LSE Research channel | Video

Contributor(s): Professor Sonia Livingstone | With 65 per cent of Europeans now online, what effect is this having on children? What type of material are children being exposed to through the internet? How do online risks compare to offline risks? In this short film, Professor Sonia Livingstone – head of LSE’s Department of Media and Communications – along with fellow researchers Dr Ellen Helsper and Dr Leslie Haddon, discuss the findings of their survey into the online habits of 23,420 children and their parents in 23 European countries. Professor Livingstone and her colleagues received funding from the EC's Internet Programmed to investigate the opportunities and the risks that children are exposed to online. They found that one in eight children report having been upset by something they have seen online and one in twelve have met an online contact offline. With almost a quarter of 9-10 year olds now hosting their own social network profile, the researchers ask what obligations internet service providers and social networking sites have to 'manage the interactions that they facilitate.' Their results are published in the EU Kids Online report, Risks and Safety on the Internet, available at the EU Kids Online website.

Contributor(s): Dr Kavita Abraham | Qualitative data can provide a researcher with a lot of interesting information , but trying to interpret what it means can lead to methodological problems. Unlike a list of numbers, the meaning of a text is not something everyone will necessarily agree on. It’s much easier for researcher bias to affect the interpretation, and it’s often difficult to explicitly demonstrate how conclusions have been reached. But what if you could train a machine to do the analysis? In this short film Kavita Abraham of LSE’s Methodology Institute explains how she has been using the software Alceste to analyse the transcripts of interviews with hundreds of people from Angola, Tanzania, and Sierra Leone. The interviews, which explored perceptions of local governance, were conducted by the BBC World Service Trust|, a charity that uses the power of the media to reduce poverty and promote human rights. Here Dr Abraham highlights some of the advantages of using a machine to study this kind of qualitative data.

Contributor(s): Dr Heather Jones | The prisoner reprisals of 1917 were a retaliatory action taken by German forces against captured French and British troops, in reaction to poor British and French treatment of German prisoner workers. This was a ruthless, calculated policy, intended to manipulate public opinion, as Heather Jones from the Department of International History explains. Prisoners held behind German lines during the 1917 reprisals were forced to work under shellfire on subsistence rations. But rather than conceal this mistreatment, the German captors actively encouraged prisoners to write home about it . This deliberate release of information was intended to mobilise public opinion in Britain and France in order to force changes in British and French military policy. The plan worked. As a direct consequence of the 1917 reprisal sequences, the French and British governments insisted, against the wishes of their military chiefs, that their German prisoner workers be withdrawn to safety. In consequence, the Germans halted their reprisals in May of 1917. However, the reprisals ultimately paved the way for more radicalised German prisoner mistreatment later in the war. By 1918, beatings and malnutrition were commonplace in the German army, and actions which a year before had been sufficiently shocking as to constitute a "reprisal" had become the norm. A book on this topic will be published with Cambridge University Press in 2011: Heather Jones, Violence against prisoners of war: Britain, France and Germany, 1914-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)

Contributor(s): Mirko Draca | Lobbying is big business in US politics, and getting bigger. Many commentators have voiced suspicions about the ties between lobbying firms, private sector businesses, and politics. They allege that a "revolving door", which sees employees moving from public office to private companies and back again, potentially jeopardises the public interest. Often highly paid, these lobbyists claim their salaries simply reflect their high ability, but critics complain those exiting the revolving door are attractive to lobbying firms because they can exploit their political connections. In this film Mirko Draca explains how he and his colleagues, Christian Fons-Rosen and Jordi Blanes i Vidal, measured the extent to which former political staff who become lobbyists benefit from their ties to government. This involves separating the issue of ability from the issue of political connections. Fortunately, the political system contains conditions for testing this: periodic elections mean that political contacts are vulnerable. By looking at what happens to a lobbyist's earnings when their former employer leaves political office, Draca and his colleagues have been able to measure the value of being politically well connected.

Contributor(s): Dr Kristen Rundle | Is law inherently moral or does Nazi law provide tragic proof that law has no intrinsic moral worth? For Positivists, such as H L A Hart, the systemic integrity of a legal code says nothing about its content – the law is simply whatever is put forward by lawgivers. In contrast natural lawyers, notably Lon Fuller, insist that the way law is expressed carries moral significance for those who are subject to it. In this film Dr Kristen Rundle, from the Department of Law, explains why the Hart- Fuller debate, begun in the Harvard Law Review in 1958, has never really gone away.

Contributor(s): Dr Kristen Rundle | Typically, the legal codes of despotic states lack transparency (you aren’t told what the laws are), lack consistency (one law will contradict another, making it impossible to obey both), often endorse retroactivity (you’re guilty today for an act that wasn’t illegal when you did it), and permit unannounced changes to the law. For Dr Kristen Rundle, from the Department of Law, this isn’t just a case of poor legal housekeeping. In this short film she discusses how the systemic disorder typically exhibited by the legal systems of despotic and transitional states suggests that tyranny requires ‘forms of power that are not compatible with law.’ Drawing on debates of legal philosophy, she explains why chaos works in the tyrant’s favour while law – even with pernicious content – ties up his ability to wield absolute power.

Contributor(s): Professor Martin Anthony | Diagnosing tumours, playing video games, detecting credit card fraud, recognising faces, reading handwriting… they don't seem like similar tasks, but they are all cases where "machine learning" is employed to enable computers to make intelligent decisions. And although the various tasks look very different, the mathematics behind them is remarkably similar, as Professor Martin Anthony explains in this short film. When computers fail to do something we find easy – reading handwriting, recognising faces – it's tempting to think of them as stupid machines. But it's often the case that tasks we find relatively easy to perform evade explicit codification. How, for example, would you specify rules which correctly identified cats and only cats – including three-legged cats – but excluded dogs? Employing ideas from probability theory, statistics, linear algebra, geometry and discrete mathematics, machine learning aims to generate systems of instructions – algorithms – that allow computers to perform cognitive-style tasks. In abstract terms, machine learning involves detecting patterns in very large datasets, clustering together similar objects and distinguishing dissimilar ones. This could help with the detection of anomalies (as with the identification of malignant tumours or fraudulent credit card usage), or it could be used to recognise patterns – making sense of handwritten characters, for example. But despite the extraordinary real-world effects this theoretical work makes possible, Professor Anthony, like many mathematicians, isn't directly concerned with the uses to which his work is eventually put – 'I think of myself as an applicable mathematician,' he says, 'if it wasn't interesting mathematically, I'd probably be doing something else.'

Contributor(s): Professor Eileen Munro | Baby P, Victoria Climbié - the names have become symbolic of the failures of the child protection agencies. Professor Eileen Munro, a former social worker herself and now an expert on child protection reform, believes that more attention needs to be given to the system, rather than just the individuals, that allowed these tragedies to occur.

In this short film, she explains that only allocating blame to individual social workers and managers can leave the impression that the problem has been successfully fixed. But if the problem is systemic, then merely punishing and removing the culpable individuals simply sets the stage for the next case to occur. As Professor Munro says, "Human error is where you should begin to ask questions rather than where you should stop."

Inspired by improved air safety procedures, she explains that the aim should be to design systems that work with the limits of human reasoning, and make it "easier for people to the right thing and harder for them to do the wrong thing".

Contributor(s): Peter Howlett, Aashish Velkar | Independent of British rule, the Indian economy expanded rapidly - but as the population also expanded, fears grew that the land would not be able to feed the rising numbers. The government took action and, during the 1960s, 70s, and into the 80s, impending famine was successfully averted through a series of agricultural policies designed to increase crop yields. This became known as the "Green Revolution."

As part of a major project investigating how well facts travel, LSE economic historians Peter Howlett| and Aashish Velkar| travelled to southern India in search of a case study to see what had made those policies so successful. But when they arrived, they found a second green revolution was underway - presenting them with a unique research opportunity.

Following a team from Tamil Nadu Agricultural University|, Dr Howlett and Dr Velkar were able to study firsthand how knowledge was transmitted between policy makers, scientists, and farmers, and how a very different model was emerging - one which emphasised a two-way flow of information and which has so far produced startling results.

Their findings are in a new book collected on the "How Well Do ‘Facts’ Travel?" project, due out mid 2010.

Contributor(s): Dr Jason Alexander | While we grapple with the finer points of stem cell research or the ethics of assisted suicide, some moral issues are so obviously wrong that we hardly need to debate them. Yet history swiftly belies our notion of the ethically self-evident precept. Cultures in the past have flourished for many centuries at a time – fostering technical innovation, establishing centres of learning and culture – while simultaneously permitting slavery or human sacrifice or cannibalism, for example. In this short film, Dr Jason Alexander from the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method explains how a naturalistic account of where morality comes from and how it operates must be flexible enough to accommodate these wildly different parameters, whilst being sufficiently robust to account for the immovable and absolute hold it has upon us. Game theory, developed by economists as a means of studying bargaining situations, has since become a vital tool for students of human behaviour. Here, Dr Alexander, explores how this approach can be used to investigate how our moral sense may have developed, and how the dictates of morality can be binding and yet relative to a place and time.