User Perceptions and Stereotypic Responses to Gender and Age of Voice Assistants

Technologies such as voiced automation can aid older adults aging in place by assisting with basic home and health tasks in daily routines. However, currently available voice assistants have a common design - they are vastly represented as young and female. Prior work has shown that humans apply stereotypes to human-computer interactions similarly to human-human interactions. When these stereotypes are activated, users may lose trust or confidence in the device or stop using it all together. The purpose of this study was to investigate if users can detect age and gender cues of voiced automation and to understand the extent to which gender, age, and reliability elicit stereotypic responses which were assessed using history-based trust. A series of health-related voice automation scenarios presented users with voice assistants varying in gender, age, and reliability. Results showed differences in age and gender perceptions across participant age groups but no differences for overall trust. A three-way interaction showed that when voiced automation reliability was low, participants rated the young female voice assistant as significantly more trustworthy than all other voice assistants. This work contributes to our understanding of how anthropomorphic characteristics like age and gender in emerging technologies can elicit varied trust responses from younger and older adults

Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcal Infection Antibiotic Prophylaxis Treatment Compared With Alternative Treatment Options

• Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders associated with Streptococcal Infection, known as PANDAS, is a clinical diagnosis made after a child develops Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and/or ticks after a Streptococcal Pharyngitis. Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders associated with Streptococcal Infection is diagnosed in children 3 years of age until 14 years of age. The purpose of this study is to determine if antibiotics versus selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor with cognitive behavior therapy versus prophylaxis with antibiotics should be used in the treatment of children who develops PANDAS. The review of literature will explore studies that compare current treatment options with new research and alternate treatment options. The researcher plans to analyze the data of these studies to better enhance treatment options for children diagnosed with PANDAS. The lack of knowledge and understanding of the diagnosis will allow providers to get a better understanding of the diagnosis and the best possible treatment. It’s anticipated that the best treatment for children diagnosed with PANDAS is antibiotic treatment for positive rapid strep test or positive Antistreptolysin O titers. The findings may indicate that health care providers need more education on PANDAS and treatment. Pediatricians along with mid-level providers should evaluate and diagnose any children with a positive ASO titer who has developed OCD with PANDAS. These children should be re-evaluated within four weeks to assess response to treatment.https://commons.und.edu/pas-grad-posters/1124/thumbnail.jp

Does Course Format Matter When Learning About Diversity? Exploring Student Evaluations in Online Versus Hybrid Classroom Structures

Poster presented at the 12th International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois

Gaining from the System: Lessons from the Law School Survey of Student Engagement About Student Development in Law School

This paper considers the factors that influence law students\u27 assessment of their professional and academic development during law school. It uses responses of 5,612 third- and fourth-year law students to the Law School Survey of Student Engagement to identify student activities and behaviors that relate to professional and academic gains; individual and law school characteristics also are examined. Four aspects of the law school experience emerge as integral parts of students\u27 professional and academic development

Obstinate memory: Working-class politics and neoliberal forgetting in the United Kingdom and Chile

© 2022 The Authors. Published by SAGE. This is an open access article available under a Creative Commons licence. The published version can be accessed at the following link on the publisher’s website: https://doi.org/10.1177/17506980211073111In the 40 years since Chile and the United Kingdom became the crucibles of neoliberalization, working-class agency has been transformed, its institutions systematically dismantled and its politics, after the continuity neoliberalism of both the UK Blair government and the Chilean Concertación, in a crisis of legitimacy. In the process, memories of struggle have been captured within narratives of ‘capitalist realism’ (Fisher) – the present, past and future collapsed into Walter Benjamin’s ‘empty homogeneous time’. This article explores ways in which two traumatic moments of working-class struggle have been narrativized by the media in the service of this ‘presentism’: the 1973 coup in Chile and the 1984–1985 Miners’ Strike in the United Kingdom. We argue that the use of ‘living history’ or bottom-up approaches to memory provides an urgently needed recovery of disruptive narratives of class identity and offers a way of reclaiming alternative futures from the grip of reductive economic nationalism.Published onlin

Valproate MHRA guidance: limitations and opportunities

Recent publication of the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) in the United Kingdom has strengthened the regulatory measures for valproate medicines. It highlights the importance of making women of childbearing age with epilepsy aware of the teratogenic risks of valproate and encourages the withdrawal of it from those currently prescribed. While a significant directive, it raises concerns of not having considered the impact on special populations such as women with Intellectual Disability (ID). While it is important that women with ID are not excluded from such safety initiatives, due caution needs to be taken on a case by case basis preferably, to ensure their best interests are central to the decision making. Many women with moderate to profound ID cannot have informed consented sexual relationships not to mention cognitive incapability to make informed choices on medication suitability. These women are at potential risk of having their epilepsy control undermined due to the MHRA directives. Around 30% of people with moderate to profound ID have seizures of which 60% are considered treatment resistant. In this vulnerable population changes to medication without clear clinical and social insights could lead to increased harm levels. This paper enumerates the challenges of application of the new directive to these special populations and proposes a pathway based on individual cognitive ability to provide informed consent to facilitate the continuation or removal of valproate. It is important not to lose sight of individual circumstances and the importance of working collaboratively toward providing person center care

``I Felt Like I Wasn't Really Meant to be There'': Understanding Women's Perceptions of Gender in Approaching AI Design & Development

Women continue to enter and remain in AI development at a rate far lower than men, and this glaring gender gap has caused AI technologies to contain inherent bias in their design. While studies have explored the challenges women face in the field, little has been done to explore the influences of women's gender identities on how women approach gender in AI design. In this study, we conducted semi-structured interviews with eight women with diverse experiences in various areas of AI design in order to understand how women perceive the role of their gender identity within the AI design community and how those perceptions have influenced their design approach for AI systems. Our research provides first-hand empirical evidence from women’s own perspectives on how the enduring gender gap in the AI field is reinforcing harmful bias in designing and developing AI systems. We also propose initial design implications and highlight urgently needed future research for designing more inclusive AI technologies with diverse gender perspectives in mind

Observation study showed that the continuity of skin-to-skin contact with low-birthweight infants in Uganda was suboptimal.

AIM: Kangaroo mother care (KMC) is a safe and effective method of reducing neonatal mortality in resource-limited settings, but there has been a lack of data on the duration of skin-to-skin contact (SSC) in busy, low-resource newborn units. Previous studies of intermittent KMC suggest the duration of SSC ranged from 10 minutes to 17 hours per day. METHODS: This was an observational study of newborn infants born weighing less than 2000 g, which collected quantitative data on SSC over the first week after birth. The study took place in July 2016 in the newborn unit of a low-resource facility in Uganda. RESULTS: The mean daily duration of SSC over the first week after birth was three hours. This differed significantly from the World Health Organization recommendation of at least 20 hours of SSC per day. SSC was provided by mothers most of the time (73.5%), but other family members also took part, especially on the day of birth. CONCLUSION: Our study found a disappointingly low daily duration of SSC in this Ugandan newborn unit. However, advocacy and community education of SSC may help to decrease the stigma of KMC, improve overall acceptance and reduce the age at SSC initiation

National Renewal in the discourse of Neoliberal Transition in Britain and Chile

The term neoliberalism became associated with processes of economic and social restructuring in various parts of the world during the latter years of the twentieth century. While the importance of these processes is undisputed, the extent to which neoliberalism constitutes a coherent and consistent ideology, or merely a contingent and contextual set of broadly related policies, remains a source of contention. In this article we explore this question through a comparative analysis of the political discourse of neoliberal transition in Britain and Chile. Drawing on the model of historical comparison developed by Antonio Gramsci, we argue that these two countries represent paradigm cases of the constitutional and authoritarian routes to neoliberalism. However, by focusing on the discourses of national renewal in the speeches and writings of Margaret Thatcher and Augusto Pinochet, we argue that both cases rest on a particular articulation of the themes of coercion and consent. As such, we suggest that while each paradigm articulates these themes in distinct ways, it is the relationship between the two that is essential to the political ideology of neoliberalism, as the coercive construction of consensus in Chile and the consensual construction of coercion in Britain