Verification of scanned document authenticity is important for digital archiving, information security, and forensic analysis. This paper proposes a reconstruction error-based method for detecting structural anomalies in scanned documents. A convolutional autoencoder is trained on authentic document patches and used to generate reconstruction error maps. These maps are then classified by a CNN to distinguish the original scans from the reproduced samples. Experiments on a controlled dataset show that reconstruction error maps provide discriminative information for detecting artefacts introduced by document reproduction. The results should be interpreted as a proof of concept for controlled reproduction detection rather than as a complete solution for all real-world forgery scenarios.
Many people see caring for the environment as part of who they are and what they believe is morally right. Yet even when protecting nature is valued, consistently acting in environmentally friendly ways in everyday life can be difficult. In this paper, we adopt an identity-goal perspective and discuss why people who set green goals and feel environmentally responsible may choose quick and easy actions that signal concern but have limited real impact. Committing to the identity goal of being a green person might be the best route to success. However, there may also be potential downsides. When people feel they have already done enough to see themselves as environmentally responsible, they may stop putting in further effort—a pattern often called “slacktivism.” At the same time, people who feel they have not done enough may look for quick and easy actions that make them feel better, rather than taking more effective steps that require time and effort. This is problematic because environmental protection requires sustained effortful action over time. We will therefore discuss potentially effective self-regulation strategies that help to overcome these problems.
Androcentrism pertains to a tendency to view humanness through the lens of masculinity. This tendency is reflected in language, in which there is ample evidence that words used to represent all people are either grammatically or semantically biased to represent predominantly men. In this chapter, we describe the most overt example of androcentrism in language, that is: the (false) masculine generic. It is the most prominent example of androcentric language in which grammatically masculine words are used. They are aimed to represent everyone, regardless of their gender, yet discriminatory effects of such language are common. We then describe the current state of knowledge regarding reformatory attempts to change language that first focused on women, but then expanded to include diverse gender expressions. We also present considerations of the effectiveness of such changes. Finally, we review evidence that points out both cognitive and attitude-based obstacles in introducing changes in language and how these obstacles were addressed in intervention studies aimed at promoting inclusive language.
In this paper, I offer a reinterpretation of populism as viewed through the lens of political pragmatism and my pragmatist concept of non-consensual democracy. My argument takes its starting point from a critique of the currently dominant approach in which populism is primarily described as a threat to liberal-democratic institutions. While such an assessment of populism is legitimate, it is also incomplete since it fails to explain why populist mobilizations prove to be convincing to the public. I argue that populism should also be regarded as an expression of real deficits of liberal democracy, including an enfeeblement of representation, a yawning gap between institutional politics and everyday experience, a crisis of representation, and the reduction of conflict to a technocratically managed consensus. In the first part, I build on John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, and also Mikhail Bakhtin to outline the pragmatist understanding of politics as rooted in practices of everyday life. In the second part, I discuss my idea of non-consensual democracy, which proposes an alternative to both the deliberative model of consensus and the agonistic affirmation of conflict. In the third part, I draw a distinction between the common good and common interests to show that pragmatism furnishes us with a language capable of capturing democratic integration without recourse to the notion of community. This promotes construing populism as both a symptom and a challenge because while it reveals actual failings of liberal democracy, it responds to them in an anti-pluralist manner. Thus, the democratic response must not come down to a condemnation of populism; instead, democratic institutions must be restructured to accommodate permanent disagreement,
conflicts of interest, and non-consensual dialogue.
