Do Europeans like nudges? Reisch, Lucia A.; Sunstein, Cass R.
Judgment and Decision Making,
07/2016, Letnik:
11, Številka:
4
Journal Article
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Abstract
In recent years, many governments have shown a keen interest in “nudges” — approaches to law and policy that maintain freedom of choice, but that steer people in certain directions. Yet to ...date, there has been little evidence on whether citizens of various societies support nudges and nudging. We report the results of nationally representative surveys in six European nations: Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, and the United Kingdom. We find strong majority support for nudges of the sort that have been adopted, or under serious consideration, in democratic nations. Despite the general European consensus, we find markedly lower levels of support for nudges in two nations: Hungary and Denmark. We are not, in general, able to connect support for nudges with distinct party affiliations.
Abstract
Academic freedom is under threat across the globe and a wave of substantial academic freedom declines affects not only autocracies but also (liberal) democracies. However, although the ...development of academic freedom has generated scholarly attention, this article presents the first systematic conceptualization and measurement of academic freedom growth and decline episodes. In particular, this article systematically analyzes the development of academic freedom across the globe and shows that global development follows waves of growth and decline. The first growth wave started in the mid-1940s and was succeeded by a second growth wave that started around 1977 and lasted for more than 30 years resulting in the greatest improvement in academic freedom that has been recorded since 1900. However, since 2013, we see an ongoing decline wave in academic freedom. Overall, this article highlights how academic freedom developed over time and across the globe in waves of growth and decline.
Conventional wireless communication architecture, a backbone of our modern society, relies on actively generated carrier signals to transfer information, leading to important challenges including ...limited spectral resources and energy consumption. Backscatter communication systems, on the other hand, modulate an antenna's impedance to encode information into already existing waves but suffer from low data rates and a lack of information security. Here, we introduce the concept of massive backscatter communication which modulates the propagation environment of stray ambient waves with a programmable metasurface. The metasurface's large aperture and huge number of degrees of freedom enable unprecedented wave control and thereby secure and high-speed information transfer. Our prototype leveraging existing commodity 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi signals achieves data rates on the order of hundreds of Kbps. Our technique is applicable to all types of wave phenomena and provides a fundamentally new perspective on the role of metasurfaces in future wireless communication.
We explore the country-specific institutional characteristics likely to influence an individual's decision to become an entrepreneur. We focus on the size of the government, on freedom from ...corruption and on "market freedom" defined as a cluster of variables related to protection of property rights and regulation. We test these relationships by combining country-level institutional indicators for 47 countries with working-age population survey data taken from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor. Our results indicate that entrepreneurial entry is inversely related to the size of the government, and more weakly to the extent of corruption. A cluster of institutional indicators representing "market freedom" is only significant in some specifications. Freedom from corruption is significantly related to entrepreneurial entry, especially when the richest countries are removed from the sample, but unlike the size of government, the results on corruption are not confirmed by country-level fixed-effects models.
•The application of the multiple-degrees-of-freedom (multi-DOF) soft actuators based on dielectric elastomer in driving the locomotion of a hexapod walking robot is presented in this paper.•The ...actuator performances are significantly enhanced by replacing the synthetic elastomer with the novel mixed silicone compound, Wacker P7670 and Nusil CF2-2186, and applying the optimized prestrain to the silicone-based actuator membranes.•The hexapod robot’s fabrication process is implemented using 3D printing technology which provides the lightweight, scalable, and easy-to-manufacture characteristic of the robot.•A theoretically and experimentally comprehensive study is carried out to investigate the soft actuators performances in terms of linear displacements, deflection angle, output force, torque, dynamic response, and load carrying capability.•The hexapod robot’s locomotion on flat rigid surfaces with the forward and backward walking movements at an average speed of 3cm/s (about 12 body-lengths/min) using the alternating tripod walking gait of insects is successfully demonstrated.
In this paper, we present the development of a printable hexapod walking robot driven by the multiple-degrees-of-freedom (multi-DOF) soft actuators based on dielectric elastomer. The multi-DOF soft actuators are employed to provide versatile movements including two translations and single rotation within a simple structure based on the antagonistic configuration of two elastomer membranes. The soft actuators demonstrate the potential of being used as a multifunctional joint to actuate the robot leg’s motion which biologically mimics the animal’s walking posture. The actuator performances are enhanced by developing the novel mixed silicone compound, Wacker P7670 and Nusil CF2-2186, and applying the optimized prestrain to the silicone-based actuator membranes. A theoretically and experimentally comprehensive study was carried out to investigate the soft actuators performances in terms of linear displacements, deflection angle, output force, torque, dynamic response, and load carrying capability. We successfully demonstrated the robot’s locomotion on the flat rigid surfaces with the forward and backward walking movements at an average speed of 3cm/s (about 12 body-lengths/min) using the alternating tripod walking gait of insects.
We previously proposed that socioeconomic status (SES) is a fundamental cause of health inequalities and, as such, that SES inequalities in health persist over time despite radical changes in the ...diseases, risks, and interventions that happen to produce them at any given time. Like SES, race in the United States has an enduring connection to health and mortality. Our goals here are to evaluate whether this connection endures because systemic racism is a fundamental cause of health inequalities and, in doing so, to review a wide range of empirical data regarding racial differences in health outcomes, health risks, and health-enhancing resources such as money, knowledge, power, prestige, freedom, and beneficial social connections. We conclude that racial inequalities in health endure primarily because racism is a fundamental cause of racial differences in SES and because SES is a fundamental cause of health inequalities. In addition to these powerful connections, however, there is evidence that racism, largely via inequalities in power, prestige, freedom, neighborhood context, and health care, also has a fundamental association with health independent of SES.
Confronted with a situation that was new to everyone, world leaders sought the best way to contain the pandemic caused by the coronavirus. The measures introduced, with lockdowns and curfews, ...affected fundamental rights such as freedom of movement and assembly, with implications for freedom of expression and freedom of the press. Demonstrations against the governments’ COVID-19 policies and the associated encroachments on citizens’ fundamental rights in turn led to attacks on media representatives and thus on the freedom of reporting. They were also further proof that attacks on the freedom of the media no longer come only from the state. The restrictions on journalistic work were by no means a surprise attack on the media, but the continuation of a worldwide trend that has been evident for several years, not only in authoritarian systems, but also in established democracies. For those who fear the free press and its watchdog function, the pandemic provided a welcome opportunity, under the pretext of public health, to tighten the reins a bit more and create facts that will endure beyond the pandemic. Financial support for the media, especially the printed press, to cushion the economic consequences of the pandemic and to secure newspapers for the future, establishes new dependencies that can affect free reporting in the long term.
Dehkhoda is one of Iran's most influential literary political elites in the constitutional era. He has dealt with the most important political issues of Iran's constitution in the course of many ...years, with a powerful pen and a penetrating view. Among the literate and the cultural, at least, there was at least one person who was as knowledgeable as the Dehkhoda who knew the status quo in both thought and action. Understanding his important political ideas, beyond his literary and cultural personality, plays an important role in the proper understanding of constitutionalism. He was a full-fledged "progressive" who had a national and Iranian view of the important feature of his valuable vocabulary. On the basis of this rise, he regarded constitutionalism as a positive, legal, libertarian political system, and in the negative sense defined it as an antithesis of "despotism". Dehkhoda must be regarded as a continuation of the early intellectuals of the Qajar era, who go beyond them and move towards a different understanding and understanding. This article seeks to explain Dehkhoda's understanding of constitutionalism, given her place in modern Iranian intellectual history.
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