Bad Practices Research Articles

A Truly Sustainable Digital Transformation Model for the Naval Sector

This document aims to show the meaning and real implications of implementing a Digital Transformation in the naval sector, explaining its three components (People - Processes - Technology), as well as the consequences of the bad practices of its application through real cases of global resonance. Subsequently, an approximation to the requirements to carry it out in an adequate and sustainable manner are stated, by understanding the concepts of the executive level that will help strategic alignment and the application of tools to achieve it, and then explain how to design and execute a Digital Transformation Strategy in any organization. Finally, a model to create a sustainable Digital Naval Industry is offered, leveraged by Industry 4.0 technologies, presenting mechanisms such as the creation of a national and regional naval cluster, which allows free exchange of data and open information in real time, whose enabler will be the Unified NameSpace (UNS).

Lessons Learned from the Educational Experience during COVID-19 from the Perspective of Latin American University Students

The COVID-19 pandemic impacted the educational context. University students were exposed to an educational transition from a face-to-face context to emergency remote teaching (ERT). This change affected the educational experience of students and teachers in general, and impacted their educational performance, as well as their emotional and mental health, among other aspects. However, learning from the successes during the ERT and reflecting on good and bad practices will allow us to configure effective learning scenarios that respond to the new normal. The objective of this paper is to describe and present the lessons learned during ERT from the experience of university students in Latin America who have already returned to face-to-face instruction. The study used a qualitative inductive approach and a phenomenographic design. The sample consisted of 640 undergraduate students (63% women) of higher education who experienced online education during the year 2021 and a face-to-face modality during the first semester of 2022, belonging to universities in Chile, Venezuela, and Ecuador. The results suggest that new learning scenarios should consider specific pedagogical practices, including active, collaborative, meaningful, and problem-based strategies, together with a diversity of feedback practices. It is concluded that the ERT brought good practices that should guide university educational policies.

On the diffusion of test smells and their relationship with test code quality of Java projects

AbstractTest smells are considered bad practices that can reduce the test code quality, thus harming software testing goals and maintenance activities. Prior studies have investigated the diffusion of test smells and their impact on test code maintainability. However, we cannot directly compare the outcomes of the studies as most of them use customized datasets. In response, we introduced the TSSM (Test Smells and Structural Metrics) dataset, containing test smells detected using the JNose Test tool and structural metrics (test code and production code) calculated with the CK metrics tool of 13,703 open‐source Java systems from GitHub. In addition, we perform an empirical study to investigate the relationship between test smells and structural metrics of test code and the relationship between test smells on a large‐scale dataset. We split the projects into three clusters to analyze the distribution of test smells, the co‐occurrences among test smells, and the correlation of test smells and structural metrics of test code. The ratio of smelly test classes with a specific test smell is similar among the clusters, but we could observe a significant difference in the number of test smells among them. The test smells Sleepy Test, Mystery Guest, and Resource Optimism rarely occur in the three clusters, and the last two are strongly correlated, indicating that those test smells are more severe than others. Our results point out that most test smells have a moderate correlation with high complexity, large size, and coupling of the test code, indicating that they can also negatively affect its quality. To support further studies, we made our dataset publicly available.

Cancer made me a shallower person: A minoritarian story in comics

AbstractThe most widely circulated breast cancer narratives today have the structure of a Bildungsroman. They market personal growth, overcoming, and self-improvement, and reflect a strikingly neoliberal stance, even towards a potentially fatal illness as breast cancer. This is not the case with Miriam Engelberg’s graphic novelCancer Made Me a Shallower Person: A Memoir in Comics(2006), which resists this dominant tendency. Engelberg’s book, does manifest some of the typical Bildungsroman traits (e. g. introspective hero, need for belonging). Mostly, however, it is torn between opposing tendencies: Engelberg oscillates between vulnerability and detachment, irony and expectation, the urge to withdraw from a frightening situation and the desire to speak up against all the injustice and bad practices she witnesses. Engelberg never gives in to “the pressure to become someone different – someone nobler and more courageous than (she) was” (Engelberg 2006: xiii), but mocks and denounces all oppressive cultural attitudes. Instead of becoming “deeper” and more spiritual, in the socially prescribed ways, she chooses “the path of shallowness” (xiii), and remains a witty and critical outsider. These attributes, together with the episodic fragmentation of Engelberg’s book, bring it closer to a picaresque, the protagonist of which, like her, occupies a marginal position, moves from situation to situation, and makes the reader aware of the social norms while she simultaneously challenges and destabilizes them (Moenandar 2017: 5). The goal of my article is to examine Engelberg’s memoir as a minoritarian, hybrid form of writing between Bildungsroman and picaresque, pointing to alternatives to the dominant stories of overcoming and neoliberal survivorship.

Municipal Solid Waste Collection: Challenges, Strategies and Perspectives in the Optimization of a Municipal Route in a Southern Mexican Town

Solid waste management represents a challenge for municipalities, particularly at the collection stage. The high costs involved in its operation make it difficult to provide the service in all its communities, which results in bad practices (burning, burying, or dumping into a river) and the proliferation of open dumps. Collection efficiency is aggravated by poor route planning, narrow road networks, and irregular scheduling. This research proposes and develops the following objectives: (1) an analysis of the technical and logistical conditions of a town, (2) an improved municipal route for waste collection, and (3) the practical implications identified in the optimization of the service (challenges, strategies, and perspectives). During the study period (2018, 2019 and 2021), the following steps were carried out: (1) field trips to monitor the formal and informal routes, georeferencing each stop with a global positioning system, (2) semi-structured interviews to route personnel to learn about technical and logistical aspects, (3) the downloading of cartographic data for digitization, and (4) a network analysis aimed at designing an optimal route for formal collection and the spatial scope of the informal routes. The current technical and logistical analysis detected inefficiency in collection due to weak municipal operational planning and the irregular frequency of visits to the locality. The locality produces an average of 2.8 tons per day and its largest volume is organic waste (68.3%), followed by non-recyclable inorganic waste (21.2%), and recyclable waste (10.5%). In terms of results for the optimization of the municipal collection route, it is estimated that there will be an improvement in the time of the day of approximately 2 h less, going through 95 points when its schedule is 60 collection points, while the distance factor does not suffer changes due to the fact that there are no alternate routes between the departure and destination route. Among the main challenges faced by the municipalities are the limited budgets for basic sanitation services, which is why technological strategies and trained human resources are required for better municipal solid waste management. From a technical perspective, geographic information systems are a current trend to model and optimize service routes, with which a better scenario can be proposed. From a social perspective, community participation works as a key factor to carry out activities focused on finding solutions to the problems related to municipal solid waste management.

Are Metaphors Ethically Bad Epistemic Practice? Epistemic Injustice at the Intersections

AbstractThe COVID-19 pandemic brought the debate about the ethics of metaphors to the fore. In this article, I draw on blending theory—a theory of cognition—and theories of epistemic injustice to explore both the epistemic and ethical implications of metaphors. Beginning with a discussion of the conceptual alterations that may result from the use of metaphors, I argue that the effects these alterations have on available hermeneutical resources have the potential to result in a type of hermeneutical injustice distinct from the “lacuna” described by Miranda Fricker (Fricker 2007). Following, I examine how metaphors may therefore be considered “ethically bad epistemic practice,” as described by Rebecca Mason, because of how they may contribute to perpetuating an inequitable epistemic status quo (Mason 2011). Yet these same features may be used to promote epistemic justice in the context of intersectional power relationships. Situating the effects of metaphors within an inequitable yet dynamic epistemic system, I argue that foregrounding intersectional power dynamics enables us to interrogate the ethics of metaphors with consideration of both the epistemic and material consequences that may occur. I conclude by providing guidance for how, given that metaphors do epistemic work, we may use them to do ethical epistemic work.

SkillVet: Automated Traceability Analysis of Amazon Alexa Skills

Skills, are essential components in Smart Personal Assistants (SPA). The number of skills has grown rapidly, dominated by a changing environment that has no clear business model. Skills can access personal information and this may pose a risk to users. However, there is little information about how this ecosystem works, let alone the tools that can facilitate its study. In this article, we present the largest systematic measurement of the Amazon Alexa skill ecosystem to date. We study developers’ practices in this ecosystem, including how they collect and justify the need for sensitive information, by designing a methodology to identify over-privileged skills with broken privacy policies. We collect 199,295 Alexa skills and uncover that around 43% of the skills (and 50% of the developers) that request these permissions follow bad privacy practices, including (partially) broken data permissions traceability. In order to perform this kind of analysis at scale, we present <monospace xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">SkillVet</monospace> that leverages machine learning and natural language processing techniques, and generates high-accuracy prediction sets. We report several concerning practices, including how developers can bypass Alexa's permission system through account linking and conversational skills, and offer recommendations on how to improve transparency, privacy and security. Resulting from the responsible disclosure we did, 13% of the reported issues no longer pose a threat at submission time.

A study of menstrual hygiene practices and associated environmental &amp; social factors among adolescent girls in rural Puducherry

Introduction. Adolescent females were prevented from receiving the appropriate knowledge due to social restrictions and traditional beliefs, which in turn led to poor hygiene habits.&#x0D; Material and methods. A community-based descriptive cross-sectional study employing a semi-structured questionnaire was carried out in the rural field practice region of MGMCRI, Puducherry, between the 15th of March 2019 and the 31st of April 2021. The study was done in Puducherry. The comprehensive enumeration yielded a total of 528 countable teenage females.&#x0D; Results. The vast majority of the teenage females (89.2%) reported using sanitary pads, whereas just 6.6% and 4.2%, respectively, reported using fresh or reused towels. 65.3% of the girls changed their wet absorbent between two and five times during the day. The vast majority of the girls, or 60.8% of them, disposed of their spent absorbent by either burying it or burning it. 67.9% of the girls were cleansing their genitalia when they were urinating. 54.4% of people cleaned their hands using soap and water, whereas 1.4% utilized ash soil, muddy dirt, or other types of soil. There was a statistically significant correlation between the style of housing and the availability of sanitary latrines (p&lt;0.005) in relation to menstrual hygiene behaviors.&#x0D; Conclusions. This research also highlighted the absence of sanitary toilet facilities in the majority of residences, which negatively impacted the girls' ability to maintain their privacy and led to bad practices around menstruation hygiene.&#x0D; &#x0D;

Traditional Medicine as Part of the Human Right to Health in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

Applicable law protecting the right to health in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) consists of ratified human rights treaties, such as the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (African Charter), and domestic laws. However, none of these legal instruments explicitly mention traditional medicine (TM). Nevertheless, their provisions are broad enough to include TM. The Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights and the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights have interpreted the right to health under the ICESCR and the African Charter to cover TM. Moreover, in implementing the right to health, the DRC has taken legislation, policies, and programs that regulate and protect TM. In addition to discouraging some bad practices associated with TM, regulation protects people from eventual violation of the right to health by Traditional Health Practitioners (THPs). Furthermore, the protection of medicinal natural resources contributes to the availability and accessibility of TM products. However, like in the colonial period, TM in the DRC continues to be marginalized compared to modern medicine. Therefore, several factors limit access to TM of good quality that is available and accessible. These include, among others, failure for public health facilities to provide TM, lack of provisions covering explicitly TM under the existing social security law, the absence of an adequate control mechanism, and the lack of appropriate criminal sanction regime.

Social and university networks. Study on the perception of privacy and its management

Virtual social networks have established themselves as the tool for greater communication between young university students. Through them, they allow the exchange of information, in addition to sharing experiences and creating social relationships quickly. This article determines indices of factors to explain the use of social networks in students; On the other hand, there are bad practices in the use of these, exposing personal information. Some of the main dangers in social networks are identity theft, spam, cyberbullying, defamation, sexting and sextortion, to name a few. The objective of the current work is to analyze the use of social networks by university students, since this can be explained by the factors of integrity, ease of use, attitude, and intention. Likewise, it is directly related to the satisfaction of the needs of inclusion, belonging and social recognition. The study was carried out in the population of four programs belonging to the Universidad Veracruzana (UV), specifically the Faculty of Accounting and Administration (FCA), and although the four programs can be considered as digital natives, the data expose that they require education in terms of digital literacy. It also analyzes how to manage these social networks and know how informed they are about: the privacy notices that social networks handle, with whom they expose personal information and what happens to the information they publish, also, knowledge regarding security measures in social networks.

Restriction of Legal Capacity in the Slovak Law and Related Court Practice

In the first part of the article, the author makes an excursion into history and gives the reader information about the legal capacity of persons in Slovak legal history. This part includes information about feudal law, the first related codification of 1877, the Czechoslovak Civil Code of 1950, and the Czechoslovak Civil Code of 1964. Further on, the author presents the up-to-date effective regulation encompassed in the Slovak Civil Code and in the procedural act, i.e., the Act on Non-Contentious Civil Procedure. At the center of attention is the abolishment of deprivation of legal capacity, introduced in 2016. The author reasons that this abolition was a response to the caselaw of the European Court of Human Rights and to the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Inevitable for this article, were the practice and experiences of The Office of the Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities. From the practical point of view, the most important is the last part of the article, where the author lists some examples of good and bad practices of the Slovak Courts concerning legal capacity. The author deems it necessary to pay attention to this important topic. The improvement of the legal position of adults with disabilities definitely contributes to legal certainty and the rule of law in modern societies. Last but not least, it reflects the degree of social forwardness.

국제통상법과 인권법의 교착

The inauguration of WTO in 1994 brings a global market to be administered on the rule of law ideal. A material welfare and fair trade through the trade liberalization and increasing terms of free market are no longer merely dreamy, but our palpable reality. The new trade agendas, so called New Round, had been and are being consulted seriously for the growing role of world trade administration. To our dissatisfaction, however, the challenge and dilemma of derogatory human right practice had not diminished provided that the perspective and strategy are less researched and receive a slim repercussion. A wisdom and cooperation of global states are truly demanded. In addition to the economic perspective and material prosperity, the nations need to be cautious for a dynamism of human right practice. The paper argues that the international standard of human right practice could be dysfunctional absent a strategic and systemic collaboration of key international players. Following an introduction, chapter II surveys the nature and quality of private enterprises. Chapters III and IV are devoted to a trait and scope of human rights contested and related with the international trade. Chapter V explores an ontological theme of transnational corporations’ duty and ethics. Chapter VI surveys a tentative model to effect the compliance of transnational corporations with the ethical and legal standard. Chapter VII suggests the categories of bad practice and best strategic alternative corresponding to each category. The final chapter provides a conclusive remark for the better future.

SHIPBREAKING IN PAKISTAN – THE NEED FOR ALIGNING WITH GLOBAL INSTRUMENTS FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

Pakistan has been the largest shipbreaking country during the 1980s and is presently among three of the largest shipbreaking countries in the world; however, shipbreaking through the beaching method has so far not been properly regulated and is evident from several incidents from time to time taken place as a result of sheer lack of consideration for health &amp; safety of the workers and the coastal environment. Toxins in the ship’s structure are harmful residue and are extremely dangerous to natural resources and employee wellness. Notwithstanding, it is volatile in terms of adding its share to the economic growth by providing opportunities to employ and supply solid iron steel to the rolling mills to meet the demand of the country’s construction sector. Environmentalists have shown their concerns, especially over countries to the global south where the beaching method is popular for breaking down obsolete vessels. Several global instruments have been introduced to curtail bad practices bringing about environmental and health issues. It will be assessed whether existing local instruments in Pakistan are responding to these issues effectively or whether there is a need for introducing more regulations, especially sector-specific, to align the viable sector according to global regulations to be able to get the share by competing with regional competitors like India and Bangladesh.&#x0D; Although in one form or another, there have been efforts on a global level to address the environmental, health, and safety issues, as several such conventions about it have taken place since 1907. The “United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea” (UNCLOS), the London Dumping Convention and Protocol and the World Charter for Nature. A Preservation of the Ozone Layer at the Vienna Convention on, Transboundary transfer of hazardous wastes, in particular from industrialised nations to poor or less developed countries, was prohibited under the Montreal Protocol until the Basel Convention under the United Nations Environment Program (to which Pakistan is a member) went into force in 1992. In 2002, technical rules were adopted for the ecologically responsible handling of ships’ complete and partial disassembly. In 2009, the International Maritime Organization established the Hong Kong Convention to address environmental dangers and worker safety and health., while decommissioning the ship, but so far, these global instruments in Pakistan have not been inducted in the procedures through local regulations; therefore, this study investigates industry viability on efficient administration and adherence to international law instruments being introduced by European Union Regulations and Hong Kong Convention, in an attempt to overcome the shortfall of earlier regulations under United Nations agencies. The effective implementation of existing local laws and making of sector-specific rules and regulations is highly desirable to respond to the earliest compliance gaps on the safe and environmentally sound dismantling of uneconomical ships. An analysis of the consistency of State legislation to respond to international legal instruments is recommended for the sustainable development of the ship-breaking industry in Pakistan.

Short note on e-cheating and online plagiarism. And possible solutions

Recent events, by making necessary online classes and exams, are raising plagiarism and cheating practices among students. I offer strategies to deal with both issues at the stake. I argue that institutions and educators should not only focus on how to detect bad practices and punishments, but rather on preventing despicable behaviours through the construction of a more sophisticated educational system.

Smells in system user interactive tests

Test smells are known as bad development practices that reflect poor design and implementation choices in software tests. Over the last decade, there are few attempts to study test smells in the context of system tests that interact with the System Under Test through a Graphical User Interface. To fill the gap, we conduct an exploratory analysis of test smells occurring in System User Interactive Tests (SUIT). We thus, compose a catalog of 35 SUIT-specific smells, identified through a multi-vocal literature review, and show how they differ from smells encountered in unit tests. We also conduct an empirical analysis to assess the diffuseness and removal of these smells in 48 industrial repositories and 12 open-source projects. Our results show that the same type of smells tends to appear in both industrial and open-source projects, but they are not addressed in the same way. We also find that smells originating from a combination of multiple code locations appear more often than those that are localized on a single line. This happens because of the difficulty to observe non-local smells without tool support. Furthermore, we find that smell-removing actions are not frequent with less than 50% of the affected tests ever undergoing a smell removal. Interestingly, while smell-removing actions are rare, some smells disappear while discarding tests, i.e., these smells do not appear in follow-up tests that replace the discarded ones.

A new technique and software to optimize compression and data retrieval in the Material Examined section of taxonomic publications

Elusive flaws are identified in techniques widely adopted to organize the Material Examined sections in taxonomic publications, mostly regarding the usage of the term ibidem and the nesting of information such as country and states. Logical errors are identified that prevent objective retrieval of the original information and can hinder or block its interpretation, even in case-by-case analyses. It is demonstrated that the free usage of ibidem in the sense of “same as previous except as follows” compromises the interpretation of data, characterizing bad practice. Solutions are proposed for the precise usage of both the term ibidem and the nesting technique. A new technique for organizing, compressing, and presenting information, called grid-setting, is described and evaluated. Its most notable practical effect is that the Material Examined section becomes literally a coded data sheet, which can be accurately converted back to spreadsheet format. In addition, the grid-setting technique was able to generate texts up to 30% shorter than those edited with the best-known traditional techniques. The new ideas and fixes are incorporated into a new software, flexible enough to process varied and unlimited data into largely user-defined texts, which remain nevertheless universal in their format and logical interpretation.

Analyzing syntactic constructs of Java programs with machine learning

The massive number of open-source projects in public repositories has notably increased in the last years. Such repositories represent valuable information to be mined for different purposes, such as documenting recurrent syntactic constructs, analyzing the particular constructs used by experts and beginners, using them to teach programming and to detect bad programming practices, and building programming tools such as decompilers, Integrated Development Environments or Intelligent Tutoring Systems. An inherent problem of source code is that its syntactic information is represented with tree structures, while traditional machine learning algorithms use n-dimensional datasets. Therefore, we present a feature engineering process to translate tree structures into homogeneous and heterogeneous n-dimensional datasets to be mined. Then, we run different interpretable (supervised and unsupervised) machine learning algorithms to mine the syntactic information of more than 17 million syntactic constructs in Java code. The results reveal interesting information such as the Java constructs that are barely (and widely) used (e.g., bitwise operators, union types and static blocks), different language features and patterns mostly (and barely) used by beginners (and experts), the discovery of particular types of source code (e.g., helper or utility classes, data transfer objects and too complex abstractions), and how complexity is an inherent characteristic in some clusters of syntactic constructs.

A constructivist grounded theory of counselling psychologists’ in-the-moment decision-making process about touching their clients

BackgroundClinician-client touch is controversial, and seemingly widespread. However, talking therapists report little-to-no training on it and major accrediting bodies offer no explicit guidance. Consequently, some clinicians feel a lack confidence and competence around touch and fear accusations of bad practice. There is no research on counselling psychologists’ (CoPs’) ‘in-the-moment’ (in-session) decision-making process about touching their clients. Hence, this study aimed to develop a constructivist grounded theory (CGT) of this process to facilitate best practice by identifying issues and evaluating and recommending changes to existing models, guidelines, and training.MethodologyFollowing a CGT methodology, cycles of semi-structured interviews were conducted with nine CoPs, one clinical psychologist and two body psychotherapists about their process. The interview transcripts were analysed following Charmaz’s (2014) three-stage CGT coding process.FindingsA dual process model of touch-decision-making was produced, with the core category ‘weighing the predicted balance of appropriateness’: participants use an embodied sense of ‘felt appropriateness’ and a cognitive process of ‘considering the appropriateness’ to assess whether a ‘touch-related action’ is likely to be experienced as minimising harm and maximising therapeutic benefit to the client.ConclusionThe findings indicate a need for a CoP ‘professional stance’ towards touch-decision-making and talking about and upholding touch-boundaries in clinical practice.

Creating multiple-choice items for testing student learning

The use of multiple-choice items for classroom testing is firmly established for many good reasons. The content any unit or course of study can be well sampled. Test scores can be reliable (trusted). And time spent administering and scoring can be minimized. This article provides a current review of best practices in the design and use of a variety of multiple-choice formats for classroom assessment of student learning. One of the most serious problems facing current educators is developing test items that measure more than simple factual recall. It is important to measure understanding, comprehension, critical thinking, and problem solving. Not only are these types of higher-level thinking described, but items are presented that illustrate how this is done. These best practices are continually evolving. The objective is always to use tests to measure validly what students have learned as well as help students learn what they have not yet learned. We call this formative and summative assessment. Guidelines are presented showing good and bad practices. What may be surprising to readers is the extensive variety of formats and methods for gathering or generating new test items. Readers are encouraged to experiment with these formats. Some formats can very efficiently measure what students were supposed to learn.

Predatory journals in otorhinolaryngology

Pseudo-scientific predatory journals have been making a commercially lucrative business with scientific manuscripts for many years misusing the "open access" model by offering a fast and uncomplicated publication of scientific manuscripts in return for publication fees. The question arises as to whether the specialty field of otorhinolaryngology has already been infiltrated by this bad practice. A pseudo-scientific fake manuscript was sent to 20 journals in which the journal title indicated an otorhinolaryngological content. Half of the journals were traditional otorhinolaryngology journals, which publish a print edition and which are mainly financed by subscriptions and advertisements. The other half were journals that published exclusively according to the "open access" model. Various parameters of the journals and of the review process were evaluated. All 10 traditional ORL journals refused to publish the fake manuscript. Among the journals that published exclusively according to the "open access" model, there was one rejection of the manuscript, while 2 journals recommended a revision and 7 journals accepted the manuscript directly for publication. Predatory publishers and journals are also active in the field of otorhinolaryngology. Especially at journals that publish articles exclusively "open access" for a publication or processing fee, scientific authors should be careful and check the seriousness of the journal in advance by using recommended hints and tools.