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Adoption and continued use of mobile contact tracing technology: multilevel explanations from a three-wave panel survey and linked data
Get PDFObjective: To identify the key individual-level (demographics, attitudes, mobility) and contextual (Covid-19 case numbers, tiers of mobility restrictions, urban districts) determinants of adopting the NHS Covid-19 contact tracing app and continued use over-time.
Design and setting: A three-wave panel survey conducted in England in July 2020 (background survey), November 2020 (first measure of app adoption), and March 2021 (continued use of app and new adopters) linked with official data.
Participants: N = 2,500 adults living in England, representative of England’s population in terms of regional distribution, age, and gender (2011 census).
Primary outcome: Repeated measures of self-reported app usage.
Analytical approach: Multilevel logistic regression linking a range of individual-level (from survey) and contextual (from linked data) determinants to app usage.
Results: We observe initial app uptake at 41%, 95% CI [0.39,0.43], and a 12% dropout rate by March 2021, 95% CI [0.10,0.14]. We also found that 7% of nonusers as of wave 2 became new adopters by wave 3, 95% CI [0.05,0.08]. Initial uptake (or failure to use) of the app associated with social norms, privacy concerns, and misinformation about third-party data access, with those living in postal districts with restrictions on mobility less likely to use the app. Perceived lack of transparent evidence of effectiveness was associated with drop out of use. In addition, those who trusted the government were more likely to adopt in wave 3 as new adopters.
Conclusions: Successful uptake of the contact tracing app should be evaluated within the wider context of the UK Government’s response to the crisis. Trust in government is key to adoption of the app in wave 3 while continued use is linked to perceptions of transparent evidence. Providing clear information to address privacy concerns could increase uptake, however, the disparities in continued use among ethnic minority participants needs further investigation
Distortion of mental body representations
Get PDFOur body is central to our sense of self, and distorted body representations are found in several serious medical conditions. This paper reviews evidence that distortions of body representations are also common in healthy individuals, in domains including tactile spatial perception, proprioception, and the conscious body image. Across domains, there is a general tendency for body width to be overestimated compared to body length. Intriguingly, distortions in both eating disorders and chronic pain appear to be exaggerations of this baseline pattern of distortions, suggesting that these conditions may relate to dysfunction of mechanisms for body perception. Distortions of body representations provide a revealing window on basic aspects of self perception
Academic texts in motion: a text history study of co-authorship interactions in writing
No full textKnowledge production in collaborative writing for publication has tended to be studied as fixed in time and place; few studies have focused on the drafting and redrafting of texts and the interactions among the co-authors involved. Using a Text History of a research article co-authored by an exiled EAL academic and his two more experienced EAL co-authors, this study investigates the impact of interactions during text production on the focal academic’s understanding of writing for international publication. We analysed the co-authors’ comments on the academic’s drafts examining their Intervention Levels (levels of directness and explicitness) and Intervention Areas (disciplinary, writing, and publishing conventions) and the exiled academic’s responses to these interventions by focusing on interaction episodes (written interactions relating to a specific point in the text and relevant textual changes throughout drafts). Findings revealed that the interventions focused on multiple areas and the co-authors acted as knowledge brokers in all domains. The interaction dynamics changed across the drafts in the focus of interaction episodes and the levels of co-authors’ interventions provided to the academic, which created a space for the exiled academic to negotiate interventions and, consequently, enrich his understanding of writing practices for international publication in English
Entrepreneurial activities and women empowerment in rural India between microfinance and social capital
Get PDFHuman development cannot occur without women’s empowerment. Particularly in marginalised contexts lacking equal treatment between women and men, women’s empowerment is conditioned upon their control on financial resources and on activities outside their households’ tasks such as entrepreneurial activities. Such contexts have been experiencing the escalation of microfinance schemes of which women have been the main target group. While scholars generally agree on the opportunities that microcredit represents for microentrepreneurial activities, its effective impact on women entrepreneurship and, hence, their empowerment show contrasting results. We aim to contribute to this debate by conducting in-depth semi-structured interviews to female members of the group lending model of microfinance institute in the western rural area of Uttar Pradesh, northern India. The thematic questions of the interviews address, particularly, the social resources (social capital) and economic conditions underpinning the process of empowerment among women’s members of peer-group lending schemes. We find that social capital plays a crucial role for a peer-group lending to be successful both in terms of access to financial resources and loan’s repayment. However, we detect the presence of empowerment only where the outcome of this social capital resources is used by a woman to pursue her own entrepreneurial activities and self-determined goals. Our findings contribute to the social capital literature as well as on the current debate regarding the revision of the goals of microcredit schemes for minority groups in entrepreneurship
"Ándate al páramo": prácticas lingüísticas de exclusión y prejuicios en contra de los indígenas en la interacción interétnica en Twitter (Ecuador)
Get PDFThis article examines the linguistic practices of Twitter users through which they discriminate and exclude indigenous people in the Ecuadorian context, and the prejudices behind these practices. For the study, the accounts of three indigenous leaders, active on Twitter, were selected and a corpus was constructed based on the responses provided by users to leaders’ tweets (i.e., 2944 responses); this was within a selected period during the 2021 presidential elections. The approach adopted is that of critical pragmatics in seeking to unveil discriminatory practices against minorities, taking into account in this case the historical and political context of their occurrence. Drawing on works on slurs (e.g., Croom 2011) and racial insults (e.g., Guimarães 2003), 329 instances of these types of insults were identified in the corpus examined; they were then grouped thematically, according to the negative beliefs about indigenous identity that they seem to (re)create (e.g., that indigenous people are ignorant, that they lack hygiene, etc.). The study shows that the racism that has been observed in face-to-face interactions (see e.g., De la Torre 2002; Placencia 2008) persists and has spread online (not surprisingly) –with multiple realizations, both conventional and nonconventional–, and it seems to go unchecked on the Twitter platform
QUaternary fault strain INdicators database - QUIN 1.0 - first release from the Apennines of central Italy
Get PDFWe present QUIN, a “QUaternary fault strain INdicators database”, designed to integrate and unify
published and unpublished local-scale geological information and derive strain parameters for
structural and seismotectonic analyses. It provides data on 3339 Fault Striation Pairs (FSP; fault plane
and slickenline), distributed within 455 survey sites. These are exposed along the intra-Apennine
Quaternary extensional faults of Central Italy. The area covers an extent of ~550 km in a NW-SE
direction. We give information on FSP location, attitude and kinematics, and deformation axes. We
also provide an original shapefile of the faults hosting the FSP. A large amount of homogeneously
distributed Quaternary fault/slip data help to clarify and implement the contemporary geometric
and kinematic deformation pattern of Central Italy that appears scattered and incomplete whenever
exclusively derived from earthquake data. The high-density of structural data can help investigate
stress pattern heterogeneities at local scales, with relevance for new generations of hazard assessment
evaluation and a better understanding of rupture propagation and related barriers
Deep learning the city: the spatial imaginaries of AI
Get PDFThis chapter examines how deep learning neural networks and computer vision technologies are impacting the design, organization and occupation of cities. It begins by providing a brief history of the development of “deep learning” approaches to artificial intelligence. The chapter then focuses on the ways artists and designers have begun to engage with deep learning and computer vision in order to highlight critical questions, especially about the ethical issues surrounding the training datasets these systems depend on. The chapter discusses three art and design examples that shift focus specifically towards the city and spatial concerns, considering the ways these works explore machine learning (the opportunities it presents and the problems it raises) within a specifically architectural or urban context.
Book synopsis: This book explores what’s happening to ways of seeing urban spaces in the contemporary moment, when so many of the technologies through which cities are visualised are digital. Cities have always been pictured, in many media and for many different purposes. This edited collection explores how that picturing is changing in an era of digital visual culture. Analogue visual technologies like film cameras were understood as creating some sort of a trace of the real city. Digital visual technologies, in contrast, harvest and process digital data to create images that are constantly refreshed, modified and circulated. Each of the chapters in this volume examines a different example of how this processual visuality is reconfiguring the spatial and temporal organisation of urban life
Transgender children: from controversy to dialogue
No full textThis paper introduces the topic and unique format of the section that follows, on psychoanalytic work with transgender children. We first review the apparent impasse that characterizes our field regarding clinical work with gender diverse kids, as well as the reasons we pursued a live dialog to push thinking forward. Then, we outline the structure of the entire section, in which four contributors offer short essays, followed by a transcribed and edited version of the dialog we facilitated, which uses these essays as a starting point. We conclude with reflections on some of the themes that arise in the dialog, and implications for all of us who work in the arena of gender and young people
Faster pattern matching under edit distance : a reduction to dynamic puzzle matching and the Seaweed Monoid of permutation matrices
Get PDFWe consider the approximate pattern matching problem under the edit distance. Given a text T of length n, a pattern P of length m, and a threshold k, the task is to find the starting positions of all substrings of T that can be transformed to P with at most k edits. More than 20 years ago, Cole and Hariharan [SODA’98, J. Comput.’02] gave an O(n + k^4·n/m)-time algorithm for this classic problem, and this runtime has not been improved since.
Here, we present an algorithm that runs in time O(n + k^{3.5}√(
log m log k) · n/m), thus breaking through this longstanding barrier. In the case where n^{1/4+ε} ≤ k ≤ n^{2/5−ε} for some arbitrarily small positive constant ε, our algorithm improves over the state-of-the-art by polynomial factors: it is polynomially faster than both the algorithm of Cole and Hariharan and the classic O(kn)-time algorithm of Landau and Vishkin [STOC’86, J. Algorithms’89].
We observe that the bottleneck case of the alternative O(n + k^4· n/m)-time algorithm of Charalampopoulos, Kociumaka, and Wellnitz [FOCS’20] is when the text and the pattern are (almost) periodic. Our new algorithm reduces this case to a new Dynamic Puzzle Matching problem, which we solve by building on tools developed by Tiskin [SODA’10, Algorithmica’15] for the so called seaweed monoid of permutation matrices. Our algorithm relies only on a small set of primitive operations on strings and thus also applies to the fully-compressed setting (where text and pattern are given as straight-line programs) and to the dynamic setting (where we maintain a collection of strings under creation, splitting, and concatenation), improving over the state of the art
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