Capturing and sharing our collective expertise on climate data: the CHARMe project

For users of climate services, the ability to quickly determine the datasets that best fit one's needs would be invaluable. The volume, variety and complexity of climate data makes this judgment difficult. The ambition of CHARMe ("Characterization of metadata to enable high-quality climate services") is to give a wider interdisciplinary community access to a range of supporting information, such as journal articles, technical reports or feedback on previous applications of the data. The capture and discovery of this "commentary" information, often created by data users rather than data providers, and currently not linked to the data themselves, has not been significantly addressed previously. CHARMe applies the principles of Linked Data and open web standards to associate, record, search and publish user-derived annotations in a way that can be read both by users and automated systems. Tools have been developed within the CHARMe project that enable annotation capability for data delivery systems already in wide use for discovering climate data. In addition, the project has developed advanced tools for exploring data and commentary in innovative ways, including an interactive data explorer and comparator ("CHARMe Maps") and a tool for correlating climate time series with external "significant events" (e.g. instrument failures or large volcanic eruptions) that affect the data quality. Although the project focuses on climate science, the concepts are general and could be applied to other fields. All CHARMe system software is open-source, released under a liberal licence, permitting future projects to re-use the source code as they wish.

Contribution to collective harms and responsibility

In the present contribution, I discuss the claim, endorsed by a number of authors, that contributing to a collective harm is the ground for special responsibilities to the victims of that harm. Contributors should, between them, cover the costs of the harms they have inflicted, at least if those harms would otherwise be rights-violating. I raise some doubts about the generality of this principle before moving on to sketch a framework for thinking about liability for the costs of harms in general. This framework uses a contractualist framework to build an account of how to think about liability for costs on the basis of the presumably attractive thought that individual agents should have as much control over their liabilities as is compatible with others having like control. I then use that framework to suggest that liability on the basis of contribution should be restricted to cases in which the contributors could have avoided their contribution relatively costlessly, in which meeting the liability is not crippling for them, and in which such a liability would not have chilling effects, either on them or on third parties. This account of the grounds for contributory liability also has the advantage of avoiding a number of awkward questions about what counts as a contribution by shifting the issue away from often unanswerable questions about the precise causal genesis of some harm or other. Instead, control over conduct, which plausibly has some relation to the harm, becomes crucial. On the basis of this account, I then investigate whether a number of uses of the contributory principle are entirely appropriate. I argue that contributory liability is not appropriate for cases of collective harms committed by coordinated groups in the way that, for example, Iris Marion Young and Thomas Pogge have suggested and that further investigation of how members of such groups may be liable will be needed.

Collective financing among Chinese entrepreneurs and department store retailing in China

Chinese entrepreneurship in department store retailing differed from that seen in other emerging economies before 1940. Rather than the leading examples of the format being owned by advanced economy firms, in China a small group of Cantonese entrepreneurs established what became known as the ‘Big Four’ department stores in Shanghai. By 1940 the ‘Big Four’ department stores were among the most famous stores in China, and among the biggest businesses in China. None of these Chinese entrepreneurs had any prior experience in department store retailing. Rather this article explains how their success in department store retailing was dependent on a business model that enabled these Chinese entrepreneurs to act as informal investment bankers (or ‘shadow’ banks) for the thousands of overseas Chinese wanting to invest surplus savings in mainland China, so creating large indigenous business groups.

The kommuna impulse: collective mechanisms and commune-ists in the early Soviet State

This study examines the creation of the urban kommuna (commune) and the ideals that stimulated this social phenomenon – the kommuna impulse of the nascent Soviet state. Collective idealism affected Soviet housing, architecture and even urban planning, but little is known of social experiments in commune‐ism. As a result, these collective cells have been dismissed as utopian anomalies or the product of a housing shortage. Here it is argued that these discursive assessments are unsatisfactory and isolated from the historical narrative. While utopian ideals and domestic necessity were central to the formation of collective living, the kommuna was also involved in an active discourse with collectivism and socialist ideology. The kommuna cell was a dynamic entity that required considerable formative planning. The activists who forged these cells – the self‐identified ‘communards’ – turned their everyday domestic life into a socialist battleground, in which they struggled with the key debates of the early Soviet state. This article examines the communard as a social activist in order to better understand this phenomenon. It clarifies the coexistence of ideological and idealist trends among Soviet youth with practical contingencies for socialism. Furthermore, it reveals the process by which the kommuna impulse and these contingencies developed throughout the 1920s and early 1930s.

Intersections and differentiations: a corpus-assisted discourse study of gender representations in the British press before, during and after the London Olympics 2012

This study examines the impact of a global sports event on gender representations in media reporting. Whereas previous research on gender, sport and media has been mainly concerned with sports events in the North American or Australian context, this study investigates the British media reporting before, during and after the London Olympics 2012. Our study follows the approach of Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) and uses both quantitative and qualitative research procedures. The results reveal more balanced gender representations during the London Olympics in that the ‘regular’ biased associations were supressed in favour of positive references to female achievements. However, little carry-though of the ‘gains’ was noted. Also, this study shows that the positive associations intersected with national sentiments and were used to celebrate the nation-state. At the same time, some subtle resistance was observed to accepting as ‘truly’ British the non-white athletes and those not born in Britain.

Small states, great power? Gaining influence through intrinsic, derivative, and collective power

In recent years, scholars have devoted increased attention to the agency of small states in International Relations. However, the conventional wisdom remains that while not completely powerful, small states are unlikely to achieve much of significance when faced by great power opposition. This argument, however, implicitly rests on resource-based and compulsory understandings of power. This article explores the implicit connections between the concept of "small state" and diverse concepts of power, asking how we should understand these states' attempts to gain influence and achieve their international political objectives. By connecting the study of small states with additional understandings of power, the article elaborates the broader avenues for influence that are open to many states but are particularly relevant for small states. The article argues that small states' power can be best understood as originating in three categories: “derivative,” collective, and particular-intrinsic. Derivative power, coined by Michael Handel, relies upon the relationship with a great power. Collective power involves building coalitions of supportive states, often through institutions. Particular-intrinsic power relies on the assets of the small state trying to do the influencing. Small states specialize in the bases and means of these types of power, which may have unconventional compulsory, institutional, structural, and productive aspects.

In the mood: the dynamics of collective sentiments on Twitter

We study the relationship between the sentiment levels of Twitter users and the evolving network structure that the users created by @-mentioning each other. We use a large dataset of tweets to which we apply three sentiment scoring algorithms, including the open source SentiStrength program. Specifically we make three contributions. Firstly we find that people who have potentially the largest communication reach (according to a dynamic centrality measure) use sentiment differently than the average user: for example they use positive sentiment more often and negative sentiment less often. Secondly we find that when we follow structurally stable Twitter communities over a period of months, their sentiment levels are also stable, and sudden changes in community sentiment from one day to the next can in most cases be traced to external events affecting the community. Thirdly, based on our findings, we create and calibrate a simple agent-based model that is capable of reproducing measures of emotive response comparable to those obtained from our empirical dataset.