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This project interrogates the United States' national fixation on the answer to the question: Who are you? In this article, it is posed that identity documentation practices arising out of the Chinese Exclusion Act era cast identity as an empirical and immutable phenomenon, specifically in response to the racialization of American-born Chinese settlers as duplicitous, through the mechanisms that information is collected, the actual information itself, and the cross-references or connections created between cases. Through tracing this lineage, racialized identification data is identified and theorized as part of hegemonic data regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study proposes a Fuzzy Data Envelopment Analysis (FDEA) approach for analyzing the performance of 8 selected paper mills of India. The proposed approach named FDEA considers the use of fuzzy weights in the objective function and makes use of alpha cut to decide the fuzzy interval. The efficiency of paper mills is evaluated based on 3 input parameters (raw material, energy consumption, and water consumption) and 4 output parameters (paper production, Biochemical Oxygen Demand (BOD), Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD) and Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions). Further, this paper also analyzes the effect of negative outputs, like BOD, COD, and GHG on the efficiency of paper mills. The study indicates that FDEA can be used efficiently for evaluating the performance of a particular sector under similar conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an overview and mapping of needs and use of data related to formal risk analysis within the context of critical infrastructures, including activities of risk assessments and risk modelling as a part of preventive work against major accidents and crises. The aim is to contribute to a greater understanding of the type of data that is actually used in published sources where different risk assessment or risk analysis methods are applied for critical infrastructure protection. The study focuses specifically on the presentation of applications of quantitative or semi-quantitative risk analysis in the scientific literature within the domain of societally important services and critical infrastructures. The survey was delimited to peer reviewed research papers between the years 2010 and 2020 and resulted in a total number of 183 papers subject for evaluation. The results provide insights into the type of data that is used, missing or difficult to obtain for an application of the identified methods. To obtain a comprehensive critical infrastructure risk analysis data needs are related to three different data dimensions; geospatial topology data, socio-economic data, and infrastructure data. However, no databases are currently available with the explicit purpose to support critical infrastructure risk analysis. Even though this is not viewed as a problem in the examined papers, collecting that data is resource intensive which is a barrier for a more systematic use of formal risk analysis methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although many contemporary demographers pay attention to historical demography, there is often a surprising lack of appreciation of the demographic circumstances and systems of the past, suggesting an implicit assumption that they are not relevant to the present or that the methods, data, and questions addressed by historical and contemporary demographers are different. This paper provides an overview of historical demography as published in Population Studies and how this has developed over time. Drawing on this, I demonstrate that historical and contemporary demography use similar data sources and identical methods, and they often address comparable questions. I argue that an appreciation of demographic patterns and processes is beneficial for all demographers, even those who work on the most recent time periods, and that better integration of historical and contemporary demography would be beneficial to both. The paper also considers three challenges for historical demography as it moves forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From our current vantage point, Michael Goodchild's (1992) game-changing ‘Geographical Information Science’ paper roughly bisects the history of our field from its beginnings in the1960s to the present. This makes it an appropriate landmark around which to organize some reflections on the evolution of geographic information science, and more particularly on Goodchild's role in the developments that have defined it these past 20 years. The focus here is on intellectual leadership rather than on any direct scholarly contributions, though scholarship provides the backbone of the narrative. The clearly spelled out research agenda that lies at the core of the 1992 paper and a handful of subsequent essays greatly facilitate that task. This paper explores different facets of Goodchild's leadership in sections titled ‘Naming’, ‘Adapting’, ‘Accepting’, ‘Persevering’, ‘Educating’, and finally, ‘Leading’, and provides evidence that, like any other science, geographic information science is a social as well as an intellectual enterprise. An aspect of the social function of intellectual leadership is that Goodchild's continuing role as agenda-setter for the diverse field of geographic information science goes well beyond generating disciples and followers; it also stimulates dialectic responses from researchers coming from quite different perspectives, thus contributing to the broadening and deepening of the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the past decade, there has been a surge in auditing research that exploits Chinese data, much of which is published in top tier journals. China has been an attractive setting for auditing research due to the highly granular nature of the available data on public audits and the unique features of Chinese institutions. These advantages have allowed researchers to use Chinese data to study important auditing questions that US data is unable to address. But the popularity of Chinese data among researchers means that most of the obvious questions that lend themselves to the use of Chinese data are likely to be exhausted. In addition, newly mandated disclosures in the US and Europe are quickly making Chinese data much less unique than it used to be. Now that the "low hanging fruit" is gone, researchers who plan to use Chinese data will have to be more creative. This paper suggests some strategies, going forward, that are designed to further exploit the richness of Chinese data to address important questions in the auditing literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that a data-driven, niche-focused approach to strategy development will assist Higher Education Institutions to direct their financial resources to greater effect by providing a more tailored service to students, therefore, increasing student satisfaction and creating brand loyalty. This approach will give institutions greater stability and prosperity in a constantly changing market. It is, however, the cultural risks which remain the biggest barrier to trying this approach in the UK and this paper aims to open the debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relating electoral laws to electoral integrity has long been a focus of academic research. Using the strategic-relational approach, as outlined in this special issue, it is possible to better understand how electoral laws shape the voter experience and electoral outcomes. This paper contributes to this understanding by looking at Voter Identification (ID) laws. With no consolidated dataset of voter ID laws existing outside the U.S.A. it is difficult to answer research questions put forward in this special issue, especially the second. This paper begins to address this shortfall by presenting the Comparative Voter ID Law (CVIL) index. Which has collected data on 246 individual electoral jurisdictions. Data presented show how voter ID laws are distributed globally, regionally, by regime type and level of democracy. The second part of the analysis goes on to describe voter ID laws by whether a jurisdiction has compulsory ID laws, how many different types of ID are accepted and the minimum number of ID documents that must be shown. Thirdly, other variables within the dataset are described. The CVIL will provide opportunities to understand how Voter ID laws are part of institutional design, are used by actors, shape the voter experience and electoral out-comes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the position of migration in population studies, focusing on the period 1996–2021. It considers the reasons why migration remains problematic for demographers, but also how approaches to migration have changed over the last 25 years. While it has arguably become more important to both demography and population studies because of the transition to low fertility and mortality, migration has metamorphosed into a complex field in its own right, almost independently from changes in demography. Both internal and international migration form the subject of this examination and four main themes are pursued: data and measurement; theories and approaches; migration and development; and migration and political demography. The papers published in the journal Population Studies are used to provide a mirror through which to view these changes over the last 25 years. This paper concludes by looking at likely future directions in migration studies, demography, and population studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the increased use of data in the governance of education, studies on how human beings interact with data become increasingly important. Recent scholarship has conceptualized human responses to data through the notion of affectivity. While this conceptualization offers a viable alternative to previous rational choice theorizations of human responses to data that over-emphasize rational though, it in turn under-emphasizes rational thought. This paper theorizes human responses to data as a matter of being set in motion by data, a term that includes rational thought, affect, and other responses. Through the philosophy of agential realism and an empirical analysis of various actors engaging with Danish graduate unemployment data, the paper elaborates how data and human beings (among other entities) intra-act and how human beings are affected by data, both in terms of what the data articulate and in terms of a code of conduct for dealing with data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a collaborative effort between academic researchers and practitioners to consider the conditions under which global benchmarking may be used as a tool for supporting urban transformation. Reflecting on WWF's One Planet City Challenge and UN-Habitat's Guiding Principles for City Climate Action Planning, the paper suggests that the practice of global benchmarking can be transformative through encouraging organisational learning and reflection, building relationships between cities and global and trans-local organisations, and governing for structurally transformative qualities. However, the practice of benchmarking is not without potential tensions: they may reify existing practices rather than reforming them, be less usable for or accessible to cities in lower income countries, and may neglect issues of climate justice, which are not easily reduced to comparative measures of success or failure. This suggests that a wholesale reliance on benchmarking as a mode of governing climate change might risk marginalising certain issues and amplifying others. We conclude by recommending improved material and technical support for urban data collection and suggest that benchmarking should be combined with a broader suite of performance indicators and reflective practices in order to support urban transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the subjectivation of students in light of the increasing amounts of digital data that are now being produced within schools. Taking a lead from critical data studies and the sociology of numbers, the paper draws on staff interviews in three Australian secondary schools to explore the various types of student data being generated, and the forms of student subjectivities that result. In particular, the paper contrasts the 'holistic' possibilities that some school leaders and administrators ascribe to data in terms of expanding the capacity to 'know' students, against the limited ways that data is actually being used within the schools. Most notably, the paper details how digital data appears to be configured within schools' official data procedures and practices to build student subjectivities and position students in narrow terms of performance and attendance. The paper also highlights how teachers make practical use of these limited data 'profiles' in a relational manner – as a way of stimulating dialogue with students to know them better, rather than a source of precise calculation. In this sense, the paper considers how 'data' might be reframed in educational discourse as a practical starting-point for teacher inquiry and professional judgment rather than an imagined source of all-encompassing knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores how Generative AI intersects with Competition Law, focusing on Foundation Models (FMs) and Large Language Models (LLMs). It examines industry dynamics and identifies key competition issues like entry barriers, tying, leveraging, and acquisitions. It highlights the supply chain's importance and looks at how FMs are integrated into search software, chatbots, and productivity tools, particularly noting entry barriers such as computing power and data collection. It suggests that FMs might require new approaches to market delineation, possibly creating a separate relevant market for data. The paper also discusses various cases pertaining to tying and leveraging and highlights the difficulty in proving tying due to the blurred lines between traditional search engines and AI chatbots. It illustrates how competition assessments for acquisitions may require changes due to data being a highly flexible commodity for the industry. The paper concludes by calling for increased scrutiny and regulation for the industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sport has undergone a data revolution. The unrelenting extraction of athlete data has become a topic of controversy and the focus of recent public campaigns and policy proposals. However, research and governance are lagging in addressing the full scope and complexity of sport's data ecosystem and the commercial assemblage involved in the generation and subsequent exploitation of athlete data. This paper examines the need to move beyond the current emphasis on the role and use of data as a product of situated surveillance practices in the sporting workplace to the capitalist orientation at the centre of a burgeoning data economy. In so doing, two interdependent theoretical concepts – surveillance culture and surveillance capitalism – are introduced as an analytical framework to shape future research, policy and debate aimed at understanding and protecting the rights of athletes in the light of their exposure to highly surveillant digital technologies used in the production of elite performance, and sport as a multi-mediated form of consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In machine learning literature, the concept of expression is seldom addressed as a general term in relation to information construction and data. The term more often carries a narrower meaning and refers to human bodily, emotional, or artistic dimensions that are recorded to train a model. However, this paper discusses a view in which expression is understood as any human sensory realm that can bring incidents explicit through the act of "pressing out," as the early etymology of expression indicates. Also, all the sensory data that are used to train a machine learning model and the data the trained model gives as an output are considered meaningful through their expressive mediality—a form that is actively produced and can therefore be subjected to critical phenomenological analysis. This paper contrasts nonverbal expressions with categorical or linguistic expressions and asks, "What do eye movements express when they are used in training a machine learning model? What kind of expression arises in linguistic models? What could be considered aesthetic data (and what would it express)?" For philosopher John Dewey, instinctive reactions in human behavior that for example exhibit mere discharge of an emotion should be separated from purposeful expressions. However, in machine learning, the two Deweyan positions (instinctive and intentional) collapse, as artificial expressions are purely simulations of learned logic. Therefore, the phenomenological question of this paper is traced back to the original stimulus and its human annotators. In this paper, philosopher Don Ihde's experimental phenomenology explains how appearances can be attended to without subsuming them under any assumptions, whereas art theory—arising especially from philosopher Dieter Mersch's thinking—provides an understanding of the mediality of expression. This paper introduces examples from machine learning that are not generally considered expressive but are used for regular tasks, such as object detection, and provides an alternative approach from aesthetics and artistic research that understands these modalities as expressive. If data are understood as expressive, it can be critically assessed how current machine learning models constitute knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Faced with an increasing level of disruption from natural disasters, terrorist attacks or internal failures, organisations need to ensure their business continuity. Ensuring this continuity depends, among other things, on the continuous assessment, monitoring, and management of their resilience based on the variations of the functionalities. Resilience-assessment methodologies are nowadays used to (1) prepare stakeholders for future crisis management situations and (2) help stakeholders assess past levels of resilience in the aftermath of the crisis. However, continuous, real-time monitoring and assessment of resilience is generally either outside the scope of such methods or limited to raw data representation, lacking effective filtering, interpretation, or integration in the evolving context of the organisation's activities. This paper enhances previous works on resilience assessment. The result is a complementary methodology for continuous, real-time resilience assessment and monitoring based on multiple data-sources and stakeholders. The novelty is (1) in the context of use of the methodology, (2) in the way the functionality analysis model is obtained and (3) in the way the resilience is continuously assessed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is central to transformative changes happening in many industries, perhaps potentially to a fourth industrial revolution, but it has also raised a storm of ethical concerns. Information professionals need to navigate these ethical issues effectively because they are likely to use AI in delivering services as well as contributing to the process of adoption of AI more widely in their organisations. Professional ethical codes are too high level to offer precise or complete guidance. In this context, the purpose of this paper is to review the relevant literature and describe eight ethics scenarios of AI which have been developed specifically for information professionals to understand the issues in a concrete form. The paper considers how AI might be defined and presents some of the applications relevant to the information profession. It then summarises the key ethical issues raised by AI in general both those inherent to the technology and those arising from the nature of the AI industry. It considers existing studies that have discussed aspects of the ethical issues specifically for information professionals. It then describes a set of eight ethics scenarios that have been developed and shared in an open form to promote their reuse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New tools are being explored to provide collective and participatory means of governing data to promote the management of data in ways that benefit those from whom data is collected. This paper discusses whether data trusts are feasible structures in an African context by outlining specific considerations that should be prioritised in the development of bottom-up and collective models of data governance on the continent. Making use of international instruments, principles and established values like Ubuntu, the paper analyses the importance of collective decision-making through collective and participatory governance, women's empowerment, and capacity-building, and how the alignment of data trusts to African contexts could help balance historical power differentials, and emphasise heterogeneity as the starting point of all discussions in the digital age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship has shed light on how data-driven food systems may entrench productivist and neo-productivist visions of 'feeding the world.' In this paper, we examine the narratives and institution-building practices of global development actors, asking: What stories do they tell about how data will transform food systems? Whose 'data' are legitimized and whose are overlooked? Our findings point to an emerging imaginary of data productivism—which constructs the making and accumulation of data as a socially intrinsic good. We examine the implications of data productivism for reconfiguring global capitalism, reproducing the modern-colonial order, and inciting social movements to anticipate its hold. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The intensification of data collection practices in schooling – often due to state accountability requirements – has resulted in the widespread adoption of commercial student management systems (SMS) in schools. Drawing on a qualitative case study of a New Zealand primary school, this paper investigates its adoption of a commercial SMS, and the ways this product re-engineers schooling processes, including what student data is collected, how school decisions are made, and when work is done by staff. Through this analysis, we argue direct-to-school commercial relationships constitute a new configuration of public–private partnerships in education. We demonstrate the rise of a local education market for data management where responsibility is placed on individual schools to choose a commercial product that will interface with the needs of a public bureaucracy. We end this paper with a critical discussion about how the commercialisation of school administration affects the broader infrastructures of public schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been recently suggested that if the Extended Mind thesis is true, mental privacy might be under serious threat. In this paper, I look into the details of this claim and propose that one way of dealing with this emerging threat requires that data ontology be enriched with an additional kind of data—viz., mental data. I explore how mental data relates to both data and metadata and suggest that, arguably, and by contrast with these existing categories of informational content, mental data should not be merely legally protected. Rather, if we value mental privacy as we know it, technological measures should be employed to ensure that one's mental data are practically—not just legally—impossible for others to obtain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Health policy and academic discourses on rare diseases and people with rare conditions frequently employ terms such as 'low prevalence' and 'unique' to characterize the smallness of the population under consideration and to justify targeted action toward these patient groups. This paper draws from recent anthropological scholarship on smallness and data, ethnographic research in Finland and Poland, as well as document and media analysis to examine how data is utilized in the context of isolated populations that are considered sites of rare diseases in these two countries. Specifically, this paper juxtaposes the notion of Finnish Disease Heritage (FDH) with that of a 'Kashubian gene' in Poland. The concept of FDH was developed by Finnish researchers in the 1970s; it encompasses almost forty rare hereditary diseases that are significantly more prevalent in Finland than elsewhere globally. On the other hand, the notion of the 'Kashubian gene' was first utilized by the media and some members of the Polish medical community around 2008. Based on 'unstable' data gathered during genetic research, the term referred to the high prevalence of a rare metabolic disorder (Long-Chain 3-Hydroxyacyl-CoA Dehydrogenase (LCHAD) deficiency) among Kashubians, an ethnic minority that resides in Northern Poland's Pomerania region. Whereas FDH facilitated the production and branding of 'a unique Finnish genetic identity' (Tupasela 2016b, 61), the notion of the 'Kashubian gene' has engendered health policy interventions targeting members of this ethnic minority and has contributed to stigmatizing practices carried out against Kashubians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data have been utilised in production research in meaningful ways for decades. Recent years have offered data in larger volumes and improved quality collected from diverse sources. The state-of-the-art data research in production and the emerging methodologies are discussed. The review of the literature suggests that production research enabled by data has shifted from that based on analytical models to data-driven. Manufacturing and data envelopment analysis have been the most popular application areas of data-driven methodologies. The research published to date indicates that data mining is becoming a dominant methodology in production research. Future trends and opportunities for data-driven production research are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a change to the remit and title of a UK government department provides a starting point for reflection on the growing role of digital technologies in the re-imagination of UK cultural policy. An early strategic report produced by the re-named DCMS was entitled Culture is Digital. Identifying the UK's cultural and technology sectors as 'the ultimate power couple,' this report directs the cultural sector towards the use of technology to enhance public engagement and to improve technical skills through the development of collaborations with technology companies. Reflecting on the place of DCMS in UK cultural policymaking and drawing on analysis of this report and associated strategic documents, including responses and updates produced in the light of the Covid pandemic, the paper analyses the claims made about the elision between culture and the digital and their consequences for the status of cultural policy within the British state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) is a modern scientific approach to balancing human activities both in space and time for achieving socio-economic and environmental targets through a public process. The adoption and application of the MSP approach have been proceeding in many developing countries like Indonesia to support the sustainable use of marine and coastal areas and to reduce conflicts for multiple uses of marine resources and areas. MSP also aims to reduce environmental impacts such as pollution, overfishing and illegal fishing, watershed-based pollution and coastal development impacts. Whilst the transition process from planning to implementation is an onerous mission, this paper aims to explain and learn from the process of Indonesian MSP development and propose a policy roadmap as an action plan for the national and provincial governments of Indonesia. Input for this paper was derived from a collaborative national symposium that involved 80 participants with international experts from U.S., Canada, and Australia, together with the Indonesian government, non-government sectors, and university representatives. The themes that emerged were: overcoming implementation challenges, engaging indigenous groups, zoning considerations, communicating with stakeholders, licensing and permits, collaborative enforcement, monitoring and evaluation, and land-sea cross-sectoral mechanisms. These themes were analyzed and discussed as the key instruments for a strategic approach in the operational base of MSP for Indonesia. Hindering factors to MSP implementation included data gaps, conflict of interest among stakeholders, and the complexity of the legalization process. It was agreed that committed leadership, stakeholder involvement and buy-in are essential to support effective implementation and a truly adaptive management approach for MSP in Indonesia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most secondary (high) schools in a broad range of jurisdictions internationally engage in various forms of high stakes, standardized assessment and related qualifications. In this paper, we interrogate how educational achievement regimes – especially via the reporting of curriculum and assessment 'data' – continue to mobilize particular gender norms. Drawing on Derrida's notion of haunting we explore how such regimes impose and reinscribe stable and binary gendered patterning and create what Barad has named 'entangled relationalities of inheritance' [,] despite young people (and many schools) moving towards greater recognition of non-binary genders. Drawing on assessment data from Aotearoa New Zealand, we look at both generalized reporting of educational achievement data along the lines of 'male' and 'female' and on reporting of a single (historically gendered) curriculum subject – health education. We argue that such systems are 'haunted' by stable gender categorizations and hierarchies and we ask what this means for the reporting of educational assessment data and the erasure of identities that don't align with the binary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The expansion of university systems across the planet over the last fifty years has led to the emergence of a new policy assemblage – 'global higher education' that depends on the collection, curation and representation of quantitative data. In this paper I explore the use of data by higher education policy actors to sustain 'epistemic coloniality'. Building on a rich genealogy of anticolonial, postcolonial and feminist scholarship, I show how decolonial theory can be used to critique dominant global higher education imaginaries and the data infrastructures they depend on. Tracing the history of these infrastructures, I begin with OECD's creation of decontextualised educational 'indicators'. I go on to track the policy impact of global university league tables owned by commercial organisations. They assemble and commensurate institutional data into rankings that become taken-for-granted 'global' policy knowledge. I end by exploring the policy challenge of building alternative socio-technical infrastructures, and finding new ways to value higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This conceptual paper aims to serve two purposes: 1) introduce theories of surveillance to aid leisure scholars in exploring surveillance in its many forms; and, 2) add to the discussion on surveillance by layering "the leisure body" onto existing theory. We begin by introducing three groupings of "surveillance" theory: panoptic surveillance (think Bentham and Foucault), post-panoptical surveillance (think Deleuze), and contemporary surveillance (Galič et al., 2017). Panoptic surveillance is a physical surveillance (reliant on a fleshy body and physical space) where, like in Bentham's and Foucault's panopticons, the individual polices personal presentation and action under the presumption of being watched. We theorize this as surveillance on the body; it is body-to-body even as it is mediated through technology. Post-panoptical surveillance is less dependent on distinct, physical spaces, and particularly those of enclosure. We theorize this as the digital merging with the physical, where surveillance comes from the interaction of the technological with the fleshy body. Although this surveillance is less reliant on specific times and spaces—occurring within or through the body—it is nonetheless conditioned by our physical connections to technological devices. This is technology-to-body surveillance that is dependent on a physical interaction between the two. Contemporary surveillance is not dependent upon a physical linkage between technology and the body or a space of enclosure; it both marks an individual and simultaneously dissolves them into an ocean of big data. It is an inescapable surveillance as existence in the modern world. We call this technobody surveillance where the need for the interaction between technologies and fleshy bodies is subsumed by the gaseous and pervasive nature of apparatuses of surveillance. With each, we provide an exemplar from leisure practice, time, and/or space to illustrate how each operates within leisure phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a multi-year project to inform academic development (AD) for instructors at a large university, as the result of a shift towards greater equity, diversity, inclusion, and access (EDIA) efforts. A variety of data were collected, along with extant literature focused on teaching and learning, to identify campus needs and priorities for AD, resulting in a signature pedagogy: the Framework for Inclusive Teaching Excellence. FITE enables a shared understanding of teaching and learning with an EDIA lens, which has been integrated across all aspects of AD programming and informs how teaching and learning are valued and assessed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how trust in teacher professional judgment has been reconstituted through the globalised trends of performative accountability and reductive data-driven logics. The article draws upon empirical research from interviews with teachers and school leaders as well as observations of teacher preparation days, classroom and staff professional learning communities (PLCs), as part of a larger study of schooling practices in two geographically and contextually bound Queensland public schools. The paper focuses attention upon the socio-political, material-economic and cultural-discursive conditions inscribed in how data are currently understood and deployed, and how these conditions constrain trust in teachers, devaluing teachers' own professional judgment. Specifically, we flag how the practices and conditions that constrained trust were manifest in a) pressures to ensure teachers generated and collected data on an ongoing basis to substantiate their claims about student learning, and b) a perceived mistrust amongst parents and a subsequent need to justify decision-making on the basis of 'hard evidence'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fintechs are crucial to ensuring Europe's transition to a digital economy. In its Digital Finance Strategy, the Commission endorses the need to ensure a level playing field in the provision of digital financial services. However, the dominant position that banks hold in the European economy has enabled them to engage in abusive practices, such as the refusal to grant access to data to fintechs. Such a practice could also occur among bigtechs, which are soon to become dominant players in the payment services sphere. The first part of this article pertains to the Payment Services Directive II and to what extent it has contributed towards levelling the playing field between banks and fintechs. The second part of this paper analyses the extent to which provisions of the proposed Digital Markets Act (DMA) could help contribute towards levelling the playing field between bigtechs and fintechs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This review paper contributes to literature on the changing nature of work and its implications for regulating work health and safety (WHS). The paper aims to examine how Australian WHS agencies can enhance their evidence base for setting priorities, in the context of trends in business size and structure, industry and work, unionisation, work arrangements and worker attributes. The paper maps key trends and incorporates these in a conceptual framework for appraising data and information sources for priority setting, as identified through searches of literature databases and websites of WHS agencies. With reference to this conceptual framework, the paper examines a range of regulator, compensation, coronial, health and labour datasets. Principal findings are: the greater strength of information about traumatic deaths, injuries and their causes compared with information about slower onset diseases and conditions; the limited basis for differentiating business WHS performance and worker experiences by key business and workforce trends; under-representation of vulnerable workers' experiences; and the retrospective focus of many sources. The paper concludes that to enhance their evidence base, WHS agencies will need to build analytical expertise and/or links with research bodies and carefully select, extend and combine sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trust in data practices and data-driven systems is widely seen as both important and elusive. A data trust deficit has been identified, to which proposed solutions are often localised or individualised, focusing either on what institutions can do to increase user trust in their data practices or on data management models that empower the individual user. Scholarship on trust often focuses on typologies of trust. This paper shifts the emphasis to those doing the trusting, by presenting findings from empirical research which explored user perspectives on the data practices of the BBC. These findings challenge the assumption that localised or individualised solutions can be effective. They also suggest that conceptualisations of trust in data practices need to account for the complex range of factors which come into play in relation to trust in data and so move beyond the production of typologies. In this paper, we propose the concept of 'complex ecologies of trust' as a way of addressing all of these issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Primarily methodological in its orientation, this paper offers a presentation of 'research outcomes' in ways that challenge and disrupt commonplace notions of data and analysis. In an attempt to write against the grain of conventional qualitative research practice and to experiment with alternative encounters with data and analysis, I present 'data/analysis' in the form of a play (or imagined performance) that writes into being two Deleuzo-Guattarian principles – the critique of the self-conscious 'I' and desire. The play draws on a wider study that examined the potential of writing as a tool for learning for undergraduate student teachers in England. As such, the paper also contributes to debates on the practice and purpose of writing as a method of (professional) inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The zero-coupon yield curve is a common input for most financial purposes. We consider three popular yield curve datasets and explore the extent to which the decision as to what dataset to use for a particular application may have an impact on the results. Many term structure papers evaluate alternative models for estimating zero coupon bonds based on their ability to replicate bond prices. However, in this paper we take a step forward by analyzing the consequences of using these alternative datasets in estimates of other moments and variables such as interest rate volatilities or the resulting forward rates and their correlations. After finding significant differences, we also explore the existence of volatility spillover effects among these three datasets. Finally, we illustrate the relevance of the choice of one particular dataset by examining the differences that may arise when testing the expectations hypothesis. In the conclusions, we provide guidance to end users in selecting a particular dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While access and engagement are usually the primary objectives of digitisation projects, they often also claim to benefit the long-term preservation of collection items due to reducing handling, one of the main risks to archival and library collections, making this a persuasive additional argument to invest in digitising a collection. Conservation intervention prior to digitisation, if done, is kept to minimum repair, cleaning and flattening of documents in order to achieve high-quality images, facilitate safe handling and ensure efficient workflow. Such preservation improvements may be negated by continued access to the physical records after digitisation has occurred. There is also a risk of damage during the digitisation process, especially for very fragile items, for which digitisation may nonetheless be the only way to provide future access. This paper assesses archival document request data before and after digitisation, and online access options, for a selection of digitisation projects from The National Archives, UK, in order to review of the effectiveness of a number of digitisation programmes in reducing demand for handling of originals. It identifies procedural improvements post-digitisation that would further reduce access to original documents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers how governors in the EnglishFurther Education and Skills(FE) sector examined their practice as ethnographers. The paper locates both FE governance and ethnography within the challenges of the performative and Panoptic environments facing English education. In doing so, the paper explores how the informants’ mobilisation of ethnographic methods revealed a novel lens on both governance and the role of ethnographer. Employing Grounded Theory, the paper considers how the participants negotiated philosophical questions regarding evidence, objectivity and truth. The paper suggests that despite the deep-seated complexities inherent in conducting ethnography in performative contexts, the participants generated data which painted a unique and revealing picture upon their practice as governor and researcher. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although predictive machine learning for supply chain data analytics has recently been reported as a significant area of investigation due to the rising popularity of the AI paradigm in industry, there is a distinct lack of case studies that showcase its application from a practical point of view. In this paper, we discuss the application of data analytics in predicting first tier supply chain disruptions using historical data available to an Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM). Our methodology includes three phases: First, an exploratory phase is conducted to select and engineer potential features that can act as useful predictors of disruptions. This is followed by the development of a performance metric in alignment with the specific goals of the case study to rate successful methods. Third, an experimental design is created to systematically analyse the success rate of different algorithms, algorithmic parameters, on the selected feature space. Our results indicate that adding engineered features in the data, namely agility, outperforms other experiments leading to the final algorithm that can predict late orders with 80% accuracy. An additional contribution is the novel application of machine learning in predicting supply disruptions. Through the discussion and the development of the case study we hope to shed light on the development and application of data analytics techniques in the analysis of supply chain data. We conclude by highlighting the importance of domain knowledge for successfully engineering features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a literature review on the ethics of self-tracking technologies which are utilized by users to monitor parameters related to their activity and bodily parameters. By examining a total of 65 works extracted through a systematic database search and backwards snowballing, the authors of this review discuss three categories of opportunities and ten categories of concerns currently associated with self-tracking. The former include empowerment and well-being, contribution to health goals, and solidarity. The latter are social harms, privacy and surveillance, ownership control and commodification of data, autonomy, data-facilitated harm, datafication and interpretability of data, negative impact on relation to self and others, shortcomings of design, negative impact on health perception, and regulation and enforcement of rules. The review concludes with a critical analysis of the existing literature and an overview of a future research agenda that could complement the current work on ethics of self-tracking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SIPRI has collected data on military expenditure almost since its foundation in the 1960s, but various historical difficulties led to breaks in the consistency of the data series, so that until recently SIPRI’s consistent military expenditure database has only provided data from 1988 onwards. This paper describes recent efforts at SIPRI that have succeeded in extending these consistent series for most countries back to at least the 1960s, and in some cases to 1949. It describes the underlying difficulties involved in collecting military expenditure data and ensuring consistent series, the sources used in the reconstruction of the long data-set, the methodological choices made, and the results of the exercise. Overall, consistent constant price data series have been extended back as far as 1957 for half of the countries covered by the SIPRI database that existed at the time. Europe and the Americas generally have the best data coverage. One of the biggest problems with the extended data-set is the extensive use of estimates to splice together overlapping, but disagreeing series for the same country, adjusting the older series upwards or downwards by an appropriate ratio to give greater consistency with the later series. A number of case studies are investigated where parallel series exist for countries, suggesting that this approach may in some cases involve significant margins for error. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last decades, different scholars have focused on how political participation has been transformed by digital media. Although insightful, current research in the field lacks a critical understanding of the personal and affective dimension of online political participation. This paper aims to address this gap by looking at the interconnection between digital storytelling, identity narratives and family life. Drawing on an ethnographic research, the paper shows that activists construct their political identities online through complex practices of digital storytelling that involve the reinterpretation of early childhood and family life. These processes of digital storytelling have an un-intended consequence: they enable the political profiling of different family members. The paper argues that these digital practices, which produce politically identifying digital traces, are transforming political socialisation in family life and introducing new ways in which we can think digital citizenship across the life course. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines digital data use within three Australian secondary schools, drawing on in-depth interviews with 50 school staff to explore tensions between: (i) established logics of "data-driven" schooling; and (ii) emerging "datafied" practices associated with digital systems, platforms and devices. Using sociological theorisation of institutional logics, the article examines how promises of digital "dataism" are thwarted by the entrenched temporal organisation of schooling, and teacher-centred understandings of students as coerced subjects. As such, prevailing logics of state bureaucracy and professionalism combine in ways that temper the prospect of individualism, self-regulation, continuous feedback, and other implicit promises of digital data. The paper considers the extent to which school data logics can endure amid the increased digitisation of K-12 education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores third-wave post-neoliberalism as an assemblage, fractured and dis/embodied, a mobile tool of governance articulated in various shapes across geopolitical sites. Post-neoliberalism is assembled alongside other key cultural shifts, such as post-truth, posthuman and the computational turn. In light of this Special Issue, this paper will argue that education reform is not only shaped by neoliberal drivers, such as marketisation, competition and decentralisation, but a central tenet of post-neoliberal reform is the presence of the intangible; 'big data' and data-fication, shaped by prominent globalised datasets such as OECD PISA, artificial intelligence, predictive software and complex algorithms. Measurement is far from new in the capitalist economy, but this economy seeks to measure the intangibles, that which does not necessarily exist in three-dimensional spaces. This is, as I will argue in this paper, the mark of capitalism without capital and the rise of the intangible economy in schooling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New data-driven technologies appear to promise a new era of accuracy and objectivity in scientifically-informed educational policy and governance. The data-scientific objectivity sought by education policy, however, is the result of practices of standardization and quantification deployed to settle controversies about the definition and measurement of human qualities by rendering them as categories and numbers. Focusing on the emerging policy agenda of 'social and emotional learning and skills,' this paper examines the practices of 'objectivity-making' underpinning this new field. Objectivity-making depends on three translations of (1) scientific expertise into standardized and enumerable definitions, (2) standardization into measurement technologies, and (3) the data produced through measurement technologies into objective policy-relevant knowledge, which consolidates a market in SEL technologies. The paper sheds light on knowledge-making practices in the era of big data and policy science, and their enduring reliance on the precarious construction of objectivity as a key legitimator of policy-relevant scientific knowledge and 'evidence-based' education governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information is valuable if it derives from reliable data. However, measurements for data reliability have not been widely established in the area of information systems (IS). This paper attempts to draw some concepts of reliability from the field of quality control and to apply them to IS. The paper develops three measurements for data reliability: internal reliability--reflects the "commonly accepted" characteristics of various data items; relative reliability--indicates compliance of data to user requirements; and absolute reliability--determines the level of resemblance of data items to reality. The relationships between the three measurements are discussed, and the results of a field study are displayed and analyzed. The results provide some insightful information on the "shape" of the database that was inspected, as well as on the degree of rationality of some user requirements. General conclusions and avenues for future research are suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the infrastructural politics of automated music mastering to reveal how contemporary iterations of artificial intelligence (AI) shape cultural production. The paper examines the emergence of LANDR, an online platform that offers automated music mastering, built on top of supervised machine learning branded as artificial intelligence. Increasingly, machine learning will become an integral part of signal processing for sounds and images, shaping the way media cultures sound, look, and feel. While LANDR is a product of the so-called 'big bang' in machine learning, it could not exist without specific conditions: specific kinds of commensurable data, as well as specific aesthetic and industrial conditions. Mastering, in turn, has become an indispensable but understudied part of music circulation as an infrastructural practice. Here we analyze the intersecting histories of machine learning and mastering, as well as LANDR's failure at automating other domains of audio engineering. By doing so, we critique the discourse of AI's inevitability and show the ways in which machine learning must frame or reframe cultural and aesthetic practices in order to automate them, in service of digital distribution, recognition, and recommendation infrastructures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the authors have used Block Chain technology for tie-line power transferred data in respect to trustworthy monitoring, non-tamper proof and traceability. Nepanagar–Dharni tie-line between MP Electricity Board and Maharashtra Electricity Board is considered. Also, an example of a solar power plant connected to the grid and a consumer is considered to show the security concern using Block Chain Technology. The intrinsic features of decentralized block chain technology enable the grid owner, utility and consumer to maintain the privacy and security of the data set and Image sharing of tie-line power transferred data and Image. The smart contract can register and authorize the grid corporation authority to access the tie-line power transferred during the period and make payments to the concern in compliance with the regulatory and involved parties' consent policy. Security's role as a trust model is used to sort out the discrepancy in the exchange for power monitored by the phase measurement unit. Distributed and scalable data models based on the block chain are implemented using a heterogeneous set of MYSQL database management systems, hosted on the AWS cloud. If the power is transferred to a tie line connected to the Railway traction system, the data and Image of the train and its status can be secured with block chain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present an intriguing topic in a mathematical modelling course where Lanchester models are taught to our students. Lanchester models are some of the earliest and most important models used for combat modelling. We describe modelling activities and the use of technology that can be implemented in teaching this topic in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]