Gender HCI Issues in End-User Software Engineering Environments

Although gender differences in a technological world are receiving significant research attention, much of the research and practice has aimed at how society and education can impact the successes and retention of female computer science professionals. The possibility of gender issues within software, however, has received almost no attention. We hypothesize that factors within software have a strong impact on how well female problem solvers can make use of the software. Evidence from other fields and investigations of our own have revealed evidence supporting this hypothesis

Exploratory information searching in the enterprise: a study of user satisfaction and task performance.

No prior research has been identified that investigates the causal factors for workplace exploratory search task performance. The impact of user, task, and environmental factors on user satisfaction and task performance was investigated through a mixed methods study with 26 experienced information professionals using enterprise search in an oil and gas enterprise. Some participants found 75% of high-value items, others found none, with an average of 27%. No association was found between self-reported search expertise and task performance, with a tendency for many participants to overestimate their search expertise. Successful searchers may have more accurate mental models of both search systems and the information space. Organizations may not have effective exploratory search task performance feedback loops, a lack of learning. This may be caused by management bias towards technology, not capability, a lack of systems thinking. Furthermore, organizations may not “know” they “don't know” their true level of search expertise, a lack of knowing. A metamodel is presented identifying the causal factors for workplace exploratory search task performance. Semistructured qualitative interviews with search staff from the defense, pharmaceutical, and aerospace sectors indicates the potential transferability of the finding that organizations may not know their search expertise levels

Exploratory information searching in the enterprise: A study of user satisfaction and task performance

No prior research has been identified which investigates the causal factors for workplace exploratory search task performance. The impact of user, task and environmental factors on user satisfaction and task performance was investigated through a mixed methods study with 26 experienced information professionals using enterprise search in an oil and gas enterprise. Some participants found 75% of high value items, others found none with an average of 27%. No association was found between self-reported search expertise and task performance, with a tendency for many participants to overestimate their search expertise. Successful searchers may have more accurate mental models of both search systems and the information space. Organizations may not have effective exploratory search task performance feedback loops, a lack of learning. This may be caused by management bias towards technology not capability, a lack of systems thinking. Furthermore, organizations may not ‘know’ they ‘don’t know’ their true level of search expertise, a lack of knowing. A metamodel is presented identifying the causal factors for workplace exploratory search task performance. Semi-structured qualitative interviews with search staff from the Defence, Pharmaceutical and Aerospace sectors indicates the potential transferability of the finding that organizations may not know their search expertise levels

Novi derivati 9-aminoakridina kao inhibitori botulinum neurotoksina i P. falciparum parazita malarije

Steroidal and adamantane aminoacridine derivatives were prepared and tested as both botulinum neurotoxin (BoNT) inhibitors and antimalarials.. Steroid-bound acridines provided good potency against both the BoNT/A and BoNT/B light chains (LCs). The observed inhibition of the BoNT/B LC by ca. 50 % is the highest attained inhibitory activity against this serotype by acridine-based compounds to date. With respect to the antimalarial activity, the adamantane acridines were the most potent derivatives (IC50 = 6-9 nM, SI gt 326), indicating that an adamantyl group is a better carrier than a steroidal motif for this indication.Sintetisani su derivati steroidnih i adamantil-akridina i ispitana je njihova inhibitorna aktivnost prema botulinum neurotoksinima (BoNT) i parazitu malarije. Steroidni akridini pokazuju dobru inhibiciju prema kratkom nizu (LCs) BoNT/A i BoNT/B. Ostvarena inhibicija BoNT/B LC od oko 50% je najviša postignuta vrednost akridinskih derivata prema ovom serotipu. Adamantil-akridinski derivati su pokazali najveću antimalarijsku aktivnost (IC50 u opsegu 6-9 nM, SI gt 326), pokazujući da je adamantil-grupa bolji nosač farmakofore u poređenju sa steroidnim, prema ovoj indikaciji.

Gender HCI: What about the software?

Computer, 39(11): pp. 97-101

Supplementary data for article: Opsenica, I.; Tot, M.; Gomba, L.; Nuss, J. E.; Sciotti, R. J.; Bavari, S.; Burnett, J. C.; Šolaja, B. A. 4-Amino-7-Chloroquinolines: Probing Ligand Efficiency Provides Botulinum Neurotoxin Serotype A Light Chain Inhibitors with Significant Antiprotozoal Activity. Journal of Medicinal Chemistry 2013, 56 (14), 5860–5871. https://doi.org/10.1021/jm4006077

Supporting information for: [https://doi.org/10.1021/jm4006077]Related to published version: [http://cherry.chem.bg.ac.rs/handle/123456789/1381

GenderMag: A Method for Evaluating Software’s Gender Inclusiveness

In recent years, research into gender differences has established that individual differences in how people problem-solve often cluster by gender. Research also shows that these differences have direct implications for software that aims to support users’ problem-solving activities, and that much of this software is more supportive of problem-solving processes favored (statistically) more by males than by females. However, there is almost no work considering how software practitioners—such as User Experience (UX) professionals or software developers—can find gender-inclusiveness issues like these in their software. To address this gap, we devised the GenderMag method for evaluating problem-solving software from a gender-inclusiveness perspective. The method includes a set of faceted personas that bring five facets of gender difference research to life, and embeds use of the personas into a concrete process through a gender-specialized Cognitive Walkthrough. Our empirical results show that a variety of practitioners who design software—without needing any background in gender research—were able to use the GenderMag method to find gender-inclusiveness issues in problem-solving software. Our results also show that the issues the practitioners found were real and fixable. This work is the first systematic method to find gender-inclusiveness issues in software, so that practitioners can design and produce problem-solving software that is more usable by everyone

Changing the Principal Supervisor Role to Better Support Principals: Evidence from the Principal Supervisor Initiative

The principal supervisor job has traditionally revolved around administration, operations and compliance, but as principals have increasingly been called on in recent years to concentrate on supporting high-quality teaching, the idea of a complementary makeover of the supervisor job has gained attention. In 2014, with funding from The Wallace Foundation, six large school districts around the country embarked on a four-year, $24-million initiative to redesign the supervisor position so it focused primarily on supporting principals in their role as instructional leaders.This report, which looks at the final year and the effects of the Principal Supervisor Initiative, concludes that the effort succeeded in changing the job so that it centered on developing and evaluating principals to help them promote effective teaching and learning in their schools. Over the course of the initiative, principals' ratings of their supervisors' effectiveness rose from 3.88 to 4.10 on a scale of 1-to-5, a statistically significant increase. Principals reported greater frequency of supervisor practices to develop school leadership—such as helping principals with data analysis, providing them with useful feedback and working with them to assess teacher effectiveness

SAM68 is a physiological regulator of SMN2 splicing in spinal muscular atrophy

Spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) is a neurodegenerative disease caused by loss of motor neurons in patients with null mutations in the SMN1 gene. The almost identical SMN2 gene is unable to compensate for this deficiency because of the skipping of exon 7 during pre-messenger RNA (mRNA) processing. Although several splicing factors can modulate SMN2 splicing in vitro, the physiological regulators of this disease-causing event are unknown. We found that knockout of the splicing factor SAM68 partially rescued body weight and viability of SMAΔ7 mice. Ablation of SAM68 function promoted SMN2 splicing and expression in SMAΔ7 mice, correlating with amelioration of SMA-related defects in motor neurons and skeletal muscles. Mechanistically, SAM68 binds to SMN2 pre-mRNA, favoring recruitment of the splicing repressor hnRNP A1 and interfering with that of U2AF65 at the 3' splice site of exon 7. These findings identify SAM68 as the first physiological regulator of SMN2 splicing in an SMA mouse model