Drug Testing in the U.S. Trucking Industry: Hair vs. Urine Samples and the Implications for Policy and the Industry

Virtually everything we own was transported by truck at some point. Around 3.5 million truck drivers haul almost 71% of U.S. freight. To ensure the safety of our roadways, the U.S. government requires all drivers to pass urinalysis drug screens. However, urinalysis drug screens are easily thwarted and some trucking companies use hair drug screens, a more stringent test. This research examines trucking industry data and finds about 300,000 truck drivers would be removed from their positions if forced to pass a hair drug test. Hair testing opponents argue that the test is biased against ethnic minority groups. Comparing urine and hair pass/fail rates for various ethnic groups, our results indicate ethnic groups are significantly different irrespective of testing procedure. Factors other than testing method seem to underlie ethnic group pass/fail rate differences

The Role of Social Media and Social Networking as Marketing Delivery Systems for Preventive Health Care Information

The use of social media and social networking (SM&N) is prevalent in health care. Through social media, individuals can access information to enhance their overall health and well-being. Given that prevention is crucial to a long healthy life, as well as restraining escalating health care costs, this study offers insights into the types of social media and networking platforms that health care consumers consider most important, especially with regard to obtaining Preventive Health Care Information (PHCI). Further, it goes on to identify the demographics of persons who consider social media and social networking platforms as most important. This research used an online survey that yielded a sample of 930, whose demographics were comparable to the U.S. population. The results indicated the most important SM&N platforms were traditional digital sources such as WebMD, Wiki’s, and internet search browsers such as Google. Also, prestigious hospitals, such as John Hopkins, MD Anderson, Cleveland Clinic and public health websites were important delivery systems for PHCI. Lastly, social media platforms like Facebook are increasing in importance, while YouTube is used more often by health consumers. Demographically SM&N was most important for (1) those whose employers offered health promotion or wellness programs, (2) those employed part-time, (3) younger health consumers mostly in the 19-24 age group, (4) African-Americans, and (5) single people who have never been married. The next generation of health consumers are expected to make greater use of SM&N platforms to secure their PHCI

Embodied Language Learning and Cognitive Bootstrapping:Methods and Design Principles

Co-development of action, conceptualization and social interaction mutually scaffold and support each other within a virtuous feedback cycle in the development of human language in children. Within this framework, the purpose of this article is to bring together diverse but complementary accounts of research methods that jointly contribute to our understanding of cognitive development and in particular, language acquisition in robots. Thus, we include research pertaining to developmental robotics, cognitive science, psychology, linguistics and neuroscience, as well as practical computer science and engineering. The different studies are not at this stage all connected into a cohesive whole; rather, they are presented to illuminate the need for multiple different approaches that complement each other in the pursuit of understanding cognitive development in robots. Extensive experiments involving the humanoid robot iCub are reported, while human learning relevant to developmental robotics has also contributed useful results. Disparate approaches are brought together via common underlying design principles. Without claiming to model human language acquisition directly, we are nonetheless inspired by analogous development in humans and consequently, our investigations include the parallel co-development of action, conceptualization and social interaction. Though these different approaches need to ultimately be integrated into a coherent, unified body of knowledge, progress is currently also being made by pursuing individual methods

Interactive Language Learning by Robots: The Transition from Babbling to Word Forms

The advent of humanoid robots has enabled a new approach to investigating the acquisition of language, and we report on the development of robots able to acquire rudimentary linguistic skills. Our work focuses on early stages analogous to some characteristics of a human child of about 6 to 14 months, the transition from babbling to first word forms. We investigate one mechanism among many that may contribute to this process, a key factor being the sensitivity of learners to the statistical distribution of linguistic elements. As well as being necessary for learning word meanings, the acquisition of anchor word forms facilitates the segmentation of an acoustic stream through other mechanisms. In our experiments some salient one-syllable word forms are learnt by a humanoid robot in real-time interactions with naive participants. Words emerge from random syllabic babble through a learning process based on a dialogue between the robot and the human participant, whose speech is perceived by the robot as a stream of phonemes. Numerous ways of representing the speech as syllabic segments are possible. Furthermore, the pronunciation of many words in spontaneous speech is variable. However, in line with research elsewhere, we observe that salient content words are more likely than function words to have consistent canonical representations; thus their relative frequency increases, as does their influence on the learner. Variable pronunciation may contribute to early word form acquisition. The importance of contingent interaction in real-time between teacher and learner is reflected by a reinforcement process, with variable success. The examination of individual cases may be more informative than group results. Nevertheless, word forms are usually produced by the robot after a few minutes of dialogue, employing a simple, real-time, frequency dependent mechanism. This work shows the potential of human-robot interaction systems in studies of the dynamics of early language acquisition

Sexual Harassment of Females by Males in the Workplace: Small Business Contrasted with Large Businesses

Sexual harassment continues to be an important topic, receiving the attention of small and large businesses. Formal claims regarding unlawful, social-sexual behavior in the workplace doubled during the J 990's.  Some small business owners believe that sexual harassment is not a crucial concern, compared with their counterparts in large businesses. Some small business owners possess the misconception that sexual harassment, regarding federal and state law, apply primarily to large businesses. Sexualization in the workplace occurs when sexual jokes, comments, innuendos, and sexual or seductive dress are tolerated, or encouraged, as well as the more blatant offense of improperly touching another employee. The membership of the Society for  Human Resource Management  was the database for  this study.  A random sample from small businesses of fewer than 500 employees and large businesses with more than 500 employees was selected Important findings indicate that sexual harassment was more of a problem for large firms as there is more male-female interaction and social pressure.  This is true even though more training takes place in larger, rather than smaller, businesses. The findings may also indicate more of a reluctance by females in smaller firms to report such incidences. Respondents believe more formal training, education and behavior modeling, especially in small businesses, are needed to maximize the effectiveness of written policies

Tutor spotter: Proposing a feature set and evaluating it in a robotic system

Lohan KS, Rohlfing K, Pitsch K, et al. Tutor spotter: Proposing a feature set and evaluating it in a robotic system. International Journal of Social Robotics. 2012;4(2):131-146