Women, words, and work : a study of change and reconstruction in adult TESOL

My dissertation asserts that the discourses which at the present time construct the world of work for teachers in adult TESOL, are no longer adequate to represent the field in these new and rapidly changing times. For the last forty years the discourses that have constructed the field present a totalising, gender free, liberal humanist view of TESOL, rendering women\u27s experience invisible, no longer speaking to or for women teachers who make up more than ninety percent of the teachers in Victorian adult TESOL programs (Cope & Kalantzis 1993, Brodkey 1991, Fine 1992, Peirce 1995). I begin by exploring the work of women teachers in adult TESOL, focusing on women teaching in the fast growing de-institutionalised settings of adult TESOL programs, which remain marginalised from the central programs in terms of administrative policy and practice. I report the findings of a series of projects undertaken by the teachers and the researcher by which new insights and understandings of teachers beliefs about their work and the changes which are currently reconstructing the field of adult language and literacy education in Australia, have been gained. I questions the discourses of applied linguistics which have for the past forty years constructed the field of adult TESOL in Australia and suggests that these lack a social theory (Candlin 1989). From the research findings I questions the possibility of continuing to work in the ways of the past, in the current climate of reconstruction of the field, rapid policy change and continued erosion of resources. I suggest that the previously loose system which held this field of work together, the ways of working, the understandings of practice, have in the light of these new times, been stretched to the limit and are in real danger of collapse. For the women working in TESOL this continued incursion of the systems into their work and the changes that have taken place, the denial of their ways of working, their local knowledge and gendered experiences, can be read against Habermas\u27 concept of the colonisation of the lifeworld of language teaching (Habermas 1987)

Paradoxes in Fair Computer-Aided Decision Making

Computer-aided decision making--where a human decision-maker is aided by a computational classifier in making a decision--is becoming increasingly prevalent. For instance, judges in at least nine states make use of algorithmic tools meant to determine "recidivism risk scores" for criminal defendants in sentencing, parole, or bail decisions. A subject of much recent debate is whether such algorithmic tools are "fair" in the sense that they do not discriminate against certain groups (e.g., races) of people. Our main result shows that for "non-trivial" computer-aided decision making, either the classifier must be discriminatory, or a rational decision-maker using the output of the classifier is forced to be discriminatory. We further provide a complete characterization of situations where fair computer-aided decision making is possible

Problematizing Strategic Alliance Research: Challenges, Issues and Paradoxes in the New Era

Strategic alliances have attracted substantial attention from industry and academia over the past three decades. However, due to rapid technological evolution, saturated marketplaces, globalisation of businesses on the one hand and de-globalisation of the market on the other (as marked by Brexit and the trade war between US and China, COVID-19 pandemic and the Ukraine war), the strategic environment of businesses is changing quickly. Fundamental and rapid changes in the wider environment necessitate the review of theoretical and practical insights of earlier and emerging studies – to examine the new challenges, issues and paradoxes of strategic alliances. This special issue attempts to provide a forum to allow researchers to question the assumptions underlying existing theory a little further beyond just “gap-spotting” or “gap-filling”. This special issue includes four very interesting literature review pieces, which venture deeper into the phenomenon, and explore the opportunities, issues and paradoxes of strategic alliances while adopting alternative theoretical perspectives, methodological approaches and interpretations to address issues of managing strategic alliances and maximising returns from them in the new strategic context

Fairness-Aware Ranking in Search & Recommendation Systems with Application to LinkedIn Talent Search

We present a framework for quantifying and mitigating algorithmic bias in mechanisms designed for ranking individuals, typically used as part of web-scale search and recommendation systems. We first propose complementary measures to quantify bias with respect to protected attributes such as gender and age. We then present algorithms for computing fairness-aware re-ranking of results. For a given search or recommendation task, our algorithms seek to achieve a desired distribution of top ranked results with respect to one or more protected attributes. We show that such a framework can be tailored to achieve fairness criteria such as equality of opportunity and demographic parity depending on the choice of the desired distribution. We evaluate the proposed algorithms via extensive simulations over different parameter choices, and study the effect of fairness-aware ranking on both bias and utility measures. We finally present the online A/B testing results from applying our framework towards representative ranking in LinkedIn Talent Search, and discuss the lessons learned in practice. Our approach resulted in tremendous improvement in the fairness metrics (nearly three fold increase in the number of search queries with representative results) without affecting the business metrics, which paved the way for deployment to 100% of LinkedIn Recruiter users worldwide. Ours is the first large-scale deployed framework for ensuring fairness in the hiring domain, with the potential positive impact for more than 630M LinkedIn members.Comment: This paper has been accepted for publication at ACM KDD 201

Robot Rights? Let's Talk about Human Welfare Instead

The 'robot rights' debate, and its related question of 'robot responsibility', invokes some of the most polarized positions in AI ethics. While some advocate for granting robots rights on a par with human beings, others, in a stark opposition argue that robots are not deserving of rights but are objects that should be our slaves. Grounded in post-Cartesian philosophical foundations, we argue not just to deny robots 'rights', but to deny that robots, as artifacts emerging out of and mediating human being, are the kinds of things that could be granted rights in the first place. Once we see robots as mediators of human being, we can understand how the `robots rights' debate is focused on first world problems, at the expense of urgent ethical concerns, such as machine bias, machine elicited human labour exploitation, and erosion of privacy all impacting society's least privileged individuals. We conclude that, if human being is our starting point and human welfare is the primary concern, the negative impacts emerging from machinic systems, as well as the lack of taking responsibility by people designing, selling and deploying such machines, remains the most pressing ethical discussion in AI.Comment: Accepted to the AIES 2020 conference in New York, February 2020. The final version of this paper will appear in Proceedings of the 2020 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Societ

Capitals and commitment. The case of a local learning and employment network.

This article draws on research undertaken with a Local Learning and Employment Network (LLEN) in the state of Victoria, Australia. LLEN are networks that were implemented by the state government in 2001 to undertake community capacity building through which the outcomes of young people aged 15-19 in education, training and employment would be enhanced. In 2008, in the context of an enhanced federal commitment to social inclusion through ‘joining-up’, the Victorian experience provides insights on the implications of such policy initiatives. Drawing on Bourdieu’s discussion of the forms of capital and Granovetter’s notion of the strength of weak ties, I argue that stores of economic, cultural and social capital as outlined by Bourdieu were necessary, but insufficient, for LLEN to achieve the objectives with which they were charged given the failure of government to follow through on the implications of its policies. I argue for a commitment on the part of all stakeholders to realise the potential of ‘joining-up’

The basal ganglia circuits, dopamine, and ambiguous word processing: A neurobiological account of priming studies in Parkinson's disease

Research into the processing of lexical ambiguities has provided a valuable paradigm for investigating the functional architecture of the language processing system in normal and neurologically impaired populations and specifically, how basal ganglia circuits and the neurotransmitter dopamine may act to enhance and/or suppress various meanings relative to the context in which the lexical ambiguity appears. In this review, we develop the hypothesis that an integrated basal ganglia thalamocortical circuit linking the striatum and inferior frontal cortex is involved in the enhancement and suppression of ambiguous word meanings when a lexical ambiguity is presented within a linguistic context. Reference to behavioral, neurophysiological, and neurochemical studies of subcortical function in both healthy populations and people with Parkinson's disease will be used to provide further support for the proposal that the subcortex is integrally involved in ambiguous word processing. (JINS, 2008, 14, 351–364.

Dopamine and semantic activation: An investigation of masked direct and indirect priming

To investigate the effects of dopamine on the dynamics of semantic activation, 39 healthy volunteers were randomly assigned to ingest either a placebo (n = 24) or a levodopa (it = 16) capsule. Participants then performed a lexical decision task that implemented a masked priming paradigm. Direct and indirect semantic priming was measured across stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) of 250, 500 and 1200 ms. The results revealed significant direct and indirect semantic priming effects for the placebo group at SOAs of 250 ms and 500 ms, but no significant direct or indirect priming effects at the 1200 ms SOA. In contrast, the levodopa group showed significant direct and indirect semantic priming effects at the 250 ms SOA, while no significant direct or indirect priming effects were evident at the SOAs of 500 ins or 1200 ms. These results suggest that dopamine has a role in modulating both automatic and attentional aspects of semantic activation according to a specific time course. The implications of these results for current theories of dopaminergic modulation of semantic activation are discussed

Patient stratification for determining optimal second-line and third-line therapy for type 2 diabetes:the TriMaster study

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Nature Research via the DOI in this recordData availability: To minimize the risk of patient re-identification, de-identified individual patient-level clinical data are available under restricted access. Requests for access to anonymized individual participant data and study documents should be made to the corresponding author and will be reviewed by the Peninsula Research Bank Steering Committee. Access to data through the Peninsula Research Bank will be granted for requests with scientifically valid questions by academic teams with the necessary skills appropriate for the research. Data that can be shared will be released with the relevant transfer agreement.Code availability: Requests for access to code should be made to the corresponding author and will be reviewed by the Peninsula Research Bank Steering Committee. Access to code through the Peninsula Research Bank will be granted for requests with scientifically valid questions by academic teams with the necessary skills appropriate for the research. Code will be released by the lead statistician.Precision medicine aims to treat an individual based on their clinical characteristics. A differential drug response, critical to using these features for therapy selection, has never been examined directly in type 2 diabetes. In this study, we tested two hypotheses: (1) individuals with body mass index (BMI) > 30 kg/m2, compared to BMI ≤ 30 kg/m2, have greater glucose lowering with thiazolidinediones than with DPP4 inhibitors, and (2) individuals with estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) 60-90 ml/min/1.73 m2, compared to eGFR >90 ml/min/1.73 m2, have greater glucose lowering with DPP4 inhibitors than with SGLT2 inhibitors. The primary endpoint for both hypotheses was the achieved HbA1c difference between strata for the two drugs. In total, 525 people with type 2 diabetes participated in this UK-based randomized, double-blind, three-way crossover trial of 16 weeks of treatment with each of sitagliptin 100 mg once daily, canagliflozin 100 mg once daily and pioglitazone 30 mg once daily added to metformin alone or metformin plus sulfonylurea. Overall, the achieved HbA1c was similar for the three drugs: pioglitazone 59.6 mmol/mol, sitagliptin 60.0 mmol/mol and canagliflozin 60.6 mmol/mol (P = 0.2). Participants with BMI > 30 kg/m2, compared to BMI ≤ 30 kg/m2, had a 2.88 mmol/mol (95% confidence interval (CI): 0.98, 4.79) lower HbA1c on pioglitazone than on sitagliptin (n = 356, P = 0.003). Participants with eGFR 60-90 ml/min/1.73 m2, compared to eGFR >90 ml/min/1.73 m2, had a 2.90 mmol/mol (95% CI: 1.19, 4.61) lower HbA1c on sitagliptin than on canagliflozin (n = 342, P = 0.001). There were 2,201 adverse events reported, and 447/525 (85%) randomized participants experienced an adverse event on at least one of the study drugs. In this precision medicine trial in type 2 diabetes, our findings support the use of simple, routinely available clinical measures to identify the drug class most likely to deliver the greatest glycemic reduction for a given patient. (ClinicalTrials.gov registration: NCT02653209 ; ISRCTN registration: 12039221 .).Medical Research Council (MRC)National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR