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Enhancing Food Operations Through Digital Technologies: A Two-Paper Study On Social Media Analytics And Blockchain Supply Chain Management
No full textThe food industry has undergone significant transformation in recent decades due to advancements in technology. This transformation presents an opportunity to examine how digital technologies can transform food business operations through a two-paper study investigating social media marketing and blockchain supply chain management. The first analyzes how visual and textual features in fast-food brands’ social media posts (e.g., consummatory image, food bundle, color variation, brightness, and speech act) impact user engagement using machine learning to assess features and statistical models to measure effects on social media engagement. The analysis reveals that specific characteristics of posts featuring consummatory, food bundle, and high-brightness images for visual appeal, as well as a combination of action images and actionable text, are effective in driving engagement. In the second study, we apply game theory to explore how blockchain can be implemented within food supply chains. By comparing various adoption strategies, the analysis considers unique challenges, such as information quality and food waste. The model examines how these different implementations approach influence the incentives of supply chain stakeholders, including their potential profits, operational advantages, and the challenges they may encounter. Blockchain supply chain management emphasizes that full cooperation between supplier and retailer, along with an appropriate cost-sharing arrangement, is the most effective strategy for the food supply chain, considering the challenges of information quality and food waste. These insights from both studies contribute to a comprehensive understanding of digital transformation across the food industry
“We All Have Our Boulders To Pass, And This Was One Of Mine”: Ethnoculturally Diverse High-School-Aged Youth And Their Reclamation Of Nature
Full text linkThis qualitative, ethnographic, youth-centered study explored how ethnoculturally diverse urban high-school-aged youth express their relationships to nature. Participatory and youth-centered methodologies and data sources, including Photovoice, photo-elicitation interviews, and classroom artifacts, centered the voices of a diverse group of urban youth and their experiences in local forest reservations. Diverse urban youth are typically marginalized from environmental education, place-based learning, and representation in outdoor-related research. Therefore, it is critical that educational researchers include the voices of these students in conversations about nature to broaden the sociocultural framework around what “nature” is, how it is experienced, and by whom. This theoretical framework of this relational study drew on critical pedagogies of place and biophilic theory to situate the voices of socially marginalized youth, tell their outdoor stories, and make “space for place” in urban education
Massachusetts\u27 Latino Population: 2020-2040
Full text linkLatinos have been a vital component of Massachusetts’ population growth since 1990. Their younger age structure has helped to offset the older age structure of the much larger non-Latino White population. As Latinos’ population crosses the 1 million threshold by 2030, their growth (even as it slows) will be faster than the commonwealth’s overall population change
SYMP25S: AI As An Equalizer: Empowering Underrepresented Students for High-Demand Careers
No full textIn an era where AI and big data skills rank among the fastest-growing competencies in the workforce, ensuring that students from underrepresented backgrounds can access cutting-edge career preparation is critical. This study explores how generative AI tools (such as large language models) can help level the playing field by building students\u27 skills, confidence, and personal brand for success in competitive, AI-driven fields like consulting and venture capital. We employed a mixed-methods approach - including literature review and student focus groups - to investigate the educational and career-development potential of tools like ChatGPT. Key findings indicate that generative AI can serve as a personalized tutor and career coach, helping to bridge skill gaps and bolster self-confidence. This report expands on the research and reflects on the personal and professional impact of AI in my own journey
Editor’s Note
No full textThis issue on climate warnings, on the eve of COP30, is a companion issue for Climate Warnings, an issue published on the eve of COP28
Wound Care Services In Rural America
No full textResidents living in rural America suffer from complications of chronic wounds at higher rates due to limited access to care and specialists. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the inequities within the rural healthcare system and provide recommendations for mitigating gaps in care. Methods include analysis of qualitative and quantitative literature, synthesis of Census data, numeric trends, policy initiatives, and CDC data. This research yielded evidence supporting various types of home health and technology-based care as a reasonable intervention for ensuring adequate ongoing wound care among rural residents. Mobile wound care clinics and at-home wound care apps are both attainable and effective interventions for ensuring proper follow-up care of wounds once patients are discharged from the hospital, and providing consistent care for those living with chronic wounds. This paper confronts barriers in policy and addresses the necessary reform needed to make lasting change
Bystanders to Nurse Incivility: Barriers and Facilitators to Bystander Responses in New England Hospitals
No full textBackground: Nurse-to-nurse incivility and bullying behaviors in the workplace often occur in the presence of bystanders or observers, who can be co-workers, patients, and families. Education and training of employees rarely focuses on preparing bystanders. Given the triad of perpetrators, targets, and bystanders, this study focuses on understanding the position of nurse bystanders to fortify their positive effects in the hospital work environment. While directing training toward the perpetrators or toward the targets of bullying may be useful, by focusing interventions on all employees, potential bystanders might be prepared to prevent or respond appropriately. This broad-based approach may precipitate a shift in the norms in the workplace toward cooperative, positive relations between nursing coworkers.
Methods: This research study uses the overarching framework of the Conceptual Model of Nursing and Health Policy to apply Schein\u27s model of organizational culture and leadership to determine what can be learned about the barriers and facilitators to bystander responses to nurse-to-nurse incivility and bullying behaviors in a hospital environment, using the qualitative research method Interpretive Description. The sample was comprised of hospital Registered Nurses (RNs) (N=23), exclusively from each of the six New England, USA states, with or without supervisory experience, who could be interviewed in English, and have had the experience of being a bystander to nurse-to-nurse workplace incivility or bullying behavior. An original method was designed to protect the participants\u27 identities and ensure the privacy of the data from the interviews. The data were analyzed from the telephone interviews regarding their observed experiences, as well as barriers and facilitators to their responses. The discussion derived recommendations for the practice environment, nurse education, and future research.
Results: The data from 23 RN participants\u27 interviews provided insights regarding the manifestations, the reactions from nurses and other bystanders, the barriers and facilitators of intervention by nurse bystanders, as well as potential organizational solutions in confirmation of existing remedies for the behavioral problem. The vivid accounts provided by the interviews also provided insights about the discrepancy between the observed behavior reported by the participants compared with the expected professional behaviors, which are based on guidelines such as the 2015 ANA Code of Ethics for Nurses with Interpretive Statements, as well as on their own New England hospital employers\u27 publicized missions, values, and goals.
Conclusion: The key question for nurse leaders: Why are the professional values of the 2015 ANA Code of Ethics for Nurses with Interpretive Statements and the stated values of the hospitals not more closely aligned with the values and behaviors within the nursing subculture on the unit level? This study has shown that in some of the New England hospitals supportive work environments are lacking; for example, timely communication could be improved, as could leadership interventions, such as rewards for positive work environments and holding nurses accountable for transgressions. Nurse leaders ought to be empowered by the hospital leadership to analyze and address the issues themselves, with the support of the upper management. A problem caused by nurses in violation of nursing standards can be corrected by trained nurse leaders once it is addressed with courage and without barriers.
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Counter-Mapping a Sugar Mill in Mascarilla, Afro-Ecuadorian Ancestral Territory of the Chota Valley
No full textThis project examines the legacies of the colonial hacienda (estate) system in the community of Mascarilla, situated in the Ancestral Territory of the Chota Valley, Carchi Province, in the northern highlands of Ecuador. This study is framed within the first half of the 20th century, during the early stages of industrialization in Ecuador, and the last period in which the Trapiche de Mascarilla was still functioning. These elements will be viewed through the lens of the archaeological feature of the trapiche (panela production facility), serving as a referential space of history under the huasipungo system (debt-peonage). The interconnected components of the research focus on participatory mapping, ethnographic research, and historical analysis to elicit a narrative constructed in collaboration with multiple actors based on the intersecting readings of the past. While delineating the complexity of historical narratives that emerged from the dialectics of forced labor and Maroonage, a counter-map was created that focuses on recognizing women and their role in place-making
Monima: A Novel of the Immigrant Experience in the Multilingual Early Republic
Full text linkFirst published in 1802, Monima offers a unique look at the lives of the poor in Philadelphia: Describing her novel as a very plain picture of life, a plea on behalf of the oppressed, and life-worn children of affliction,\u27\u27 the author exposes the class fractures within a society we have mythologized as egalitarian (99). Such myths, the novel shows, are based on ignorance; as one character, awakened to the existence of the poor, remarks, one half of the world don\u27t know how the other half live (196). Though the identity of Monima\u27s author was not discovered for over 220 years, the novel\u27s focus on the immigrant underclass reflects her lived experience. Mary Endress Ralston was the trilingual child of German and French immigrants whose fortunes rose and fell in the Revolutionary era. But rather than writing a factual record of her life, Mary Ralston created her portrait of Monima and her world through a complex multilingual and multiethnic alchemy. The resulting novel, which highlights language justice through the trials of its beleaguered heroine and her father, is a complex synthesis of literary modes that has been largely overlooked. We are proud to present Monima, the first American novel by an English,language learner, and Mary Endress Ralston, an early American novelist who has been hiding in plain sight
To Live and Thrive in Massachusetts : Native American Perspectives on Wealth
No full textThe racial wealth gap has gained significant attention recently, in both national and regional discussions, owing to the accumulating data that shine ever brighter light on the large disparities between White, Latino, and Black households. Native American families are almost always left out of these discussions, however, in part because the same type of comprehensive wealth data does not exist for them due to sample size limitations. This is why Boston Indicators commissioned the Institute for New England Native American Studies (INENAS) at UMass Boston to produce this unique report, released as part of our Racial Wealth Equity Resource Center research series. While this is a mixed-methods report, the most novel contribution is the qualitative research findings from a series of in-depth focus groups