deplorables” and Donald Trump calling Hillary Clinton a “nasty woman” during a televised debate. Taking a “small data” approach, we find funny content enacting meaningful political work including expressions of opposition, political identification, and displays of civic support. Furthermore, comparing humor style between partisan cases shows the partial-but incomplete-breakdown of humor’s notoriously firm boundaries. Partisan patterns reveal that the meeting of humor and social media leave neither unchanged.
Collective Social Identity Davis, Jenny L.; Love, Tony P.; Fares, Phoenicia
Social psychology quarterly,
09/2019, Letnik:
82, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Identity theory (IT) and social identity theory (SIT) are eminent research programs from sociology and psychology, respectively. We test collective identity as a point of convergence between the two ...programs. Collective identity is a subtheory of SIT that pertains to activist identification. Collective identity maps closely onto identity theory’s group/social identity, which refers to identification with socially situated identity categories. We propose conceptualizing collective identity as a type of group/social identity, integrating activist collectives into the identity theory model. We test this conceptualization by applying identity theory hypotheses to the “vegan” identity, which is both a social category and part of an active social movement. Data come from comments on two viral YouTube videos about veganism. One video negates prevailing meanings of the vegan identity. A response video brings shared vegan identity meanings back into focus. Identity theory predicts that nonverifying identity feedback elicits negative emotion and active behavioral response, while identity verification elicits positive emotion and an attenuated behavioral response. We test these tenets using sentiment analysis and word counts for comments across the two videos. Results show support for identity theory hypotheses as applied to a collective social identity. We supplement results with qualitative analysis of video comments. The findings position collective identity as a bridge between IT and SIT, demonstrate innovative digital methods, and provide theoretical scaffolding for mobilization research in light of emergent technologies and diverse modes of activist participation.
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