What Can Asian Eyelids Teach Us About User Experience Design? A Culturally Reflexive Framework for UX/I Design

The proliferation of web applications in recent years has brought about conversations among technology designers about user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) design’s role in propagating and reaffirming cultural bias, and in facilitating race-based discrimination. At times, such conversations have demonstrated how taking stock of racialized and cultural bias during the design process can challenge widely held design assumptions. For example, in 2015, Nextdoor, a neighborhood-based social network, was reported to have facilitated racial profiling when users began posting to the application’s Crime and Safety section reports of “suspicious” persons on the basis of racialized appearance, as opposed to any actual suspicious behavior (Harshaw, 2015). To address this problem, Jamie Ayers (2016) explained, Nextdoor opted to break “a cardinal rule of contemporary user experience design: they added friction to the interface of the platform.” Nextdoor developers did so by adding steps and reminders to make incident reporting slightly more complicated so that over a more prolonged process, users would “stop and think.

Course-Embedded Mentoring for First-Year Students: Melding Academic Subject Support with Role Modeling, Psycho-Social Support, and Goal Setting - TA

This article examines a mentoring initiative that embedded advanced students in first-year composition courses to mentor students to excel to the best of their abilities. Mentors attended all classes along with students and conducted many out-of-class individual conferences, documenting each of them using program-implemented work logs. Four hundred four first-year students provided end-of-term anonymous feedback on standardized forms, which were transcribed, digitized, and tabulated for analysis. Analysis showed that the mentoring was effective in providing the four constructs key to mentoring as identified by Nora and Crisp (2008): psychological/emotional support; support for setting goals and choosing a career path; academic subject knowledge support aimed at advancing a student\u27s knowledge relevant to his or her chosen field; specification of a role model. Analysis also revealed a key construct not mentioned by Nora and Crisp: the mentee’s predisposition. Recommendations for implementing embedded mentoring for first-year students in other contexts follow the Discussion

Interfacing Cultural Rhetorics: A History and a Call

This essay responds to recent exigencies that ask scholars to honor histories of cultural rhetorics, engage in responsible and responsive cultural rhetorics conversations, and generate productive openings for future inquiry and practice. First, the authors open by paying homage to scholarship and programs that have made cultural rhetorics a disciplinary home. Next, they consider the varied ways in which “culture” and “rhetoric” interface in cultural rhetorics scholarship. The authors provide case studies of how cultural rhetorics inquiry shapes their scholarship across areas of rhetoric, composition, and technical communication. Finally, they close by discussing the ethics of doing cultural rhetorics work

Search for dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks in √s = 13 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for weakly interacting massive particle dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks is presented. Final states containing third-generation quarks and miss- ing transverse momentum are considered. The analysis uses 36.1 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data recorded by the ATLAS experiment at √s = 13 TeV in 2015 and 2016. No significant excess of events above the estimated backgrounds is observed. The results are in- terpreted in the framework of simplified models of spin-0 dark-matter mediators. For colour- neutral spin-0 mediators produced in association with top quarks and decaying into a pair of dark-matter particles, mediator masses below 50 GeV are excluded assuming a dark-matter candidate mass of 1 GeV and unitary couplings. For scalar and pseudoscalar mediators produced in association with bottom quarks, the search sets limits on the production cross- section of 300 times the predicted rate for mediators with masses between 10 and 50 GeV and assuming a dark-matter mass of 1 GeV and unitary coupling. Constraints on colour- charged scalar simplified models are also presented. Assuming a dark-matter particle mass of 35 GeV, mediator particles with mass below 1.1 TeV are excluded for couplings yielding a dark-matter relic density consistent with measurements

“It’s Like Writing Yourself into a Codependent Relationship with Someone Who Doesn’t Even Want You!” Emotional Labor, Intimacy, and the Academic Job Market in Rhetoric and Composition

Drawing on forty-eight interviews with individuals who participated on the academic job market in rhetoric and composition between 2010 and 2015, this essay shows how conceptualizing the academic job search as an intimate endeavor can offer insights for understanding the rhetorical production of affective binds within institutional contexts

Course-Embedded Mentoring for First-Year Students: Melding Academic Subject Support with Role Modeling, Psycho-Social Support, and Goal Setting - TA

This article examines a mentoring initiative that embedded advanced students in first-year composition courses to mentor students to excel to the best of their abilities. Mentors attended all classes along with students and conducted many out-of-class individual conferences, documenting each of them using program-implemented work logs. Four hundred four first-year students provided end-of-term anonymous feedback on standardized forms, which were transcribed, digitized, and tabulated for analysis. Analysis showed that the mentoring was effective in providing the four constructs key to mentoring as identified by Nora and Crisp (2008): psychological/emotional support; support for setting goals and choosing a career path; academic subject knowledge support aimed at advancing a student's knowledge relevant to his or her chosen field; specification of a role model. Analysis also revealed a key construct not mentioned by Nora and Crisp: the mentee’s predisposition. Recommendations for implementing embedded mentoring for first-year students in other contexts follow the Discussion

Building a Community, Having a Home: A History of the Conference on College Composition and Communication Asian/Asian American Caucus

Building a Community, Having a Home: A History of the Conference on College Composition and Communication Asian/Asian American Caucus documents how Asian/Asian American teacher-scholars have emerged within and contributed to a number of areas in rhetoric and composition, as well as the National Council of Teachers of English and the Conference on College Composition and Communication in diverse and substantial ways from the 1960s to contemporary times. Contributors reflect on the spaces where the writing of history and the potential for community coalesce, ultimately demonstrating how a history that acknowledges the alliances, unexpected connections and coalitions, gaps, setbacks, and silences is necessary for sustaining a scholarly community that is persistently open to re/vision.https://digitalcommons.wcupa.edu/engfaculty_books/1001/thumbnail.jp

Feminisms and Interaction Design (IxD)

Curatorial note from Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: This project was designed by Professor Jennifer Sano-Franchini as the culmination of Issues in Professional and Public Discourse, a course for English majors at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. This course, which won the university’s XCaliber Award for excellence in teaching with technology, invites students to investigate a “wicked problem,” defined by designer and educator Jon Kolko as a “social or cultural problem that is difficult to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements” (qtd. in Sano-Franchini). In an interview about the course, Sano-Franchini describes sexism and gender inequality as wicked problems for which interaction design can offer useful approaches. For the final project, students work in groups to design a conceptual prototype (for a mobile application, game, Web site, interface, performance, etc.) informed by theories, research, and ideas in feminisms and interaction design. The artifact includes learning outcomes, a timeline, grading criteria, and more, all of which could be adapted for other courses

Search for direct top squark pair production in final states with two leptons in s=13\sqrt{s} = 13 TeV pppp collisions with the ATLAS detector

International audienceThe results of a search for direct pair production of top squarks in events with two opposite-charge leptons (electrons or muons) are reported, using $36.1~\hbox {fb}^{-1}$ of integrated luminosity from proton–proton collisions at $\sqrt{s}=13$ TeV collected by the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. To cover a range of mass differences between the top squark $\tilde{t}$ and lighter supersymmetric particles, four possible decay modes of the top squark are targeted with dedicated selections: the decay $\tilde{t} \rightarrow b \tilde{\chi }_{1}^{\pm }$ into a b-quark and the lightest chargino with $\tilde{\chi }_{1}^{\pm } \rightarrow W \tilde{\chi }_{1}^{0}$ , the decay $\tilde{t} \rightarrow t \tilde{\chi }_{1}^{0}$ into an on-shell top quark and the lightest neutralino, the three-body decay $\tilde{t} \rightarrow b W \tilde{\chi }_{1}^{0}$ and the four-body decay $\tilde{t} \rightarrow b \ell \nu \tilde{\chi }_{1}^{0}$ . No significant excess of events is observed above the Standard Model background for any selection, and limits on top squarks are set as a function of the $\tilde{t}$ and $\tilde{\chi }_{1}^{0}$ masses. The results exclude at 95% confidence level $\tilde{t}$ masses up to about 720 GeV, extending the exclusion region of supersymmetric parameter space covered by previous searches

Measurements of ttˉt\bar{t} differential cross-sections of highly boosted top quarks decaying to all-hadronic final states in pppp collisions at s=13 \sqrt{s}=13\, TeV using the ATLAS detector

Measurements are made of differential cross-sections of highly boosted pair-produced top quarks as a function of top-quark and $t\bar{t}$ system kinematic observables using proton--proton collisions at a center-of-mass energy of $\sqrt{s} = 13$ TeV. The data set corresponds to an integrated luminosity of $36.1$ fb$^{-1}$, recorded in 2015 and 2016 with the ATLAS detector at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. Events with two large-radius jets in the final state, one with transverse momentum $p_{\rm T} > 500$ GeV and a second with $p_{\rm T}>350$ GeV, are used for the measurement. The top-quark candidates are separated from the multijet background using jet substructure information and association with a $b$-tagged jet. The measured spectra are corrected for detector effects to a particle-level fiducial phase space and a parton-level limited phase space, and are compared to several Monte Carlo simulations by means of calculated $\chi^2$ values. The cross-section for $t\bar{t}$ production in the fiducial phase-space region is $292 \pm 7 \ \rm{(stat)} \pm 76 \rm{(syst)}$ fb, to be compared to the theoretical prediction of $384 \pm 36$ fb