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1. Politics of attributing extreme events and disasters to climate change

   https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.750  

   Lahsen, Myanna ; Ribot, Jesse ( December 2021 , WIREs Climate Change)

   Climate change certainly shapes weather events. However, describing climate and weather as the cause of disasters can be misleading, since disasters are caused by pre‐existing fragilities and inequalities on the ground. Analytic frames that attribute disaster to climate can divert attention from these place‐based vulnerabilities and their socio‐political causes. Thus, while politicians may want to blame crises on climate change, members of the public may prefer to hold government accountable for inadequate investments in flood or drought prevention and precarious living conditions. To be both strategic and moral, framing choices must therefore be sensitive to context‐dependent political meanings and particularities, and to how the values implicit within analytic frames about the causes of disasters shape policy responses. Such sensitivity requires multicausal analysis of weather‐linked disasters to illuminate a broader range of means to reduce the damages associated with climate change and weather extremes. Through examples from around the world, and especially Brazil, we discuss how and why climate‐centric disaster framing can erase from view—and, thus, from policy agendas—the very socio‐economic and political factors that most centrally cause vulnerability and suffering in weather extremes and disasters. We also offer a theoretical discussion of why attribution is not neutral. Analytic frameworks always embed choices about factors that matter, and thus are inherently normative and consequential for understandings of responsibility and action.

   This article is categorized under:

   Social Status of Climate Change Knowledge > Climate Science and Decision Making

   Attributing crises only to climate is inadequate from a mechanical, moral, and strategic policy points of view.

    

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2. The Blame Game: Understanding Blame Assignment in Social Media

   https://doi.org/10.1109/TCSS.2023.3261242  

   Xi, Ruijie ; Singh, Munindar P. ( January 2023 , IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems)

   Cognitive and psychological studies on morality have proposed underlying linguistic and semantic factors. However, laboratory experiments in the philosophical literature often lack the nuances and complexity of real life. This paper examines how well the findings of these cognitive studies generalize to a corpus of over 30,000 narratives of tense social situations submitted to a popular social media forum. These narratives describe interpersonal moral situations or misgivings; other users judge from the post whether the author (protagonist) or the opposing side (antagonist) is morally culpable. Whereas previous work focuses on predicting the polarity of normative behaviors, we extend and apply natural language processing (NLP) techniques to understand the effects of descriptions of the people involved in these posts. We conduct extensive experiments to investigate the effect sizes of features to understand how they affect the assignment of blame on social media. Our findings show that aggregating psychology theories enables understanding real-life moral situations. Moreover, our results suggest that there exist biases in blame assignment on social media, such as males are more likely to receive blame no matter whether they are protagonists or antagonists. 

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3. Beyond Open vs. Closed: Balancing Individual Privacy and Public Accountability in Data Sharing

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3287560.3287577  

   Young, Meg ; Rodriguez, Luke ; Keller, Emily ; Sun, Feiyang ; Sa, Boyang ; Whittington, Jan ; Howe, Bill ( January 2019 , FAT*)

   Data too sensitive to be "open" for analysis and re-purposing typically remains "closed" as proprietary information. This dichotomy undermines efforts to make algorithmic systems more fair, transparent, and accountable. Access to proprietary data in particular is needed by government agencies to enforce policy, researchers to evaluate methods, and the public to hold agencies accountable; all of these needs must be met while preserving individual privacy and firm competitiveness. In this paper, we describe an integrated legal-technical approach provided by a third-party public-private data trust designed to balance these competing interests. Basic membership allows firms and agencies to enable low-risk access to data for compliance reporting and core methods research, while modular data sharing agreements support a wide array of projects and use cases. Unless specifically stated otherwise in an agreement, all data access is initially provided to end users through customized synthetic datasets that offer a) strong privacy guarantees, b) removal of signals that could expose competitive advantage, and c) removal of biases that could reinforce discriminatory policies, all while maintaining fidelity to the original data. We find that using synthetic data in conjunction with strong legal protections over raw data strikes a balance between transparency, proprietorship, privacy, and research objectives. This legal-technical framework can form the basis for data trusts in a variety of contexts. 

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4. Ethical Guidance in Human Paleogenomics: New and Ongoing Perspectives

   https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-genom-120621-090239  

   Fleskes, Raquel E. ; Bader, Alyssa C. ; Tsosie, Krystal S. ; Wagner, Jennifer K. ; Claw, Katrina G. ; Garrison, Nanibaa’ A. ( August 2022 , Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics)

   Over the past two decades, the study of ancient genomes from Ancestral humans, or human paleogenomic research, has expanded rapidly in both scale and scope. Ethical discourse has subsequently emerged to address issues of social responsibility and scientific robusticity in conducting research. Here, we highlight and contextualize the primary sources of professional ethical guidance aimed at paleogenomic researchers. We describe the tension among existing guidelines, while addressing core issues such as consent, destructive research methods, and data access and management. Currently, there is a dissonance between guidelines that focus on scientific outcomes and those that hold scientists accountable to stakeholder communities, such as descendants. Thus, we provide additional tools to navigate the complexities of ancient DNA research while centering engagement with stakeholder communities in the scientific process. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics, Volume 23 is October 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates. 

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5. Blame Tracking and Type Error Debugging

   https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.SNAPL.2019.2  

   Chen, Sheng ; Campora III, John ( May 2019 , Leibniz international proceedings in informatics)

   In this work, we present an unexpected connection between gradual typing and type error debugging. Namely, we illustrate that gradual typing provides a natural way to defer type errors in statically ill-typed programs, providing more feedback than traditional approaches to deferring type errors. When evaluating expressions that lead to runtime type errors, the usefulness of the feedback depends on blame tracking, the defacto approach to locating the cause of such runtime type errors. Unfortunately, blame tracking suffers from the bias problem for type error localization in languages with type inference. We illustrate and formalize the bias problem for blame tracking, present ideas for adapting existing type error debugging techniques to combat this bias, and outline further challenges. 

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