Simplistic Solutions Research Articles

A feminist cybersecurity: addressing the crisis of cyber(in)security

Abstract This article draws on feminist security studies (FSS) to construct a more inclusive cybersecurity. We ask: What can a gendered lens do for cybersecurity? Methodologically, this exploratory piece brings FSS insights to bear on studies in cybersecurity (both traditional and critical) to better conceptualize the risks and benefits embedded in the cybersphere, as well as the role of gender in cyberspace. We propose incorporating a gendered lens (an intersectional approach) to shed light on violence and insecurity online. Without recognizing gendering in the cyber realm, including how gender intersects with other systems of oppression, cybersecurity scholars and policy-makers cannot fully understand what we term the crisis of cyber(in)security. Additionally, we challenge simplistic solutions that rely solely on human rights protections in cyberspace. Such approaches often reinforce existing gender and power hierarchies through protectionist discourse. Our FSS-based understanding of cybersecurity has important policy implications. It calls for increased access and diverse participation in cybersecurity policy-making and diplomacy, and promotes a more thoughtful approach to human rights protection to address a broader range of cyber-based insecurities and forms of violence.

Rapid Drug Susceptibility Testing to Preserve Antibiotics.

Antibiotic resistance is a global challenge likely to cost trillions of dollars in excess costs in the health system and more importantly, millions of lives every year. A major driver of resistance is the absence of susceptibility testing at the time a healthcare worker needs to prescribe an antimicrobial. The effect is that many prescriptions are unintentionally wasted and expose mutable organisms to antibiotics increasing the risk of resistance emerging. Often simplistic solutions are applied to this growing issue, such as a naïve drive to increase the speed of drug susceptibility testing. This puts a spotlight on a technological solution and there is a multiplicity of such candidate DST tests in development. Yet, if we do not define the necessary information and the speed at which it needs to be available in the clinical decision-making progress as well as the necessary integration into clinical pathways, then little progress will be made. In this chapter, we place the technological challenge in a clinical and systems context. Further, we will review the landscape of some promising technologies that are emerging and attempt to place them in the clinic where they will have to succeed.

THE MULTIPLE ENACTMENTS OF CONTAMINATION: Rethinking the Remediation and Redevelopment of Military‐Industrial Brownfields in the Tel Aviv Region

AbstractThe remediation and redevelopment of industrially contaminated land are complex challenges for urban regions worldwide. Yet the literature on urban brownfields mostly addresses this as a technical problem through dichotomic and anthropocentric terms, contrasting the passive and negative role of the contamination as a toxic entity in the ground with the active and positive roles assigned to human actors such as planners, developers and communities. This article contests this prevalent view by tracing in detail debates concerning the remediation of three highly contaminated military‐industrial brownfield sites in the Tel Aviv metropolitan region. Drawing on notions of ontological multiplicity and enactment from science and technology studies and on qualitative analysis of a vast database of planning protocols and court hearings alongside interviews with key stakeholders, we uncover how contamination is enacted in multiple ways as mobile/immobile, unified/fragmented, remediable/irremediable. Furthermore, following one of our field's inherent controversies—whether to fully map the contamination prior to planning the sites—the article highlights the attempts to regulate this multiplicity and replace it with a single coherent contamination. By acknowledging the multiple enactments of contamination, our approach offers a more nuanced understanding that could help stakeholders rethink the remediation and redevelopment of urban brownfields beyond simplistic technical solutions or neoliberal policy imperatives.

Teacher appraisal system and professional learning. Insights from Italian school principals’ and teachers’ views on multiple sources of data and indicators

ABSTRACTThis paper explores school principals’ and teachers’ views of the Italian teachers’ appraisal system and related indicators. In particular, the research aimed at examining the opinions of school principals and teachers regarding the domains to be considered for teacher appraisal purposes. An investigation involving 37 school principals and 868 in service teachers, from three Italian regions, is presented. The data was collected through a questionnaire and statistically analysed. Findings suggest operationalising new data sources – specifically students and parent, - is beneficial to evaluate teacher quality as a construct in data-based professional learning communities. They show different positioning: teachers seem to be really inclined to be evaluated, especially by students and parents, while school principals still seem very cautious in entrusting the teachers’ appraisal to an external point of view. This paper adds to the existing research showing the perspective of a new teachers’ appraisal, inspired by multi-faceted models based on multiple points of view (students, parents, not only principals) and not reduced to simplistic solutions of an accounting type. Furthermore, the study answers the call for research into teachers’ appraisal as part of the professional learning actions and in view of more integrated professional leadership.

Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer’s Literary Resistance to Right-Wing Populist Discourse in Grand Hotel Europa (2018)

ABSTRACT Right-wing populism has been on the rise in Europe for the past two decades. The success of populist strategies has generated a broader discursive shift in news coverage about immigration as simplifying and polarizing strategies have been incorporated into mainstream media. This paper discusses how Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer offers resistance to the discursive structures of right-wing populist discourse in his 2018 novel Grand Hotel Europa. More specifically, it analyses the novel’s late postmodernist politics of literature, which emerges from its reflection on the future of Europe. This reflection, which revolves around two forms of hospitality dominating Europe’s border politics, i.e., immigration and tourism, addresses and subverts the main topoi and tenets of right-wing discourses. In doing so, the novel spurs its readers to engage in critical thinking, reject simplistic solutions to layered problems and foster debates on Europe’s identity and future in the 21st century.

Transforming Society Through Critical Service-Learning: A Position for a Justice-Based Approach to Experiential Learning in Physical Therapy Education.

In response to the numerous calls for the physical therapy profession to position itself as an equity and social justice-centered profession, we are called to provide aspiring physical therapists with the skills to dismantle inequities and injustice in their communities. Exposure to health inequity and injustice through conceptual and experiential learning alone does not prepare students to create positive change and may serve to perpetuate stereotypes and offer simplistic solutions to complex problems. We argue that a traditional service-learning model lacks transformative potential for bringing about social change. Therefore, we introduce critical service-learning, compare it with the traditional model in the context of physical therapy experiential learning, and provide rationale and guidance on transitioning to this educational approach. We believe critical service-learning is an action-oriented approach that works to identify the root causes of social and structural determinants and accept personal and shared responsibility for acting to ameliorate their effects. Critical service-learning experiences require critical reflection and call for intentional design including teacher training, rich community engagement, student assignments that challenge current paradigms, and use of evaluative measures that assess community goals. These aspects add to the historically practiced traditional model. We invite educators to shift to critical service-learning, an approach that has great potential for benefiting all interested parties in meaningful and long-lasting ways. Critical service-learning holds the opportunity for our profession to be better positioned to transform society.

Industry responses to the UK government’s public consultation on the proposed soft drinks industry levy: Qualitative documentary analysis using the framework method and a systems perspective

The United Kingdom (UK) Chancellor of the exchequer announced a tax on sugar sweetened beverages in his March 2016 budget. A public consultation on the Soft Drinks Industry Levy (SDIL) was conducted before the levy’s implementation in 2018. We aimed to identify arguments that industry stakeholders made during the public consultation to influence the discursive environment using thematic framework analysis with a novel complex systems lens.Forty-two censored consultation responses from industry stakeholders (manufacturers, retailers, or representative trade associations) were obtained by Freedom of Information requests to Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs and Her Majesty’s Treasury. Industry stakeholders were overall opposed to the SDIL. Key themes included unintended consequences of the levy, denying the impact of the levy, the responsibility of government to industry over health, and proposals of alternative policies. Industry stakeholders created a discursive environment that showcased the complexity of business relationships in response to the levy, in contrast to linear causal arguments and simplistic solutions (e.g., consumer education). Documented industry discursive strategies were engaged, including promoting voluntary agreements, use of industry commissioned research, and questioning the effectiveness of the policy.Industry stakeholders’ submissions presented opposition to an evidence-based policy and use of documented industry discursive strategies emphasised the need for a pro-active and transparent consultation process and stakeholder management. A complex systems approach, alongside robust evidence, can identify changing relationships and adaptations in response to a policy, and pre-empt industry positioning in future health policymaking by identifying areas of push-back in advance to allow better stakeholder management.

China opportunity or China threat? A corpus-based study of China’s image in Australian news discourse

ABSTRACT Australia has increasingly dependent on China for economic prosperity, but the formidable resources China has brought in its engagement with Australia have been discursively constructed as a threat. Past studies have observed a conventional and often oversimplified binary perception of China–Australia relations (i.e. China opportunity or China threat). Premised on corpus evidences concerning the representation of China in Australian media discourses from 2009 to 2019, this article has shown China threat is considerably more complex than previously observed. China was not only constructed as a security threat but also an economic threat. Australian media contemporary imaginaries of China threat were related to continued fears of “Yellow Peril” and “Red Peril”, which spread from the US and reinforced Australia’s tendency to dependency. There is a danger of China threat dominating public perceptions of China, drifting into populism of offering simplistic solutions to complex issues.

Masking Visible Poverty through ‘Activation’: Creative Placemaking as a Compassionate Revanchist Policy

ABSTRACT Creative placemaking strategies are widely adopted by urban planners, local governments, and business communities in hopes to revive economically struggling urban areas. These strategies seek to attract pedestrian traffic by facilitating arts and cultural activities in underutilized urban spaces. While these are seemingly innocuous and uncontroversial urban design strategies, I argue that a particular creative placemaking tactic called ‘activation’ is a compassionate revanchist policy that is touted as a caring approach but, in practice, functions to mask visible poverty to advance a capital project in a revitalizing urban space. Drawing from a case study of a downtown revitalization project in London, Ontario (Canada), I show how a private placemaking consultant narrates and legitimizes this policy to city councillors as well as how the downtown business association rationalizes and enacts activation strategies. This demonstrates that private placemaking consultants are powerful actors who transfer and legitimize simplistic spatial solutions as a panacea to a local ‘urban crisis’. Activation does not resemble punitive tactics that exclude and criminalize homelessness, it rather aims to dissolve the homeless within the fabric of the revitalizing urban environment.

When a RF beats a CNN and GRU, together—A comparison of deep learning and classical machine learning approaches for encrypted malware traffic classification

Internet traffic classification plays a crucial role in Quality of Experience (QoE), Quality of Services (QoS), intrusion detection, and traffic-trend analyses. While there is no theoretical guarantee that deep learning (DL)-based solutions perform better than classic machine learning (ML)-based ones, DL-based models have become the common default. This paper compares well-known DL-based and ML-based models and shows that in the case of malicious traffic classification, state-of-the-art DL-based solutions do not necessarily outperform the classical ML-based ones. We exemplify this finding using two well-known datasets for a varied set of tasks, such as: malware detection, malware family classification, detection of zero-day attacks, and classification of an iteratively growing dataset. Note that, it is not feasible to evaluate all possible models to make a concrete statement, thus the above finding is not a recommendation to avoid DL-based models, but rather an empirical finding that in some cases, there are more simplistic solutions, that may perform even better.

Judicial Enforcement of Mandatory Provincial Interventions in Municipalities in South Africa

This article evaluates the judicial enforcement of provincial interventions in municipalities as a viable response to the collapse of local government in South Africa. We argue that when relations between municipalities and their communities have deteriorated to a level of deep mistrust and collapse, and when there is dismal service delivery, there is a case for the courts to order unresponsive provincial authorities to intervene in municipalities as provided for in law. Such interventions are necessary in the name of intergovernmental support and co-responsibility. They protect the rights of communities. However, reality shows that judicially ordered interventions are simplistic solutions that do not do justice to the legal and political complexities around such interventions. Party politics and the need for sustained good local governance often clash when the judiciary orders provincial executives to intervene in failing municipalities. Consideration of the aftermath of judicially ordered interventions in selected cases in this article confirms that whereas litigation may enforce the law around provincial interventions and municipal duties, it is a short-term fix that does not bring sustainable solutions to the collapse of local government. Instead, it often exacerbates the situation.

Daniel Greene. The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021. 260p. Paper, $30.00 (ISBN 978-0-262-54233-3).

In The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope, Daniel Greene sets out to examine “how the problem of poverty is transformed into a problem of technology” and the larger effect this has on public service-oriented institutions like schools and libraries. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2012 and 2015 at three organizations—a tech start-up, a public library, and a charter school—he tells a story of public institutions adapting to dwindling state investment by embracing simplistic technological solutions to inequality, even when those who staff them seemingly know better. Why do we look to tech start-ups as models of success for public institutions when they operate under vastly different conditions? The allure of access and the promise of technology makes an intractable problem like poverty into something that is actionable and legible to funders but sets these institutions on a path that may well end in their own undoing.

Antipsychotics, Antiepileptics, and Fabrication: Are We Making It or Faking It?

Antipsychotics, Antiepileptics, and Fabrication: Are We Making It or Faking It?

Germany should reflect on its rich theoretical tradition

Germany should reflect on its rich theoretical tradition

A Nurse Leader’s Guide to Reducing Burnout:: Strategies to Improve Well-Being

The COVID-19 pandemic has deepened our understanding of the complex nature of burnout and secondary trauma and solidified the knowledge that simplistic solutions will not effectively create nurse well-being. Without applying the latest scientific evidence about the nature of burnout and the secondary trauma caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, efforts may be misguided or ineffective. In this article, we outline how to implement meaningful system change using examples of current evidence-based practices to improve nurse well-being.

Structural injustice and the Requirements of Beauty

Structural injustice and the Requirements of Beauty

Discourse patterns used by extremist Salafists on Facebook: identifying potential triggers to cognitive biases in radicalized content

ABSTRACT Understanding how extremist Salafists communicate, and not only what, is key to gaining insights into the ways they construct their social order and use psychological forces to radicalize potential sympathizers on social media. With a view to contributing to the existing body of research which mainly focuses on terrorist organizations, we analyzed accounts that advocate violent jihad without supporting (at least publicly) any terrorist group and hence might be able to reach a large and not yet radicalized audience. We constructed a critical multimodal and multidisciplinary framework of discourse patterns that may work as potential triggers to a selection of key cognitive biases and we applied it to a corpus of Facebook posts published by seven extremist Salafists. Results reveal how these posts are either based on an intense crisis construct (through negative outgroup nomination, intensification and emotion) or on simplistic solutions composed of taken-for-granted statements. Devoid of any grey zone, these posts do not seek to convince the reader; polarization is framed as a presuppositional established reality. These observations reveal that extremist Salafist communication is constructed in a way that may trigger specific cognitive biases, which are discussed in the paper.

Biodiversity conservation as infectious disease prevention: why a social-ecological perspective is essential

Non-technical summaryInvesting in stricter biodiversity conservation and wildlife protection to reduce the number of emerging diseases and, consequently, the risk of pandemics such as coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19), must integrate a social-ecological perspective. Biodiversity conservation, in order to be effective as disease prevention, requires consideration of people's needs, knowledge and institutions within their locally specific contexts. To meet this goal, future biodiversity research and conservation policy should apply six social-ecological principles for shaping future practices of co-existence of societies and nature.Technical summaryThe COVID-19 pandemic, presumably originating in a spillover event from natural wildlife reservoirs into the human population, sets a new benchmark for the indirect cost of biodiversity exploitation. To reverse the trend of increasing pandemic risk, biodiversity conservation and wildlife protection must be strengthened globally. In this paper, we argue that such preventive measures explicitly need to employ a social-ecological approach. In particular, attention must be paid to the societal relations to nature to avoid falling for simplistic solutions that neglect regional and local particularities of both, biodiversity and local communities. We emphasize the importance of avoiding a Western-biased view and acknowledging the factors and causations of infectious disease emergence in industrialized countries. To reduce the emergence of zoonotic and vector-borne diseases in their specific contexts, we propose applying a social-ecological systems approach by integrating plural local knowledge and values, established practices, formal and informal institutions, as well as technology. We further introduce six social-ecological principles for shaping transformations in the Anthropocene to maintain and build more resilient and sustainable communities. By operationalizing these inter- and transdisciplinary principles, biodiversity conservation can be effectively implemented as infectious disease prevention.Social media summaryA social-ecological approach to biodiversity conservation can pave the way for an effective and socially just reduction of future pandemic risks.

Training Load and Its Role in Injury Prevention, Part I: Back to the Future.

The purpose of this 2-part commentary series is† to explain why we believe our ability to control injury risk by manipulating training load (TL) in its current state is an illusion and why the foundations of this illusion are weak and unreliable. In part 1, we introduce the training process framework and contextualize the role of TL monitoring in the injury-prevention paradigm. In part 2, we describe the conceptual and methodologic pitfalls of previous authors who associated TL and injury in ways that limited their suitability for the derivation of practical recommendations. The first important step in the training process is developing the training program: the practitioner develops a strategy based on available evidence, professional knowledge, and experience. For decades, exercise strategies have been based on the fundamental training principles of overload and progression. Training-load monitoring allows the practitioner to determine whether athletes have completed training as planned and how they have coped with the physical stress. Training load and its associated metrics cannot provide a quantitative indication of whether particular load progressions will increase or decrease the injury risk, given the nature of previous studies (descriptive and at best predictive) and their methodologic weaknesses. The overreliance on TL has moved the attention away from the multifactorial nature of injury and the roles of other important contextual factors. We argue that no evidence supports the quantitative use of TL data to manipulate future training with the purpose of preventing injury. Therefore, determining "how much is too much" and how to properly manipulate and progress TL are currently subjective decisions based on generic training principles and our experience of adjusting training according to an individual athlete's response. Our message to practitioners is to stop seeking overly simplistic solutions to complex problems and instead embrace the risks and uncertainty inherent in the training process and injury prevention.

Deliberative democracy in the age of serial crisis

What is the state of deliberative democracy in the age of serial crisis? This survey article provides a descriptive and reflective assessment of recent developments in the field in the light of a political context in which there is growing incivility, political polarization, normalization of disinformation and the growing appeal of finding simplistic solutions to complex problems. We describe deliberative democracy as a field of research that has evolved to become (a) assertive in practice, (b) precise in theory, (c) global in reach and (d) ambitious in empirical research. For each of these facets of deliberative democracy, we reflect on the extent to which the field has responded to conceptual, empirical and political challenges, and identify its shortcomings, which warrant further attention. We conclude by drawing attention to research imperatives that the field needs to address to remain relevant in a highly unequal, climate-challenged and increasingly fragile global public sphere.