In 1988, three laboratories performed a radiocarbon analysis of the Turin Shroud. The results, which were centralized by the British Museum and published in Nature in 1989, provided ‘conclusive evidence’ of the medieval origin of the artefact. However, the raw data were never released by the institutions. In 2017, in response to a legal request, all raw data kept by the British Museum were made accessible. A statistical analysis of the Nature article and the raw data strongly (...) suggests that homogeneity is lacking in the data and that the procedure should be reconsidered. (shrink)

Model-data symbiosis is the view that there is an interdependent and mutually beneficial relationship between data and models, whereby models are not only data-laden, but data are also model-laden or model filtered. In this paper I elaborate and defend the second, more controversial, component of the symbiosis view. In particular, I construct a preliminary taxonomy of the different ways in which theoretical and simulation models are used in the production of data sets. These include (...) class='Hi'>data conversion, data correction, data interpolation, data scaling, data fusion, data assimilation, and synthetic data. Each is defined and briefly illustrated with an example from the geosciences. I argue that model-filtered data are typically more accurate and reliable than the so-called raw data, and hence beneficially serve the epistemic aims of science. By illuminating the methods by which raw data are turned into scientifically useful data sets, this taxonomy provides a foundation for developing a more adequate philosophy of data. (shrink)

Educational Data Mining (EDM) is a new paradigm aiming to mine and extract knowledge necessary to optimize the effectiveness of teaching process. With normal educational system work it’s often unlikely to accomplish fine system optimizing due to large amount of data being collected and tangled throughout the system. EDM resolves this problem by its capability to mine and explore these raw data and as a consequence of extracting knowledge. This paper describes several experiments on real educational (...) class='Hi'>data wherein the effectiveness of Data Mining is explained in migration the educational data into knowledge. The experiments goal at first to identify important factors of teacher behaviors influencing student satisfaction. In addition to presenting experiences gained through the experiments, the paper aims to provide practical guidance of Data Mining solutions in a real application. (shrink)

When a technique purports to provide information that is not available to the unaided senses, it is natural to think that the only way to validate that technique is by appealing to a theory of the processes that lead from the object of study to the raw data. In fact, scientists have a variety of strategies for validating their techniques. Those strategies can yield multiple independent arguments that support the validity of the technique. Thus, it is possible to produce (...) a robust body of data with a single technique. I illustrate and support these claims with a historical case study. *Received September 2009; revised October 2009. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of History and Philosophy of Science, 1017 Cathedral of Learning, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

All societies have to balance privacy claims with other moral concerns. However, while some concern for privacy appears to be a common feature of social life, the definition, extent and moral justifications for privacy differ widely. Are there better and worse ways of conceptualising, justifying, and managing privacy? These are the questions that lie in the background of this thesis. -/- My particular concern is with the ethical issues around privacy that are tied to the rise of new information and (...) communication technologies (henceforth “ICT”). The focus here is on technologies involved in processing personal data in its broadest sense, including “any operation or set of operations which is performed on personal data or on sets of personal data, whether or not by automated means, such as collection, recording, organisation, structuring, storage, adaptation or alteration, retrieval, consultation, use, disclosure by transmission, dissemination or otherwise making available, alignment or combination, restriction, erasure or destruction.” The issue of moral concern is commonly designated as that of 'data privacy'. -/- The first step is to consider why privacy matters, or ought to matter, in the first place. And here we run into our first difficulty, since both the conceptualisation of privacy and the justification for the right to privacy are matters for contention. On the one hand, we are animated by a moral concern for privacy in some sense; on the other, we lack the conceptual and moral resources for making sense of this concern or for promoting particular social policies and criticising others. This often-cited dichotomy and its ensuing confusion have been the central motivation for most of the philosophical literature on privacy – including this thesis. -/- In what follows, I will suggest a way out of the confusion that pervades the current debate on data privacy. I will essentially argue two claims: one, that the concept of (data) privacy is uniquely characterised by a particular context within which we exchange information; two, that because (data) privacy constitutes an intrinsic value, its moral concerns and justifications ought to be deliberated as such. -/- The first chapter sketches the current data privacy landscape by introducing a number of concepts and arguing the unique nature of the landscape. I argue that the traditional distinction between four kinds of privacy (physical, mental, decisional and informational) is no longer accurate, given the technological context that reduces, unifies and processes all aspects of people’s lives by means of digital data. In fact, to hold on to the distinction leads to a fundamental misconception of data privacy. I further argue that today’s distinction between data protection and data privacy runs the risk of ignoring the fact that the former is an inherent aspect of the latter. These arguments allow me to settle on a (provisional) definition of data privacy: controlling how data about identifiable people is processed by ICT. -/- Next, I draw a line between descriptive and normative accounts of data privacy, and explain why this book belongs to the latter category. After a brief discussion of the coherence and distinctiveness theses, and of the difference between instrumental and intrinsic theories of privacy, I introduce the problem of data privacy as a distinct, coherent, and intrinsic moral concern. Three arguments support this position: one, data privacy is a coherent moral concern because it is motivated by a singular moral concept; two, data privacy is a distinct moral concern because the privacy challenges we face today are of a fundamentally new nature – distinct from any moral concerns we’ve faced in the past; and three, data privacy is an intrinsic moral concern that is predominantly justified, not by what it instrumentally protects us from, but by what it intrinsically constitutes. -/- Chapter Two makes the case against a harm-based, consequentialist approach to data privacy. After a brief introduction to the basic tenets of consequentialism I discuss harm-based arguments in favour as well as against privacy. I explain how privacy may protect us against psychological distress, but at the same time constitute the source of that distress; how privacy may be necessary for the proper functioning of democratic societies, but at the same time provide a cloak for anti-social and immoral behaviour; and how privacy protects us against the improper use of our personal data by others, but at the same enables us to conceal information or spread false information about ourselves in ways that are harmful to others. Next, I argue that consequentialism essentially relies on two flawed presumptions – that we know what harm is, and that we know how to predict it – and discuss the controversies surrounding definitions and predictions of harm. This argument becomes especially pertinent in today’s rapidly changing technological context: we may guess, and make assumptions, perhaps even find correlations, but don’t really know or understand (yet) with any degree of certainty the harmful consequences today’s data privacy violations are causing or will eventually cause – if any. -/- I illustrate this with examples of recent data privacy violations, and with a brief overview of consequentialist arguments for and against data privacy. Those who invoke consequentialist arguments against data privacy claim that personal data is nothing more than a raw material that can be turned into something useful and valuable without harming anyone. Choosing to move fast and break things – a popular mantra that promotes the benefits of technological “permissionless innovation” over and above its risks and costs – they draw our attention to the many benefits free data flows generate. Those who rely on consequentialist arguments in favour of data privacy, on the other hand, insist on actual and potential misuse of personal data. Rather careful than sorry, they draw our attention to the urgent need to take back control and protect ourselves against data privacy violations – precisely because we don’t know which harm they may cause in the future. Others go one step further and argue that these violations are part of a broader ideology of power. -/- What Chapter Two demonstrates is that vague definitions, unreliable predictions and inconclusive allegations of harm from both sides of the debate perpetuate a stalemate that fails to produce morally defensible answers to our growing data privacy concerns. Deliberating about data privacy from a consequentialist perspective is a dead end. -/- Chapter Three proposes an alternative to the harm-based approach, namely that privacy is an intrinsic value that deserves moral protection for its own sake. After a brief account of what I take values to be, and why we have a need to protect them, I introduce the foundational value of respect for persons, and lay out my main argument in two steps. The conceptual component of my argument returns to the definition of data privacy I had temporarily settled on in Chapter One, but now with the added consideration of the particular context, and particular circumstances and attitudes, within which information is exchanged. This addition is crucial, as it reveals the fundamental value that is at stake in our data privacy concerns, namely the inherent value of each and every person, which we protect by upholding an ethical principle commonly known as the principle of respect for persons. It is for this reason that the violation of privacy cannot (only) be expressed in terms of harm. I further argue that the principle of respect for persons is consistent with, and in fact unthinkable without, some degree of privacy. -/- I reply to potential challenges to a value-based approach to data privacy by showing that (i) values and value trade-offs are fundamentally different from consequential benefits and cost-benefit analyses; (ii) the suspension of one value in favour of another is not inherently contradictory; what matters is morally defensible deliberation about values and valid individual consent; (iii) data privacy concerns cannot be reduced to other moral concerns and therefore deserve a specific, distinct protection. -/- Finally, because this is a thesis in applied ethics, I attempt an answer to the question as to how we ought to apply a value-based approach to practical data privacy concerns. I argue that a revised, three-pronged version of John Rawls’ reflective equilibrium, founded on the non-negotiable principle of respect for persons, is the best possible procedure to deliberate data privacy concerns in relation to other moral values. (shrink)

With the current improvement of development towards pharmaceutical, distinctive ultrasound methodologies are open to find the fetal prosperity. It is analyzed with diverse clinical parameters with 2-D imaging and other test. In any case, prosperity desire of fetal heart still remains an open issue due to unconstrained works out of the hatchling, the minor heart appraise and inadequate of data in fetal echocardiography. The machine learning strategies can find out the classes of fetal heart rate which can beutilized for (...) earlier evaluating. With this background, we have utilized Cardiotocographic Fetal heart rate dataset removed from UCI Machine Learning Store for predicting the fetal heart rate health classes. The Prediction of fetal health rate are achieved in six ways. Firstly, the data set is preprocessed with Feature Scaling and missing values. Secondly, exploratory data investigation is done and the dispersion of target feature is visualized. Thirdly, the raw data set is fitted to all the classifiers and the performance is analysed before and after feature scaling. Fourth, the raw data set is subjected to undersampling methods like ClusterCentroids, RepeatedENN, AllKNN, CondensedNearestNeighbour, EditedNearestNeighbours, InstanceHardnessThreshold and NearMiss. Fifth, the undersampled dataset by above mentioned methods are fitted to all the classifiers and the performance is analyzed before and after feature scaling. Sixth, performance analysis is done using metrics like Precision, Recall, F-score, Accuracy and running time. The execution is done using python language under Spyder platform with Anaconda Navigator. Experimental results shows that the Decision Tree classifier tends to retain 98% before and after feature scaling for the underrsampling with EditedNearestNeighbours, RepeatedENN and AllKNN methods. (shrink)

Fixing the problem won’t be easy, but humans’ sharpened focus on an emerging philosophy of data might give us some clue about where we will be heading for.

Background: The concept of digital twins has great potential for transforming the existing health care system by making it more personalized. As a convergence of health care, artificial intelligence, and information and communication technologies, personalized health care services that are developed under the concept of digital twins raise a myriad of ethical issues. Although some of the ethical issues are known to researchers working on digital health and personalized medicine, currently, there is no comprehensive review that maps the major ethical (...) risks of digital twins for personalized health care services. Objective: This study aims to fill the research gap by identifying the major ethical risks of digital twins for personalized health care services. We first propose a working definition for digital twins for personalized health care services to facilitate future discussions on the ethical issues related to these emerging digital health services. We then develop a process-oriented ethical map to identify the major ethical risks in each of the different data processing phases. Methods: We resorted to the literature on eHealth, personalized medicine, precision medicine, and information engineering to identify potential issues and developed a process-oriented ethical map to structure the inquiry in a more systematic way. The ethical map allows us to see how each of the major ethical concerns emerges during the process of transforming raw data into valuable information. Developers of a digital twin for personalized health care service may use this map to identify ethical risks during the development stage in a more systematic way and can proactively address them. Results: This paper provides a working definition of digital twins for personalized health care services by identifying 3 features that distinguish the new application from other eHealth services. On the basis of the working definition, this paper further layouts 10 major operational problems and the corresponding ethical risks. Conclusions: It is challenging to address all the major ethical risks that a digital twin for a personalized health care service might encounter proactively without a conceptual map at hand. The process-oriented ethical map we propose here can assist the developers of digital twins for personalized health care services in analyzing ethical risks in a more systematic manner. (shrink)

In men and women sexual arousal culminates in orgasm, with female orgasm solely from sexual intercourse often regarded as a unique feature of human sexuality. However, orgasm from sexual intercourse occurs more reliably in men than in women, likely reflecting the different types of physical stimulation men and women require for orgasm. In men, orgasms are under strong selective pressure as orgasms are coupled with ejaculation and thus contribute to male reproductive success. By contrast, women's orgasms in intercourse are highly (...) variable and are under little selective pressure as they are not a reproductive necessity. The proximal mechanisms producing variability in women's orgasms are little understood. In 1924 Marie Bonaparte proposed that a shorter distance between a woman's clitoris and her urethral meatus (CUMD) increased her likelihood of experiencing orgasm in intercourse. She based this on her published data that were never statistically analyzed. In 1940 Landis and colleagues published similar data suggesting the same relationship, but these data too were never fully analyzed. We analyzed raw data from these two studies and found that both demonstrate a strong inverse relationship between CUMD and orgasm during intercourse. Unresolved is whether this increased likelihood of orgasm with shorter CUMD reflects increased penile–clitoral contact during sexual intercourse or increased penile stimulation of internal aspects of the clitoris. CUMD likely reflects prenatal androgen exposure, with higher androgen levels producing larger distances. Thus these results suggest that women exposed to lower levels of prenatal androgens are more likely to experience orgasm during sexual intercourse. . (shrink)

There is a tendency to take mounted dinosaur skeletons at face value, as the raw data on which the science of paleontology is founded. But the truth is that mounted dinosaur skeletons are substantially intention-dependent—they are artifacts. More importantly, I argue, they are also substantially imagination-dependent: their production is substantially causally reliant on preparators’ creative imaginations, and their proper reception is predicated on audiences’ recreative imaginations. My main goal here is to show that dinosaur skeletal mounts are plausible candidates (...) for art-status. But, what is more, I think they are artworks—specifically, sculptures. (shrink)

Contextuality and entanglement are valuable resources for quantum computing and quantum information. Bell inequalities are used to certify entanglement; thus, it is important to understand why and how they are violated. Quantum mechanics and behavioural sciences teach us that random variables ‘measuring’ the same content (the answer to the same Yes or No question) may vary, if ‘measured’ jointly with other random variables. Alice’s and Bob’s raw data confirm Einsteinian non-signaling, but setting dependent experimental protocols are used to create (...) samples of coupled pairs of distant ±1 outcomes and to estimate correlations.Marginal expectations, estimated using these final samples, depend on distant settings. Therefore,a system of random variables ‘measured’ in Bell tests is inconsistently connected and it should be analyzed using a Contextuality- by-Default approach, what is done for the first time in this paper.The violation of Bell inequalities and inconsistent connectedness may be explained using a contextual locally causal probabilistic model in which setting dependent variables describing measuring instruments are correctly incorporated. We prove that this model does not restrict experimenters` freedom of choice which is a prerequisite of science. Contextuality seems to be the rule and not an exception; thus, it should be carefully tested. (shrink)

I show how archaeologists have two problems. The construction of scenarios accounting for the raw data of Archaeology, the material remains of the past, and the explanation of pre-history. Within Archaeology, there has been an ongoing debate about how to constrain speculation within both of these archaeological projects, and archaeologists have consistently looked to biological mechanisms for constraints. I demonstrate the problems of using biology, either as an analogy for cultural processes or through direct application of biological principles to (...) material remains. This is done through setting out the requirements of a Darwinian Archaeology, and then measuring various approaches against these requirements. This approach leads to the conclusion that archaeologist's explanations of the past must include within their formulations an account of human cognitive capacities within their explanatory framework. The limits of our understanding of the human past will be the limits of our understanding of Homo sapiens. (shrink)

The purpose of the existing examination has changed to gain access to the "Ethiopian Higher Education Students' Status of Physical Education". The current study was conducted on 800 students (500 males and 300 females) between the ages of 20 and 26 years. The subjects were Ethiopian Higher Education Students, Addis Ababa, and Dire Dawa. Topics were Ethiopian Higher Education Students, Addis Ababa, and Dire Dawa. The responses collected from the given studies were converted into raw data with the help (...) of a frequency distribution method. The data were then sorted as a result of a percentage study method. (shrink)

Here we present an experimental model to be applied to the storage and retrieval of information based on an associative information system’s sensory and motor state change data, aiming to represent the dynamics of a dynamic perceptual system. The model and database implementation use a universal information storage structure holding both data and metadata within the same structure. This model is characterized by the emphasis on associative information about the represented system derived from raw data, which are (...) in their turn produced by the associative system’s interactions with the environment. Instead of defining objects using descriptive relations, this model stores relations between occurents where the represented system is not replicated in its various components, but defined by its relations when they occur. This model therefore represents the dynamics and interaction of systems such as human perception, rather than imposing artificial boundaries and qualities. In essence, the model is an alternative to perceptual knowledge accumulation, which, as we show, can be applied to a database design. (shrink)

This essay includes four general thoughts on perception that I have not approached separately. It adds to my thinking on perception and marks a shift into philosophy of mind.

The claim defended in the paper is that the mechanistic account of explanation can easily embrace idealization in big-scale brain simulations, and that only causally relevant detail should be present in explanatory models. The claim is illustrated with two methodologically different models: Blue Brain, used for particular simulations of the cortical column in hybrid models, and Eliasmith’s SPAUN model that is both biologically realistic and able to explain eight different tasks. By drawing on the mechanistic theory of computational explanation, I (...) argue that large-scale simulations require that the explanandum phenomenon is identified; otherwise, the explanatory value of such explanations is difficult to establish, and testing the model empirically by comparing its behavior with the explanandum remains practically impossible. The completeness of the explanation, and hence of the explanatory value of the explanatory model, is to be assessed vis-à-vis the explanandum phenomenon, which is not to be conflated with raw observational data and may be idealized. I argue that idealizations, which include building models of a single phenomenon displayed by multi-functional mechanisms, lumping together multiple factors in a single causal variable, simplifying the causal structure of the mechanisms, and multi-model integration, are indispensable for complex systems such as brains; otherwise, the model may be as complex as the explanandum phenomenon, which would make it prone to so-called Bonini paradox. I conclude by enumerating dimensions of empirical validation of explanatory models according to new mechanism, which are given in a form of a “checklist” for a modeler. (shrink)

In order to perceive the world, we need more than just raw sensory input: a subliminal paradigm of thought is required to interpret raw sensory data and, thereby, create the objects and events we perceive around ourselves. As such, the world we see reflects our own unexamined, culture-bound assumptions and expectations, which explains why every generation in history has believed that it more or less understood the world. Today, we perceive a world of objects and events outside and independent (...) of mind, which merely reflects our current paradigm of thought. Anomalies that contradict this paradigm have been accumulated by physicists over the past couple of decades, which will eventually force our culture to move to a new paradigm. Under this new paradigm, a form of universal mind will be viewed as nature’s sole fundamental entity. In this paper, I offer a sketch of what the new paradigm may look like. (shrink)

Ethical questions regarding access to and use of electronically generated data are (if asked) commonly resolved by distinguishing in Lockean fashion between raw (unworked) and refined (worked) data. The former is thought to belong to no one, the latter to the collector and those to whom the collector grants access. Comparative power separates free riders from rightful owners. The resulting two-tiered ethics of access is here challenged on the grounds that it inequitably establishes a rule of law for (...) the strong while leaving the weak in a Hobbesian state of nature. Efforts at legislative constraints are reviewed; but such constraints are found to afford inadequate protections of privacy if a data subject may not prohibit others under ordinary circumstances from using recognizably name-linked data. (shrink)

Some of the world's most powerful corporations practise what Shoshana Zuboff (2015; 2019) calls ‘surveillance capitalism’. The core of their business is harvesting, analysing and selling data about the people who use their products. In Zuboff's view, the first corporation to engage in surveillance capitalism was Google, followed by Facebook; recently, firms such as Microsoft and Amazon have pivoted towards such a model. In this paper, I suggest that Karl Marx's analysis of the relations between industrial capitalists and workers (...) is closely analogous to the relations between surveillance capitalists and users. Furthermore, three problematic aspects of industrial capitalism that Marx describes – alienation, exploitation and accumulation – are also aspects, in new forms, of surveillance capitalism. I draw heavily on Zuboff's work to make these parallels. However, my Marx-inspired account of surveillance capitalism differs from hers over the nature of the exchange between users and surveillance capitalists. For Zuboff, this is akin either to robbery or the gathering of raw materials; on the Marx-inspired account it is a voluntary sale. This difference has important implications for the question of how to resist surveillance capitalism. -/- Joint winner of the 2020 Philosophy essay prize. (shrink)

There is an enduring story about empiricism, which runs as follows: from Locke onwards to Carnap, empiricism is the doctrine in which raw sense-data are received through the passive mechanism of perception; experience is the effect produced by external reality on the mind or ‘receptors’. Empiricism on this view is the ‘handmaiden’ of experimental natural science, seeking to redefine philosophy and its methods in conformity with the results of modern science. Secondly, there is a story about materialism, popularized initially (...) by Marx and Engels and later restated as standard, ‘textbook’ history of philosophy in the English-speaking world. It portrays materialism as explicitly mechanistic, seeking to reduce the world of qualities, sensations, and purposive behaviour to a quantitative, usually deterministic physical scheme. Building on some recent scholarship, I aim to articulate the contrarian view according to which neither of these stories is true. On the contrary, empiricism turns out to be less ‘science-friendly’ and more concerned with moral matters; materialism reveals itself to be, in at least a large number of cases, a ‘vital’, anti-mechanistic doctrine which focuses on the unique properties of organic beings. This revision of two key philosophical episodes should reveal that our history of early modern philosophy is dependent to a great extent on ‘special interests’, whether positivistic or Kantian, and by extension lead us to rethink the relation and distinction between ‘science’ and ‘philosophy’ in this period. (shrink)

India, despite being the world's largest vaccine manufacturer is now struggling with various unprecedented social, legal, moral issues with the ongoing Covid-19 vaccination program for 1.3 billion people, the largest democracy in the world. With three major vaccines including Covishield, homemade vaccine Covaxin, and Russia's Sputnik V, India is still facing acute scarcity of vaccines and raw material supply. This is not only unfortunate but also reveals the ethically-triggered facts about the imbalanced healthcare system between public and private sectors, ineffective (...) inequitable healthcare policies, unaccountable data reports that raise mistrust and confusion, and a deeper concern about global unfair distribution. In this paper, I have briefly discussed some unparalleled ethical issues raised from the vaccination program of India. (shrink)

What is the essential ingredient of creativity that only humans – and not machines – possess? Can artificial intelligence help refine the notion of creativity by reference to that essential ingredient? How / do we need to redefine our conceptual and legal frameworks for rewarding creativity because of this new qualifying – actually creatively significant – factor? -/- Those are the questions tackled in this essay. The author’s conclusion is that consciousness, experiential states (such as a raw feel of what (...) is like to be creating) and propositional attitudes (such as intention to instigate change by creating) appear pivotal to qualifying an exploratory effort as creativity. Artificial intelligence systems would supposedly be capable of creativity if they could exhibit such states, which philosophers and computer scientists posit as conceptually admissible and practically possible. -/- The existing legal framework rewards creative endeavours by reference to the novelty or originality of the end result. But this bar is not insurmountable for artificial intelligence. Technically speaking, artificial intelligence systems can create works that are novel and/or original. Are we then prepared to grant to those systems the legal status of “creators” in their own right? Whom should the associated benefits and rewards be assigned to? How does the position change (or not) based on the qualifying factors set out above? Should – and if, how – the general public benefit from inventions / creative works of artificial intelligence systems if troves of personal data are the key component that fueled and informed creative choices? (shrink)

Food has been a vital material of the life since inception of all organisms. By taking food we ensure growth of our children and youth, and maintain our good health. But some foods are good and helpful for maintaining health, while some are harmful. A large part of it is scientifically beneficial for body and fulfils needs of our life style. Thus, it can be stated that food is that which nourishes our body. It may also be defined as anything (...) which is eaten or drunk, that meets the needs for energy building. In short, the food is the raw material from which our bodies are made. Intake of its any kinds amounts to health, which may be evident in our appearance, efficiency and emotional well-being. My objective of this study is that to check the health status of urban and rural health. This approach is used for rural and urban population of Allahabad district. Research design is descriptive type and data collection techniques are applied interview schedule, participant observation, sampling etc. Finally conclusion is found out in my study that variation of diet is present and health of urban people is good. (shrink)

The high failure rate of new small enterprises in Angola calls to attention the fact that they are not equipped enough to meet the challenges of sustainable economic growth, equitable distribution of wealth and job creation. The worrying impact on the Angolan landscape, as a consequence, has had economists scrambling for solutions in recent years. Moving from on the assumption that the current business climate has been a contributing factor, this paper attempts to examine the role of external environmental factors (...) in the context of Angola. Adopting a quantitative approach, the questionnaire was utilized as the primary data collection tool with snowballing as the sampling technique. The Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) software delivered a result to the quantitative data that indicate a severe lack of economic support and availability of fundamental business resources such as raw material, skilled people and finance, and rigid policy-making regulations. The doomed-to-fail death knell to the Angolan small business comes in the form of a high level of corruption and theft in the country. (shrink)

In this initially daunting but ultimately enjoyable and informative book, Mohan Matthen argues that this tradition is mistaken about both the processes of perception or sensing and the relationship between sensation, perception, and cognition. Since this tradition is sufficiently alive and well in the contemporary literature to constitute something like the received view of perception and the role of sensation in it, Matthen’s challenge and the alternative view he proposes are potentially significant. Sensory systems, Matthen thinks, are primarily devices for (...) sorting objects into kinds, a process resulting in sensory quality spaces that provide the basis for judgments about and inductions over what there is in the world perceived. Sensory systems do not deliver ‘raw’ sense data, fleeting qualia, or unordered sensations for true cognitive processing; rather, they deliver an output that is sorted and ordered, an output that is already, in traditional terms, conceptualized. Sensory experience or sensations come not ‘before’ cognition but ‘after’ it. When we think about sensory systems in general, and not just the small subset of them that we possess, sensory experience is thus a kind of icing on the cake of perception, not one of its crucial ingredients. (shrink)

We critically engage two traditional views of scientific data and outline a novel philosophical view that we call the pragmatic-representational view of data. On the PR view, data are representations that are the product of a process of inquiry, and they should be evaluated in terms of their adequacy or fitness for particular purposes. Some important implications of the PR view for data assessment, related to misrepresentation, context-sensitivity, and complementary use, are highlighted. The PR view provides (...) insight into the common but little-discussed practices of iteratively reusing and repurposing data, which result in many datasets’ having a phylogeny—an origin and complex evolutionary history—that is relevant to their evaluation and future use. We relate these insights to the open-data and data-rescue movements, and highlight several future avenues of research that build on the PR view of data. (shrink)

How should a machine intelligence perform unsupervised structure discovery over streams of sensory input? One approach to this problem is to cast it as an apperception task [1]. Here, the task is to construct an explicit interpretable theory that both explains the sensory sequence and also satisfies a set of unity conditions, designed to ensure that the constituents of the theory are connected in a relational structure. However, the original formulation of the apperception task had one fundamental limitation: it assumed (...) the raw sensory input had already been parsed using a set of discrete categories, so that all the system had to do was receive this already-digested symbolic input, and make sense of it. But what if we don't have access to pre-parsed input? What if our sensory sequence is raw unprocessed information? The central contribution of this paper is a neuro-symbolic framework for distilling interpretable theories out of streams of raw, unprocessed sensory experience. First, we extend the definition of the apperception task to include ambiguous (but still symbolic) input: sequences of sets of disjunctions. Next, we use a neural network to map raw sensory input to disjunctive input. Our binary neural network is encoded as a logic program, so the weights of the network and the rules of the theory can be solved jointly as a single SAT problem. This way, we are able to jointly learn how to perceive (mapping raw sensory information to concepts) and apperceive (combining concepts into declarative rules). (shrink)

Nowadays, protecting trust in social sciences also means engaging in open community dialogue, which helps to safeguard robustness and improve efficiency of research methods. The combination of open data, open review and open dialogue may sound simple but implementation in the real world will not be straightforward. However, in view of Begley and Ellis’s (2012) statement that, “the scientific process demands the highest standards of quality, ethics and rigour,” they are worth implementing. More importantly, they are feasible to work (...) on and likely will help to restore plausibility to social sciences research. Therefore, I feel it likely that the triplet of open data, open review and open dialogue will gradually emerge to become policy requirements regardless of the research funding source. (shrink)

Recently, it has been argued that the use of Big Data transforms the sciences, making data-driven research possible and studying causality redundant. In this paper, I focus on the claim on causal knowledge by examining the Big Data project EXPOsOMICS, whose research is funded by the European Commission and considered capable of improving our understanding of the relation between exposure and disease. While EXPOsOMICS may seem the perfect exemplification of the data-driven view, I show how causal (...) knowledge is necessary for the project, both as a source for handling complexity and as an output for meeting the project’s goals. Consequently, I argue that data-driven claims about causality are fundamentally flawed and causal knowledge should be considered a necessary aspect of Big Data science. In addition, I present the consequences of this result on other data-driven claims, concerning the role of theoretical considerations. I argue that the importance of causal knowledge and other kinds of theoretical engagement in EXPOsOMICS undermine theory-free accounts and suggest alternative ways of framing science based on Big Data. (shrink)

This paper presents an ethical framework designed to support the development of critical data literacy for research methods courses and data training programmes in higher education. The framework we present draws upon our reviews of literature, course syllabi and existing frameworks on data ethics. For this research we reviewed 250 research methods syllabi from across the disciplines, as well as 80 syllabi from data science programmes to understand how or if data ethics was taught. We (...) also reviewed 12 data ethics frameworks drawn from different sectors. Finally, we reviewed an extensive and diverse body of literature about data practices, research ethics, data ethics and critical data literacy, in order to develop a transversal model that can be adopted across higher education. To promote and support ethical approaches to the collection and use of data, ethics training must go beyond securing informed consent to enable a critical understanding of the techno-centric environment and the intersecting hierarchies of power embedded in technology and data. By fostering ethics as a method, educators can enable research that protects vulnerable groups and empower communities. (shrink)

While the term “reactivity” has come to be associated with specific phenomena in the social sciences, having to do with subjects’ awareness of being studied, this paper takes a broader stance on this concept. I argue that reactivity is a ubiquitous feature of the psychological subject matter and that this fact is a precondition of experimental research, while also posing potential problems for the experimenter. The latter are connected to the worry about distorted data and experimental artifacts. But what (...) are experimental artifacts and what is the most productive way of dealing with them? In this paper, I approach these questions by exploring the ways in which experimenters in psychology simultaneously exploit and suppress the reactivity of their subject matter in order to produce experimental data that speak to the question or subject matter at hand. Highlighting the artificiality of experimental data, I raise the question of what distinguishes a genuine experimental result from an experimental artifact. My analysis construes experimental results as the outcomes of inferences from the data that take material background assumptions as auxiliary premises. Artifacts occur when one or more of these background assumptions are false, such that the data do not reliably serve the purposes they were generated for. I conclude by laying out the ways in which my analysis of data quality is relevant to, and informed by, recent debates about the replicability of experimental results. (shrink)

Between 2006 and 2011, humanity accumulated 1,600 EB of data. As a result of this growth, there is now more data produced than available storage. This article explores the problem of “Big Data,” arguing for an epistemological approach as a possible solution to this ever-increasing challenge.

Ontological realism aims at the development of high quality ontologies that faithfully represent what is general in reality and to use these ontologies to render heterogeneous data collections comparable. To achieve this second goal for clinical research datasets presupposes not merely (1) that the requisite ontologies already exist, but also (2) that the datasets in question are faithful to reality in the dual sense that (a) they denote only particulars and relationships between particulars that do in fact exist and (...) (b) they do this in terms of the types and type-level relationships described in these ontologies. While much attention has been devoted to (1), work on (2), which is the topic of this paper, is comparatively rare. Using Referent Tracking as basis, we describe a technical data wrangling strategy which consists in creating for each dataset a template that, when applied to each particular record in the dataset, leads to the generation of a collection of Referent Tracking Tuples (RTT) built out of unique identifiers for the entities described by means of the data items in the record. The proposed strategy is based on (i) the distinction between data and what data are about, and (ii) the explicit descriptions of portions of reality which RTTs provide and which range not only over the particulars described by data items in a dataset, but also over these data items themselves. This last feature allows us to describe particulars that are only implicitly referred to by the dataset; to provide information about correspondences between data items in a dataset; and to assert which data items are unjustifiably or redundantly present in or absent from the dataset. The approach has been tested on a dataset collected from patients seeking treatment for orofacial pain at two German universities and made available for the NIDCR-funded OPMQoL project. (shrink)

The potential to collect brain data more directly, with higher resolution, and in greater amounts has heightened worries about mental and brain privacy. In order to manage the risks to individuals posed by these privacy challenges, some have suggested codifying new privacy rights, including a right to “mental privacy.” In this paper, we consider these arguments and conclude that while neurotechnologies do raise significant privacy concerns, such concerns are—at least for now—no different from those raised by other well-understood (...) class='Hi'>data collection technologies, such as gene sequencing tools and online surveillance. To better understand the privacy stakes of brain data, we suggest the use of a conceptual framework from information ethics, Helen Nissenbaum’s “contextual integrity” theory. To illustrate the importance of context, we examine neurotechnologies and the information flows they produce in three familiar contexts—healthcare and medical research, criminal justice, and consumer marketing. We argue that by emphasizing what is distinct about brain privacy issues, rather than what they share with other data privacy concerns, risks weakening broader efforts to enact more robust privacy law and policy. (shrink)

ICTs, personal data, digital rights, the GDPR, data privacy, online security… these terms, and the concepts behind them, are increasingly common in our lives. Some of us may be familiar with them, but others are less aware of the growing role of ICTs and data in our lives - and the potential risks this creates. These risks are even more pronounced for vulnerable groups in society. People can be vulnerable in different, often overlapping, ways, which place them (...) at a disadvantage to the majority of citizens; Table 3 in this guide presents some of the many forms and causes of vulnerability. As a result, vulnerable people need greater support to navigate the digital world, and to ensure that they are able to exercise their rights. This guide explains where such support can be found, and also answers the following questions: - What are the main ethical and legal issues around ICTs for vulnerable citizens? - Who is vulnerable in Europe? - How do issues around ICTs affect vulnerable people in particular? This guide is a resource for members of vulnerable groups, people who work with vulnerable groups, and citizens more broadly. It is also useful for data controllers1 who collect data about vulnerable citizens. While focused on citizens in Europe, it may be of interest to people in other parts of the world. It forms part of the Citizens’ Information Pack produced by the PANELFIT project, and is available in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish. You are welcome to translate this guide into other languages. Please send us a link to online versions in other languages, so that we can add them to the project website. (shrink)

Healthcare professionals decide wisely about personalized medicine, treatment plans, and resource allocation by utilizing big data analytics and machine learning. To guarantee that algorithmic recommendations are impartial and fair, however, ethical issues relating to prejudice and data privacy must be taken into account. Big data analytics and machine learning have a great potential to disrupt healthcare, and as these technologies continue to evolve, new opportunities to reform healthcare and enhance patient outcomes may arise. In order to investigate (...) the patient’s outcomes with empirical evidence, this research was conducted using an online survey to incorporate healthcare professionals, patient’s reviews, and clinical staff. The data were analyzed using SmartPLS 4.0 to predict the structural model. The findings revealed a direct impact as positive influence of using machine learning on healthcare performance and patient outcomes through big data analytics. Moreover, it is evident that this can lead to personalized treatment plans, early interventions, and improved patient outcomes. Additionally, big data analytics can help healthcare providers optimize resource allocation, improve operational efficiency, and reduce costs. The impact of big data analytics on patient outcome and healthcare performance is expected to continue to grow, making it an important area for investment and research. (shrink)

Data subject rights provide data controllers with obligations that can help with transparency, giving data subjects some control over their personal data. To date, a growing number of researchers have used these data subject rights as a methodology for data collection in research studies. No one, however, has gathered and analysed different academic research studies that use data subject rights as a methodology for data collection. To this end, we conducted a systematic (...) literature review that searched, compiled, and analysed 32 academic studies that use data subject rights as a data collection method. We find that the right of access is the most commonly-used data subject right by researchers, most studies are interested in measuring data subject rights compliance, and that a variety of difficulties exist in conducting research studies with data subject rights. We conclude that researchers should explore other data subject rights for alternative purposes, ease the process of exercising data subject rights, and improve the scalability of these studies. (shrink)

A growing awareness of the lack of reproducibility has undermined society’s trust and esteem in social sciences. In some cases, well-known results have been fabricated or the underlying data have turned out to have weak technical foundations.

The first few years of the 21st century were characterised by a progressive loss of privacy. Two phenomena converged to give rise to the data economy: the realisation that data trails from users interacting with technology could be used to develop personalised advertising, and a concern for security that led authorities to use such personal data for the purposes of intelligence and policing. In contrast to the early days of the data economy and internet surveillance, the (...) last few years have witnessed a rising concern for privacy. As bad data practices have come to light, citizens are starting to understand the real cost of using online digital technologies. Two events stamped 2018 as a landmark year for privacy: the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and the implementation of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The former showed the extent to which personal data has been shared without data subjects’ knowledge and consent and many times for unacceptable purposes, such as swaying elections. The latter inaugurated the beginning of robust data protection regulation in the digital age. Getting privacy right is one of the biggest challenges of this new decade of the 21st century. The past year has shown that there is still much work to be done on privacy to tame the darkest aspects of the data economy. As data scandals continue to emerge, questions abound as to how to interpret and enforce regulation, how to design new and better laws, how to complement regulation with better ethics, and how to find technical solutions to data problems. The aim of the research project Data, Privacy, and the Individual is to contribute to a better understanding of the ethics of privacy and of differential privacy. The outcomes of the project are seven research papers on privacy, a survey, and this final report, which summarises each research paper, and goes on to offer a set of reflections and recommendations to implement best practices regarding privacy. (shrink)

Data mining possess a significant threat to ethics, privacy, and legality, especially when we consider the fact that data mining makes it difficult for an individual or consumer (in the case of a company) to control accessibility and usage of his data. Individuals should be able to control how his/ her data in the data warehouse is being access and utilize while at the same time providing enabling environment which enforces legality, privacy and ethicality on (...) data scientists, or data engineer during data mining process. This paper review issues of legality, privacy, and ethicality in data mining, review processes of Data mining, and also proposes solution to current ethical and privacy issue in data mining. It introduces a new method which enforces data mining without infringing on the privacy of individual or consumer whose data are being used. The sole aim of this paper is to propose a new method of mining data which restricts scientists within the constraints of legality, privacy, and ethicality. (shrink)

Digital data help data scientists and epidemiologists track and predict outbreaks of disease. Mobile phone GPS data, social media data, or other forms of information updates such as the progress of epidemics are used by epidemiologists to recognize disease spread among specific groups of people. Targeting groups as potential carriers of a disease, rather than addressing individuals as patients, risks causing harm to groups. While there are rules and obligations at the level of the individual, we (...) have to reach a stage in the development of data analytics where groups are protected as entities. This chapter offers a deeper examination of harms to the groups. (shrink)

In this essay, we advocate that the issue of health data ethics should no longer be considered on the level of individual scientists or research labs, but rather as a problem involving all stakeholders, from publishers, funders, ethical committees to governments, for the sake of research integrity.

In this paper we investigate if sentences presented as the result of the application of statistical models and artificial intelligence to large volumes of data – the so-called ‘Big Data’ – can be characterized as semantically true, or as quasi-true, or even if such sentences can only be characterized as probably quasi-false and, in a certain way, post-true; that is, if, in the context of Big Data, the representation of a data domain can be configured as (...) a total structure, or as a partial structure provided with a set of sentences assumed to be true, or if such representation cannot be configured as a partial structure provided with a set of sentences assumed to be true. (shrink)

The theory of knowledge in early twentieth-century Anglo American philosophy was oriented toward phenomenally described cognition. There was a healthy respect for the mind-body problem, which meant that phenomena in both the mental and physical domains were taken seriously. Bertrand Russell's developing position on sense-data and momentary particulars drew upon, and ultimately became like, the neutral monism of Ernst Mach and William James. Due to a more recent behaviorist and physicalist inspired "fear of the mental", this development has been (...) down-played in historical work on early analytic philosophy. Such neglect assumes that the "linguistic turn" is a proper and permanent effect of twentieth-century philosophy, an assumption that distorts early analytic historiography, and begs a substantive philosophical question about thought and cognition. (shrink)

Biodiversity science is in a pivotal period when diverse groups of actors—including researchers, businesses, national governments, and Indigenous Peoples—are negotiating wide-ranging norms for governing and managing biodiversity data in digital repositories. These repositories, often called biodiversity data portals, are a type of organization for which governance can address or perpetuate the colonial history of biodiversity science and current inequities. Researchers and Indigenous Peoples are developing and implementing new strategies to examine and change assumptions about which agents should count (...) as salient participants in scientific projects, especially in projects that build and manage large digital data portals. Two notable efforts are the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) and CARE (Collective benefit, Authority, Responsibility, Ethics) Principles for scientific data management and governance. To characterize how these principles influence the governance of biodiversity data portals, we develop an account of fit-for-use data that makes explicit its social as well as technical conditions in relation to agents and purposes. The FAIR Principles, already widely adopted by biodiversity researchers, prioritize machine agents and efficient computation, while the CARE Principles prioritize Indigenous Peoples and their data sovereignty. Both illustrate the potency of an emerging general strategy by which groups of actors craft and implement governance principles for data fitness-of-use to change assumptions about who are salient participants in data science. (shrink)

Despite an enormous philosophical literature on models in science, surprisingly little has been written about data models and how they are constructed. In this paper, I examine the case of how paleodiversity data models are constructed from the fossil data. In particular, I show how paleontologists are using various model-based techniques to correct the data. Drawing on this research, I argue for the following related theses: first, the ‘purity’ of a data model is not a (...) measure of its epistemic reliability. Instead it is the fidelity of the data that matters. Second, the fidelity of a data model in capturing the signal of interest is a matter of degree. Third, the fidelity of a data model can be improved ‘vicariously’, such as through the use of post hoc model-based correction techniques. And, fourth, data models, like theoretical models, should be assessed as adequate for particular purposes. (shrink)

The existing body of knowledge has witnessed gaps arising from the paucity of research literature on the quality of educational research output in higher education. This study shows how the management of data in higher education affects the quality of academic research conducted by university lecturers in South-South Nigeria. A sample of 602 lecturers were accessed during data collection and responded to two questionnaires (Data Management Practices Questionnaire – DMPQ and "Educational Research Effectiveness Questionnaire – EREQ). Multiple (...) regression was employed in the analysis of data. Findings revealed amongst others that; data storage, data security, data retrieval, data sharing, and data re-use jointly contributed to the total variance in educational research effectiveness of university lecturers in terms of proper citations by 56.25%, problem-solving by 22.14%, knowledge creation by 34.50%, and generation of testable data by 36.88%. The five data management practices compositely influences the educational research effectiveness of university lecturers in terms of proper citations (F=152.25,p<.05), problem-solving (F=33.90,p<.05), knowledge creation (F=62.78,p<.05), and the generation of testable data (F=69.65,p<.05), is statistically significant. Based on the findings of this study, it was concluded that data management practices (storage, security, retrieval, sharing, and re-use) jointly and relatively contributes to the total variance in educational research effectiveness in terms of proper citations, problem-solving, knowledge creation and generation of testable data at varying extents. It was recommended, among others that, lecturers should practice the habit of managing research data in their personal computers and through manual channels. These records could become vital in the future for further problem-solving. (shrink)

Big Data has the potential to enable unprecedentedly rigorous quantitative modeling of complex human social relationships and social structures. When such models are extended to nonhuman domains, they can undermine anthropocentric assumptions about the extent to which these relationships and structures are specifically human. Discoveries of relevant commonalities with nonhumans may not make us less human, but they promise to challenge fundamental views of what it is to be human.