E-commerce in China and Latin America. A Review and Future Research Agenda

This study reviews scientific publications in China’s e-commerce and influence on Latin America’s market. The study took China, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Chile, Argentina and Uruguay as variables. This study also offers an overview of Chinese platforms with presence and use in Latin America’s business. This research uses a qualitative approach, using a paper review (2001–2020) within the Scopus and Web of Science databases. This study shows China’s e-commerce lessons for Latin American e-markets and Latin-American e-commerce challenges. The cross-cultural research in this field is immature. The authors help to close the gap in providing Latin American businesses with knowledge in e-commerce and how to put into practice the learned lessons from China e-commerce. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

Living Without a Mobile Phone: An Autoethnography

This paper presents an autoethnography of my experiences living without a mobile phone. What started as an experiment motivated by a personal need to reduce stress, has resulted in two voluntary mobile phone breaks spread over nine years (i.e., 2002-2008 and 2014-2017). Conducting this autoethnography is the means to assess if the lack of having a phone has had any real impact in my life. Based on formative and summative analyses, four meaningful units or themes were identified (i.e., social relationships, everyday work, research career, and location and security), and judged using seven criteria for successful ethnography from existing literature. Furthermore, I discuss factors that allow me to make the choice of not having a mobile phone, as well as the relevance that the lessons gained from not having a mobile phone have on the lives of people who are involuntarily disconnected from communication infrastructures.Comment: 12 page

Bridging global divides with tracking and tracing technology

Product-tracking technology is increasingly available to big players in the value chain connecting producers to consumers, giving them new competitive advantages. Such shifts in technology don't benefit small producers, especially those in developing regions, to the same degree. This article examines the practicalities of leveling the playing field by creating a generic form of tracing technology that any producer, large or small, can use. It goes beyond considering engineering solutions to look at what happens in the context of use, reporting on work with partners in Chile and India and reflecting on the potential for impact on business and community well-being

Benchmarking news recommendations: the CLEF NewsREEL use case

The CLEF NewsREEL challenge is a campaign-style evaluation lab allowing participants to evaluate and optimize news recommender algorithms. The goal is to create an algorithm that is able to generate news items that users would click, respecting a strict time constraint. The lab challenges participants to compete in either a "living lab" (Task 1) or perform an evaluation that replays recorded streams (Task 2). In this report, we discuss the objectives and challenges of the NewsREEL lab, summarize last year's campaign and outline the main research challenges that can be addressed by participating in NewsREEL 2016

A flexible architecture for privacy-aware trust management

In service-oriented systems a constellation of services cooperate, sharing potentially sensitive information and responsibilities. Cooperation is only possible if the different participants trust each other. As trust may depend on many different factors, in a flexible framework for Trust Management (TM) trust must be computed by combining different types of information. In this paper we describe the TAS3 TM framework which integrates independent TM systems into a single trust decision point. The TM framework supports intricate combinations whilst still remaining easily extensible. It also provides a unified trust evaluation interface to the (authorization framework of the) services. We demonstrate the flexibility of the approach by integrating three distinct TM paradigms: reputation-based TM, credential-based TM, and Key Performance Indicator TM. Finally, we discuss privacy concerns in TM systems and the directions to be taken for the definition of a privacy-friendly TM architecture.\u

Software Engineering for Millennials, by Millennials

Software engineers need to manage both technical and professional skills in order to be successful. Our university offers a 5.5 year program that mixes computer science, software and computer engineering, where the first two years are mostly math and physics courses. As such, our students' first real teamwork experience is during the introductory SE course, where they modify open source projects in groups of 6-8. However, students have problems working in such large teams, and feel that the course material and project are "disconnected". We decided to redesign this course in 2017, trying to achieve a balance between theory and practice, and technical and professional skills, with a maximum course workload of 150 hrs per semester. We share our experience in this paper, discussing the strategies we used to improve teamwork and help students learn new technologies in a more autonomous manner. We also discuss what we learned from the two times we taught the new course.Comment: 8 pages, 9 tables, 4 figures, Second International Workshop on Software Engineering Education for Millennial

WP 111 - Health workforce remuneration: Comparing wage levels, ranking and dispersion of 16 occupational groups in 20 countries using survey data

This article focuses on remuneration in the Human Resources for Health (HRH), comparing wage levels, ranking and dispersion of 16 HRH occupations in 20 countries (Argentina, Belarus, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, India, Mexico, Netherlands, Poland, Russian Federation, South-Africa, Spain, Sweden, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States). Research questions asked are to what extent are the wage rankings, wage dispersion, and standardized wage levels are similar between the 16 occupational groups in the HRH workforce across countries. The pooled data from the continuous, worldwide, multilingual WageIndicator web-survey between 2008 and 2011Q1 have been analysed (N= 38,799). Hourly wages expressed in standardized USD, all controlled for PPP and then indexed to 2011 levels. The findings show that the Medical Doctors have overall the highest median wages and they have so in 11 of 20 countries, while the Personal Care Workers have overall lowest wages and they have so in 9 of 20 countries. Health Care Managers lower earnings than Medical Doctors, but in 5 of 20 countries they have higher earnings (BLR, CZE, POL, RUS, UKR). The wage levels of Nursing & Midwifery Professionals vary largely across countries. The correlation of the overall ranking to the national ranking is more than .7 in 7 of 20 countries. The wage dispersion is defined as the ratio of the highest to the lowest median earnings in an occupation in a country. It is highest in Brazil (7.0), and lowest in Sweden, Germany, Poland, and Argentina. When comparing wage levels in occupations across countries, the largest wage differences for the Medical Doctors: the Ukraine doctor earns 19 times less compared to the US doctor. A correlation between country-level earnings and wage differentials across countries reveals that the higher the median wages in an occupation, the higher the wage difference across countries (r=.9). In conclusion, this article breaks new ground by investigating for the first time the wage levels, ranking and dispersion of occupational groups in the HRH workforce across countries. Findings illustrate that the assumption of similarity in cross-country wage ranking, wage dispersion, and purchasing power adjusted wage levels does not hold. These findings help to explain the complexity of migratory paths seen.

Building multi-layer social knowledge maps with google maps API

Google Maps is an intuitive online-map service which changes people's way of navigation on Geo-maps. People can explore the maps in a multi-layer fashion in order to avoid information overloading. This paper reports an innovative approach to extend the "power" of Google Maps to adaptive learning. We have designed and implemented a navigator for multi-layer social knowledge maps, namely ProgressiveZoom, with Google Maps API. In our demonstration, the knowledge maps are built from the Interactive System Design (ISD) course at the School of Information Science, University of Pittsburgh. Students can read the textbooks and reflect their individual and social learning progress in a context of pedagogical hierarchical structure

Women, gender and the informal economy: An assessment of ILO research and suggested ways forward

This discussion paper provides an overview of ILO research on women, gender and the informal economy which was undertaken during the last two decades. It examines methodological and analytical frameworks used in various studies, identifies research gaps and proposes directions for future work. It ultimately aims to enhance ILO's work in developing consistent, coherent and coordinated policy advice to constituents across the four pillars of the ILO Decent Work Agenda: standards and fundamental principles and rights at work, employment, social protection and social dialogue