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Media, informacja a szczepienia przeciw COVID-19

The fourth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic is another significant confession for European societies. Despite extensive efforts, a safe level of population resilience has not been achieved in most countries. Previous actions and government programs aimed at persuading as many people as possible to accept vaccinations. Full availability of free vaccination has brought different levels of participation in fully vaccinated people across the European Union. This article presents the preliminary results of research on the role of the media in shaping pro-vaccination attitudes in Poland, based on a critical analysis of the literature on the subject, statistical data and an empirical research. The differences in attitudes towards vaccination against the SARS-CoV-2 virus in individual European Union countries have multifaceted conditions. These include factors of a social, political and cultural nature. Information plays an important role, shaping social attitudes in the discussed issue. One of the primary sources of this information is media – both traditional and digital. It is therefore worth defining the strength of media in the fight to build population resilience in the face of a pandemic.

Genesis of the COVID-19 pandemic. An attempt at analysis based on the New Green Political Theory

The analysis includes an attempt to identify the ecopolitical genesis of the COVID-19 pandemic caused by the pathogenic virus SARS-CoV-2, based on the New Green Political Theory paradigm.NGPT is a modernised version of the classic Green Political Theory, extended to include opposite and dichotomous concepts (such as unsustainable development) and the consequences of post-democratic turn. It can be hypothesised, according to NGPT, that the appearance of the virus SARS-CoV-2 in November 2019 in Chinese Wuhan was only the result of previous eco-political actions or omissions. The main research question: is the New Green Political Theory (NGPT) as a revised paradigm useful for identifying political processes, actions or omissions that have contributed to COVID-19 disease appearing in political sphere and becoming a global pandemic? The methodological tool planned for research tasks will be the equilibrium/nonequilibrium approach (E/NA), because the New Green Political Theory tests the tensions between opposing and dichotomous concepts based on the antagonism of ecocentrism versus anthropocentrism.

“We Need to be Better”: Race, Outdoor Recreation, and Corporate Social Advocacy

The summer 2020 protests following the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and other African-Americans sparked important conversations about race, police brutality, and institutionalized racism in the United States. In response to widespread civil unrest, organizations across the country issued statements condemning anti-Black violence and supporting the Black Lives Matter movement. This essay analyzes public statements released by 50 outdoor sport and recreation organizations. Extending scholarly literature on race and corporate social advocacy, our analysis develops the concept of conciliatory discourse, which functions by rhetorically constructing 1) a non-specification of grievance, 2) an obfuscation of commitments to action, and 3) a reinforcement of previous actions or processes. We argue that while many outdoor recreation organizations took action in support of racial justice, their public statements complicate long-term commitments for inclusivity and diversity.

One model packs thousands of items with Recurrent Conditional Query Learning

Recent studies have revealed that neural combinatorial optimization (NCO) has advantages over conventional algorithms in many combinatorial optimization problems such as routing, but it is less efficient for more complicated optimization tasks such as packing which involves mutually conditioned action spaces. In this paper, we propose a Recurrent Conditional Query Learning (RCQL) method to solve both 2D and 3D packing problems. We first embed states by a recurrent encoder, and then adopt attention with conditional queries from previous actions. The conditional query mechanism fills the information gap between learning steps, which shapes the problem as a Markov decision process. Benefiting from the recurrence, a single RCQL model is capable of handling different sizes of packing problems. Experiment results show that RCQL can effectively learn strong heuristics for offline and online strip packing problems (SPPs), outperforming a wide range of baselines in space utilization ratio. RCQL reduces the average bin gap ratio by 1.83% in offline 2D 40-box cases and 7.84% in 3D cases compared with state-of-the-art methods. Meanwhile, our method also achieves 5.64% higher space utilization ratio for SPPs with 1000 items than the state of the art.

Exploitation by asymmetry of information reference in coevolutionary learning in prisoner’s dilemma game

Mutual relationships, such as cooperation and exploitation, are the basis of human and other biological societies. The foundations of these relationships are rooted in the decision making of individuals, and whether they choose to be selfish or altruistic. How individuals choose their behaviors can be analyzed using a strategy optimization process in the framework of game theory. Previous studies have shown that reference to individuals’ previous actions plays an important role in their choice of strategies and establishment of social relationships. A fundamental question remains as to whether an individual with more information can exploit another who has less information when learning the choice of strategies. Here we demonstrate that a player using a memory-one strategy, who can refer to their own previous action and that of their opponent, can be exploited by a reactive player, who only has the information of the other player, based on mutual adaptive learning. This is counterintuitive because the former has more choice in strategies and can potentially obtain a higher payoff. We demonstrated this by formulating the learning process of strategy choices to optimize the payoffs in terms of coupled replicator dynamics and applying it to the prisoner’s dilemma game. Further, we show that the player using a memory-one strategy, by referring to their previous experience, can sometimes act more generous toward the opponent’s defection, thereby accepting the opponent’s exploitation. Mainly, we found that through adaptive learning, a player with limited information usually exploits the player with more information, leading to asymmetric exploitation.

The nomenclatural status of the amphibian and reptile nomina introduced by  La Cepède in his Histoire Naturelle des Quadrupèdes Ovipares et des Serpens, with comments on various questions of zoological nomenclature

The ‘suppression’ (invalidation) for nomenclatural purposes by the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature of the work Histoire Naturelle des Quadrupèdes Ovipares et des Serpens first published by La Cepède from 1788 to 1790 brought no benefit of any kind to zoological taxonomy and nomenclature but generated several nomenclatural problems. Here we review the history of the many discussions and proposals, as well as the successive and contradictory decisions of the Commission, regarding this work and the new nomina it contains, and we make new proposals to solve some of the problems created by these decisions. We suggest the Commission should take the initiative to restore nomenclatural availability to 18 nomina of La Cepède invalidated or of unclear status following its previous actions. More generally, we think that the use of the Plenary Power by the Commission should be more strictly regulated and made less easy and straightforward, and that the whole invalidation of complete works that have been considered as nomenclaturally available for a very long time in many works (e.g., 100 works in the 100 immediately preceding years) should be forbidden, and that the Commission should rather concentrate its attention and action on nomina rather than on works. Besides, we show that the snake nomen Coluber trigonocephalus Donndorff, 1798, currently considered valid, is invalid, and should be replaced by the nomen Coluber capitetriangulatus Bonnaterre, 1790.

Action planning and control under uncertainty emerge through a desirability-driven competition between parallel encoding motor plans.

Living in an uncertain world, nearly all of our decisions are made with some degree of uncertainty about the consequences of actions selected. Although a significant progress has been made in understanding how the sensorimotor system incorporates uncertainty into the decision-making process, the preponderance of studies focus on tasks in which selection and action are two separate processes. First people select among alternative options and then initiate an action to implement the choice. However, we often make decisions during ongoing actions in which the value and availability of the alternatives can change with time and previous actions. The current study aims to decipher how the brain deals with uncertainty in decisions that evolve while acting. To address this question, we trained individuals to perform rapid reaching movements towards two potential targets, where the true target location was revealed only after the movement initiation. We found that reaction time and initial approach direction are correlated, where initial movements towards intermediate locations have longer reaction times than movements that aim directly to the target locations. Interestingly, the association between reaction time and approach direction was independent of the target probability. By modeling the task within a recently proposed neurodynamical framework, we showed that action planning and control under uncertainty emerge through a desirability-driven competition between motor plans that are encoded in parallel.

Blind decision making: Reinforcement learning with delayed observations

Many applications, such as robotics, are increasingly utilizing Reinforcement Learning (RL). The current implementation of RL typically assumes that the state update from the previous actions happens instantaneously, and thus can be used for making future decisions. However, this may not always be true. When the state update is not available, the decision is taken partly in the blind since it cannot rely on the current state information. This paper proposes an approach, where the delay in the knowledge of the state can be used, and the decisions are made based on the available information which may not include the current state information. One approach could be to include the actions after the last-known state as a part of the state information, however, that leads to an increased state-space making the problem complex and slower in convergence. The proposed algorithm gives an alternate approach where the state space is not enlarged, as compared to the case when there is no delay in the state update. Evaluations on the control environments further illustrate the improved performance of the proposed algorithm.

Will Costliness Amplify the Signalling Strength of Past Pro-Environmental Behaviour? Exploratory Study on Autonomy.

Research has shown that the extent to which previous environmental actions are linked to people’s environmental self-identity influences subsequent environmentally-friendly behaviour. The study empirically examined the influences of recycling efforts on subsequent pro-environmental behaviour by PLS (partial least squares) structural equation modelling based on the survey data of 426 respondents in China. The results indicate that recycling efforts have a positive effect on pro-environmental behaviour through the mechanism of feelings of pride and environmental self-identity. We hypothesise that past pro-environmental behaviour is more likely to promote an individual’s environmental self-identity when the behaviour is incurred with a higher costliness. However, the results show that only when individuals autonomously perform costly recycling behaviour, the signalling strength of previous recycling efforts is higher to promote environmental self-identity. On the contrary, the high costliness weakens the signalling strength of previous recycling efforts through producing negative emotions. Our results show that when reminding people of their past pro-environmental behaviour in order to promote future pro-environmental behaviour, it is useful to emphasize the autonomously taken costliness of behaviour as it can strongly signal that one is a pro-environmental person, thus as to strengthen environmental self-identity.

Perceived Barriers of Incident Reporting Among Internists: Results from Hamad Medical Corporation in Qatar.

Background Adverse events (AE) are responsible for annual deaths that exceed deaths due to motor vehicle accidents, breast cancer, and AIDS. Many AE are considered preventable. Thus, AE needs to be detected and analyzed. Incident reporting systems (IRS) are crucial in identifying AE. Nevertheless, the incident report (IR) process is flawed with underreporting, especially from the physicians' side. This limits its efficiency in detecting AE. Therefore, we aimed to assess the practice and identify the barriers associated with incident reporting among internal medicine physicians in a large tertiary hospital through a survey. Methods A cross-sectional descriptive study. We distributed an online survey to physicians working in the Internal Medicine Department of Qatar's largest tertiary academic institute. The questionnaire was validated and piloted ahead of the start of the trial. The response rate was 53%. Results A total of 115 physicians completed the survey; 59% acknowledged the availability of an institutional IRS. However, only 29% knew how to submit an online IR, and 20% have ever submitted an IR. The survey revealed that participants were less likely to submit an IR when they or a colleague is involved in the incident; 46% and 63%, respectively. The main barriers of reporting incidents were unawareness about the IRS (36%) and the perception that IR will not bring a system change (13%); moreover, there exists the fear of retaliation (13%). When asked about solutions, 57% recommended training and awareness, and 22% recommended sharing learnings and actions from previous IR. Conclusions IRS is underutilized by internal medicine physicians. The main barrier at the time of the survey is the lack of training and awareness. Promoting awareness and sharing previous learning and actions may improve the utilization of the IRS.

Previous Motor Actions Outweigh Sensory Information in Sensorimotor Statistical Learning.

Humans can use their previous experience in form of statistical priors to improve decisions. It is, however, unclear how such priors are learned and represented. Importantly, it has remained elusive whether prior learning is independent of the sensorimotor system involved in the learning process or not, as both modality-specific and modality-general learning have been reported in the past. Here, we used a saccadic eye movement task to probe the learning and representation of a spatial prior across a few trials. In this task, learning occurs in an unsupervised manner and through encountering trial-by-trial visual hints drawn from a distribution centered on the target location. Using a model-comparison approach, we found that participants’ prior knowledge is largely represented in the form of their previous motor actions, with minimal influence from the previously seen visual hints. By using two different motor contexts for response (looking either at the estimated target location, or exactly opposite to it), we could further compare whether prior experience obtained in one motor context can be transferred to the other. Although learning curves were highly similar, and participants seemed to use the same strategy for both response types, they could not fully transfer their knowledge between contexts, as performance and confidence ratings dropped after a switch of the required response. Together, our results suggest that humans preferably use the internal representations of their previous motor actions, rather than past incoming sensory information, to form statistical sensorimotor priors on the timescale of a few trials.

Local reputation, local selection, and the leading eight norms

Humans are capable of solving cooperation problems following social norms. Social norms dictate appropriate behaviour and judgement on others in response to their previous actions and reputation. Recently, the so-called leading eight norms have been identified from many potential social norms that can sustain cooperation through a reputation-based indirect reciprocity mechanism. Despite indirect reciprocity being claimed to extend direct reciprocity in larger populations where direct experiences cannot be accumulated, the success of social norms have been analysed in models with global information and evolution. This study is the first to analyse the leading eight norms with local information and evolution. We find that the leading eight are robust against selfish players within most scenarios and can maintain a high level of cooperation also with local information and evolution. In fact, local evolution sustains cooperation under a wider set of conditions than global evolution, while local reputation does not hinder cooperation compared to global reputation. Four of the leading eight norms that do not reward justified defection offer better chances for cooperation with quick evolution, reputation with noise, larger networks, and when unconditional defectors enter the population.

How Does Technology Shape Corruption?

Does computerization reduce corruption? The field of ICT4D (Information and Communication Technology for Development) has grappled with this issue with no clear direction emerging. To address this question, our study focuses on the technological disruption brought about by a decade long computerization of the paper records, data and work procedures of a national land registration agency in a Mediterranean country. Based on a five-year ethnographic field study involving 127 interviews, we identify and describe the working of elusive actions within the three major work practices in the Registry. By focusing on the struggles that surrounded the introduction of digitization, we offer a highly contextualized analysis of how employees involved in corruption reacted to the limits on previous elusive actions and the visibility that the system imposed. From our analysis, we find that corrupt actions are deeply embedded in legitimate and core work processes but involve specific actions such as: document alteration, delaying and accelerating process, and subverting organizational controls. Institutionally, these corrupt activities are protected by claims of professional autonomy, active maintenance of process opacity, and the implicit acquiescence to the operation of camouflaged networks.

The 2013 Brussels Agreement and the Political Discourse of the Serbian Leadership: Pro-EU Adaptation with Anti-EU Rhetoric

With the 2013 Brussels Agreement, Serbia met the EU’s expectations in order to advance its membership bid. However, the Agreement was embedded in anti-EU rhetoric on a domestic level, which included criticising EU mediation and previous actions in the EU integration process. Based on Riker’s rational choice discourse analysis and by using a spatial metaphor of competition, the article attempts to explain this discrepancy. It suggests that Serbian parties deliberately used ambiguous positioning to obscure their actions. In a wider picture, Serbian domestic actors in the Europeanisation process have more complex motives than the literature has suggested so far, and they are neither pure reformers nor reform-adverse.

Solving The Problem of Indonesian Migrant Workers In Taiwan: An Analysis of Indonesian Government Response

The problems faced by Indonesian Migrant Workers (PMI) in Taiwan, there are still several problems such as unpaid salaries, work accidents, Indonesian Migrant Workers repatriation, sexual harassment, abuse, and illegal/runaway Indonesian Migrant Workers. This problem has prompted Indonesia and Taiwan to renew the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the two countries to resolve Indonesian Migrant Worker problems. There are 3 (three) ways to solve the problem, namely conducting Indonesia-Taiwan cooperation, recruiting/re-collecting Indonesian Migrant Worker' data, and protecting Indonesian Migrant Workers. These efforts have been made since the reforms in 2018; this is because previous actions did not go well; therefore, the two countries agreed again so that Indonesian Migrant Workers in Taiwan get protection and the problem can be resolved quickly. Then, after the cooperation renewal, the issues experienced by Indonesian Migrant Workers in Taiwan in 2020 were determined with a percentage of 83.3%. It means Indonesia has succeeded in resolving the Indonesian Migrant Workers problem with the efforts that have been agreed upon by Taiwan.

Idealizing the Bodies of Medieval Mermaids: Analyzing the Shifted Sexuality of Medieval Mermaids in the Presence of Medieval Mermen

In Medieval manuscript images from 1200 to 1400, mermaids appear as supernatural female archetypes performing a variety of acts like standing idle, playing musical instruments, embodying sirens to lure sailors, and using weaponry.  These early images show mermaids with short or partially concealed hair and sagging breasts.  Medieval manuscript images begin depicting mermen in the 1400s, with the mermen performing acts like wielding weaponry, playing musical instruments, and raising phallic objects over their heads.  These mermen appear primarily clothed in cloth garments or metal armor with head coverings and weaponry.  As images of mermen appear, mermaids embrace a more decorative role with depictions of them primarily combing their hair and looking into mirrors while neglecting most of their previous actions.  Medieval mermen act as heroic entities of the Medieval merfolk species, consequently forcing Medieval mermaids to forfeit their agency and serve as sexual entities of the Medieval merfolk species.

Interactions between ventrolateral prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortex during learning and behavioural change.

Hypotheses and beliefs guide credit assignment - the process of determining which previous events or actions caused an outcome. Adaptive hypothesis formation and testing are crucial in uncertain and changing environments in which associations and meanings are volatile. Despite primates' abilities to form and test hypotheses, establishing what is causally responsible for the occurrence of particular outcomes remains a fundamental challenge for credit assignment and learning. Hypotheses about what surprises are due to stochasticity inherent in an environment as opposed to real, systematic changes are necessary for identifying the environment's predictive features, but are often hard to test. We review evidence that two highly interconnected frontal cortical regions, anterior cingulate cortex and ventrolateral prefrontal area 47/12o, provide a biological substrate for linking two crucial components of hypothesis-formation and testing: the control of information seeking and credit assignment. Neuroimaging, targeted disruptions, and neurophysiological studies link an anterior cingulate - 47/12o circuit to generation of exploratory behaviour, non-instrumental information seeking, and interpretation of subsequent feedback in the service of credit assignment. Our observations support the idea that information seeking and credit assignment are linked at the level of neural circuits and explain why this circuit is important for ensuring behaviour is flexible and adaptive.

A double network structure anti-jamming algorithm based on deep reinforcement learning

At this stage, when dealing with intelligent jammer with environmental cognition, most anti-jamming methods only consider how to maximize avoidance of it. However, the user’s previous waveform and frequency actions have been leaked. As the intelligent jammer continues to learn, the performance of anti-jamming will decline. Existing literature has proposed the idea of hidden anti-jamming. The user uses rational communication action-making to prevent the jammer from obtaining the information of the user so that the jammer cannot target the user for jamming, but its model is relatively simple and cannot cope with complex jamming types. This paper designs a kind of decision related judgment module between jammer and user based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN), which uses the environment state received by the user to reversely infer the user’s decision whether to avoid jammer’s sense. Specifically, the neural network is used to fit the environment state under known user information, and calculate the loss between it and the real environment state to evaluate whether the user’s decision is to avoid jammer’s sense. Then, this paper proposes a deep reinforcement learning algorithm with double-network structure, which can deal with various types of complex jamming while ensuring anti-jamming performance. The final simulation results show that the improved deep reinforcement learning algorithm proposed in this paper can improve the anti-jamming performance, achieve hidden anti-jamming, and have a wider range of applications.

Water Co-Governance for Sustainable Ecosystems: Reflections and Recommendations from Pilot Processes in the UK

As part of the Water Co-Governance for Sustainable Ecosystems (WaterCoG) project, this research evaluated two river catchment pilots in the United Kingdom (UK) via a series of semi-structured interviews in order to better understand how collaborative governance (co-governance) approaches contribute to water governance. The findings demonstrate that the participatory process used by catchment partnerships (comprising stakeholders working together within a catchment area) to co-produce knowledge has enabled them to jointly identify improvements that are more meaningful than previous actions to those involved or affected by the situation in their catchment. However, there are concerns about the balance of social, economic and environmental interests in decision making, as well as perceived misunderstandings about the situation in the catchment as a whole. All interviewees (comprising stakeholders from across different scales and levels of water governance) recognized benefits from working together. They also observed that progress to deliver measures is impeded by polices and institutions that are not conducive to partnership working. The interviewees recognized and valued the significant capacity and capability of catchment partnership host organization(s) to facilitate and enable the development of the catchment partnership. However, they also raised important questions about the host’s ability to represent the needs and interests of all catchment partnership members. The recommendations emerging from this research suggest ways to improve water co-governance, including considering the feasibility and desirability of the catchment partnership host; reconceptualizing catchment management plans as a process rather than an outcome; conducting and regularly reviewing a stakeholder analysis of catchment partnership members; working more closely together with other types of partnerships and committees; engaging in and providing opportunities for developing skills in systems thinking, social learning and collaborative actions; working with the UK Government to develop place-based policies and plans; and engaging in dialogue with the UK Government and other bodies to review access to funding and other types of resources.

An Overview of Life and Works of Jami & His Perception of Love

Abd al-Rahman Jami (817/1414- 898/1492) is regarded as the last grand classical poet of Persian literature and a great Sufi of his time. Towards the end of his life, he compiled his <em>Divan</em> in which one can trace his life pattern that he has divide into three main phases. These include: 1) the period of his childhood and early phases of education, which is reported in <em>Fātiḥah al-Shabāb</em>; 2) his mid-life phase as elaborated in <em>Wāsiṭah al-‘Aqd; </em>and, 3)<em> </em>the last stage of his life, discussed in <em>Khātimah al-Ḥayāt. </em>In<em> </em>the latter, Jami tends to evaluate his life span in search of elixir of salvation. This search led him to an elevated stage of self-realization where he questioned his previous actions and all that which he was praised for, i.e. a prolific writer, an imaginative poet, and a distinguished commentator of Sufi thought. This spiritual self-assessment eventually directed him to the path of ‘love’ – the transforming power that reveals the essential meaning of life, realization of the inner divine self, and that which could bring about union with God. This paper intends to trace Jami’s transformation of thought, character and worldview. It begins with a bibliographical account followed by an elaboration of the three phases of Jami’s life, his status as a poet, a melting pot of Sufism, and, finally his perception of true love and its transforming and purifying effect on the seeker of truth.<strong></strong>