Pandemic Profiles: Emily Then Keep the Creative Juices Flowing

Quarantine has been hard for everyone in different ways, but who knew that meeting Taylor Swift would be so impactful for someone during this time? Emily Then, a third-ear student at Whittier College has been greatly influenced through Taylor Swift and her music, recently got to meet Swift, an experience which has helped inspire her during the pandemic

Household Poverty: Addressing the Core of Microfinance

Few studies on microfinance have delved on its development from the household perspective as it relates to poverty alleviation. This Policy Notes focuses on this aspect and comes up with the revealing observation that there is virtually no difference in the extent of poverty between male- and female-headed households. This finding has a strong implication on the current thrust of mainly targeting poverty alleviation programs for female-headed households and should lead planners to explore other indicators that may improve the effectiveness of poverty alleviation programs.microfinance, poverty alleviation, gender, poverty measures, households, community-oriented financial intermediary (COFI)

Efficiency and Gender Concerns: Issues Confronting the Philippine Credit Cooperatives

This Policy Notes looks at the issue of gender concerns in credit cooperatives from a different perspective. Specifically, it looks at the implications of women participation on the performance of credit cooperatives. It points out that the incorporation of gender issues in microfinance should not necessarily just limit to directing a program towards women as clients but rather and more importantly to involving women as policymakers and managers of MFIs and assessing their contribution to the development of MFIs.microfinance, credit cooperative, women's participation, gender governance, cost efficiency, profit efficiency

La evaluación de la usabilidad de un sistema de memoria de traducción

L'ús d'eines de traducció assistida per ordinador en les classes de traducció s'ha convertit en una pràctica comuna des de fa poc més d'una dècada. Amb tot, per als estudiants actuals, els anomenats ?nadius digitals?, l'experiència d'aprenentatge amb aquesta mena de programari està lluny de ser senzilla. Això ens va portar a preguntar-nos per les actituds reals dels estudiants respecte a la usabilitat d'aquesta mena de programari. Aquest treball presenta una avaluació de la usabilitat des del punt de vista de l'usuari final d'una memòria de traducció líder en el mercat. Més concretament, l'objectiu de l'estudi era avaluar la percepció d'usabilitat dels estudiants. Per a això, al final de dos cursos acadèmics, 95 estudiants d'últim curs van emplenar el qüestionari Programari Usability Measurement Inventory, que es considera un mètode de referència per a avaluar la usabilitat d'un producte de programari. Mesura cinc escales, això és, Eficiència, Afecte, Utilitat, Control i Aprenentatge. L'anàlisi dels resultats obtinguts mostra que l'opinió dels estudiants sobre la usabilitat global de l'eina avaluada està dins de la mitjana, però no tant respecte a l'escala Aprenentatge, que és la pitjor valorada. L'única escala per damunt de la mitjana va ser Afecte. Aquests resultats mostren que es necessita fer major èmfasi en el disseny de l'eina avaluada perquè s'adapte a les necessitats reals dels seus usuaris i millorar, d'aquesta manera, el coneixement tecnològic dels nostres estudiants de traducció

Experimental determination of invasive fitness in Caenorhabditis elegans

The deposited article is a post-print version and has been submitted to peer reviewing. This publication hasn't any creative commons license associated. The deposited article version contains attached some supplementary materials within the pdf. Some supplementary materials are not present in the uploaded version of the article, are present in the publisher's page in the following link: https://www.nature.com/articles/nprot.2014.098#integrated-supplementary-informationEstimation of fitness is a key step in experimental evolution studies. However, no established methods currently exist to specifically estimate how successful new alleles are in invading populations. The main reason is that most assays do not accurately reflect the randomness associated with the first stages of the invasion, when invaders are rare and extinctions are frequent. In this protocol, I describe how such experiments can be done in an effective way. By using the nematode model, Caenorhabditis elegans, a large number of invasion experiments are set up, whereby invading individuals carrying a visual marker are introduced into populations in very low numbers. The number of invaders counted in consecutive generations, together with the number of extinctions, is then used in the context of individual-based computer simulations to provide likelihood (Lk) estimates for fitness. This protocol can take up to five generations of experimental invasions and a few hours of computer processing time.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia grant: (EXPL/BIA-EFV/1211/2013); Human Frontiers Science Program grant: (RGP0045/2010).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Translation Technology and Ethical Competence: An Analysis and Proposal for Translators’ Training

The practice of translation today is inextricably linked to the use of technology, and this is reflected in how translator training is conceptualized, with technologies present in every area of such training. More and more authors have begun to voice their concerns about the ethical issues posed by the use of technology and artificial intelligence systems, and our focus here is to ask whether such concerns are being reflected in pedagogical models and teaching programs in the field of translation. To this end, we analyze a variety of translation and translation technology (TT) competence models, together with a review of the literature on ethics, and a corpus analysis of TT syllabi to explore the different sub-competences addressed in these. The analysis reveals that ethical competence is not specifically addressed in TT classes, or at least it is not reflected in our corpus. The literature review also illustrates a dearth of specific competence models for TT classes, as well as a lack of pedagogical interventions to develop ethical sub-competence, something we aim to address by developing a series of new models and tools. We conclude that the inclusion of ethical issues in the TT classroom is still far from widespread, despite it being a necessary step towards enabling new generations to act critically and professionally.This publication forms part of the research project “Digitisation, processing and online publication of open, multilingual and gender-sensitive terminology resources in the digital society (DIGITENDER)” (TED2021-130040B-C21), funded by Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, Agencia Estatal de Investigación (10.13039/501100011033) and by the European Union “NextGenerationEU”/Plan de Recuperación, Transformación y Resiliencia

Warning, or Manipulating in Pandemic Times? A Critical and Contrastive Analysis of Official Discourse Through the English and Spanish News

Focusing on media discourse and adopting a Critical Discourse Analysis—linguistic and rhetorical—perspective, this paper explores the role of the media in influencing citizens’ behaviour towards the COVID-19 crisis. The paper evaluates the set of potentially persuasive lexical items and emotional implicatures used by two quality newspapers, i.e. The Guardian (UK edition) and El País (Spain edition), to report on the pandemic during the three waves—the periods between the onset and trough of virus contamination—that occurred until March 2021. A representative, ad-hoc, comparable corpus (COVIDWave_EN and COVIDWave_ES) was compiled in English and Spanish comprising the news on the pandemic that appeared in the aforementioned newspapers during the three established time periods. The corpora were uploaded to Sketch Engine, which was used to first detect and analyse different categories (nouns, verbs, and adjectives) of word frequency, and then assign negative or positive polarity. Lexical keyness was secondly analysed to categorize emotional implicatures of control, metaphors, signals of epistemic asymmetry and positive implicatures in order to discern how they become weapons of negative or positive persuasion. The ultimate end of the study was to critically analyse and contrast the lexicon and rhetoric used by these two newspapers during this time period so as to unveil the stance taken by governments and health institutions—voices of authority—to disseminate words of control and persuasion with the aim of exerting influence on the behaviour of citizens in UK and Spain.Open Access funding provided thanks to the CRUE-CSIC agreement with Springer Nature