Road Less Taveled: My Journey to Becoming a Certified Tobacco Cessation Specialist

I didn’t arrive in Public Health through conventional means. My father is a physician and I grew up thinking medicine was in my future. Towards the end of my undergrad I started to learn about other careers and eventually came across Public Health. I saw the importance of helping avoid problematic health issues in our community through early intervention. My Public Health training when combined with my background in Biology opened new doors I never knew existed. Grad School gave me the opportunity to have involvement with different community health initiatives in Baptist Congregational Health, UM Docs Program, and as well as Miami-Dade Area Health Education Center. Through these experiences a disturbing trend was becoming apparent. A lack of meaningful intervention. People were in many cases completely unaware of services available to them in order to take better care of themselves. Tobacco is the leading cause of preventable death in the United States. Car Accidents, Gun Violence, infections, illicit drug use, and STDs combined do not reach the number of deaths caused by tobacco use. I saw a problem and wanted to do something about it. I began training with the Florida Certification Board and became a Certified Tobacco Treatment Specialist. The amount of people I have been able to help quit smoking easily has changed hundreds if not thousands of lives. Families who don’t have to see a love one suffer or a patient who thought they could never give up addiction now see a new outlook on life. I am proud to be a part of Tobacco Free Florida. When deciding what your career should be you should feel two things. If you are happy doing it and if you feel you are making a positive difference in the world

The role of reciprocation in social network formation, with an application to blogging

This paper deals with the role of reciprocation in the formation of individuals' social networks. We follow the activity of a panel of bloggers over more than a year and investigate the extent to which initiating a relation brings about its reciprocation. We adapt a standard capital investment model to study how reciprocation affects the build-up of the individual social capital of bloggers, as measured by their links and interactions with others. This allows us to measure the role of content production and relationship building in the dynamics of online social networks and to distinguish between the social networking and media aspects of blogging.Blogs, Friendship, LiveJournal, Reciprocation, Social Capital, Social Networks

The impact of online reviews on consumer evaluations and decision making: an analysis of review volume and user-generated photos

This thesis investigates the impact of online social influence on consumer behaviour, specifically within the context of online reviews. It examines how review volume and user-generated photos affect consumer evaluations and decision-making. In Chapter 2, I introduce a novel phenomenon, the N-effect, which explores how opinion volume influences the content of online evaluations. I find that as the number of opinions increases, the content becomes more emotional and less analytical. In Chapter 3, I investigate the role of user-generated photos in shaping purchase intentions. This research demonstrates that photos can enhance review helpfulness, even when they lack diagnostic information. This effect is driven by the confidence signalled by the reviewer when posting a review with a photo, which is later assimilated by readers, leading to increased perceived helpfulness and purchase likelihood. This thesis makes several theoretical and practical contributions to the literature on human interaction with technology. Theoretically, it expands our understanding of online social influence by examining the dynamics of online opinion expression and content. I contribute to the literature on group size by demonstrating how responsibility may be lost in online contexts. Furthermore, the findings provide insights into the social influence of photos on viewers and the role of pseudo-evidence in shaping beliefs and attitudes. From a practical standpoint, this research offers valuable insights for online platform managers and marketers on interpreting and using consumer-written reviews. Overall, this thesis contributes to the existing literature on online social influence and provides insights for businesses to improve communication and interpretation with consumers by better understanding and leveraging online reviews and opinions.Open Acces

Sex on TV 2

Part of a series that examines the nature and extent of sexual messages conveyed on TV. Tracks changes that occur over time in the treatment of sexual topics, including references to possible risks or responsibilities. Based on a 1999-2000 program sample

Translating Cards against Humanity for Finnish Users : What Should Be Taken into Consideration?

Tämän tutkielman tavoitteena oli kääntää poliittisesti epäkorrekti korttipeli nimeltä Cards against Humanity siten, että suomenkielinen versio olisi mahdollisimman käytettävä ja hauska. Tämän tavoitteen saavuttamiseksi tutkielmassa hyödynnettiin Tytti Suojasen, Kaisa Koskisen ja Tiina Tuomisen luomaa käyttäjäkeskeinen kääntämisen teoriaa (UCT) ja sen tarjoamia työkaluja, kuten mentaalimalleja ja heuristista arviointia. Lisäksi hyödynnettiin lingvistiikan sekä huumorin ja kulttuurin kääntämisen tutkimuskirjallisuutta. Tutkielman hypoteesi oli, että mitä paremmin käännöstyössä huomioidaan pelin tulevat käyttäjät ja tutkimuskirjallisuus, sitä parempi käännöksestä tulee. Käytettävyyden ja hauskuuden arvioimiseksi tehtiin käytettävyystutkimus, joka suoritettiin testipelien ja kyselylomakkeiden avulla. Tutkimukseen osallistui 42 henkilöä, jotka pelattuaan suomennettua peliä vastasivat taustatietokysymyksiin ja arvioivat mm. korttien käytettävyyttä ja ymmärrettävyyttä, kieltä, hauskuutta, loukkaavuutta ja kokonaisuutta. Kyselylomakkeiden tuottama aineisto analysoitiin kvantitatiivisesti ja kvalitatiivisesti, ja lopuksi aineisto arvoitiin heuristisesti. Tutkimuksen mukaan käännös onnistui käytettävyyden ja hauskuuden tavoitteissaan, ja ennakko-oletuksen mukaisesti tulevien käyttäjien profiloinnilla ja tutkimuskirjallisuuteen tukeutumisella oli positiivinen vaikutus käännöksen laatuun. Käännöksen suurimmat ongelmat liittyivät korttien kokoon ja määrään, sekä sanojen tunnistukseen ja korttien yhteensopivuuteen. Nämä ongelmat olisi olleet todennäköisesti vältettävissä seuraamalla UCT-teoriaa kokonaisvaltaisemmin

The Whalesong

Opening the door to opportunity: UAS offers new bachelor degrees -- School's out, get a job -- Coming back to the real world -- Lab side show -- Balance -- The nature of UAS: A farewell from Spanish professor -- Crappy situation -- Troops have to deal with spiders? -- Ski season has closed -- KBJZ 94.1 LPFM: Free to mix it up -- Multi-billion dollar idea -- Semester at sea: a floating campus to discover the world -- UAS students bring home first place -- 7th grade geography-fair judges needed at Dryden -- Campus poll -- Osteosarcoma: A risk worth taking? -- Thank you -- A blocked electro-man -- Informed-Traitor advice -- The Learning Center: Building on a successful past -- Arts & entertainment -- Deer dreams: A memoir -- Celebrating 10 years of study abroad at UAS

MindDial: Belief Dynamics Tracking with Theory-of-Mind Modeling for Situated Neural Dialogue Generation

Humans talk in free-form while negotiating the expressed meanings or common ground. Despite the impressive conversational abilities of the large generative language models, they do not consider the individual differences in contextual understanding in a shared situated environment. In this work, we propose MindDial, a novel conversational framework that can generate situated free-form responses to negotiate common ground. We design an explicit mind module that can track three-level beliefs -- the speaker's belief, the speaker's prediction of the listener's belief, and the common belief based on the gap between the first two. Then the speaking act classification head will decide to continue to talk, end this turn, or take task-related action. We augment a common ground alignment dataset MutualFriend with belief dynamics annotation, of which the goal is to find a single mutual friend based on the free chat between two agents. Experiments show that our model with mental state modeling can resemble human responses when aligning common ground meanwhile mimic the natural human conversation flow. The ablation study further validates the third-level common belief can aggregate information of the first and second-order beliefs and align common ground more efficiently

Generation Z and Attending Traditional Spectator Sports: A Study of Contemporary Sport Consumer Behaviour

Understanding consumer behaviour and attracting new generations of consumers are important aspects of operating a successful sport organization (Teed et al., 2008). However, limited academic attention has been given to the most recently emergent generation: Generation Z (Gen Z). Moreover, it has been shown that the interest level in traditional spectator sports is waning amongst younger consumers (Richelieu & Pons, 2005; 2009) and, most recently, Gen Z (Kuchefski, 2018; Whistle, 2018). The purpose of this research was therefore to better understand the sport consumption behaviours of this Gen Z by examining both the motivators and inhibitors to their nominal spectator sport consumption. Participants (n=17) were recruited physically in Hamilton, Ontario and virtually through social media platforms Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Using a semi-structured format, a total of three synchronous online focus group interviews were conducted with individuals from Gen Z. It was clear from a thorough analysis of the data that participants viewed the consumption of traditional spectator sports analogously with attending live games. Thus, the data, its themes, and its implications were inherently linked to attending traditional spectator sports. Although there were important intragroup differences found, several important motivators and inhibitors were present. Socialization, status, and experimental behaviours all presented as significant motives for Gen Z to attend traditional spectator sports. Alternatively, issues with affordability and a shared unrest proved to be important inhibitors to nominal spectator sport consumption. Directions for future research and recommendations are presented and discussed