Search for: All records

Abstract Labor abuse on fishing vessels and illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing violate human rights, jeopardize food security, and deprive governments of revenues. We applied a multi-method approach, combining new empirical data with satellite information on fishing activities and vessel characteristics to map risks of labor abuse and IUU fishing, understand their relationships, and identify major drivers. Port risks were globally pervasive and often coupled, with 57% of assessed ports associated with labor abuse or IUU fishing. For trips ending in assessed ports, 82% were linked to labor abuse or IUU fishing risks. At-sea risk areas were primarily driven by fishing vessel flags linked to poor control of corruption by the flag state, high ownership by countries other than the flag state, and Chinese-flagged vessels. Transshipment risk areas were related to the gear type of fishing vessels engaged in potential transshipment and carrier vessel flags. Measures at port offer promise for mitigating risks, through the Port State Measures Agreement for IUU fishing, and ensuring sufficient vessel time at port to detect and respond to labor abuse. Our results highlight the need for coordinated action across actors to avoid risk displacement and make progress towards eliminating these socially, environmentally and economically unsustainable practices. 

Despite our intimate relationship with music in every-day life, we know little about how people create music. A particularly elusive area of study entails the spontaneous collaborative musical creation in the absence of rehearsals or scripts. Toward this aim, we designed an experiment in which pairs of players collaboratively created music in rhythmic improvisation. Rhythmic patterns and collaborative processes were investigated through symbolic-recurrence quantification and information theory, applied to the time series of the sound created by the players. Working with real data on collaborative rhythmic improvisation, we identified features of improvised music and elucidated underlying processes of collaboration. Players preferred certain patterns over others, and their musical experience drove musical collaboration when rhythmic improvisation started. These results unfold prevailing rhythmic features in collaborative music creation while informing the complex dynamics of the underlying processes. 

Abstract Injustices are prevalent in food systems, where the accumulation of vast wealth is possible for a few, yet one in ten people remain hungry. Here, for 194 countries we combine aquatic food production, distribution and consumption data with corresponding national policy documents and, drawing on theories of social justice, explore whether barriers to participation explain unequal distributions of benefits. Using Bayesian models, we find economic and political barriers are associated with lower wealth-based benefits; countries produce and consume less when wealth, formal education and voice and accountability are lacking. In contrast, social barriers are associated with lower welfare-based benefits; aquatic foods are less affordable where gender inequality is greater. Our analyses of policy documents reveal a frequent failure to address political and gender-based barriers. However, policies linked to more just food system outcomes centre principles of human rights, specify inclusive decision-making processes and identify and challenge drivers of injustice. 

In citizen science, participants’ productivity is imperative to project success. We investigate the feasibility of a collaborative approach to citizen science, within which productivity is enhanced by capitalizing on the diversity of individual attributes among participants. Specifically, we explore the possibility of enhancing productivity by integrating multiple individual attributes to inform the choice of which task should be assigned to which individual. To that end, we collect data in an online citizen science project composed of two task types: (i) filtering images of interest from an image repository in a limited time, and (ii) allocating tags on the object in the filtered images over unlimited time. The first task is assigned to those who have more experience in playing action video games, and the second task to those who have higher intrinsic motivation to participate. While each attribute has weak predictive power on the task performance, we demonstrate a greater increase in productivity when assigning participants to the task based on a combination of these attributes. We acknowledge that such an increase is modest compared to the case where participants are randomly assigned to the tasks, which could offset the effort of implementing our attribute-based task assignment scheme. This study constitutes a first step toward understanding and capitalizing on individual differences in attributes toward enhancing productivity in collaborative citizen science.