Life satisfaction and air quality in London

Personalized recommendations in search engines, social media and also in more traditional media increasingly raise concerns over potentially negative consequences for diversity and the quality of public discourse. The algorithmic filtering and adaption of online content to personal preferences and interests is often associated with a decrease in the diversity of information to which users are exposed. Notwithstanding the question of whether these claims are correct or not, this article discusses whether and how recommendations can also be designed to stimulate more diverse exposure to information and to break potential ‘filter bubbles’ rather than create them. Combining insights from democratic theory, computer science and law, the article makes suggestions for design principles and explores the potential and possible limits of ‘diversity sensitive design’.

https://tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/1369118X.2016.1271900

Exposure diversity as a design principle for recommender systems

What explains why a majority of western democracies have adopted same-sex union (SSU) laws in the past decade and a half? I argue that this startling trend toward policy convergence in part can be explained by the rise of a human rights oriented transnational network of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) activists as well as the transnationally networked policy elites these activists influence. These networks, however, do not fully determine policy outcomes as is evidenced by the fact that not all western democracies legally recognize same-sex relationships and those that do have adopted different models of SSU laws. To explain these differences, I show how the nature of national religious practices and the perceived legitimacy of international norms by national elites and publics mediate the influence of the transnational networks and the norms they promote.

http://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.istr.org/resource/resmgr/working_papers_toronto/kollman.kelly.pdf

Same‐Sex Unions: The Globalization of an Idea

By advancing integration through incomplete agreements, the European Union (EU) has created the very conditions for the emergence of crises, and this has, in turn, spurred on further agreements to deepen integration. Employing this theoretical lens, this article examines EU co-operation in asylum and migration that culminated in 2015 to determine whether crises are, in fact, integral to a cyclical process of EU integration rather than occasional events caused by external shocks. This is done by examining the failures and crises that emerged in migration and asylum policy up to 2015 and the agreements struck at EU level to address them. It is found that despite nominal action to address the weak monitoring mechanisms in use to date and incremental reinforcement of the constellation of institutions operating in this area, no solution has dealt with the critical lack of solidarity and absence of centralized institutions at the root of these issues.

Failing forward in EU migration policy? EU integration after the 2015 asylum and migration crisis

The recent foundering of the Costa Concordia in January 2012 demonstrated that accidents can occur even with ships that are considered masterpieces of modern technology and despite more than 100 years of regulatory and technological progress in maritime safety. The purpose of this paper is, however, not to speculate about the concrete causes of the Costa Concordia accident, but rather to consider some human and organizational factors that were present in the Costa Concordia accident as well as in the foundering of the Titanic a century ago, and which can be found in many other maritime accidents over the years. The paper argues that these factors do not work in isolation but in combination and often together with other underlying factors. The paper critically reviews the focus of maritime accident investigations and points out that these factors do not receive sufficient attention. It is argued that the widespread confidence in the efficacy of new or improved technical regulations, that characterizes the recommendations from most maritime accident investigations, has led to a lack of awareness of complex interactions of factors and components in socio-technical systems. If maritime safety is to be sustainably improved, a systemic focus must be adopted in future accident investigations.

/pdf/from-titanic-to-costa-concordia-a-century-of-lessons-not-1icvoe4yr6.pdf

From Titanic to Costa Concordia—a century of lessons not learned

On 10 November 2005 the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (‘Court’) decided the long-running headscarf battle between Muslim students and Turkish universities in the Sahin judgment. On appeal, it held that the prohibition against wearing headscarves on university premises did not violate Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights (‘Convention’) on freedom of thought, conscience and religion. It thereby confirmed the decision of the Fourth Section of the Court of 29 June 2004.

Onur Karahanogullari

Papers

European Court of Human Rights