Technical Communication in China:Studies on the User Experience of Technical Documentation

Technical communication is the process of conveying complex information to a varied audience, including both technical and non-technical individuals. It aims to make information usable and accessible. The dissertation provides an in-depth examination of technical communication's evolution in China, with a focus on enhancing user experience with technical documentation.The dissertation is organized into seven chapters, beginning with the current state of technical communication in China, followed by three parts covering five research studies on various aspects of technical documentation, including the roles of technical communicators who create technical documentation, the design and evaluation of developer documentation, and the application of emotional design in user manuals. It concludes by summarizing key findings, discussing theoretical and practical implications, and suggesting future research directions.This dissertation aims to answer five research questions. The first focuses on the state of the art of TC in China. The other four questions explore specific angles on TC in a Chinese context. The five research questions are:• RQ1. What is the development of technical communication as a professional discipline in China?• RQ2. What are the learning habits, information journey, and expectations of Chinese developers regarding developer documentation?• RQ3. What are key factors influencing the effectiveness of searching and finding technical documentation?• RQ4. What are effective strategies for evaluating performance and user experience of developer documentation?• RQ5. What is the impact of emotional design on user experience and effectiveness in technical documentation?<br/

GVSU Undergraduate and Graduate Catalog, 2019-2020

Grand Valley State University 2019-2020 undergraduate and/or graduate course catalog published annually to provide students with information and guidance for enrollment.https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/course_catalogs/1094/thumbnail.jp

Fairness and Bias in Algorithmic Hiring

Employers are adopting algorithmic hiring technology throughout the recruitment pipeline. Algorithmic fairness is especially applicable in this domain due to its high stakes and structural inequalities. Unfortunately, most work in this space provides partial treatment, often constrained by two competing narratives, optimistically focused on replacing biased recruiter decisions or pessimistically pointing to the automation of discrimination. Whether, and more importantly what types of, algorithmic hiring can be less biased and more beneficial to society than low-tech alternatives currently remains unanswered, to the detriment of trustworthiness. This multidisciplinary survey caters to practitioners and researchers with a balanced and integrated coverage of systems, biases, measures, mitigation strategies, datasets, and legal aspects of algorithmic hiring and fairness. Our work supports a contextualized understanding and governance of this technology by highlighting current opportunities and limitations, providing recommendations for future work to ensure shared benefits for all stakeholders

Beyond Labor Rights: Which Core Human Rights Must Regional Trade Agreements Protect?

As World Trade Organization ( WTO ) Members relentlessly pursue new regional trade agreements to achieve even faster economic growth than the extraordinary numbers posted by global trade rules, the smaller number of parties and their greater cultural affinity have led negotiators to address the intersection of trade and human rights to an extent unparalleled in the culturally disparate and near-unmanageable, 150-plus member WTO itself. These new provisions have used trade\u27s huge power to improve worker rights, secure environmental protections, and make initial inroads toward defending indigenous populations from trade\u27s adverse effects. Employing the perspectives both of trade negotiators and students of this halting progress toward the integration of trade and human rights, we have concluded that the single greatest barrier to engaging in regional trade agreements ( RTAs ) openly and unequivocally to reduce global poverty through human rights implementation is the near-impenetrable complexity of human rights norms. Captured within dozens of United Nations human rights treaties and a growing corpus of customary international norms, human rights law embraces literally hundreds of specific entitlements, each by U.N. guarantee designated as indivisible, interdependent, and interrelated. This foreboding array of obligations, each ostensibly of equal rank, whose legal intricacies are sometimes beyond the experience and training of trade ministries, explains the reluctance of trade negotiators to undertake the responsibility for further integration of trade rules with human rights, and does so more credibly than the oft-cited reason that trade rules succeed only when they single-mindedly pursue economic growth. The breakthrough in worker rights may be attributed directly to the International Labor Organization\u27s ( ILO\u27s ) endorsement, at WTO urging, of four core human rights standards inarguably tied to international trade. The ILO\u27s Work Declaration chooses those core standards for workers that are inarguably and inextricably linked to trade without downplaying the importance of the hundreds of worker protections identified in dozens of other ILO conventions. This choice has freed trade negotiators to concentrate on incorporating these core worker rights in regional trade agreements, a manageable task that has met with great success. Encouraged by the ILO precedent, we identify those core standards in each of six categories of human rights that are so closely linked to trade and so fundamental in importance that their exclusion from RTAs cannot reasonably be argued. We justify in some detail our selection of those core aspects of the human rights of women, indigenous cultures, health, the environment, and democratic governance that stand at the same level of importance to trade as do the four core labor standards identified by the ILO. With respect to the core labor standards, we explain in greater detail the specific obligations placed on states for implementation of worker rights in RTAs. By identifying a limited and manageable body of fundamental human rights standards in those human rights fields most closely affected by trade, we believe that trade negotiators may more successfully use RTAs to accomplish the symbiosis of trade and human rights that is inherent in their basic objectives. This symbiosis can accomplish the goal of increased economic growth together with increased standards of well-being of civil society. We begin our study with the most difficult case to make: that there are core standards in the emerging right to democracy that must be included in RTAs regardless of the form of governance of the parties. We next take up the human rights of women most often implicated by trade liberalization and proceed, in turn, to treat the core human rights of health, of indigenous populations, and of workers. We conclude by identifying core standards of the emerging human right to a healthy environment

Methodological aspects in cross-national research

Die Beiträge diese Heftes gehen zumeist auf mehrere Tagungen des Research Committee 33 (Logik und Methodologie) der International Sociological Association zurück. Im Mittelpunkt stehen Fragen der Messung sowie die Vergleichbarkeit, Reliabilität und Validität in der international vergleichenden empirischen Forschung. Die Beiträge sind vier Themengruppen zugeordnet. Im ersten Teil geht es um Design und Implementation kulturvergleichender Studien (Instrumentarium, Question Appraisal System, EU-Projekte, Fragebogenverstehen, Interpretation der Ergebnisse). Der zweite Teil ist verschiedenen Aspekten der "Äquivalenz"-Problematik gewidmet, vor allem in Bezug auf das International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) und den European Social Survey (ESS). Im dritten Teil wird die Harmonisierung soziodemographischer Information in unterschiedlichen Untersuchungen behandelt (amtliche Statistik, ESS, ISSP). Im abschließenden vierten Teil werden sozioökonomische Variablen in international vergleichender Perspektive diskutiert (Einkommen, Bildung, Beruf, Ethnizität, Religion). (ICE)"Cross-national and cross-cultural survey research has been growing apace for several decades and interest in how best to do them has possibly never been greater. At the International Sociological Association Research Committee 33 (Logic and Methodology) several sessions were dedicated to cross-cultural cross-national survey methodology and the vast majority of the papers in this volume were presented at that conference. Researchers involved in comparative research have always been worried about measurement issues, comparability, reliability and validity of their data. But the design and execution of comparative studies has changed markedly since the early cross-national projects of the nineteen sixties and nineteen seventies." (excerpt). Contents: Jürgen H.P. Hoffmeyer-Zlotnik, Janet A. Harkness: Methodological aspects in cross-national research: foreword (5-10). I. Designing and implementing cross-cultural surveys - Johnny Blair, Linda Piccinino: The development and testing of instruments for cross-cultural and multi-cultural surveys (13-30); Elizabeth Dean Rachel Caspar, Georgina McAvinchey, Leticia Reed, Rosanna Quiroz: Developing a low-cost technique for parallel cross-cultural instrument development: the Question Appraisal System (QAS-04) (31-46); Felizitas Sagebiel: Using a mixed international comparable methodological approach in a European Commission project on gender and engineering (47-64); Timothy P. Johnson, Young Ik Cho, Allyson Holbrook, Diane O'Rourke, Richard Warnecke, Noel Chávez: Cultural variability in the effects of question design features on respondent comprehension (65-78); Kristen Miller, Gordon Willis, Connie Eason, Lisa Moses, Beth Canfield: Interpreting the results of cross-cultural cognitive interviews: a mixed-method approach (79-92). II. Different issues of comparability or "equivalence" - Michael Braun, Janet A. Harkness: Text and context: challenges to comparability in survey questions (95-108); Nina Rother: Measuring attitudes towards immigration across countries with the ESS: potential problems of equivalence (109-126); Vlasta Zucha: The level of equivalence in the ISSP 1999 and its implications on further analysis (127-146). III. Harmonising socio-demographic information in different types of surveys - Thomas Körner, Iris Meyer: Harmonising socio-demographic information in household surveys of official statistics: experiences from the Federal Statistical Office Germany (149-162); Kirstine Kolsrud, Knut Kalgraff Skjak: Harmonising background variables in the European Social Survey (163-182); Evi Scholz: Harmonisation of survey data in the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) (183-200). IV. Socio-economic variables in cross-national perspective - Uwe Warner, Jürgen H.P. Hoffmeyer-Zlotnik: Measuring income in comparative social survey research (203-222); Jürgen H.P. Hoffmeyer-Zlotnik, Uwe Warner: How to measure education in cross-national comparison: Hoffmeyer-Zlotnik/Warner-Matrix of Education as a new instrument (223-240); Harry B.G. Ganzeboom: On the cost of being crude: a comparison of detailed and coarse occupational coding in the ISSP 1987 data (241-258); Paul S. Lambert: Ethnicity and the comparative analysis of contemporary survey data (259-278); Christof Wolf: Measuring religious affiliation and religiosity in Europe (279-294)

An employer demand intelligence framework

Employer demand intelligence is crucial to ensure accurate and reliable education, workforce and immigration related decisions are made. To date, current methods have been manually intensive and expensive — providing insufficient scope of information required to address such important economic implications. This research developed an Employer Demand Intelligence Framework (EDIF) to address detailed employer demand intelligence requirements. To further the EDIF’s functionality, a semi-automated Employer Demand Identification Tool (EDIT) was developed that continuously provide such intelligence