Purpose The purpose of this paper is to lay out an approach to addressing the problem of privacy protection in the global digital environment based on the importance that information has to improve users’ informational self-determination. Following this reasoning, this paper focuses on the suitable way to provide user with the correct amount of information they may need to maintain a desirable grade of autonomy as far as their privacy protection is concerned and decide whether or not to (...) put their personal data on the internet. Design/methodology/approach The authors arrive at this point in their analysis by qualitative discourse analysis of the most relevant scientific papers and dossiers relating to privacy protection. Findings The goal of this paper is twofold. The first is to illustrate the importance of privacy by default and informed consent working together to protect information and communication technology users’ privacy. The second goal is to develop a suitable way to administrate the mentioned “informed consent” to users. Originality/value To fulfil this purpose, the authors present a new concept of informed consent: active “informed consent” or “Opt-in” model by layers. “Opt-in” regimens have already been used with cookies but never with 2.0 applications, as, for instance, social network sites. (shrink)

In this paper I want to examine quantum teleportation from a point of view that is different from that normally considered. This will enable us to gain a new perspective into what is involved in the process of teleportation. It is clear that, at least in the case where particles are involved, it is not the particle that is transported, but rather the information contained in the wave function. This idea in itself is not new, but the central question (...) that requires clarification is the nature of this information. This paper provides a new insight into this question. (shrink)

This is an open peer commentary on O’Brien & Opie (1999) “A connectionist theory of phenomenal experience”, published as a target article in the Behavioral and Brain Sciences. O’Brien & Opie defend a “vehicle” rather than a “process” theory of consciousness largely on the grounds that only conscious information is “explicit”. I argue that preconscious and unconscious representations can be functionally explicit (semantically well-formed and causally active). I also suggest that their analysis of how neural activation space mirrors (...) the information structure of phenomenal experience fits more naturally into a dual-aspect theory of information than into their reductive physicalism. (shrink)

Bohm and Hiley suggest that a certain new type of active information plays a key objective role in quantum processes. This paper discusses the implications of this suggestion to our understanding of the relation between the mental and the physical aspects of reality.

Mainstream cognitive neuroscience typically ignores the role of quantum physical effects in the neural processes underlying cogni¬tion and consciousness. However, many unsolved problems remain, suggesting the need to consider new approaches. We propose that quantum theory, especially through an ontological interpretation due to Bohm and Hiley, provides a fruitful framework for addressing the neural correlates of cognition and consciousness. In particular, the ontological interpretation suggests that a novel type of 'active information', connected with a novel type of 'quantum (...) potential energy', plays a key role in quantum physical processes. After introducing the ontological interpretation we illustrate its value for cognitive neuroscience by discussing it in the light of a proposal by Beck and Eccles about how quantum tunneling could play a role in controlling the frequency of synaptic exocytosis. In this proposal, quantum tunneling would enable the 'self' to control its brain without violating the energy conservation law. We argue that the ontological interpretation provides a sharper picture of what actually could be taking place in quantum tunneling in general and in synaptic exocytosis in particular. Based on the notions of active information and quantum potential energy, we propose a coherent way of understanding how mental processes (understood as involving non-classical physical processes) can act on traditional, classically describable neural processes without violating the energy conservation law. (shrink)

Young children's social learning is a topic of great interest. Here, we examined preschoolers’ help-seeking as a social information gathering activity that may optimize and support children's opportunities for learning. In a toy assembly task, we assessed each child's competency at assembling toys and the difficulty of each step of the task. We hypothesized that children's help-seeking would be a function of both initial competency and task difficulty. The results confirmed this prediction; all children were more likely to seek (...) assistance on difficult steps and less competent children sought assistance more often. Moreover, the magnitude of the help-seeking requests similarly related to both competency and difficulty. The results provide support for viewing children's help-seeking as an information gathering activity, indicating that preschoolers flexibly adjust the level and amount of assistance to optimize their opportunities for learning. (shrink)

To shed light on the key premise of the bifocal stance theory (BST) that social learners flexibly take instrumental and ritual stances, we focus on developmental origins of child-led information transmission, or teaching, as a core social learning strategy. We highlight children's emerging selectivity in information transmission influenced by epistemic and social factors and call for systematic investigation of proposed stance-taking.

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to present a novel mnemonic, ACTIVE, inspired by Mason's 1985 PAPA mnemonic, which will help researchers and IT professionals develop an understanding of the major issues in information ethics.Design/methodology/approach– Theoretical foundations are developed for each element of the mnemonic by reference to philosophical definitions of the terms used and to virtue ethics, particularly MacIntyrean virtue ethics. The paper starts with a critique of the elements of the PAPA mnemonic and then proceeds (...) to develop an understanding of each of the elements of ACTIVE ethics, via a discussion of the underpinning virtue ethics.Findings– This paper identifies six issues, described by the mnemonic, ACTIVE. ACTIVE stands for: autonomy, the ability of the individual to manage their own information and make choice; community, the ethical effect of an information systems on the community which it supports; transparency, the extent to which the derivation of content and process in an information system is made clear; identity, the social and ethical effect of an information system on the definition and maintenance of the distinctive characteristics of a person; value, the value or moral worth placed on information associated with an individual and hence on the relationship with the individual; and empathy, the ability of the information systems professional to emotionally connect with the user and the extent to which the information system distances or connects.Originality/value– The paper applies virtue ethics to developing a tool to help information professionals reflect on their ethical practice in developing and supporting information systems. (shrink)

The emerging neurocomputational vision of humans as embodied, ecologically embedded, social agents—who shape and are shaped by their environment—offers a golden opportunity to revisit and revise ideas about the physical and information-theoretic underpinnings of life, mind, and consciousness itself. In particular, the active inference framework makes it possible to bridge connections from computational neuroscience and robotics/AI to ecological psychology and phenomenology, revealing common underpinnings and overcoming key limitations. AIF opposes the mechanistic to the reductive, while staying fully grounded (...) in a naturalistic and information-theoretic foundation, using the principle of free energy minimization. The latter provides a theoretical basis for a unified treatment of particles, organisms, and interactive machines, spanning from the inorganic to organic, non-life to life, and natural to artificial agents. We provide a brief introduction to AIF, then explore its implications for evolutionary theory, ecological psychology, embodied phenomenology, and robotics/AI research. We conclude the paper by considering implications for machine consciousness. (shrink)

Business Ethics, the Environment &Responsibility, EarlyView.

Shared brain regions have been found for processing action and language, including the left inferior frontal gyrus, the premotor cortex, and the inferior parietal lobule. However, in the context of action and language generation that shares the same action semantics, it is unclear whether the activity patterns within the overlapping brain regions would be the same. The changes in effective connectivity affected by these activity patterns are also unclear. In this fMRI study, participants were asked to perform hand action and (...) verb generation tasks toward object pictures. We identified shared and specific brain regions for the two tasks in the left PMC, IFG, and IPL. The mean activation level and multi-voxel pattern analysis revealed that the activity patterns in the shared sub-regions were distinct for the two tasks. The dynamic causal modeling results demonstrated that the information flows for the two tasks were different across the shared sub-regions. These results provided the first neuroimaging evidence that the action and verb generation were task context driven in the shared regions, and the distinct patterns of neural information flow across the PMC-IFG-IPL neural network were affected by the polymodal processing in the shared regions. (shrink)

The connection between brain and mind is an important scientific and philosophical question that we are still far from completely understanding. A crucial point to our work is noticing that thermodynamics provides a convenient framework to model brain activity, whereas cognition can be modeled in information-theoretical terms. In fact, several models have been proposed so far from both approaches. A second critical remark is the existence of deep theoretical connections between thermodynamics and information theory. In fact, some well-known (...) authors claim that the laws of thermodynamics are nothing but principles in information theory. Unlike in physics or chemistry, a formalization of the relationship between information and energy is currently lacking in neuroscience. In this paper we propose a framework to connect physical brain and cognitive models by means of the theoretical connections between information theory and thermodynamics. Ultimately, this article aims at providing further insight on the formal relationship between cognition and neural activity. (shrink)

Understanding how neurons represent, process, and manipulate information is one of the main goals of neuroscience. These issues are fundamentally abstract, and information theory plays a key role in formalizing and addressing them. However, application of information theory to experimental data is fraught with many challenges. Meeting these challenges has led to a variety of innovative analytical techniques, with complementary domains of applicability, assumptions, and goals.

While previous studies have examined the impact of informal institutions to determine entrepreneurial activities, this paper explores the different configurational paths of informal institutions to promote men’s and women’s entrepreneurial activities across factor-driven and efficiency-driven economies. We collected data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor for 56 countries for the years 2008-2013 and employed fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to conduct the empirical analysis. The results confirm that a single antecedent condition is unable to produce an outcome while combination of different conditions (...) can produce an outcome. We find that cultural-cognitive institutional antecedents in combination with social-normative antecedents create configurations of conditions that lead to the higher levels of men’s and women’s entrepreneurial activities in factor-driven and efficiency-driven economies. Moreover, this study shows that these causal conditions configure differently to promote men’s and women’s entrepreneurial activities in factor-driven and efficiency-driven nations. This paper may create awareness in potential entrepreneurs regarding specific sets of institutional antecedents that can increase the emergence of entrepreneurship in different economic clusters. We show that institutional antecedents which are essential to promote entrepreneurship combine distinctly for men’s and women’s entrepreneurship and this combination varies in different stages of economic development. (shrink)

Synchronization of neural activity in oscillatory neural networks is a general principle of information processing in the brain at both preattentional and attentional levels. This is confirmed by a model of attention based on an oscillatory neural network with a central element and models of feature binding and working memory based on multi-frequency oscillations.

The study of dis/misinformation is currently in vogue, however with much ambiguity about what the problem precisely is, and much confusion about the key concepts that are brought to bear on this problem. My aim of this paper is twofold. First, I will attempt to precisify the (dis/mis)information problem, roughly construing it as anything that undermines the “epistemic aim of information.” Second, I will use this precisification to provide a new grounded account of dis/misinformation. To achieve the latter, (...) I will critically engage with three of the more popular accounts of dis/misinformation which are (a) harm-based, (b) misleading-based, and (c) ignorance-based accounts. Each engagement will lead to further refinement of these key concepts, ultimately paving the way for my own account. Finally, I offer my own information hazard-based account, which distinguishes between misinformation as content, misinformation as activity, and disinformation as activity. By introducing this distinction between content and activity, it will be shown that my account is erected on firmer conceptual/ontological grounds, overcoming many of the difficulties that have plagued previous accounts, especially the problem of the proper place of intentionality in understanding dis/misinformation. This promises to add clarity to dis/misinformation research and to prove more useful in practice. (shrink)

Formed in the wake of May 1968, the Prisons Information Group (GIP) was a radical resistance movement active in France in the early 1970's. Theorist Michel Foucault was heavily involved. This book collects interdisciplinary essays that explore the GIP's resources both for Foucault studies and for prison activism today.

In the text, I discuss the abilities and challenges of information systems interoperability. The anticipated and expected result of interoperability is to improve the provision of public utility services to citizens and companies by means of facilitating the provision of public utility services on the basis of a “single window” principle and reducing the costs incurred by public administrations, companies, and citizens, resulting from the efficiency of the provision of public utility services. In the article, the conceptual framework of (...) interoperability is elaborated upon. Moreover, information systems and public registers for entrepreneurs in Poland exemplify whether the interoperability may be applied and, if so, whether interoperability fulfils its targets to the extent of e-Government services for entrepreneurs. (shrink)

A number of central government policy initiatives in the UK are encouraging the sharing of information between government and other partners. A relatively large amount of information is available to enhance social inclusion but this data does not always have the detail required to investigate small areas. As a result information sharing of locally generated information is increasing in the UK, particularly for issues such as health and crime where information is not readily available for (...) Local Authorities. Legal and ethical issues associated with sharing locally generated information are frequently perceived as problematical. Examples of methods and protocols to overcome these problems are reviewed. It is possible that the activities of the Cabinet Office Committee on data sharing will act as an incentive for data sharing. However, an equally important catalyst will be commitment and support across UK central government and at the local level by Chief Executives and members to the principles and benefits of information sharing for better informed policymaking. (shrink)

The increasing concern about visual representation in science has been usually converged on representations – photographs, diagrams, graphs, maps –, while instruments of visualization have been usually neglected, even because of the concrete difficulty to grasp their effects on visualization. In this regard, the questions and concepts formulated in the debate on digital visualization deserve here as a starting point to analyze the change in instrumental mediation triggered by the introduction of computer-assisted imaging technologies in those laboratories that traditionally have (...) used and still use microscopes. Empirical materials gathered during an ethnographic investigation of Italian cytogenetics labs are here presented to show the visual spaces provided by microscopes and digital systems as activity fields, which are inhabited by and suggest in an either divergent or complementary way specific practices, materials, organizations, epistemological orientations and aesthetical preferences. (shrink)

In this age of interdisciplinary interaction, we probably owe one another disclosures of our qualifications for commenting on each other’s profession. And you might well wonder why a philosopher would be asked to address this distinguished society of professiona l geologists. So, let me give what information I can about my qualifications to talk this evening about, of all things, the ethics of water geology.

Two experiments examined similarities and differences in the effects of consciously and unconsciously perceived rewards on the active maintenance of goal-relevant information. Participants could gain high and low monetary rewards for performance on a word span task. The reward value was presented supraliminally or subliminally at different stages during the task. In Experiment 1, rewards were presented before participants processed the target words. Enhanced performance was found in response to higher rewards, regardless whether they were presented supraliminally or (...) subliminally. In Experiment 2, rewards were presented after participants processed the target words, i.e., during maintenance. Performance increased in response to relatively high rewards when they were presented subliminally, but decreased when they were presented supraliminally. We conclude that both consciously and unconsciously perceived rewards boost resources supporting the maintenance of task-relevant information. Conscious processing of rewards can, however, heavily interfere with an ongoing maintenance process and impair performance. (shrink)

Findings about the desire for health-risk information are heterogeneous and sometimes contradictory. In particular, they seem to be at variance with established psychological theories of information-seeking behavior.The present paper posits the decision about treating illness with medicine as the causal determinant for the expected net value of information, and attempts to explain idiosyncrasies in information-seeking behavior by using the notion of decision sensitivity to incoming information.Furthermore, active information avoidance is explained by modeling the (...) expected emotional distress potentially brought about by “bad news” as a disutility factor in pay-off maximization.In this context two notions of uncertainty are distinguished: an epistemic uncertainty related to the prognostic probability assigned to the risk, and an emotional uncertainty related to the expected damage. Health-risk information can both reduce epistemic and increase emotional uncertainty, giving rise to idiosyncratic processing strategies. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article argues that new forms of conducting military information activities using the Internet require renewed consideration of the ethical frameworks in which conduct of such activities can be grounded: frameworks that require these operations to be considered on their own terms rather than as a subset of wider categories. In this online context the article explores the interlinked areas of proportionality and privacy, delineations between combatant and non-combatant, and limits to acceptable deceptive practices. The article argues that the (...) “soft” effects that online information activities promise may reduce destruction and loss of life in the pursuit of military objectives. This context creates new reference points from which necessity and proportionality tests are conducted: tests that justify collection of online data to support online military information activities, and the conduct of the actual activities. The article outlines the possibility that such activities may facilitate potenti... (shrink)

From his preliminary analysis in 1965, Hubert Dreyfus projected a future much different than those with which his contemporaries were practically concerned, tempering their optimism in realizing something like human intelligence through conventional methods. At that time, he advised that there was nothing “directly” to be done toward machines with human-like intelligence, and that practical research should aim at a symbiosis between human beings and computers with computers doing what they do best, processing discrete symbols in formally structured problem domains. (...) Fast-forward five decades, and his emphasis on the difference between two essential modes of processing, the unconscious yet purposeful mode fundamental to situated human cognition, and the “minded” sense of conscious processing characterizing symbolic reasoning that seems to lend itself to explicit programming, continues into the famous Dreyfus–McDowell debate. The present memorial reviews Dreyfus’ early projections, asking if the fears that punctuate current popular commentary on AI are warranted, and in light of these if he would deliver similar practical advice to researchers today. (shrink)

The Influence of Emotional and Non-emotional Concepts Activation on Information Processing and Unintentional Memorizing The aim of the work is to compare mechanisms of semantic and emotional processing and memory. Targets were primed by category name. The congruency of prime and target was manipulated. The reaction time of lexical decisions and the effects of unintentional memorizing of word targets were measured. Activation of semantic and emotional nodes leads to faster processing of related concepts: congruent targets are processed faster than (...) incongruent. Processing congruent primed emotional concepts depends on their modality: anger and joy words are processed faster than sadness. Thus, congruently primed activating emotional concepts are processed differently from congruently primed deactivating concepts. The effectiveness of unintentional memory of emotional and non-emotional concepts is based on different mechanisms: congruently primed emotional words are better remembered than incongruently primed. The results are discussed in the framework of spreading activation theory and theory of emotional memory. (shrink)

The functional neural mechanisms underlying the cognitive benefits of aerobic exercise have been a subject of ongoing research in recent years. However, while most neuroimaging studies to date which examined functional neural correlates of aerobic exercise have used simple stimuli in highly controlled and artificial experimental conditions, our everyday life experiences require a much more complex and dynamic neurocognitive processing. Therefore, we have used a naturalistic complex information processing fMRI paradigm of story comprehension to investigate the role of an (...) aerobically active lifestyle in the processing of real-life cognitive-demanding situations. By employing the inter-subject correlation approach, we have identified differences in reliable stimulus-induced neural responses between groups of aerobically active and non-active cognitively intact older adults. Since cardiorespiratory fitness has previously been suggested to play a key role in the neuroprotective potential of aerobic exercise, we have investigated its dose-response relationship with regional inter-subject neural responses. We found that aerobically active lifestyle and cardiorespiratory fitness were associated with more synchronized inter-subject neural responses during story comprehension in higher order cognitive and linguistic brain regions in the prefrontal and temporo-parietal cortices. In addition, while higher regional inter-SC values were associated with higher performance on a post-listening memory task, this was not translated to a significant between-group difference in task performance. We, therefore, suggest that the modulatory potential of aerobic exercise and cardiorespiratory fitness on cognitive processing may extend beyond simple and highly controlled stimuli to situations in which the brain faces continuous real-life complex information. Additional studies incorporating other aspects of real-life situations such as naturalistic visual stimuli, everyday life decision making, and motor responses in these situations are desired to further validate the observed relationship between aerobic exercise, cardiorespiratory fitness, and complex naturalistic information processing. (shrink)