Building a Pillowfort: Political Tensions in Platform Design and Policy

Social media platforms make trade-offs in their design and policy decisions to attract users and stand out from other platforms. These decisions are influenced by a number of considerations, e.g. what kinds of content moderation to deploy or what kinds of resources a platform has access to. Their choices play into broader political tensions; social media platforms are situated within a social context that frames their impact, and they can have politics through their design that enforce power structures and serve existing authorities. We turn to Pillowfort, a small social media platform, to examine these political tensions as a case study. Using a discourse analysis, we examine public discussion posts between staff and users as they negotiate the site's development over a period of two years. Our findings illustrate the tensions in navigating the politics that users bring with them from previous platforms, the difficulty of building a site's unique identity and encouraging commitment, and examples of how design decisions can both foster and break trust with users. Drawing from these findings, we discuss how the success and failure of new social media platforms are impacted by political influences on design and policy decisions.

Use of Incremental Model in Analyzing Bangladesh Education Policy 2010

Education is one of the essential components in developing a scholarly society capable of facing the demands and challenges of the twenty-first century. Education policy refers to the principles of government policymaking in the educational sector and the set of laws and norms that govern the operation of the educational system. It focuses on the effects of educational policy decisions and alternatives in the real world. It investigates the link between educational policy and practice. Even though our educational system has shortcomings, we are improving daily. Bangladesh is fully committed to the EFA goals, the Millennium Development Goals, and universal declarations. Every child between the ages of six and eighteen is entitled to free education under Article seventeen of the Bangladesh Constitution. As a result, the "National Education Policy 2010" was created using the incremental model of one of the most used public policy frameworks. The government makes incremental public policy decisions based on earlier actions. All of the model's functions are divided into distinct groups. Our educational system underwent significant changes over a long period. The incremental model's important aspects are time progression and social demand.

June–September 2021

Though public policy continued to be dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic, restrictions began to ease as the vaccine rollout progressed. The volume of secondary legislation barely slackened, however, and the lack of parliamentary scrutiny was a cause of concern both to academic commentators and to parliamentarians. On 10 June, the House of Lords Constitution Committee published its third and final report on the constitutional implications of coronavirus and was clearly very unhappy with the course of events: ‘The Government has introduced a large volume of new legislation, much of it transforming everyday life and introducing unprecedented restrictions on ordinary activities. Yet parliamentary oversight of these significant policy decisions has been extremely limited.’

Methodologies to Associate COVID-19 Spreading Data to Space and Scale

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the correlation between the spread of the SARS-Cov-2 virus and a number of epidemiological parameters has been a key tool for understanding the dynamics of its flow. This information has assisted local authorities in making policy decisions for the containment of its expansion. Several methods have been used including topographical data, artificial intelligence and machine learning data, and epidemiological tools to analyze factors facilitating the spread of epidemic at a local and global scale. The aim of this study is to use a new tool to assess and categorize the incoming epidemiological data regarding the spread of the disease as per population densities, spatial and topographical morphologies, social and financial activities, population densities and mobility between regions. These data will be appraised as risk factors in the spread of the disease on a local and a global scale.

Impact of Delaying Effective and Cost-Effective Policy Decisions: An Example From Cervical Cancer Prevention in Norway

Introduction. Delayed implementation of evidence-driven interventions has consequences that can be formally evaluated. In Norway, programs to prevent cervical cancer (CC)—screening and treatment of precancerous lesions and prophylactic vaccination against human papillomavirus (HPV) infection—have been implemented, but each encountered delays in policy implementation. To examine the effect of these delays, we project the outcomes that would have been achieved with timely implementation of two policy changes compared with the de facto delays in implementation (in Norway). Methods. We used a multimodeling approach that combined HPV transmission and cervical carcinogenesis to estimate the health outcomes and timeline for CC elimination associated with the implementation of two CC prevention policy decisions: a multicohort vaccination program of women up to age 26 years with bivalent vaccine in 2009 compared with actual “delayed” implementation in 2016, and a switch from cytology to primary HPV-based testing in 2015 compared with “delayed” rollout in 2020. Results. Timely implementation of two policy changes compared with current Norwegian prevention policy timeline could have averted approximately 970 additional cases (range of top 10 sets: 830–1060) and accelerated the CC elimination timeline by around 4 years (from 2039 to 2035). Conclusions. If delaying implementation of effective and cost-effective interventions is being considered, the decision-making process should include quantitative analyses on the effects of delays.

Global Climate Services: A Typology of Global Decisions Influenced by Climate Risk

Climate services are ideally co-developed by scientists and stakeholders working together to identify decisions and user needs. Yet, while climate services have been developed at regional to local scales, relatively little attention has been paid to the global scale. Global climate services involve decisions that rely on climate information from many locations in different world regions, and are increasingly salient. Increasing interconnections in the global financial system and supply chains expose private companies and financial institutions to climate risk in multiple locations in different world regions. Further, multilateral decisions on greenhouse gas emission reduction targets, disaster risk finance or international migration should make use of global scale climate risk assessments. In order to advance global climate service development, we present a typology of decisions relying on global (i.e., non-local) climate risk information. We illustrate each decision type through examples of current practice from the coastal domain drawn from the literature and stakeholder interviews. We identify 8 types of decisions making use of global climate information. At a top-level, we distinguish between “multilateral climate policy decisions,” and “portfolio decisions involving multiple locations.” Multilateral climate policy decisions regard either “mitigation targets” or “multilateral adaptation” decisions. Portfolio decisions regard either “choice of location” or “choice of financial asset” decisions. Choice of location decisions can be further distinguished as to whether they involve “direct climate risks,” “supply chain risks” or “financial network risks.” Our survey of examples shows that global climate service development is more advanced for portfolio decisions taken by companies with experience in climate risk assessment, i.e., (re-)insurers, whereas many multilateral climate policy decisions are at an earlier stage of decision-making. Our typology thus provides an entry-point for global climate service development by pointing to promising research directions for supporting global (non-local) decisions that account for climate risks.

Executive Politics

This chapter explains the historical origins of strong bureaucratic power in South Korea and recent changes in which the concentration of bureaucratic power has weakened. In the 1960s and 1970s, economic growth was South Korea’s top priority, and economic policy agencies such as the Economic Planning Board (EPB) led the nation’s overall policy decisions under the protection of the powerful president, Park Chung-hee. As the economy grew, however, various social demands, such as welfare, labour rights, and environmental protection, were expressed by the public, and many institutions that could reflect these demands grew within the bureaucracy in the 1980s and 1990s. As a consequence, the influence of the EPB was relatively reduced. Since the 2000s, democratization has matured and the ability of the National Assembly to make policy decisions and keep the administration in check has been strengthened. As a result, the bureaucrats’ influence on policy further diminished.

The Long and Winding Road: A Caregiver’s Journey

In a discussion about innovative caregiving programs, it is important to hear the voice of the caregiver. In this section, using her personal experience, this healthcare professional will explore her interactions with the medical system as a caregiver for her partner. She will discuss her caregiver journey from the cancer diagnosis in 2014 through her partner’s final days in hospice, which occurred during the pandemic. She will discuss pertinent issues regarding in what ways the healthcare system response was helpful, which responses were problematic, and where it outright failed to address caregiver needs. Issues, such as caregiver perceived invisibility during the hospital stay, how ageism affected policy decisions and what effect those policies had on her as the caregiver, and other important issues will be explored, including the how the pandemic affected her as a caregiver.