Information ethics in the age of digital labour and the surveillance-industrial complex

Thee rise of computing and the internet have brought about an ethical eld of studies that some term information ethics, computer ethics, digital media ethics, or internet ethics e aim of this contribution is to discuss information ethics’ foundations in the context of the internet’s political economy e chapter rst looks to ground the analysis in a comparison of two information ethics approaches, namely those outlined by Rafael Capurro and Luciano Floridi It then develops, based on these foundations, analyses of the information ethical dimensions of two important areas of social media: one concerns the framing of social media by a surveillance-industrial complex in the context of Edward Snowden’s revelations and the other deals with issues of digital labour processes and issues of class that arises in this context e contribution asks ethical questions about these two phenomena that bring up issues of power, exploitation, and control in the information age It asks if, and if so, how, the approaches of Capurro and Floridi can help us to understand ethico-political aspects of the surveillance-industrial complex and digital labour

Rethinking crises and the accretion of executive power: the “War on Terror” and conditionality evidence from seven political systems

External shocks to democratic systems are likely to threaten the stability of relations between the executive and the representative assembly. This article investigates the impact of the so-called “war on terror” on executive-assembly relations in comparative perspective. We analyze data from seven countries, which varied in terms of form of government, level of democracy, culture, social structure, and geographic location, to evaluate its effects. We find that whereas in some systems the “war on terror” altered the balance of power between the executive and the assembly, in other cases the extant balance of power was preserved. We postulate various conditions under which the constitutionally sanctioned balance of power is most likely to be preserved in times of crisis.

A Rapid Detection of Meat Spoilage using an Electronic Nose and Fuzzy-Wavelet systems

Freshness and safety of muscle foods are generally considered as the most important parameters for the food industry. To address the rapid detection of meat spoilage microorganisms during aerobic or modified atmosphere storage, an electronic nose with the aid of fuzzy wavelet network has been considered in this research. The proposed model incorporates a clustering pre-processing stage for the definition of fuzzy rules. The dual purpose of the proposed modelling approach is not only to classify beef samples in the respective quality class (i.e. fresh, semi-fresh and spoiled), but also to predict their associated microbiological population directly from volatile compounds fingerprints. Comparison results against neural networks and neurofuzzy systems indicated that the proposed modelling scheme could be considered as a valuable detection methodology in food microbiology