Public relations and artificial intelligence: It’s not (just) about robots

Organizations of all kinds, as well as their in-house or agency public relations teams, increasingly co-opt Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enhance their capabilities. This paper examines a relatively new topic that has received little scholarly attention: the growing relationship between AI and public relations. It outlines several key roles that AI may play in future, based on trends in other industries, and considers the implications for public relations practitioners, their clients and employers. It therefore launches a dialogue about the diversity and extent of AI’s uses in public relations practice. The paper argues that, to date, commentators have placed too much emphasis on AI’s potential for task automation; AI’s broader technological, economic and societal implications for public relations warrant greater critical attention. This does not imply that practitioners need become expert technologists; rather, they should develop a sufficient understanding of AI’s present and potential uses to be able to offer informed counsel.     

后共产主义社会中的民族主义——一个以波兰及其他后共产主义国家为中心的社会学分析

民族主义问题不仅是当今世界令人眼花缭乱的重大意识形态问题,而且在处于转型和过渡时期的社会中呈现为令人困扰的思潮.结合着历史上具有共产主义思想和实践的国家的传统与现状,本文对后共产主义社会境域中的民族主义问题进行了分析.文章认为,后共产主义的民族主义既是一种政治思想,也是一种社会运动,其起源、生发和蔓延与社会变革产生的焦虑息息相关,既与自由主义民主和自由市场相对立,也与社会结构变迁相承接.     

Creative and innovative behaviours of corporate directors: an elusive role of task-related conflicts

The aim of the present work is to examine corporate directors’ boardroom interactions associated with conflicts as well as creativity and innovation phenomena. In line with the behavioral perspective in research on boards, we investigate relationships between task conflicts, an emerging creative and innovative boardroom climate as well as directors’ work behaviors. Drawing upon the survey data from 423 corporate directors, we tested hypothesized relationships by the means of the structural equation modelling technique. The results provide evidence suggesting that task-related conflicts among corporate directors appear to be equally detrimental for the psychological workgroup climate as they are advantageous for initiating creative and innovative work behaviours. In other words, the positive effect of task conflicts on directors’ creative and innovative work behaviours occurs so long as such conflicts do not simultaneously impair their perception of the creative/innovative boardroom environment. By integrating the literature on workplace group conflicts, creativity and innovation with the corporate governance writings, this study offers a new insight into corporate directors functioning. Presented findings have clear implications for future board research and managerial practice.     

A conference on Polish‐Jewish relations

A Special Skill. V. V. Chepko, Goroda Byelorussii v pervoy polovine XIX veka. Ekonomicheskoe razvitie (The Economic Development of the Towns of Byelorussia in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century). Minsk: Byelorussian State University, 1981. 144pp. 1.20 roubles.

Jewish Anti‐Fascist Committee. Shimon Redlich. Propaganda and Nationalism in Wartime Russia: The Jewish Antifascist Committee in the USSR, 1941–1948. Boulder, Col.: East European Quarterly, 1982.236 pp. (East European Monographs, 58).

Unwelcome Guests David Prital (ed.). In Search of Self: The Soviet Jewish Intelligentsia and the Exodus. Jerusalem: Mount Scopus Publications, 1982. 262pp.

Antisemitic Classic. Lev Aleksandrovich Korneev. Klassovaya sushchnost sionizma (The Class Essence of Zionism). Kiev. Politizdat Ukrainy, 1982. 263 pp. (Critique of the Ideology and Policies of Anti‐Communism Series). 10,000 copies. 1.20 roubles.

The Super‐Powers in the Middle East. Adeed Dawisha and Karen Dawisha (eds.). The Soviet Union in the Middle East: Policies and Perspectives. London: Heinemann Educational Books for the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1982. 172 pp. Tables. Index. (Political Science/World Affairs). £5.50; and R.V. Borisov, SShA. Blizhnevostochnaya politika v 70‐e gody (United States Policy Towards the Middle East in the 1970s). Moscow: Nauka, 1982. 216 pp.     

Multi-level Monte Carlo methods for the approximation of invariant measures of stochastic differential equations

We develop a framework that allows the use of the multi-level Monte Carlo (MLMC) methodology (Giles in Acta Numer. 24:259–328, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1017/S096249291500001X) to calculate expectations with respect to the invariant measure of an ergodic SDE. In that context, we study the (over-damped) Langevin equations with a strongly concave potential. We show that when appropriate contracting couplings for the numerical integrators are available, one can obtain a uniform-in-time estimate of the MLMC variance in contrast to the majority of the results in the MLMC literature. As a consequence, a root mean square error of $$\mathcal {O}(\varepsilon )$$ is achieved with $$\mathcal {O}(\varepsilon ^{-2})$$ complexity on par with Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, which, however, can be computationally intensive when applied to large datasets. Finally, we present a multi-level version of the recently introduced stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics method (Welling and Teh, in: Proceedings of the 28th ICML, 2011) built for large datasets applications. We show that this is the first stochastic gradient MCMC method with complexity $$\mathcal {O}(\varepsilon ^{-2}|\log {\varepsilon }|^{3})$$, in contrast to the complexity $$\mathcal {O}(\varepsilon ^{-3})$$ of currently available methods. Numerical experiments confirm our theoretical findings.     

IMPACT OF COMPETITION,INVESTMENT, AND REGULATION ON PRICES OF MOBILE SERVICES: EVIDENCE FROM FRANCE

In this paper, we assess the impact of competition, investment, and regulation on prices of mobile services in France. We estimate hedonic price regressions using data on tariff plans offered by the main mobile telecommunications operator in France between May 2011 and December 2014. In this time period, the obtained quality‐adjusted price index decreased by about 42.8% as compared to a decline in weighted average prices without quality‐adjustment of 8.7%. In a second step, we relate the quality‐adjusted prices to a set of competition, investment, and regulation variables and find that the launch of 4G networks by mobile operators was the main driver of price reductions for classic tariffs with commitment. Low‐cost tariffs without commitment which were introduced to pre‐empt the entry of low‐cost competitor declined at the time of entry. Moreover, we find that regulation, which is approximated by the level of mobile termination charges and international roaming price caps for voice and data, has a joint significant impact on quality‐adjusted prices. In percentage terms, competition is responsible for about 23.4% of total price decline and investments in 4G for 56.1%. We conclude that the reduction in quality‐adjusted prices in the last years was largely caused by competition between operators for a new 4G technology and by entry of a fourth low‐cost operator. (JEL L13, L50, L96)     

The More Who Die,the Less We Care: Evidence from Natural Language Analysis of Online News Articles and Social Media Posts

Considerable amount of laboratory and survey‐based research finds that people show disproportional compassionate and affective response to the scope of human mortality risk. According to research on “psychic numbing,” it is often the case that the more who die, the less we care. In the present article, we examine the extent of this phenomenon in verbal behavior, using large corpora of natural language to quantify the affective reactions to loss of life. We analyze valence, arousal, and specific emotional content of over 100,000 mentions of death in news articles and social media posts, and find that language shows an increase in valence (i.e., decreased negative affect) and a decrease in arousal when describing mortality of larger numbers of people. These patterns are most clearly reflected in specific emotions of joy and (in a reverse fashion) of fear and anger. Our results showcase a novel methodology for studying affective decision making, and highlight the robustness and real‐world relevance of psychic numbing. They also offer new insights regarding the psychological underpinnings of psychic numbing, as well as possible interventions for reducing psychic numbing and overcoming social and psychological barriers to action in the face of the world's most serious threats.