Writing for the Public/Writing for the Academy: Competing Goals with Uncertain Outcomes

2006 ◽  
Vol 68 (1) ◽  
pp. 108-118
Author(s):  
W. A. V. (William A. V.) Clark
Keyword(s):  
Public Writing ◽  
The Public ◽  
Uncertain Outcomes

scholarly journals Major Risks, Uncertain Outcomes: Making Ensemble Forecasts Work for Multiple Audiences

2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (5) ◽  
pp. 1359-1373 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Hogan Carr ◽  
Burrell Montz ◽  
Kathryn Semmens ◽  
Keri Maxfield ◽  
Samantha Connolly ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Water Resource ◽  
Ensemble Forecasts ◽  
Proper Understanding ◽  
The Public ◽  
Emergency Personnel ◽  
Emergency Managers ◽  
Resource Managers ◽  
Multiple Audiences ◽  
Uncertain Outcomes ◽  
Hydrologic Forecast

Abstract When extreme river levels are possible in a community, effective communication of weather and hydrologic forecasts is critical to protecting life and property. Residents, emergency personnel, and water resource managers need to make timely decisions about how and when to prepare. Uncertainty in forecasting is a critical component of this decision-making, but often poses a confounding factor for public and professional understanding of forecast products. A new suite of products from the National Weather Service’s Hydrologic Ensemble Forecast System (HEFS) provides short- and long-range forecasts, ranging from 6 h to 1 yr, and shows uncertainty in hydrologic forecasts. To understand how various audiences use and interpret ensemble forecasts showing a range of hydrologic forecast possibilities, a research project was conducted using scenario-based focus groups and surveys with community residents, emergency managers, and water resource managers in West Virginia and Maryland. The research assessed the utility of the HEFS products, identified barriers to proper understanding of the products, and suggested modifications to product design that could improve the understandability and accessibility for a range of users. There was a difference between the residential users’ reactions to the HEFS compared to the emergency managers and water resource managers, with the public reacting less favorably to all versions. The emergency managers preferred the revised HEFS products but had suggestions for additional changes, which were incorporated. Features such as interactive text boxes and forecaster’s notes further enhanced the utility and understandability of the products.

HDZ leader could supplant Croatia's non-party premier

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Public Debt ◽  
Social Situation ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Reform Agenda ◽  
The Public ◽  
Nationalist Party ◽  
Ethnic Tensions ◽  
The Government ◽  
Uncertain Outcomes

Significance The package could be the government's swan song. One coalition party, the centre-right Bridge (Croatian: Most) of Independent Lists, strongly supported a reform agenda from the beginning, but Croatia's main nationalist party, the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ), did not. This, in addition to key appointments, has become a major point of dispute between them, blocking decision-making. HDZ leader Tomislav Karamarko has been frustrated in his ambition to control the government and especially the security apparatus. Impacts Political instability could cause further political and ethnic tensions, with uncertain outcomes. Persistent deadlock will worsen Croatia's parlous economic and social situation. Instability could frustrate consolidating Croatia's exit from its six-year recession in 2015 and reducing the public debt from 87% of GDP.

The Emergence and Uncertain Outcomes of Prostitutes' Social Movements

2003 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lilian Mathieu
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Comparative Study ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World ◽  
Uncertain Outcomes ◽  
First Time

This article is a comparative study of five prostitutes' social movements. The emergence of these movements is one of the major developments in the politics of prostitution: for the first time, prostitutes are politically organizing and expressing their claims and grievances in the public debate about prostitution — a debate from which they are usually excluded. But, as is the case for most stigmatized populations, this pretension to enter into the public debate is faced with many difficulties. Some of these are inherent to the world of prostitution, which is an informal, competitive and violent world, in which leaders face constant challenges to establish and maintain their authority and legitimacy. The article also emphasizes the crucial, but ambiguous, role played by alliances between prostitutes and people from other parts of society (especially feminists). Prostitutes' dependence on these supporters leads the author to consider their social movements to be heteronomous mobilizations.

Going to write

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 140-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorenza Mondada
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
Participatory Democracy ◽  
Entire Body ◽  
Multimodal Approach ◽  
Public Writing ◽  
The Public ◽  
Video Recordings

This paper offers a multimodal approach of writing as an embodied interactional action, prefigured by the movements of the entire body, projecting going to write. It considers grassroots participatory democracy meetings as an exemplary setting for studying issues related to writing in public, for the public and on behalf of the public. In this context, a facilitator is in charge of writing down the outcome of the participatory discussion, in a way that is public, transparent and intelligible for the audience. On the basis of extensive video recordings, I study the methodic embodied practices that precede and lead to public writing. The analysis shows that the writing of proposals is contingent on the establishment of an agreement about them: clear agreement is followed by a straight and brisk walk of the facilitator towards the board, projecting the inscription. By contrast, when there are problems in establishing the agreement, his walk is more discontinuous. Finally, in case of persisting disagreement, the walk deploys in very different manners. Thus embodied movements of the facilitator are reflexively related to the agreed upon vs. disagreed status of the proposal that the facilitator is going to inscribe. This demonstrates how writing is strongly projected by walking; and how writing is observably done in a public, transparent, and revisable way as the product of a collective action.

scholarly journals AI under great uncertainty: implications and decision strategies for public policy

AI & Society ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Nordström
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Public Sector ◽  
The Public ◽  
Great Uncertainty ◽  
Potential Applications ◽  
Decision Making Processes ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Uncertain Outcomes ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Public Policy Decisions

AbstractDecisions where there is not enough information for a well-informed decision due to unidentified consequences, options, or undetermined demarcation of the decision problem are called decisions under great uncertainty. This paper argues that public policy decisions on how and if to implement decision-making processes based on machine learning and AI for public use are such decisions. Decisions on public policy on AI are uncertain due to three features specific to the current landscape of AI, namely (i) the vagueness of the definition of AI, (ii) uncertain outcomes of AI implementations and (iii) pacing problems. Given that many potential applications of AI in the public sector concern functions central to the public sphere, decisions on the implementation of such applications are particularly sensitive. Therefore, it is suggested that public policy-makers and decision-makers in the public sector can adopt strategies from the argumentative approach in decision theory to mitigate the established great uncertainty. In particular, the notions of framing and temporal strategies are considered.

scholarly journals Towards Principles and Standards for the Benefit-Cost Analysis of Safety

2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Farrow ◽  
W. Kip Viscusi
Keyword(s):  
Cost Analysis ◽  
Community Of Practice ◽  
Public Safety ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Benefit Cost Analysis ◽  
The Public ◽  
Welfare Measures ◽  
Principles And Standards ◽  
Uncertain Outcomes ◽  
Benefit Cost

Benefit-cost analysis (BCA) is frequently applied to decisions involving public safety which requires analyzing risk and assessing options to manage risks. Principles and standards may assist analysts, decision-makers, and the public in developing and interpreting such BCAs. Principles and standards at best represent commonly held views among a community of practice. Such views are continually evolving with advances in the field. This paper presents a modularized format towards principles and standards that may assist in focusing discussion and decisions about whether such proposals actually reflect principles and standards within the benefit-cost analysis community of practice. Among topics covered are welfare measures, benefit or cost transfer, and valuing uncertain outcomes.

Linguistic warscapes of northern Mali

2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 213-242 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fiona Mc Laughlin
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Recent Period ◽  
Public Writing ◽  
The Public ◽  
Symbolic Control ◽  
Stark Contrast ◽  
Symbolic Construction ◽  
Multiple Languages

In this paper I show that public writing (and its effacement) during a recent period of crisis in northern Mali constituted a powerful tool by which various factions attempted to inscribe political hegemony on the linguistic warscapes of three cities: Gao, Kidal, and Timbuktu. The warscapes of these Saharan cities are linguistically complex: they are written in multiple languages, primarily French, Arabic and Tamasheq, and involve three different scripts, Latin, Arabic and Tifinagh, each of which is associated with a number of ideological stances. Within this context, linguistic warscape becomes more than the symbolic construction of the public space, it becomes symbolic control of the public space. The linguistic warscape of northern Mali stands in stark contrast to the linguistic soundscape which, in addition to Tamasheq, is dominated by languages that rarely or never appear in the LL. This paper shows that in multilingual, multigraphic contexts, LL can only be understood against the backdrop of an entire linguistic ecology and its regimes of literacy.

Replications can cause distorted belief in scientific progress

2018 ◽  
Vol 41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michał Białek
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Scientific Progress ◽  
The Public ◽  
Psychological Science

AbstractIf we want psychological science to have a meaningful real-world impact, it has to be trusted by the public. Scientific progress is noisy; accordingly, replications sometimes fail even for true findings. We need to communicate the acceptability of uncertainty to the public and our peers, to prevent psychology from being perceived as having nothing to say about reality.

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