Arbitrary Decisions Research Articles

The meta-governance of quality registries for public health

Abstract Issue/problem Healthcare-related planning and policy requires evidence, which in turn requires data. Generating sensitive, high-quality data is expensive. Given the constraints of routine or study-related data for quality monitoring, quality registries are commonly used. But when is it adequate, from a public health meta-governance point of view, to establish dedicated quality registries? Description of the problem Many countries have established public patient registries over time. The lack of a meta-governance framework complicates decision-making for establishing and funding dedicated quality registries. Simultaneously, legal advancements like the European Health Data Space may enhance the use of routine data in healthcare policy, potentially transforming both registry and meta-governance practices. Results We identified key meta-governance challenges, such as setting criteria for the creation, modification, or closure of registries, deciding on public funding and choosing between routine and specially collected data. We argue against using absolute thresholds like disease prevalence, advocating for a scorecard approach that evaluates epidemiologic reasoning, policy relevance, healthcare impact and factors like data availability and registry synergies. Lessons The EHDS will enable enhanced secondary data use, necessitating decisions on when to use routine versus specifically collected data. Decision-makers must consider sustainability, ethics, practicability and data linkability, while recognizing risks such as data quality limitations and potential bias from original data collection purposes. Key messages • The necessity for quality registries varies by case, serving specific policy questions. Optimizing funds and avoiding arbitrary decisions require a strategy based on a meta-governance framework. • With the introduction of EHDS, the focus may shift more toward data curation and quality control, making it critical to align registry efforts with the broader health information system.

Governance of labour relations in the platform economy. The cooperation between YouTubers Union and IG Metall

AbstractThe article focuses on the factors that explain the emergence and accomplishments of the ‘FairTube’ campaign, which was initiated in 2019 by the YouTubers Union and the German metalworkers' union IG Metall, and was later established as a formalised German association (“Verein”). While the initial focus of the campaign was on changing the monetisation rules, which YouTube had altered very abruptly in 2017, the initiative subsequently focused on improving the working conditions of content creators. Methodologically, we deploy a mixed‐methods design that flanks media discourse network analysis through qualitative content analysis of expert interviews, which helps to identify the interaction between these established and new actors in the governance and interest representation in the digital platform economy. Our findings reveal a ‘hybrid form of governance’ that, by aligning ideologies and combining sources of power, was able to accomplish most of the goals set out by the campaign (avoiding arbitrary platform decisions, increasing transparency and communication, securing creators' income). We conclude that new forms of collective action, i.e. the coalition between “old” and “new” organizations, may mitigate particular negative consequences of the platform economy. The study seeks to contribute to a better understanding of platform work and to the concepts of power, ideas, and interests in industrial relations.

Impact of Un-ethical Decision Making in Managing Teacher Disciplinary Matters in Public Secondary Schools in Malawi

Public administration inclusive the education sector, is catalyst for national development, it hinges citizen’s intellectual and professional development. Malawi vision 2063, for self and reliant nation incorporates New public management that calls for competent public administrators to influence delivery of quality service to Malawians. The study examines the impact of Heads unethical decisions in managing teacher disciplinary matters in public secondary schools in Malawi a case of Mzuzu City. Research implores mixed methods exploratory sequential under pragmatics paradigm. Quantitative survey uses quota sampling of estimated 9 respondents from each school within the 22 public secondary schools in Mzuzu City. Sample size of participants came to approximately 200 participants out of 514 total secondary school teachers’ population. Within each school, random sampling was utilized to identify 9 to 10 teachers. Qualitative used purposive sampling to identify one respondent from each of twenty-two secondary schools. Quantitative used semi-structured questionnaire while qualitative used interview guide to collect data. Qualitative data was transcribed and coded, codes were grouped into sub-themes and sub-themes were grouped into themes which answered research questions aided by Nvivo application. Quantitative data was analyzed using descriptive statistics which ended up producing tables and graphs through SPSS 20. Through bounded rationality theoretical framework, findings reveal that respondents agreed to have knowledge of disciplinary procedures. Implying that teachers expect total compliance from responsible authorities to handle teacher disciplinary matters professionally. However, Heads gave oral warnings, written warnings, suspensions and interdictions. Heads deliberately flouted the procedures. Heads unethical decisions affected teaching and learning industry; where teachers stopped teaching for a long period of time, half pay reduced victim’s economic dignity, students suffered because they had no other teachers to teach them, some teachers left the school for better place, demoralized staff, litigations and government compensated victims of arbitrary decisions, victim teachers were sociologically affected because no other teachers wanted to associate with suspended/interdicted teacher, violation of Constitutional rights and school poor performances. The impact is negative thwarting the aspirations of Malawi Vision 2063 through derailing of quality human resources, compromised future generation and continuous breeding of mediocrity. Public service administrators deliberately bring disorder in the system for personal interests. They are committing crimes of abuse of office and neglect of official duties. Citizens be enlightened to call for accountability and transparency to those acting with mediocrity of negligence, corruption and compromised character. There must be personal liability to compensate for mediocrity.

Key kinematic measures of sensorimotor control identified via data reduction techniques in a population study (Born in Bradford)

Background Sensorimotor processes underpin skilled human behaviour and can thus act as an important marker of neurological status. Kinematic assessments offer objective measures of sensorimotor control but can generate countless output variables. This study sought to guide future analyses of such data by determining the key variables that capture children’s sensorimotor control on a standardised assessment battery deployed in cohort studies. Methods The Born in Bradford (BiB) longitudinal cohort study has collected sensorimotor data from 22,266 children aged 4–11 years via a computerised kinematic assessment battery (“CKAT”). CKAT measures three sensorimotor processing tasks (Tracking, Aiming, Steering). The BiB CKAT data were analysed using a “train then test” approach with two independent samples. Independent models were constructed for Tracking, Aiming, and Steering. The data were analysed using Principal Components Analysis followed by Confirmatory Factor Analysis. Results The kinematic data could be reduced to 4-7 principal components per task (decreased from >600 individual data points). These components reflect a wide range of core sensorimotor competencies including measures of both spatial and temporal accuracy. Further analyses using the derived variables showed these components capture the age-related differences reported in the literature (via a range of measures selected previously in a necessarily arbitrary way by study authors). Conclusions We identified the key variables of interest within the rich kinematic measures generated by a standardised tool for assessing sensorimotor control processes (CKAT). This work can guide future use of such data by providing a principled framework for the selection of the appropriate variables for analysis (where otherwise high levels of redundancy cause researchers to make arbitrary decisions). These methods could and should be applied in any form of kinematic assessment.

How big is a boulder? The importance of boulder definition choice in earth science research and river management

AbstractBoulders are globally widespread and influence processes across many landscapes including hillslopes, coasts, rivers and extra‐terrestrial settings. Boulders are described as particles, sufficiently large, that they have a disproportionate effect on the surrounding landscape. Moving beyond this conceptual definition, however, requires a somewhat arbitrary decision of how to define a minimum boulder size. The implications of boulder definition on study findings are rarely considered. We investigate the suitability of five boulder definitions, two based on fixed sizes: (1) 0.26 m and (2) 1 m, and three definitions which vary based on system characteristics: (3) grain mobility, (4) grain protrusion and (5) surface grain size distribution (> 84th percentile, D84). We consider the impact of definition on calculated boulder metrics, and, for the >1m and >D84 definitions, their association with channel and catchment characteristics across 20 boulder‐bed streams in northern Sweden. We also surveyed river managers responsible for restoring these rivers, to gain a practitioner insight on boulder size definition. We found that boulder definition matters; for metrics relating to the number or density of boulders, the >D84 and >1m size definitions were negatively correlated. Surveys indicated the importance of communicating boulder definition. We conclude that, whilst the best choice of boulder size definition will vary based on the questions of interest and techniques employed, evaluating the implications of the chosen boulder size definition and communicating the reasoning behind boulder definition choice is crucial.

Harnessing enviromics to predict climate‐impacted high‐profile traits to assist informed decisions in agriculture

AbstractModern agriculture is a complex system that demands real‐time and large‐scale quantification of trait values for evidence‐based decisions. However, high‐profile traits determining market values often lack high‐throughput phenotyping technologies to achieve this objective; therefore, risks of undermining crop values through arbitrary decisions are high. Because environmental conditions are major contributors to performance fluctuation, with the contemporary informatics infrastructures, we proposed enviromic prediction as a potential strategy to assess traits for informed decisions. We demonstrated this concept with wheat falling number (FN), a critical end‐use quality trait that significantly impacts wheat market values but is measured using a low‐throughput technology. Using 8 years of FN records from elite variety testing trials, we developed a predictive model capturing the general trend of FN based on biologically meaningful environmental conditions. An explicit environmental index that was highly correlated (r = 0.646) with the FN trend observed from variety testing trials was identified. An independent validation experiment verified the biological relevance of this index. An enviromic prediction model based on this index achieved accurate and on‐target predictions for the FN trend in new growing seasons. Two applications designed for production fields illustrated how such enviromic prediction models could assist informed decision along the food supply chain. We envision that enviromic prediction would have a vital role in sustaining food security amidst rapidly changing climate. As conducting variety testing trials is a standard component in modern agricultural industry, the strategy of leveraging historical trial data is widely applicable for other high‐profile traits in various crops.

Flexible parametrization of graph-theoretical features from individual-specific networks for prediction.

Statistical techniques are needed to analyze data structures with complex dependencies such that clinically useful information can be extracted. Individual-specific networks, which capture dependencies in complex biological systems, are often summarized by graph-theoretical features. These features, which lend themselves to outcome modeling, can be subject to high variability due to arbitrary decisions in network inference and noise. Correlation-based adjacency matrices often need to be sparsified before meaningful graph-theoretical features can be extracted, requiring the data analysts to determine an optimal threshold. To address this issue, we propose to incorporate a flexible weighting function over the full range of possible thresholds to capture the variability of graph-theoretical features over the threshold domain. The potential of this approach, which extends concepts from functional data analysis to a graph-theoretical setting, is explored in a plasmode simulation study using real functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange (ABIDE) Preprocessed initiative. The simulations show that our modeling approach yields accurate estimates of the functional form of the weight function, improves inference efficiency, and achieves a comparable or reduced root mean square prediction error compared to competitor modeling approaches. This assertion holds true in settings where both complex functional forms underlie the outcome-generating process and a universal threshold value is employed. We demonstrate the practical utility of our approach by using resting-state fMRI data to predict biological age in children. Our study establishes the flexible modeling approach as a statistically principled, serious competitor to ad-hoc methods with superior performance.

An attempt at an evaluation of Philippa Foot’s conception of naturalistic virtue ethics

In this article I present subsequent stages of the evolution of Ph. Foot’s conception. I point out that her concepts of morality, virtue and justice are detached from earlier visions of the world (ancient harmony, Christian divine order). At each stage of the evolution of her project, she is forced either to make arbitrary decisions or to make metaphysical assumptions. I emphasize that biological references in justifying the need for morality may be legitimate as long as we understand ethics as a practical science that aims to achieve practical goals (including the protection of the human species).

Rankings without U.S. News: A revealed preference approach to evaluating law schools

AbstractSince their inception in 1989, the U.S. News & World Report law school rankings have influenced how schools, students, and the legal profession itself think about legal education. In the Fall of 2022, however, several of the most selective law schools formally withdrew from the annual rankings. In so doing, these schools laid bare longstanding criticisms of the rankings' questionable criteria and opaque methodology. While the long‐term effect of this boycott remains to be seen, school rankings are likely here to stay. In this Article we design a more informative approach to rankings, based on actual decisions students make. Using individual‐level data provided by the Law School Admissions Council (LSAC), we analyze the universe of applicants to U.S. law schools for the period 1988 through 2017. In so doing, we are the first to create a revealed preference ranking based solely on where applicants matriculate given offers of admission. Our approach relies neither on potentially faulty data collection from schools nor arbitrary decisions about which factors to emphasize in rankings, thereby minimizing the scope for manipulation. It also allows us to quantify the magnitude of differences in preferences among schools and to test their statistical significance. Matriculants reveal a strong preference for a handful of the most selective schools; outside of the top tier, however, matriculants do not appear to draw meaningful distinctions between schools ranked adjacently or even near to each other. While existing school rankings sow more confusion than clarity, our analysis provides a rigorous and transparent alternative, and a blueprint for redesigning school rankings.

Content analysis of the Measure of the Quality of the Environment by linkage with the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health.

This study explores the linkage between the Measurement of Environmental Quality (MQE) and the International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health (ICF). Stemming from the Human Development Model-Disability Creation Process (HDM-DCP), MQE enhances understanding of how environmental quality impacts disability development across diverse socio-cultural contexts. Integrating MQE with ICF expands the perspective on disability formation beyond HDM-DCP, encompassing ICF's functioning approach. To link the MQE with the concepts and categories of the ICF. Two health professionals with adequate taxonomic knowledge of the ICF performed the initial linkage, which was based on updated standardized rules considering all hierarchical levels of the ICF. Linkage agreement between the first two assessors was measured using the Kappa (k) coefficient and respective 95% confidence intervals. In the absence of a consensus between the two assessors (k>0.60), a third assessor was consulted to make the arbitrary decision of the final categories linked to the MQE. Insufficient agreement between the two assessors was found for the linkage process (k=0.52; p<0.001), requiring the final decision from the third assessor. At the end of the process, 26 ICF categories were linked to the main concepts (MC) measured by the 26 items of the short version of the MQE. Ten ICF categories were linked to the additional concepts (AC) measured by the MQE. Moreover, the MQE addresses the five domains of the ICF component "environmental factors," with a predominance of the "services, systems and policies" domain (MC=45.8% and AC=40%). The linkage of the concepts measured by the MQE to ICF categories enabled mapping the content of the MQE, identifying it as a promising tool for measuring environmental factors in accordance with ICF percepts.

헌법재판소 결정에 대한 정량적 분석에 관한 시론적 연구

This paper aims to analyze the argumentative structure of proportionality in the Constitutional Court's decisions regarding laws restricting the venue of assemblies from the perspective of the quantity. Specifically, this paper focuses on the minimal impairment and balancing by establishing seven indicators. The seven indicators are broadly composed of three indicators related to the minimal harm of infringement, three indicators related to the balance of legal interests, and one indicator related to the intensity of scrutiny. The Constitutional Court changed their position from constitutional to unconstitutional upon adjudicating the prohibition of assemblies near the National Assembly Building in the Decision 2018Hun-Ba322 on May 31, 2018. Therefore, the analysis of this decision takes precedence. Subsequently, the analysis proceeds to the recent decisions such as the 2018Hun-Ba48 on December 22, 2022, regarding the prohibition of assemblies near the presidential residence and the 2019Hun-Ma1417 on September 26, 2023, regarding the prohibition of assemblies in front of Incheon City Hall. From the perspective of the quantity of arguments, an analysis of the argumentative structure of these three decisions reveals that the distinctions between minimal impairment and balancing has become clearer, as well as an enhanced recognition and argumentation regarding the intensity of judicial review. Consistent argumentative structures concerning minimal impairment and balancing enhance the persuasiveness of the decisions, lead to more appropriate conclusions, and prevent arbitrary decisions, highlighting their significant importance. Furthermore, the intensity of judicial review has distinguished significance in Constitutional Court rulings as it is a matter of the principle of separation of powers regarding the extent to which the discretion of the legislative branch should be respected. Especially in cases regarding legal provisions that restrict essential freedoms for maintaining democracy, such as the freedom of assembly, the necessity for clearly articulating the intensity of scrutiny is even greater. The rules of argumentation that must be followed to reach any conclusion, whether constitutional or unconstitutional, should be consistently upheld.

The Language Games of Canon Law: Strategic Ambiguity Between Law and Religion

Abstract The continental tradition of modern positive law, with its attempt to formulate clear legal rules, tends to be suspicious of ambiguity and struggles with the productive power of the untranslatable. Opaque kernels that inevitably remain in laws seem risky and call for disambiguation—through legislation, the courts, or administration. Yet despite this struggle against ambiguity, laws, as texts made of language, not only remain essentially ambiguous, but often require ambiguity when regulating for plural groups. In global legal orders, such as Roman Catholic canon law, we can observe that ambiguity is used strategically to allow for the inclusion of plural legal cultures. Adding to this, canon law fosters its opaqueness by meandering between secular and religious language games, thus playing with the semantic surplus of religion for the sake of cultivating ambiguity. This ambiguity management is itself ambiguous. It is inclusive, allowing plural communities to exist under the roof of Catholicism, but it is also open to the authorities’ arbitrary decisions undermining legal certainty as a core value of modern law.

Discretionary powers of administrative court: some aspects of their understanding and exercise

Having studied Ukrainian general legislative provisions, binding legal opinions of the Supreme Court of Ukraine and the scientific literature concerning the discretionary powers of administrative courts, it is established that, regardless of the use of quasi-dispositive wording expressing the “possibility” or the “right” of the administrative court to make a procedural decision, the existence of grounds for such decisions implies that it has the duty to make this decision or, in exceptional cases, to adequately justify the inconsistency of the decision that could have been made with the tasks and principles of administrative proceedings. It is noted that the discretion of the administrative court cannot be unlimited and is subject to general and sectoral principles, the purpose of administrative proceedings and individual procedural mechanisms and some other factors of a higher order to the provision establishing procedural discretion. For instance, it was determined that deviations from previous decisions made by the same administrative court judge in the same or similar cases are not acceptable. However, not any non-uniform application of law within the freedom of discretion should be justified, but only a difference that has a significant impact on disputed rights and obligations on the participants of the relevant legal relationship.&#x0D; It is argued that the discretion of the administrative court, which is not limited by special restrictive legislative provisions, in order to prevent arbitrary decisions, must be accompanied by the obligation to properly substantiate the existence of grounds for making a particular procedural decision with reference to those real factual circumstances, which as far as possible can be measured by objective indicators and verified within the framework of the court decision appellate. It is emphasized that this when exercising discretionary powers is necessary for the administrative court to fulfill general requirements regarding the existence of a rational basis for the decision taken, confirmation of its legality and reasonableness with the help of facts and evidence, relying on which any other judge of the administrative court acting in good faith and with competence in the relevant matters would have sufficient grounds to make the same decision.

ARDST: An Adversarial‐Resilient Deep Symbolic Tree for Adversarial Learning

The advancement of intelligent systems, particularly in domains such as natural language processing and autonomous driving, has been primarily driven by deep neural networks (DNNs). However, these systems exhibit vulnerability to adversarial attacks that can be both subtle and imperceptible to humans, resulting in arbitrary and erroneous decisions. This susceptibility arises from the hierarchical layer‐by‐layer learning structure of DNNs, where small distortions can be exponentially amplified. While several defense methods have been proposed, they often necessitate prior knowledge of adversarial attacks to design specific defense strategies. This requirement is often unfeasible in real‐world attack scenarios. In this paper, we introduce a novel learning model, termed “immune” learning, known as adversarial‐resilient deep symbolic tree (ARDST), from a neurosymbolic perspective. The ARDST model is semiparametric and takes the form of a tree, with logic operators serving as nodes and learned parameters as weights of edges. This model provides a transparent reasoning path for decision‐making, offering fine granularity, and has the capacity to withstand various types of adversarial attacks, all while maintaining a significantly smaller parameter space compared to DNNs. Our extensive experiments, conducted on three benchmark datasets, reveal that ARDST exhibits a representation learning capability similar to DNNs in perceptual tasks and demonstrates resilience against state‐of‐the‐art adversarial attacks.

Accounting Regulations in Poland: Do They Work or Should They Be Improved? A Survey Among Accountants and Other Professionals

The aim of the study was to find out the opinions of accountants, people professionally involved in finance, managers of business units and working in other departments of business units on the accounting regulations in force in Poland. A large part of the regulations governing broadly understood accounting is introduced at the international level, and those introduced at the national level are often inspired by international solutions. It is not possible to consult them widely with the community, so getting to know the opinions of the people they concern becomes particularly important. The study was conducted in the form of an anonymous survey. The results of the survey indicate that the majority of those involved directly or indirectly in accounting believe that accounting needs improvement. A very small proportion of respondents felt that accounting does not need improvement. Accounting regulations are perceived as ambiguous, allowing for arbitrary decisions, and unfortunately perceived as not good due to little convergence with tax regulations. Respondents also noted the problem of falsification of financial statements, indicating that they had encountered or heard of falsification of accounts. At the same time, an equally large group of respondents considers financial statements to be as reliable as necessary.

Rola zasady proporcjonalności przy określaniu podmiotowości prawnej w zakresie praw podstawowych

The legal capacity to fundamental rights gives the right-holder the ability to exercise and enforce fundamental rights. In the absence or questionable status of the legal capacity of a right-holder, there is a need to justify such a position. In this regard, no general standards based on legal doctrine and jurisprudence can be identified. The paper focuses on the question of whether the principle of proportionality could play a role in identifying and justifying the legal capacity to fundamental rights. Based on a review of the literature, two functions of the proportionality analysis can be identified as relevant in this regard: it supports the justification of the decision to restrict fundamental rights and it precludes arbitrary decisions in relation to the limitation. The author argues that, based on its justificatory function, proportionality can play a role in identifying the legal capacity to fundamental rights in the case of human persons. In the case of autonomous organizations, in addition to its justificatory function, its function related to the exclusion of arbitrary decisions can be taken into account when using it as a standard for identifying legal capacity. In the case of human persons and autonomous organizations, there is a need for a negative justification of the limitation of legal capacity, based on proportionality. In the case of new challengers in fundamental rights disputes (such as future generations), a positive justification is required to determine legal capacity. The proportionality analysis does not play a role here, but rather other standards that require a rationality-based justification.

Stop trying to predict elections only with twitter – There are other data sources and technical issues to be improved

Since the popularization of social media (SM) platforms, researchers have been trying to use their data to predict electoral results. Previous surveys point out that the most used approach is based on volume and sentiment analysis of posts on Twitter. However, they are almost unanimous in presenting that the results are not better than chance. In this context, this study aims to investigate the feasibility of predicting electoral results based only on Twitter, discover the main issues, and draw guidelines for future alternative directions. For this, we reviewed the evolution of election polling and predictions, including the “polling crises” of 1936 and 1948, and their similarities with current approaches. We also built on the official SM platforms' documentation and on our experience collecting and analyzing large-scale data from many SM platforms. Lastly, we analyzed nine reviews on predicting elections with SM data from 2013 to 2021. We observed that, contrary to initial expectations, most of the current research with Twitter has been unable to solve many of the challenges encountered since initial studies, and also shares many of the characteristics of unsuccessful straw polls performed before 1936. We illustrate that by highlighting the impracticability of polling over Twitter due to several biases and technical barriers, the need for external data, the high dependency on the arbitrary decisions of researchers, and the constant change in platforms' scenarios, that may invalidate specific models. Lastly, we indicate some of the possible future directions, such as a focus on creating repeatable processes; the use of SM data as part of statistical models, instead of polling; diversifying the input data sources, including multiple SM platforms and non-SM data such as polls and economic indicators; using machine learning for regression of the vote share, rather than for sentiment analysis; and dealing with the uncertainty of the highly divergent polling results.

Patchwork infrastructures: Indonesian and Filipino multinational migratory trajectories to Chile

ABSTRACT By discussing the multinational labor migration trajectories of Indonesian and Filipino women to Chile, this article proposes the term “patchwork infrastructures” to examine the improvised coordination between multiple persons and institutions that facilitate and enable such uncommon migration pathways. Drawing on ethnographic research and 41 semi-structured interviews conducted between 2018–2022 with migrant women, employers, and relevant state actors in Chile, I focus on two such journeys that occurred partially due to instances of infrastructural failures in Southeast Asia and the absence of a coherent migration infrastructure connecting Southeast Asia and Latin America. Patchwork infrastructure highlights the creative practices and complex relations that were forged and maintained to ensure the eventual migration and emplacement of women whose journeys had been disrupted, prevented, or delayed. A focus on such processes of “patchworking” highlights the high level of human discretion, arbitrary decision, and action in interactions among diverse actors involved in migration. Patchwork infrastructure calls for attention to the micro- and personal level of infrastructuring migration in contexts where relevant institutions fail or are absent; these processes demonstrate the generative and expansive nature of infrastructure.

Quality aspects of annotated data

The quality of Machine Learning (ML) applications is commonly assessed by quantifying how well an algorithm fits its respective training data. Yet, a perfect model that learns from and reproduces erroneous data will always be flawed in its real-world application. Hence, a comprehensive assessment of ML quality must include an additional data perspective, especially for models trained on human-annotated data. For the collection of human-annotated training data, best practices often do not exist and leave researchers to make arbitrary decisions when collecting annotations. Decisions about the selection of annotators or label options may affect training data quality and model performance.In this paper, I will outline and summarize previous research and approaches to the collection of annotated training data. I look at data annotation and its quality confounders from two perspectives: the set of annotators and the strategy of data collection. The paper will highlight the various implementations of text and image annotation collection and stress the importance of careful task construction. I conclude by illustrating the consequences for future research and applications of data annotation. The paper is intended give readers a starting point on annotated data quality research and stress the necessity of thoughtful consideration of the annotation collection process to researchers and practitioners.

The place of Free Will: the freedom of the prisoner.

Debates about the concept of Free Will date back to ancient times. About 40years ago, Benjamin Libet designed an experiment showing that the conscious intention to move is preceded by a specific pattern of brain activation. His finding suggested that unconscious processes determine our decisions. Libet-style experiments have continued to dominate the debate about Free Will, pushing some authors to argue that the existence of Free Will is a mere illusion. We believe that this dispute is because we often measure Free Will using arbitrary human decisions rather than deliberate actions. After reviewing the definition of Free Will and the related literature, we conclude that the scientific evidence does not disprove the existence of Free Will. However, our will encounters several constraints and limitations that should be considered when evaluating our deeds' personal responsibility.