Survey on virtual coaching for older adults

Virtual coaching has emerged as a promising solution to extend independent living for older adults. A virtual coach system is an always-attentive personalized system that continuously monitors user's activity and surroundings and delivers interventions - that is, intentional messages - in the appropriate moment. This article presents a survey of different approaches in virtual coaching for older adults, from the less technically supported tools to the latest developments and future avenues for research. It focuses on the technical aspects, especially on software architectures, user interaction and coaching personalization. Nevertheless, some aspects from the fields of personality/social psychology are also presented in the context of coaching strategies. Coaching is considered holistically, including matters such as physical and cognitive training, nutrition, social interaction and mood.The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 769830

A chronology of global air quality

Air pollution has been recognized as a threat to human health since the time of Hippocrates, ca 400 BC. Successive written accounts of air pollution occur in different countries through the following two millennia until measurements, from the eighteenth century onwards, show the growing scale of poor air quality in urban centres and close to industry, and the chemical characteristics of the gases and particulate matter. The industrial revolution accelerated both the magnitude of emissions of the primary pollutants and the geographical spread of contributing countries as highly polluted cities became the defining issue, culminating with the great smog of London in 1952. Europe and North America dominated emissions and suffered the majority of adverse effects until the latter decades of the twentieth century, by which time the transboundary issues of acid rain, forest decline and ground-level ozone became the main environmental and political air quality issues. As controls on emissions of sulfur and nitrogen oxides (SO2 and NOx) began to take effect in Europe and North America, emissions in East and South Asia grew strongly and dominated global emissions by the early years of the twenty-first century. The effects of air quality on human health had also returned to the top of the priorities by 2000 as new epidemiological evidence emerged. By this time, extensive networks of surface measurements and satellite remote sensing provided global measurements of both primary and secondary pollutants. Global emissions of SO2 and NOx peaked, respectively, in ca 1990 and 2018 and have since declined to 2020 as a result of widespread emission controls. By contrast, with a lack of actions to abate ammonia, global emissions have continued to grow

In Brief

Table of Contents: Death Penalty or Life Imprisonment?What Obligation Do Hospitals Have to Provide Charity Care?Combating Terrorism FinancingThe Constitution Matters in Taxation Regulating Firms Too Big To Fail Faculty BriefsThe Trial of Radovan KaradzicWorking to Help High School Students Realize Their Full PotentialAlumni SpotlightProsecuting Terrorist SuspectsClass NotesEventshttps://scholarlycommons.law.case.edu/in_brief/1087/thumbnail.jp

Designing and evaluating a behaviour change intervention that introduces modification of time perceptions as a solution to promote sustainable behaviours

This research presents the design and evaluation of an intervention that introduces modification of time perceptions as one of the solutions to promote sustainable behaviours. It is demonstrated in this thesis that unnecessary energy use is often caused by temporal tensions, defined as the relation between actions to be performed and available time. This research proposes that it is possible to deliberately reduce temporal tensions, and this can motivate people to behave more sustainably. Persuasive technology and human-computer interaction provided the tools needed to manipulate time perceptions and therefore bring about changes in the specific behaviours that result in unnecessary energy usage. Previous studies indicate that behaviours play an important role in energy consumption. From the different domains of energy use that could be examined, cooking was chosen to be the platform where the studies on behaviour change and energy use would take place. How behaviours influence energy use motivated the design of empirical studies to understand behaviours related to domestic energy use and identify what are the determinants of these behaviours. Each determinant was related to a strategy to be included on a behaviour change intervention. A wider survey was developed to understand students acceptance of a set of proposed energy saving techniques, and resulted in a vast volume of information about user preferences and intentions to perform the suggested energy saving behaviours for cooking. It emerged that participants rushed into the cooking tasks without much deliberation, consequently not following preparation procedures and thus using more energy. Information gathered during the first studies also showed that participants behaviours were partially motivated by the need to speed up the cooking process in order to reduce boredom when they were waiting for the food to cook, consequently resulting in extra energy usage. The knowledge gathered from the preceding steps and a literature review informed the design of strategies to modify the non-sustainable behaviours and promote energy saving. A user-centred design process involving an idea generation session and scenario analysis was used to provide a set of strategies to be embedded in an intervention, containing the specific methods to tackle the correspondent determinants of behaviours. The specific needs of the cooking activity indicated that an electronic intervention was an adequate platform to be implemented and tested. Two high resolution working prototypes of the electronic interventions were developed as mobile phone applications. The final study comprised the evaluation of the proposed interventions in improving aspects of the cooking activity, the acceptance of the interventions and effectiveness in promoting energy saving

Otterbein Towers Fall 2010

Young Qingdao students come to Otterbein to learn language, culture; A Lifelong Career Abroad; Choir Performs in China; History of International study; Features: Community Garden Takes Root; The Global Classroom; The World’s His Oyster; The Language of Learning; Voices Bridging Cultures; Towers is 84 Years Old; Regulars: Letters; Otterbein Here & Now; Around the ’Bein; Classnotes; Milestones; Alumni Matters, etc.https://digitalcommons.otterbein.edu/towers/1011/thumbnail.jp

Content Selection for Effective Counter-Argument Generation

The information ecosystem of social media has resulted in an abundance of opinions on political topics and current events. In order to encourage better discussions, it is important to promote high-quality responses and relegate low-quality ones. We thus focus on automatically analyzing and generating counter-arguments in response to posts on social media with the goal of providing effective responses. This thesis is composed of three parts. In the first part, we conduct an analysis of arguments. Specifically, we first annotate discussions from Reddit for aspects of arguments and then analyze them for their persuasive impact. Then we present approaches to identify the argumentative structure of these discussions and predict the persuasiveness of an argument. We evaluate each component independently using automatic or manual evaluations and show significant improvement in each. In the second part, we leverage our discoveries from our analysis in the process of generating counter-arguments. We develop two approaches in the retrieve-and-edit framework, where we obtain content using methods created during our analysis of arguments, among others, and then modify the content using techniques from natural language generation. In the first approach, we develop an approach to retrieve counter-arguments by annotating a dataset for stance and building models for stance prediction. Then we use our approaches from our analysis of arguments to extract persuasive argumentative content before modifying non-content phrases for coherence. In contrast, in the second approach we create a dataset and models for modifying content -- making semantic edits to a claim to have a contrasting stance. We evaluate our approaches using intrinsic automatic evaluation of our predictive models and an overall human evaluation of our generated output. Finally, in the third part, we discuss the semantic challenges of argumentation that we need to solve in order to make progress in the understanding of arguments. To clarify, we develop new methods for identifying two types of semantic relations -- causality and veracity. For causality, we build a distant-labeled dataset of causal relations using lexical indicators and then we leverage features from those indicators to build predictive models. For veracity, we build new models to retrieve evidence given a claim and predict whether the claim is supported by that evidence. We also develop a new dataset for veracity to illuminate the areas that need progress. We evaluate these approaches using automated and manual techniques and obtain significant improvement over strong baselines. Finally, we apply these techniques to claims in the domain of household electricity consumption, mining claims using our methods for causal relations and then verifying their truthfulness

The Nebraska Educator, Volume 6, Issue 1 (2021)

Contents: • Again Awake: A White Researcher’s Iterative Positioning for Entering Black Spaces—Eileen Boswell, Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education. (doi: 10.32873/unl.dc.ne021) • Exploration of Lived Experiences of Science Teachers of English Language Learners: A Transcendental Phenomenological Study— Uma Ganesan, Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education (doi: 10.32873/unl.dc.ne022) • Confronting the Past, Challenging the Future: Linguistic Hegemony and Neoliberalism in TESOL— Crystal Bock Thiessen, Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education (doi: 10.32873/unl.dc.ne023) • The Effects of Self-Regulated Strategy Development on Students with Emotional/Behavioral Disorders: A Literature Review—Danika Lang, Special Education and Communication Disorders (doi: 10.32873/unl.dc.ne024) • Assessments and Accommodations for English Language Learners: A Literature Review—Heidi Jo Bartlett, Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education (doi: 10.32873/unl.dc.ne025) • Triangulating Research in Decolonizing and Race-Based Educational Theories— Beth Dotan, Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education (doi: 10.32873/unl.dc.ne026) • Multiracial Individuals and Educational Testing— Karen Alexander, Educational Psychology (doi: 10.32873/unl.dc.ne027) • Diversifying the Classroom: Masculinity and Intersectionality in (Teacher) Education: A Review of the Literature— Scott V. Gealy, Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education (doi: 10.32873/unl.dc.ne028