Public Acceptability of Low Emission Zones: The Case of “Madrid Central”

Cities have intensified the adoption of Low Emission Zones (LEZs) to improve urban livability. Despite the high social controversy caused by LEZs in many cities, the scientific literature has paid little attention to study their public acceptability. This paper conducts a modelling approach exploring the impact of four groups of variables on the public acceptability of LEZs: (i) socio-economic and demographic characteristics; (ii) personal attitudes; (iii) travel-related variables; and (iv) perceptions and mobility habits linked to LEZs. The city of Madrid, Spain, is a case study of great interest because a LEZ called “Madrid Central” has been recently implemented. A total of 799 individual questionnaires were used to calibrate an ordered logit model. Results indicate that socio-economic and demographic variables are weakly related to the level of public acceptability towards the LEZ. On the contrary, the political ideology of individuals, their environmental awareness, their primary transport mode, the use of shared mobility systems, and the frequency of access to “Madrid Central” have a higher explanatory power. The results may be useful for policy-makers to understand the factors that increase the public acceptability of LEZs.

Towards a Framework for Acquisition and Analysis of Speeches to Identify Suspicious Contents through Machine Learning

The most prominent form of human communication and interaction is speech. It plays an indispensable role for expressing emotions, motivating, guiding, and cheering. An ill-intentioned speech can mislead people, societies, and even a nation. A misguided speech can trigger social controversy and can result in violent activities. Every day, there are a lot of speeches being delivered around the world, which are quite impractical to inspect manually. In order to prevent any vicious action resulting from any misguided speech, the development of an automatic system that can efficiently detect suspicious speech has become imperative. In this study, we have presented a framework for acquisition of speech along with the location of the speaker, converting the speeches into texts and, finally, we have proposed a system based on long short-term memory (LSTM) which is a variant of recurrent neural network (RNN) to classify speeches into suspicious and nonsuspicious. We have considered speeches of Bangla language and developed our own dataset that contains about 5000 suspicious and nonsuspicious samples for training and validating our model. A comparative analysis of accuracy among other machine learning algorithms such as logistic regression, SVM, KNN, Naive Bayes, and decision tree is performed in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the system. The experimental results show that our proposed deep learning-based model provides the highest accuracy compared to other algorithms.

Science Citation Index (SCI) and scientific evaluation system in China

In February 2020, China’s Ministry of Education and Ministry of Science and Technology issued an official Opinion discouraging the use of the Science Citation Index (SCI) as a framework for the assessment of research performance. There is a need to assess the origin of the new policy, and how it will reshape cultures and practices of scientific knowledge production in China. We suggest that while concerns over the quality of research and conduct of scientists are at play, a deeper reason underlying the government’s adoption of a more cautious stance towards SCI is wider social controversy around what system of research assessment is best suited to social development and wellbeing in China. However, failing to continue to engage in international publication and collaboration would be self-defeating for China. We propose three recommendations for reforming scientific evaluation in China: diversity of criteria, autonomy of scientific evaluation, and quality of peer-review.

The Cycle of Verbal Violence Among Nurse Colleagues in South Korea

In Korea, suicide by nurses due to workplace verbal violence has become a serious social controversy. This study used a descriptive survey to identify factors influencing nurses’ experiences with being either victims or perpetrators of verbal violence among colleagues. Participants were 205 nurses working at large-scale general hospitals in D city in August 2019. Data were collected through standardized questionnaires on experiences of verbal violence, committing acts of verbal violence, demographic characteristics, and job stress. For experiences of verbal violence, statistically significant differences were observed in age, gender, and nightshift work. Committing acts of verbal violence showed statistically significant differences in age, gender, entire career experience, career experience in one’s present division, and nightshift work. A significant correlation was found between experiences of verbal violence, committing acts of verbal violence, and job stress. Gender and nightshift work influenced experiences of verbal violence in Model 1, while gender, nightshift work, and relationship conflicts were extracted in Model 2. In Model 3, career experience and committing acts of verbal violence were found to be significant. For committing acts of verbal violence, gender, nightshift work, and career experience were extracted in Model 1; gender, nightshift work, and relationship conflict were extracted in Model 2; and nightshift work, career experience, and experiences of verbal violence were significant in Model 3. Regarding verbal violence among nurses, a vicious cycle caused by job stress exists, in which newly hired nurses are often victims of verbal violence; however, as they gain career experience, they become the perpetrators. Therefore, to reduce nurses’ job stress, it is necessary to operate job stress-control programs by career level, promote conversations among nurses to increase understanding of each other, and build a culture of mutual respect.

The Law and Ethics of Switching from Biologic to Biosimilar in Canada

Governments and financial institutions in several jurisdictions are planning or implementing nonmedical/‘forced’ switches by cutting drug coverage for reference biologics and funding only less expensive biosimilars. Switches raise numerous ethical and legal challenges, as the drugs are framed as not being identical and, despite strong evidence for noninferiority of some biosimilars, there is controversy over whether switching can sometimes lead to adverse events. Canadian law generally requires physicians to give precedence to their patients’ best interests over social interests such as cost containment. The primacy of patients’ interests is also clearly reflected in professional policies and codes of ethics. Moreover, physicians are obligated to disclose everything a reasonable person in the patient’s position would want to know when obtaining informed consent for treatment, including addressing not only scientific information but also relevant social controversy about nonmedical switches. Under Canadian law, physicians may be obligated to tell patients about the ability to access unfunded biologics, even if patients lack the resources to obtain them. In sum, while there is no inherent right to funding for reference biologics in Canada, physicians in some circumstances may have a legal obligation as fiduciaries to advocate on behalf of patients to remain on a reference biologic. At a minimum, the controversy surrounding switching will necessitate, as part of the consent process, a robust and thorough disclosure of relevant risks, benefits and reasonable alternatives.

The Contours of Social Criticism in Late-Socialist Slovenia

Self-management socialism displayed ambiguities and vagueness in handling social controversy and public life in general, giving rise to numerous peculiarities particular to this social phenomenon in Yugoslavia. While a Leninist interpretation of democracy in socialism constituted the background of Edvard Kardelj’s recipe for “socially responsible criticism,” Yugoslavia and Slovenia were at the same time under the influence of western liberal concepts. Considering the political and ideological contexts of late socialism, the article discusses the systemic way of dealing with social criticism between the late 1960s and the mid-1980s, while trying to determine the impact of these circumstances on the subsequent evolvement of democratisation. Prior to the major social shifts of the second half of the 1980s, the “pluralism of self-management interests” could be articulated in practice primarily in a way that did not force it into competition with the Party. In those cases when this nevertheless occurred, the leading political establishment preferred to leave it to its “proxies” to deal with the transgressors, while itself taking on arbitrary positions that displayed some of the key features of the late-socialist regime in Slovenia.

DIVING IN MAGMA: HOW TO EXPLORE CONTROVERSIES USING ACTOR-NETWORK THEORY

Controversy mapping is a set of techniques for exploring and visualizing issues. It was developed by Bruno Latour as a didactic version of actor-network theory to train college students in the investigation of contemporary social and technical debate. However, the scope and interest of this mapping extend beyond its didactic origin. Controversy mapping was conceived as a toolkit to cope with increasing hybridization and as an attempt to follow disputes when they cut across disciplinary boundaries. This mapping should be applied far beyond the limits of sociology, not only to allied humanities but also to the much more distant domains of the natural sciences. According to controversy mapping, the frames of reference of researchers are never unbiased. Some of them may offer a broader or clearer overview of social landscapes, but no observation can escape its origins. Objectivity may be attained only by multiplying the points of observation. The more numerous and partial are the perspectives from which a phenomenon is considered, the more objective and impartial its observation will be. Although controversy mapping is unfortunately not much documented, it is today a full-fledged research method that has been adopted and developed in several universities in Europe and the US. To correct the lack of documentation, the author draws on his experience as Latour’s teaching assistant to introduce some of the main techniques in the social controversy mapping toolkit. In particular, the article focusses on exploration, leaving a discussion of visualization tools for a subsequent paper.

After the Flood

Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005, killing over 1,000 people and displacing over 1 million. As the rebuilding process began, musicians, Mardi Gras Indians, and Social Aid and Pleasure Club members began trickling back. Culture prevailed as politics failed. The life force of music and memory, determined to survive, came back to the shattered city. The hurricane wasn’t the only devastating force: the city had undertaken many urban development projects in Tremé throughout the second half of the 20th century, demolishing historical areas and displacing people. New Orleans has also long suffered from government corruption, and several politicians were arrested throughout the 2000s. Yet hope and vibrancy abound. The 2014 funeral for Larry Bannock, Big Chief of the Golden Starhunters, drew a large gathering of black Indians in a magnificent cultural spectacle. Amidst much political and social controversy, Mayor Mitch Landrieu removed the Robert E. Lee statue from the city in 2017. As New Orleans begins its fourth century, it faces issues of gun violence, poverty, and gentrification, but opportunities from a flourishing digital economy, resurgent music scene, and cultural mecca as well. It is still the vibrant, diverse society composed of people whose roots lie across the world, whose resilience has been a rudder through the storms and violent upheavals throughout the centuries.